All: this is quite an interesting article. It deserves much better than the tedious flamewar that this topic has routinely been converging to, so let's give it a go.
If you're going to comment, please focus on specific, interesting things in the article that you're curious about.
Please don't post generic, shallow, obvious, indignant, and/or dismissive comments—those are repetitive and predictable, we've had more than enough of them, they're tedious, not what this site is for, and we don't need more.
This is a really well-thought-out, nuanced take. I really appreciate mixture of "but there are still servers", not being able to stop a gold rush, and (refreshingly) the technical take on the implementation details.
It stands in such stark contrast to other content. For example, a web3 chat app announcement I saw yesterday [1]. I even joined the Discord to learn more and just found...hype.
I found this parenthetical to be amusing:
> (visualizing this financial structure would resemble something similar to a pyramid shape)
The centralization of apis (infura, opensea and ethscan used by metamask) is the biggest problem. I could be wrong, but I don't think we've seen that fast consolidation in other early tech. I remember in the late 90s there were a number of search engines but no one really owned the space. Only 20 years later did Google emerge as the winner and is (IMO) by far the best in terms of relevant results. But that didn't happen overnight, and there wasn't a search engine dominating 90% of the market within a few years of the beginning of mainstream acceptance.
How hard is it to create a competitor to infura? MetaMask should be incentivized to do this as they're core offering is controlled by one party.
[edit] Never mind, metamask and infura are owned by the same company (ConsenSys). It's even worse than it appears...
Tally is a community-owned, open-source fork of MetaMask. From first impressions it looks like it will also solve some of the issues brought up in Moxie's (excellent) blog post, i.e decentralizing the node-> NFT->wallet Metadata routes.
Regarding the immutability of NFT image pointers:
Some emerging solutions to this issue are:
Use ERC2477 (DRAFT). This allows you to have some control over the metadata to ensure the name is as you want it. Note that this will require you to implement a zero-knowledge proof or a JSON parser on-chain which validates the new metadata.
Use 0xcert Framework. The 0xcert framework is specifically designed to provide metadata integrity for ERC-721 tokens, it uses a different hashing technique (Merkle tree). But it requires you to use the same schema across metadata versions.
Ceramic Network is doing some interesting work on schema coordination amongst other things.
> How hard is it to create a competitor to infura?
Infura is merely hosting nodes for you and exposing their JSON RPC endpoints. They did not _create_ the API.
There's already plenty of competitors in that space. QuickNode and GetBlock for instance, if you want mutualised/managed nodes. You can also host your own node yourself, or use e.g. AWS Blockchain to host it for you, or even use the public free hosted nodes that most blockchain project provide. It's just a Metter of trade-off between cost, time and security.
If you are using JSON RPC APIs (which most people do) there is nothing that locks you to Infura or any other provider.
When you open metamask there's a dropdown in the top right. It lets you choose which network you're using, and defaults to "Ethereum Mainnet". If you hit the "Add Network" button you can configure which server your metamask talks to.
How many more switched it to Google from Bing from Microsoft Edge? Google having 91% market share is an effect, not a cause; they have it because their product is the best and does what I want it to 91% of the time.
If Google’s market share was only a result of a superior product then they wouldn’t feel compelled to pay Apple billions of dollars to be the default search engine on iPhones. Defaults matter.
As other comments mentioned, you can change your endpoint in metamask.
Also, metamask is not the only wallet there is... Some dApps only accept Metamask buts it's becoming rare. Most dApps implement multiple alternatives, like WalletConnect, which is more of a dapp/wallet protocol, which allows you to use any wallet software.
> I don't think we've seen that fast consolidation in other early tech
I actually struggled with this point throughout the article. I'm not sure I see this as a parallel trend toward centralization like we saw with web2 - but rather that this is how software is built today and this is what we're comfortable with. It doesn't seem unnatural or problematic to me that we will start with something that approximates the world around us today and move toward the decentralized end state that apologists are hoping for.
>and move toward the decentralized end state that apologists are hoping for.
Is there any evidence that this is actually happening? It seems rather backwards! Is the maximalist argument here that these companies are going to build out all this infrastructure, move the global financial system onto it, and then rip it apart and rewrite it to be entirely distributed afterwards? Why? If the point is to be distributed, wouldn't they want it to be distributed first?
Where are the blockchains with full-fat clients that can actually run on normal mobile devices? And if they actually exist, does anybody use them? Like, for normal, actual uses, not "shilling this app makes my portfolio go up 300% before I dump it on some clueless bagholder, to the moon rocket emoji rocket emoji".
The crux of the article is that the front-ends are all routing calls through centralized APIs to get their message included on the blockchain. Infura and Alchemy don't do much. They just pass a JSON-RPC message to an Ethereum node running on their servers. There is some additional indexing services they provide, but there are many open, decentralized alternatives for that such as TheGraph Protocol. And it's not unfeasible for an application to run its own Postgres instance to index data from the ETH blockchain.
As for full-fat clients on normal mobile devices, the main issue is the data requirements. Running a full node can take hundreds of gigabytes. It is possible on light hardware. People are running Beacon chain nodes on Raspberry Pis. But you do need the storage and that tends to be scarce on mobile.
Meanwhile, the Ethereum core devs are aware of this issue and are actively working towards it. They shipped the Altair hard fork this year that has adds sync committees which make it possible to do without needing the whole chain history (using merkle trees): https://github.com/ethereum/annotated-spec/blob/master/altai...
It's almost as if there's only the bare minimum decentralization needed to avoid regulation and taxation and the rest is good old fashioned centralized web apps.
So "decentralized" doesn't necessarily mean "no servers" it means "the servers don't matter". If Infura went down tomorrow, nothing would be lost, because Infura was just hosting something anyone could have hosted. You want to be the next Infura? You just download the same code they did and run it: Infura isn't holding any state. If Facebook goes down tomorrow, everyone's accounts and all of their data is destroyed.
“Goes down” could be substituted for a lot of things, for example, “becomes evil”, “disables API access”, “arbitrarily bans you”.
Lots of developers including myself have had things break when Twitter decided to abandon its liberal approach to APIs. There was no alternative endpoint I could just point my app at.
> “Goes down” could be substituted for a lot of things
For clarity, you are now arguing a tangential point.
> Twitter decided to abandon its liberal approach to APIs
I just don’t understand the comparison between Twitter/FB to a blockchain.
Are crypto maximalists arguing that social networks are only about the database itself and access to it?
> There was no alternative endpoint I could just point my app at.
The article already has a great example about this not working as intended - opensea removing his NFT from their API despite it existing on-chain. And every NFT viewer using the opensea view of things than the chain’s view.
> For clarity, you are now arguing a tangential point.
I don’t think I am; all these fall under GP’s first sentence; I took “goes down” in the next sentence as one example, WLOG.
> Are crypto maximalists arguing that social networks are only about the database itself and access to it?
I can’t speak for crypto maximalists (I’m probably as skeptical of this stuff as you are), but I think the best argument is that the existence of a viable off-ramp forces the centralized player to be a good actor. Similar to how many open source projects are very centralized, but the possibility of a fork (like mariadb) is enough of an incentive that it’s rare for a project to screw up so badly that a fork can gain steam.
FWIW, you aren't (arguing a tangential point to me): I didn't say "one of Facebook's servers goes down", I said "Facebook goes down". Companies go out of business or simply get tired of operating product lines constantly. I can sort of appreciate the idea "well maybe by goes down I just meant temporarily", but then I think one needs apply that to the entire sentence: if it goes down permanently, the accounts are no longer usable permanently (aka, "destroyed"); and, if it goes down temporarily, the accounts and data are no longer usable temporarily.
> Is the maximalist argument here that these companies are going to build out all this infrastructure, move the global financial system onto it, and then rip it apart and rewrite it to be entirely distributed afterwards
I haven't heard anyone articulate this as their vision lol. I would think they distribute the systems somewhere between trading monkey JPEGs and actually moving the global financial system onto it.
As to why start with it centralized, it's easier to get a POC working with the systems and conventions we have in place today than alongside rethinking all of the infrastructure at the same time. Work on the UI, trade some stupid goods that finance the development of these distributed systems, etc. I just don't understand the argument that this whole thing will or should be binary. Huge migrations like that fall over all the time. Gradual rollouts take longer but are generally safer and in this case probably the only option.
"You should check out my new car company, ThreeWheel. We're completely revolutionizing the business of getting around. The key innovation is that our cars have three wheels. This reduces tire cost, improves aerodynamics, and reduces rolling friction. Our three wheeled cars are the future of all wheeled transport!"
"Okay."
"But our prototype has four wheels, as a temporary prototype to test out the technology."
"That doesn't seem like it tests the technology very well."
"I don't see why you're quibbling about the details. We've sold thousands of ThreeWheels to people who are very enthusiastic about living in a three wheeled future!"
"You've sold four wheeled cars to people who want three wheeled cars?"
"They then resell them for tens of thousands of dollars more than they paid! They're ecstatically happy! Nobody is bigger fans of the three wheel car future than our customers."
"Even though these cars, the cars they purchased, have four wheels."
"Well, they could remove one wheel later, if they wanted."
"Would that work?"
"Oh no, absolutely not. You couldn't drive it at all, then. It would be much worse than a regular car. A lot of work remains to be done to gradually transition current ThreeWheels to a three wheeled form. We plan to send robots to each customer's garage to cut sections from the frame and re-weld them together. Then we need to swap out the steering rack, re-route the driveshaft, change suspension components, brakes..."
"That sounds hard."
"Yes, we think it will take hundreds of changes over years to move current generation ThreeWheels to a three wheeled mode."
"Instead of just building three wheeled cars today?"
"Wow John Cena bought a ThreeWheel and posted it on his instragram! My collection of ThreeWheels is going to explode in value! I love my job!"
Not GP but I have to say I love getting 50mpg in the city and having the same range as any gas powered car. So I don't quite see how Prius is a better example than the awesome analogy made above.
This example is not good. Hardware has a much different release cycle than software. Once you sell a car, you can't simply release a hardware update.
99.999% of internet software is built iteratively. Even programming languages and operating systems have versions. This argument about needing everything to be decentralized from the beginning is exposing bias because it's not a logical conclusion unless you're bent on antagonizing web3.
Even most DAOs start out centralized and slowly become decentralized. This is expected. You don't want to go full decentralized until everything is stable.
> Even most DAOs start out centralized and slowly become decentralized
This is also how democratic governance works. A core group of “trusted” leaders makes decisions that are ratified by elected representatives. It is then disseminated through the various layers of governance and implemented in a distributed fashion.
If key financial institutions had more trust in a blockchain than in the Federal Reserve, and the European Central Bank, and the Bank of England, and maybe the Central Bank of Japan to hold an account of their assets.
Do we have any reason to think that would be the case, or they’d enrich the early adopters of one of the existing blockchains by using it rather than creating their own? Central banking doesn’t need to pay the overhead for trustless anonymity since all of the participants are known and have ongoing working relationships.
Surely development of the full fat clients will lead to the required innovations to provide light, mobile clients for blockchains that are properly distributed.
I agree there are many scams but we really are in more of a research period with regards to the tech. The research will continue through the hype cycles.
But why would it do that though? I’d like to hear a falsifiable theory of how that would happen, because as of right now it’s not happening, and no one seems able to explain what big thing is going to change. If the biggest part of the change (using the blockchain) isn’t causing the dynamic to shift, what future change will?
To me the argument here is because it's easy. Even if the interaction layer is centralized the underlying tech is decentralized so everything can easily be validated and that's the key difference.
I think he touched on that in the article. The masses are trusting the centralized API, not the blockchain. His NFT exists in the chain, but not the API, so it effectively doesn't exist in the eyes of the market.
That feels like an argument that could be applied to web2 too though, and it falls apart there too: It’s never been easier to spin up some servers and whip up a basic social media site or search engine or online store, but it’d still be hard to displace Facebook, Google or Amazon. The problem isn’t with the ease of starting a competitor, it’s the psychological and social forces that cause people to prefer having one default place where they can go for a certain thing.
But as noted in the article, that's not the case. OpenSea stores data that then isn't on any blockchain, like royalties. That's done as just a regular web2 feature, a database on OpenSea's backend.
So no, it can't be validated, and it can't be migrated.
Royalties is a funny example because a) they’re being standardized, see eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-2981 and b) royalties are entirely opt-in. You can happily transfer NFTs without having to pay royalties if you forgo an exchange that respects them.
That’s literally one of the most salient points of TFA: protocols move dog slow and provide too little too late, platforms iterate fast and give people what they want right now.
But there will be other features over time, that would not be standardized. As per article centralized platforms progress faster than decentralized standardization. Switching cost will grow.
Why would we ever move toward decentralization? It is almost always easier to have at least some central point of control in any distributed system, even the Internet (IANA, RIRs, etc.). It is also very difficult to remove a centralized control point after a system is already deployed, especially if the system supports heterogenous clients (as it is likely that some clients will be slow to switch to the new design, and many will make bad assumptions about the system architecture).
There is a point to be made here that is an important difference between web2 and web3+centralized apis. On the latter companies do not have lock-in of the data, which provides a big incentive to not be evil. the moment someone can make a case for bad play they have the advantage to shift the market to a different platform. Unfortunately this is not so easy on web2 because of the data that locks users on those platforms.
> There is a point to be made here that is an important difference between web2 and web3+centralized apis. On the latter companies do not have lock-in of the data
This is only true of the data stored on the blockchain itself. As described in the article, that isn’t anywhere near enough to replace the centralized systems being billed as “web3”, and it’s completely unworkable for data which can’t be public, which is updated frequently, or which needs to be deleted. Combined with blockchains being unavoidably quite expensive and slow, and the challenges of standardizing protocols while the competition is shipping it seems quite unlikely that this will change.
It doesn’t reduce lock-in meaningfully if Google were to continue to store and process all of your data but now you’re using an outside authentication system. I’m sure they would love, however, the way “web3” makes their job of tracking users so much easier.
Deletion and/or non-public is an interesting problem. Obviously, you can store it encrypted and delete the key, but advances in compute and algorithms might render that encryption breakable.
For data that needs to be updated, all you need is an override mechanism, which sounds simple enough.
Storing it encrypted also means you have to ask what happens if the key is leaked — for example, if I tried to sell movies that way rightsholders would be unlikely to accept a system where you could pay $10 and then give the decryption key to all of your friends, leaving me no way to revoke it.
For updates, you can definitely replace things but that's expensive if you have to pay a transaction fee regularly and it could quickly get to non-trivial storage sizes if you have to store obsolete versions in perpetuity, especially with non-trivial metadata overhead.
Distributed storage does not make any difference for lock-in with a centralized API. For example, imagine a system for storing photos on some distributed system and a popular, centralized web front-end for users. Now what I will do with the centralized front-end is to give users a "value-add" by encrypting their photos, thus protecting their privacy, and better still I will use my proprietary key management technology to relieve end users of the various problems with losing private keys. Lock-in achieved, and all you accomplished with distributed storage was to outsource the maintenance of the storage infrastructure.
We already see this with blockchain payments. The vast majority of merchants who accept cryptocurrency payment do so through a service that manages their wallet and typically offers some kind of value-added features to lock them in. There is no reason to believe the same will not happen with Web3, if it is not happening already.
for all of the reasons that web3 apologists are excited about decentralization. I'm not really one of them, so I'm not going to advocate on their behalf, but lots of people are very excited about this.
> It is almost always easier to have at least some central point of control
I don't think anyone is going to argue that decentralization is the easiest solution.
I agree that it's hard to remove this point of centralization once it's there. My guess would be that, if this goes the way many are hoping, new places emerge over time with increasing levels of independence from these central providers.
This discussion would benefit from a Ramsey, graph, random matrix person to expound on "random" graphs as seen in nature. Nodes with n edges in, 1 out are around but not without some centralization. Surely not robust?
decentralization in the blockchain world is really to provide security and interoperability by emulating centralized services. So essentially it looks like a centralized service, but it's more secure than a centralized service.
From a cryptographic perspective, centralized and decentralised services are equally secure. From a user perspective, blockchains are less secure as there is no authority you can approach for chargebacks
The point of blockchain was removing trust from a single person and spreading it around over a network
> From a user perspective, blockchains are less secure as there is no authority you can approach for chargebacks
This actually proves the point that security is relative. There are instances when I would feel more secure when an outside party can refund my money, say when the seller never ships the product I ordered. There are also times when I would feel less secure with chargebacks, like when I sell something on eBay and the buyer files a complaint with PayPal after taking delivery of exactly what they ordered.
Security wasn't an original goal of bitcoin. Privacy, anonymity, and immutability were, though the first to were lost a decade ago and immutibly is pretty well solved but also the primary cause for so much wasted resource consumption.
It sounds like you did understand my two examples, not sure how they could have made no sense. The two scenarios point to competing ideas of what "secure" would mean, and my point was that security can't be a goal because its relative
Oh it doesn't, I haven't found any value in web3 yet. I may just be missing something, but I still don't get what problem web3 can solve that isn't solved easier with web1 or web2 technologies.
I would argue consolidation and centralized elements are inevitable, the promise of true decentralization is like socialism: a promising theory but failed application.
As someone who has run nodes, no it is hard and expensive. Every time a geth node dies it has to resync and no persistent volume mounts and stateful sets are not solutions. They are problems. If you need to scale horizontally you get strange consistency issues with the API. All of this makes for a very unpleasant experience. It's built for TLC on a beefy box not a herd.
And that's the rub. The new node doesn't have the same state as the old one. So clients making requests assuming that latest is the same start having problems. If you haven't seen them you just haven't been running a production quality service.
But one of the main points of article is that people don't want to run servers, developers included. Even being easy, letting someone else do it will always be easier.
But the question was how hard is it to run a competitor to Infura. And the answer is trivially easy. Infura is just an Ethereum node API that's publicly exposed. Building an Infura competitor literally is nothing more than $100/month it costs to run a Geth node on AWS.
This is true today. But the standard approach in this industry is to start by offering access to an open service and then quickly build in value-add services that aren’t available in the open service. So for example, the smart move would be for Infura to offer a proprietary chain or rollup that gets widely used but isn’t available outside of Infura. If they can pull that off, competition could get much harder.
> People don't usually run Postgres themselves (e.g. set up Postgres in a docker container), but it's not very hard to do.
It's easy to do a basic install.
It's quite hard to do it right, at scale, with workload-appropriate configuration, replication, backup etc.
My point... neither Postures nor Indira, or any other blockchain solution are easy to install and maintain in a fully scaled-up, fault-tolerant, multi-node deployment
How many (large) companies, governments, etc... run their own email servers? If there's a strong enough need, people will run their own servers even if they'd rather not. "people don't want to run servers" arguably could be rephrased as "people don't have a reason (today) to run their own servers". I'd argue this is a key difference between web1 and cryto centralization and the web2 centralization. If Google announced tomorrow that anyone can buy the gmail contents of any gmail address, you'd bet a lot more individuals would either switch to alternatives or start running their own severs.
> How many (large) companies, governments, etc... run their own email servers?
Office 365 financials alone suggest that the answer is "very few, and rapidly decreasing". I work for a ~30k employee technology company that doesn't run it's own email servers.
Don't get me wrong its good that the option is there, but short of coding and operating your own full node Metamask will still be trusting a centralized third party
I'm not sure I understand, running a full node requires some consumer hardware and a few days. And most infura usage doesn't even need a full node, so it's easier to run.
The API is the same, swapping out for another node is just a config change
> running a full node requires some consumer hardware and a few days
There are monthly utilities and regular maintenance as well. Networking could also be a problem, you'd really want a static IP and an unlimited high-speed network which isn't always supported by many home ISPs
> And most infura usage doesn't even need a full node, so it's easier to run
I don't know as much about the protocol details of infura. Have they found a way to verify transactions with a partial node? That'd be huge if they have, regardless of what happens to the current NFT platforms!
Many projects have chased pruning, but it always seems to get stuck when people realize that means adding trust into Tue system since you can't trace back to the genesis block
If the goal is to remove trust in a third party you would either need to code or verify the software before running it. Short of that and you still have to trust whoever coded it and all the distribution infrastructure that let you download it.
More options is good for sure, but doesn't solve centralization or trust concerns
The level of centralization is a spectrum and I don't mean to fall into the trap of describing it as all or nothing. The question is how close to decentralization web3 is or can be, and my concern with regards to picking your own API endpoint is just how similarly it is to the original point Moxie was making with regards to there only really being two API hosts in use
There are voices within the space that have been talking about this issue for many years. There is at least one project which aims to use economic incentives within the design of the protocol to mitigate. Check out Saito.
> The centralization of apis (infura, opensea and ethscan used by metamask) is the biggest problem. I could be wrong, but I don't think we've seen that fast consolidation in other early tech. I remember in the late 90s there were a number of search engines but no one really owned the space. Only 20 years later did Google emerge as the winner and is (IMO) by far the best in terms of relevant results. But that didn't happen overnight, and there wasn't a search engine dominating 90% of the market within a few years of the beginning of mainstream acceptance.
> How hard is it to create a competitor to infura? MetaMask should be incentivized to do this as they're core offering is controlled by one party.
> [edit] Never mind, metamask and infura are owned by the same company (ConsenSys). It's even worse than it appears...
Currently working in the space (graduated from doing systems-level . My hot take is what is considered a "full node" can potentially use significantly less resources. The base word size is 256-bit (size of SHA256), most is either 1s or 0s, the entire raw Ethereum blockchain is roughly 350 GiB uncompressed, probably can be much better with zstd compression on multi-core. Let's just quietly ignore that most is not using an assembly-level optimized implentations of uint256 arithmetic operations. Also all the current clients (a) afaik run transactions single-threaded, and (b) no on-disk compression, (c) at best use mmap relying on OS level paging even though you're going to have 32-byte random reads invalidating entire 4K or 16K pages out of ~3TiB of read/write space. I'm more than certain execution can be ran speculatively using STM (software transaction memory). I seriously doubt that most Ethereum transactions within a single block have that much r/w contention if you were to execute them in arbitrary order in parallel. Basically application level speculative execution (except you know the ending hash ahead of time, so you know of the ending state is valid or not). Anyhow...
What is your point? Sounds to me you're just regurgitating technical mambo jambo that doesn't realy have any relation whatsoever to any of the points quoted!
Are you trying to say that by optimizing a node's software, people will be able to run a full node on their devices?? That's patently false currently, even more if the technology actually goes viral one day (small system-level optimisations simply won't scale to compensate for the fast increase in the blockchain size).
The fundamental problem with decentralisation is that it will always be less efficient than a centralised solution due to the overhead necessary for coordinating the system. This means increased costs of some nature. In order to justify those costs, the decentralised system has to add a sufficient amount of value compared to the centralised solution. And not only is that usually not the case, but, as Moxie points out, it is usually the opposite, because a centralised system can iterate more quickly.
And that is also true for the crypto/web3 world: Outside of some niches, it does not add any value. Almost anything it can do, existing centralised technologies can do better. The only reason they haven't so far is that most of these things are not terribly useful to begin with.
This is the exact argument for authoritarianism over democracy. Centralization is easier and often cheaper, but you have to trust the group in charge completely. Even then, the collective loses out on innovation and new ideas because only a small subset of the population is in a position to change anything.
Centralization is often a short term win, decentralization is a long play. Unfortunately, we almost always seem to chose immediate gratification which is why we see decentralization abandoned early, and why we see democratic freedoms being replaced by authoritarian control.
This is what representative democracy with an executive function is for. The government / executive acts without the need of democratic micromanagement, but is subject to popular oversight through a number of mechanisms.
Even in the case of democracy, you have to put trust in the sovereign.
And whenever the sovereign enforces a law, the person facing the enforcement will consider it tyranny. It’s a known paradox of the power we, the people, grant to the sovereign.
A thousand times no. A true democracy earns trust through the integrity of its institutions: executive, legislative and judicial, and the respectfully balanced and constitutionally limited powers they share.
My point wasn't to draw a direct line between democracy and a decentralized network. I just thought it was important to point out the risks and potentially short sidedness of giving up on decentralization because its slower and more difficult. That line of thought leads to more authoritarian control, and that's never worked out well for the average person in the long run.
I don't recall that argument in practice. In Kazakhstan just now for the leader has recently used the argument "Those who don't surrender will be eliminated" which seem more common than "centralization is easier and often cheaper" as far as I can tell in such situations.
I was speaking generally not to any one authoritarian. I can't imagine many, if any, authoritarian leaders would be using the "it's easier and cheaper" argument when grabbing more power, but its a very common argument used in more general and philosophical debates.
Look into any of the writings that led to the USSR and you'll find it all over. The goal was total government control would be the best way to optimize resource allocation. They were making the case that Soviet communism would win out against fascism because they could make everything faster and cheaper.
I might be crazy, but reading this I imagine a blockchain based temporary democracy: full proof-of-whatever correct voting scheme choosing a temporary centralized “government” with measurable goals to move the system to eventual decentralization.
This is actually one of the few uses I know of that I have a lot of hope for. I worked on a digital voting system in college a decade ago, we were researching accessibility concerns mainly related to visually impaired voters. The voting industry in the US is just as much of a tire fire now as it was then but it could easily be improved.
A blockchain based voting system with each state acting as a PoW validator could actually work. The main challenge is how to centralize key distribution in a way that is accessible to everyone without compromising anonymity. If anyone knows your public key they know exactly who you voted for in every election.
The fundamental problem is that problems with centralized platforms are attributed to centralization, and thus decentralization is seen as the answer. This is entirely false. Centralization and decentralization are just words that have an objective definition. Neither is inherently better than the other and choosing either as a solution to your problem is entirely context dependent. Anyone that has a stake in crypto / web 3 conveniently leaves this crucial piece of information. E.g. it's a different solution to the same problem, not a _better_ solution the same problem. Having options by itself can be a valuable use case, but I'm afraid the gold rush is not driven by the excitement for having options, but rather for the excitement of becoming rich quick.
Only looming at financial and corporate systems is a seriously limited pool of data. There are non profits, collectives, employee owned businesses, etc that are not a hierarchical structure but I don't think they would fall into the pool of financial or corporate structures.
fwiw I follow a lot of crypto people on Twitter and 0 of them are following this message app, it has 700 followers and you decide to jump into the discord? To me that’s like getting a random email about a product and saying “yes tell me more” I’m not sure what you are expecting.
>When you think about it, OpenSea would actually be much “better” in the immediate sense if all the web3 parts were gone. It would be faster, cheaper for everyone, and easier to use.
That sums up the situation for me. Having a marketplace for purely digital goods might be a concept with a future. Having standard ways to interoperate between different platforms and query and update these goods might make sense (although I still think it goes opposite to the general trend of walled gardens vs. decentralized web, I don't see why the IP owners would play ball and accept the loss of control).
The thing is that in most case those NFTs wouldn't be trustless. I see people putting forward that a use case would be an NFT that proves that your Rolex is real, or for Fortnite skins, or for the ownership of your house. But in all these situations, there's a very clear authority (Rolex, Epic Games and the municipal authorities, respectively). These authorities will be allowed to mint new NFTs at will (because who else?) and as such have to be trusted. That opens up interesting questions btw, like "who is Rolex exactly?" which creates a chain of custody of trusted authority involving trademark management among other things. But I digress.
But then as soon as an authority is identified, why bother with the extreme overhead (it terms of resources and costs) of blockchain tech? Couldn't Rolex issue a PGP signed CSV of all valid Rolex serial numbers once a month on IPFS and you'd get the exact same security and trust profile without having to involve any "web3" feature?
Like cryptocurrencies, the subset of problems that can only be solved using NFTs is incredibly tiny and speculators rush to make up use cases that, if you think about it for five minutes, clearly make no sense and could be better solved using good old centralized tech.
As the article points out, many NFTs are implemented by storing a URL in the blockchain; the digital artwork sits on some server and is reachable by that link. Fine, you can prove that you own the URL. But what that URL points to can change out from under you, so there's no way to make that trustless. If you own the domain and the server that it points to, the registrar can take the domain away from you and give it to someone else.
In a sense, NFTs are a lot like those schemes we used to see where some company will promise to name a star after you, even though no one recognizes their authority to do this. Fine, that URL is "yours". You just own a sequence of bytes, the ones in the URL, not the ones that the URL (temporarily) points to.
So, this has a really easy fix. The NFT points to a content hash, and the content is uploaded to the Internet Archive (and they're compensated for the storage) as part of the NFT minting process.
Your ownership is now on a distributed ledger, with a cryptographic hash of the content, paired with long term storage of said digital artwork. The Internet Archive's costs are ~$2/GB to store content in perpetuity, which seems insanely cheap to carve off as part of a transaction (Eth gas fees aside).
But then it’s just back to trust based web2, you’re trusting internet archive. That’s his point: this isn’t leading to trust less decentralization in practice. To do that, you’d have to store the NFT data on chain, which is prohibitively expensive
This is where it falls apart for me too, people are paying huge sums for artificially scarce links to someone else’s server? I keep feeling like I’m missing something.
You are missing something - a huge position in crypto. Like the article points out, your existing investment would benefit from all the hype that a slew of crypto-oriented services and products could give. Irrespective of whether those same services could be implemented "better" using standard centralized tech. And - amusingly - irrespective of whether those services offer products that you would ever in a million years have paid for without the novelty of crypto sprinkled on top - e.g. paying big bucks for receipts for jpgs.
Yes, well, the fundamental reason is not what any individual owns, it's that (as the article brilliantly points out) these positions make it a gold rush.
No, they are paying huge sums for a digital certificate of ownership of the content on some else’s server; the link is just the description of what they are certified to own, like the address on a deed.
(There's all kinds of problems with it, sure, but they aren't paying for the link.)
The value of a deed is that it's recognized by a legal system, which is backed by a police force, who you can call if some guy shows up claiming that your house actually belongs to him.
With an NFT, you don't get that. It's equivalent to your county clerk's deed registry, including the $100 filing fee, and excluding the legal machinery which gives the deed registry its value.
> The value of a deed is that it's recognized by a legal system
Sure, I’m not saying an NFT is substantively like a deed, I’m saying the link in an NFT serves a broadly similar purpose to the address in a deed.
An NFT is perhaps more akin to a certificate from one of those star name registry outfits that were popular for a while, but with less specificity as to what you supposedly bought with respect to thing it describes.
On the other hand that same legal system can decide you are no longer entitled to said property and that same police force can come and drag you out of it. That physically (as far as we know) can't happen on a cryptographic blockchain. They can some how convince you that giving up ownership of your NFT is a good idea, but it still has to be of your own volition.
His example of his NFT that gets shut down is showing that because of this layer of centralization, anything that can happen to normal assets can happen to blockchain. Governments can force OpenSea to take your NFTs, OpenSea can delete your ownership at their discretion, etc. All he is left with is a meaningless string of data on chain, while the NFT visual is gone. It’s not immune and protected like people think
Forcing a transfer does not require consent. They’ll seize the hardware that holds your private key.
If you’re worried about the government forcing you out of your home at gunpoint, what makes you think they can’t seize a private key or force a few keystrokes?
Hardware wallets usually have a password enabled, in addition to other security mechanisms. Like I said, not sure the difference matters, but there is a difference.
But what's the difference of just authority making your NFT URL invalid and moving the item under a different URL? That would be equivalent of forcing you out of your home, they cannot force you to give them keys, but they can change the lock.
If they really want they can analyze the memory on your desktop or install a keylogger. There’s so many ways to extract a private key barring a deadman switch and a cyanide tooth capsule.
Again, you’re seriously arguing that it’s harder for the government to take your house rather than give up your password?
Houses also have locks and yet presumably the police can and will bypass that security measure in this scenario. The point is that nothing will protect you in the face of overwhelming force.
Depends on who you are — Gitmo comes to mind – but at least in the United States you can substitute being beaten by agents of the government with being imprisoned where the other prisoners and possibly agents of the government will beat you until you give up the password.
Why not? If NFT ownership ever became meaningful, the people with the guns can simply keep a list of ownership amendments separate from the blockchain.
It kind of sounds like you're arguing that since the blockchain can just be ignored it's somehow less meaningful. But I'll bite:
Then the people with guns now have to expend resources to maintain and enforce those amendments. If they are not somehow just discarding the entire blockchain subsequent to their amendment, they're maintaining an every increasingly complex set of merges. Furthermore their amendment (very probably) isn't a cryptographic blockchain, so it's subject to all the problems that the actual blockchain list are not (forgery for example).
What makes blockchains unique is that they are the first example of these various records (ledgers, titles, etc) that physically cannot be manipulated in certain ways.
> Furthermore their amendment (very probably) isn't a cryptographic blockchain, so it's subject to all the problems that the actual blockchain list are not (forgery for example).
Their amendments are theirs. This is like saying that keeping your own accounting is worse for you than putting it on a blockchain, since someone might forge your own accounting books - it just makes no sense.
"They" can do just about anything they want. They can make their amendment. They can declare the blockchain null and void. They can hold a gun to your head and tell you to sell your NFT. They can even pull the trigger, in an attempt to make an example out of you for the next fool that tries to defy their authority. But the one thing they cannot do is seize your NFT without your volition. Not without breaking some of the fundamental mathematical ideas behind encryption.
Is there value in that in present day society? Maybe not. But there is undeniably something special about it.
> But the one thing they cannot do is seize your NFT without your volition
That’s not true.
I mean, even if the access to the NFT relies solely on material in your head, there are pharmacological approaches, among others, that while not necessary reliable, can cause you to give up information without meaningfully willing it.
And private information will probably one day no longer exist. Imagine some kind of device that can scan the neurons in your brain along with the electrical/chemical state and somehow extract information from that (such as a memorized cryptographic private key). Let's just throw our hands up and give up on cryptography altogether.
Even a pharmacological approach is a side channel attack which no one seems to care to distinguish between attacks on or flaws with the underlying idea. When discussing the merits of blockchain technology we are allowed to take for granted its very obvious underlying assumptions. Namely that there exists private information held by a user of the system.
"the link is just the description of what they are certified to own"
No a link isn't a description of its content, just like the article demonstrated the content can change to anything, anytime, in many ways. Even if the URL contains the hash of the content like with IPFS URLs it's not a description of the content but one step better because you can check if it's pointing to the content it supposed to be.
More importantly, they don't own the original item. An unofficial version of a deed registry says they own the link to the item. That's not the same as actually transferring the copyright or anything.
As I understand, most NFTs don't confer any copyrights. So unlike a deed, it's not a certificate of ownership of the content at all. Some other entity still owns the content in the legal sense.
> As I understand, most NFTs don't confer any copyrights.
Yes, one of the “all kinds of problems” I mentioned upthread (this one isn't an inherent problem with NFTs, but seems to be a practical one with many current NFTs) is that while NFTs certify ownership of something with regard to the linked content, exactly what that is (beyond the certificate that is the NFT itself) is often not clear, even, AFAICT, to the purchasers.
But they don't even get the ownership of the content. The original creator still owns the copyright, and as a the buyer you don't even get a license to use the work in the NFT. The copyright is the only meaningful way you can own digital art.
I think it's worse than that since, as described in the article, NFTs don't include a hash of what the link points to. So you own a certificate that describes the content of a link in the very literal sense of describing the characters in the link URL and not really anything more.
> ok so you own a certificate that describes the content of a link
More precisely you have a certificate that says you own something (often ambiguous, though this could be precise; ambiguity is a choice in the minting of an NFT rather than a fundamental issue with the technology) relating to the content described by means of a link (the NFT may or may not include additional description of the content via metadata.)
Well I imagine opensea at least prevents url collisions on their own service, but yes as the article demonstrates someone could sell the same url on several services while changing what that url points to whenever they like. I think most of the time the url points to the marketplace itself though?
So I suppose it is more accurate to say they own that particular citation of the url embedded in the blockchain, for certain values of own.
> But then it’s just back to trust based web2, you’re trusting internet archive.
Correct, because it's clear storing the content in web2 Internet Archive is superior ("you’d have to store the NFT data on chain, which is prohibitively expensive"). They will persist regardless of web3 shenanigans, and hash addressing ensures content integrity. You could even use a torrent to store and serve the content (again, which uses hashes to identify and preserve integrity of content).
Why would one trust a distributed ledger over a centralized archive run by folks whose primary focus is on preservation of the bits they're storing? The economic benefit of running storage nodes of encrypted content is unlikely to ever be sufficient to provide the same economic incentives a corporation or non profit realizes by offering the durability a centralized service provides (due to scale).
EDIT: @Ragnarork It seems like web3 is making some promises it can't keep?
I'm not sure it's even necessary to use Internet Archive or a torrent? If I own an NFT whose hash is stored on-chain, I can just ensure the availability of the preimage by storing it myself.
Then when I want to interact with a centralized NFT marketplace, I can upload the preimage to their server. They'd verify the hash and store the image. I'd continue storing it myself though, so if that marketplace goes away, I can follow the same process with another one.
If the NFT contained the content hash, your and the creators public keys, a signed timestamp, and the signature of those parts by the content creator, then the content could be stored elsewhere no?
Obviously you'd want to keep a copy yourself, but at least you could then prove to others the file you have really is the one the creator sold, no?
No expert at these crypto things, in either sense, am I missing something?
Say you add all that information to the transaction, to verify it in the future you still need to run the original file through the same hash function to prove they match.
Its common for image files to be modified, many times even automatically by the hosting service. They might compress it, remove unnecessary metadata, or add metadata for themselves. Any of that would break the hash, so you'd need to make sure any host you use to store the original absolutely never changes the file.
Then what? Well the image exists and you can verify it wasn't changed off-chain since the transaction finalized, so that's good. There's now an image publicly available online BUT a specific block chain says you own it, so that's also cool.
But wait, that hash isn't guaranteed to be unique so really anyone could make another NFT pointing to the same URL and file hash, now they also own it? And anyone could just download the file, so they own it to? And there are no legal protections for NFTs, so what was the benefit of paying to have one block chain transaction say you own it in the first place?
> so you'd need to make sure any host you use to store the original absolutely never changes the file
Which is trivial, just download the file. The place where you bought the NFT would ideally have some facility where they guarantee you can download the correct file, otherwise why buy from them?
> But wait, that hash isn't guaranteed to be unique so really anyone could make another NFT pointing to the same URL and file hash, now they also own it? And anyone could just download the file, so they own it to?
Preimage attacks are quite hard to accomplish from what I understand against modern, secure hashes. If the hash used is later broken and a preimage attack is possible then yeah you're screwed. That's a risk you take.
As for exclusive ownership, I forgot in my initial reply to add another aspect I thought about which was the license. That is, some well-defined licenses should be specified, similar to the Creative Commons stuff, and the NFS should specify one of them. Then you know if you get copyright or not etc.
Enforcement of the license would of course be similar to other digital assets, ie hard to do unless you're big, that's just the nature of digital things.
Now, just to be clear, please don't take this to mean I'm advocating NFTs. I just think the way they're currently used seems to make them completely worthless, while in theory it might be possible to make them not quite worthless.
What's the benefit of having the URL permanently stored on the blockchain in that case? If I have to download the original file as soon as the transaction completes to make sure they don't change the photo on me, why bother?
And then what am I spelling later? A transaction immortalized in a block chain with nothing more than a broken URL and, at best, a hash of the original file?
Edit: I realize I sound a bit dickish in how I'm replying. Don't take it that way, I'm really confused at how NFTs solve anything but really appreciate the conversations here and am glad to hear differing opinions!
> What's the benefit of having the URL permanently stored on the blockchain in that case?
Not much as far as I can tell. I mean it would kinda be like a signature on a painting, in that it's a visual indication of who made it. But the proof would be in the digital, cryptographic signature.
> I'm really confused at how NFTs solve anything
I'm in the same boat. I'm just trying to figure out how they might be useful if they implemented them differently.
I don't even know if I like this idea, but it'd be a different ball game if NFTs held legal status. That goes pretty counter to many of the usual benefits claimed of crypto projects,but if an NFT was treated as legally binding ownership that could make them really useful
I thought we were talking about the problem of someone pulling the rug out from under you by changing the content at a URL. The hash solves the problem, but what you are talking about is an entirely different subject, and a problem which all NFTs suffer. Or not a problem, but just a general property of NFTs and crypto as well. The network effect is extremely important with blockchains. You could also fork BTC right now and claim you own everything on the chain. Doesn't mean people will honor it.
A hash doesn't really solve the core of the rug pull problem. If the hash doesn't match you know the file at that URL changed, but how was it changed? Was it just a metadata that didn't really change the artwork, or is it a totally different file?
And what does it mean for the transaction on the block chain if both the URL and the hash no longer match? Is it worthless now and unsellable? Or do you sell it with a note that says ignore the URL, ignore the hash, or both?
I did point out other issues and that may have been unnecessary, but a hash doesn't solve the rug pull problem if the art isn't part of the encrypted and (mostly) immutable transaction block.
Not really. The hash would prevent someone to pull the rug unnoticed, but it wouldn't prevent rug pulling in the first place.
With a hash, you would be able to prove that what's currently at that url isn't what you bought, but (since hashes are by definition non-reversible) you wouldn't be able to show or see what it was you bought (unless you stored it somewhere else yourself).
No you're not - it could be stored in multiple places. It's, a hash, not a URL, and if it's a properly constructed hash it would hard or impossible to fake. The content on server other than internet archive would have the same hash.
It’ll scale like S3, et al.: replicated storage requires ongoing payments because sysadmins need to be paid, storage needs to be bought & replaced, network bandwidth is metered, etc.
It could be cheaper if someone can finally make a P2P network which becomes and stays popular[1] but it’ll always require more than a one-time payment. That could be donor funded (Internet Archive) but I’d be leery of assuming anything long-term unless you’re paying for it.
1. Abuse is the hard problem here: if I host a node, when the police download something illicit my IP is the one they see and I have to prove that it was done without my knowledge. This is why nobody does this except for known sources.
> It’ll scale like S3, et al.: replicated storage requires ongoing payments because sysadmins need to be paid, storage needs to be bought & replaced, network bandwidth is metered, etc.
That's what they are trying to solve with their tokenomics model.
The value of token will appreciate over time whereas the price of storage will keep getting cheaper.
It's simpler than s3 in many aspects so I'm not sure you would need a system administrator. Everyone can run a node and things are replicated many times over. The failover model is to look for the next node. There are no API, security, access, etc consideration to be maintained at the node level.
Data itself is public by default.
> Abuse is the hard problem here: if I host a node, when the police download something illicit my IP is the one they see and I have to prove that it was done without my knowledge. This is why nobody does this except for known sources
> The value of token will appreciate over time whereas the price of storage will keep getting cheaper.
That's not a given, however, and it's not just raw storage but also network bandwidth and operator time which all require regular ongoing payments. Expecting newcomers to pay for the early adopters' storage in perpetuity is tricky because you need high demand for an otherwise useless token but there's a limit on the price for most users in the form of all of the competing options, which are currently faster and more reliable.
> It's simpler than s3 in many aspects so I'm not sure you would need a system administrator. Everyone can run a node and things are replicated many times over. The failover model is to look for the next node. There are no API, security, access, etc consideration to be maintained at the node level.
It's not that simple: anyone running much storage will need to spend time replacing failed drives, managing their bandwidth relative to demand, etc. That time needs to be paid for. Massive replication is necessary to deal with the reduced node reliability but that means the network needs to pay for considerably more storage in total than, say, Amazon does and adds significant scaling issues managing all of those extra nodes with more frequent status changes.
This has been tried a number of times before and it always founders due to being slower and less reliable, with considerably more complicated software required to deal with all of those issues which the competitors don't have. It's possible that this will be more successful but I think it's really important to look at how the market pressures have consistently gone in the other direction. Amazon didn't end up with exabytes of storage in S3 because it started there — people migrated their data there because it was faster, cheaper, and easier to have it there — and that is a competitive challenge for a replacement trying to build on nodes which aren't maintained with comparable levels of service.
Thanks — I’m trying to keep an open mind here but it often feels like there’s a lot of history which people could benefit from. I’m not terribly old but I’ve seen a few iterations of these ideas crash on the {freeloader,abuse} rocks so I’ve been reconsidering whether my earlier enthusiasm was more a mirage than practical.
Why's there a need to trust internet archive in this situation? If the content hash is no the ETH blockchain, then it's immutable. You can make as many copies of the underlying image as you want so that sticks around permanently.
IPFS is famously slow/unreliable, not widely used, and you still need to pay for hosting of anything you don’t want to lose because storage, bandwidth, and operator time aren’t free and someone needs to get paid to deal with abuse.
They can delete the content. That's the only "change" they can do. It's like your watch analogy, except you can easily back up an image, but cannot back up a watch.
I see no reason they couldn’t change the content rather than just delete it. In fact the article shows an example of exactly that in practice.
Sure you can back up an image, but the backup is worth the same as a copy of the NFT: zip. You now own a pointer on the blockchain to nothing and a jpeg on your disk. I’ve got a lot of that going on already with zero expenditure.
The article was about the NFT containing a name. This thread is about "NFT points to a content hash", to quote toomuchtodo. You can't change the content and keep the same hash.
Similarly, you can prove to others that the version on your disk the version pointed to by the blockchain by having people check the hash.
Or even just include a content hash along with the URL in the NFT payload. Just a way to verify the referent of the URL hasn't changed since the NFT was minted. Where you can find the content with that hash if not the URL can be left arbitrary or out-of-band, but it's at least capturing a fingerprint of the content, not just an address.
It seems like this would be absolutely trivial to implement, right? Just... add a separator token (say `#`) and a content hash (say with `sha1:` prefix, urn-style) to the end of the URL that's already in NFTs.
I don't really understand why NFT's don't already do this. I don't understand why they didn't do it from the start. It seems an obvious choice to me in designing such a thing. Like, it's so easy, and such a step up in making NFT's do something closer to what people think they do... it leaves me thinking that the design of NFT's just wasn't done seriously, and nobody using it really cares.
Despite the various claims about how the worlds smartest most talented developers are working on web3… that’s not true. It was a significant oversight and I think technical leadership in the space is lacking. You have people who know lots and lots about crypto stuff but they are focused like a laser.
It’s like that crypto thought-leader on Twitter who didn’t know his NFT’d pfp was being served to various web clients over http.
It’s also why web3 startups are throwing huge cash at engineers from “web2” companies because, while they may not be crypto experts, they know how to build scalable systems, how web tech works etc. That knowledge is sorely lacking in the crypto space.
There was an "interesting" thread yesterday by some people who were surprised that static analyzing a contract and a once-over code review weren't enough to prevent the author from instantly stealing all their money.
I don't know for sure, but I'd guess they don't do file hashes because image hosts so often change the file you uploaded. They might compress it, remove unnecessary metadata, or add their own metadata. All of that would change the file contents, breaking the hash.
A permenantly verifiable has still doesn't really solve it though. Someone can still change or remove the file later, even if you downloaded the original before you now have a transaction with a bad URL but a good hash. You can't update the transaction to change the URL, so what would that mean for anyone wanting to buy the NFT from you?
There's also the much bigger issue - say we solve the above problem as well. There are no legal protections for NFT ownership and there is nothing stopping people from just copying the artwork you own. What's the point of paying so much money for the right to kind of own a piece of art that anyone can legally copy and use?
> What's the point of paying so much money for the right to kind of own a piece of art that anyone can legally copy and use?
I don't fully understand the "collector" mindset. But let's assume there are people, similar to whales in free-to-play games, that are willing to pay ridiculous large sums for what the majority would not be willing to pay anything for.
Now, think of those collectors as being willing to pay for ownership over original artwork.
The Mona Lisa itself has many replicas, you can buy prints of it, and you could probably easily find paintings of it for much cheaper. Those are all copies as well, but their monetary value is much lower, because people know they are not the original.
Now, think of photography, there are people collecting prints, sometimes of digital photography. Similarly, the 1st print is worth a lot more. Think of Vinyl records, or CD/cassette tapes for music, the worth of the 1st pressed record is a lot more, and collectors are willing to pay a lot for them.
Now think of complete digital art, that which is not even printed. Which is the "original"? Unless you were to own the HDD or the RAM stick where it was first recorded, all instances are perfect copies of the same bits. So instead, the "original" is the first person the artist publicly acknowledged as the owner of the "original". It is like the artist signing the print. This is recorded in a public ledger, that people trust and believe to be very hard to manipulate or fake. That is what an NFT is.
You might find it absurd, but is it anymore absurd than paying lots of money for the 1st print of a photo? Or the first pressed vinyl? Or the first book as signed by the artist?
The value is in people's head and emotional attachment. Someone was given by the artist themselves recognition of the piece signed in a public ledger. That's now the "original" and people assign it value.
You can think of it a bit how a lot of collectors offer public showing of their collection, the fact others can "see" the artwork for themselves isn't what make it valuable, it's the emotional knowledge around it, that of having it handed directly by the artist itself.
This is what I've understood of it at least.
Edit: Now the article still makes good point, that as it stands, some NFTs are ambiguous as to what artwork they even relate too or if they were truly created by the "artist".
That's a good explanation and it looks like people do value NFTs for those reasons. But it still doesn't compare to the Mona Lisa which if I possessed it I would know that only those physical brush strokes came from Leonardo's hand. The vinyl example is better. But even then the vinyl is physically old and unique. I can take it out and know that it was pressed in 1972. The NFT is just pixels on my screen that are a copy of a copy of.. and will be destroyed when I close the viewer.
> But it still doesn't compare to the Mona Lisa which if I possessed it I would know that only those physical brush strokes came from Leonardo's hand.
I think the idea of NFTs is that you know that the original artist (Beeple or whoever) issued the NFT, they clicked the buttons and saw the same hash you see on your screen.
Like if Leonardo da Vinci sent you a cryptographically signed email with something in it indicating that you specifically owned it, you'd probably find that valuable even though it's "just pixels" and the email can be copied - the ownership is embedded in the signed email (your name or public key, let's say) and can't be copied.
I think that's the point, anyway, I still don't think I really get it...
> But it still doesn't compare to the Mona Lisa which if I possessed it I would know that only those physical brush strokes came from Leonardo's hand
There's probably a whole industry around recognizing a true or a fake painting. I'd say if you possessed the Mona Lisa, you might still doubt its authenticity, or find yourself in a big debate with others who claim to also possess the "true" Mona Lisa. In a way, NFTs don't (or could be made not to) have this problem. I think this is actually something that people in the market of art collecting and trading actually value. I think especially in private collections, you can claim to have sold me the original bible of Pope Pius XII for 10 million and hand me a bible that is a fake, I believe to now have the real one. And then I can go and resell it to someone else for 11 million, while you also go and sell the real one you still have for 20 million to another person, and now three people believe to all have the real one. The NFTs being in a global ledger, it would be clear who owns it truly, even if three people have a copy of the same PDF.
> But even then the vinyl is physically old and unique. I can take it out and know that it was pressed in 1972.
That's because you value the artifact. But I'd say in this case the NFT IS the artifact. The NFT is what will live on, because in 2125 (assuming the chain still exists), someone will have this token tied to their own wallet. They can know that it was minted in 2021 with the same certainty (and possibly even more certain) that it was truly minted in 2021 by the artist himself (or at least the person whose key society believes was the true artist).
Finally, if the NFT contains say an IPFS URL, or some other content describing attribute, its even more clear. You know you own the first "copy" if you want.
Let me put it some other way. I create some JPEG drawing. I then hash it and have a hash of its content. I then register my art (the JPEG) on some chain by creating an NFT for it which contains said hash (maybe in the form of an IPFS URL). At this point, the world through the public blockchain ledger knows about my JPEG art, and as the first in the chain, I prove to be the creator, or it is known that I am the creator through some other means, like posting it to my blog.
I own the NFT for my own JPEG art at this point. I can host it myself on IPFS, or maybe I just post it on my blog, or even keep it secret on my computer. Now you want to buy it from me. At that point you pay me money and I transfer the NFT to you, the ledger now says that the token started from me and was transferred to you. You now own the token that says that the IPFS hash URL or the hash of my JPEG art belongs to you and was given to you by me, the artist. I also give you a copy of the JPEG itself through whatever means, maybe you download it from my IPFS hosting, or I send it to you by email, or you download it from my blog, etc.
In the digital world, it is all copies, but only you have the token.
Ya, if the token doesn't include the content description like a hash, it's a bit fuzzy and a lot crappier, because while it would show you got some token from me the artist, its not clear which of my artwork would be the one you have, assuming in 100 years the URLs were to no longer exist for example, or to point to something else. But I think this will become the norm eventually to have the hash or use IPFS.
I agree with you, I still would prefer a physical artifact, something that you can see the wear and tear, something from an old era, maybe it doesn't even look the same, maybe bits of it are gone and forgotten. But that's just me and what I'm willing to value. If people are willing to value a digital good the same, knowing the token traces back to the original artist, and they see the value in that, then it can be worth just as much.
If your solution is to trust the Internet Archive, why not just skip the blockchain part?
Any hash can match virtually unlimited number of different turd images.
And even if you trust the hash function to never be broken or brute forced with future technology, it can only verify the image, not prevent it from being deleted or altered, rendering the NFT broken and useless. Verifiably broken and useless, but still...
And why are NFT links so common, because they just seem short sighted to me and borderline dumb considering how volatile everything in the crypto space is?
Nothing about NFT's seems long term viable as they are now.
So long as "number go up", nobody cares. The moment number start going down, there'll be a magic new buzzword (ICO, token, smart contract, enterprise blockchain, DeFi) for people to speculate on and distract from the fundamental problems.
Is there any market pressure that will demand a change to the cryptographic hash? Is any of the current speculation concerned in any way about the content hosted at the URL, or just the current value of the NFT and what you can sell it for.
There is. Not from the entire space, but there's a bit of street cred you get by being entirely 'on-chain', as they say.
Within the smart contracts themselves is a read function for that content uri that provides all the data needed (from what I've seen, a hashed string) to generate an .svg file. But it obviously taxes the system and costs a lot more in gas fees (not to read it, that doesn't cost gas fees, but to deploy the contracts and mint), especially the more complex those are, which is why you mostly see it with 8-bit or very low-res artwork.
Cryptopunks being the most well-known (and also the most valuable) NFT project is all on-chain, and Anonymice being the most open and forked project that does this. EtherOrcs does it a little differently but is also on-chain and has completely open contracts you can refer to as well.
There's quite a few more besides this, but I don't know what percent it is, probably pretty small. Some people won't buy anything that's not entirely on-chain. But you're right that most people don't really care, they just care about the price or the image.
I've been digging through the Anonymice and EtherOrcs contracts to get a better understanding of the different approaches they took (and I still wouldn't say I completely understand it yet). It's pretty interesting, though.
EDIT: Sorry, you only said cryptographic hash. Cryptopunks started by providing that, but then moved to entirely on-chain (so above and beyond that), where you could query and get a full SVG file or stream of pixels for any given image directly from the contract.
This gives me an idea: Internet Archive could sell Internet Tokens™ that function exactly like NFTs (but stored on the Archive instead of blockchain). Holders would be incentivised to make sure that the Archive continues to exist via donations. It's a win win for everyone
I think they mean you keep the URL and the content stays in the Internet Archive.
But it could also mean that the Internet Archive creates a special page, say, "Owned URLs", where they list a username owner for each URL that someone has payed for. If you wanted to trade your URL, the IA would get a small cut to modify the contents of that page with the new owner.
This is 1:1 equivalent to the proposed scheme, but cuts out the inefficient "mint NFT on Ethereum blockchain" step, replacing it with a simple database on the IA side.
We can add the hash of the content but what happens if the URL goes 404 or the web server disappears? I'll be the owner of a useless pair of URL and hash.
Or those NFT contents (and the URL domain!) are guaranteed not to disappear unless many web 1.0 and 2.0 services people was paying for and went out of business?
I’m not terribly up to date with IPFS (so feel free to correct me), but if I’ve understood it correctly, it’s not dissimilar to Bittorent where files are seeded by interested parties and if no one happens to be seeding any longer, the file is essentially dead?
It’s almost like you want some centralised entity to preserve copies of the images these NFTs link to.
I wonder how many IPFS-backed NFTs are only being seeded on nodes run by the big players like OpenSea?
I guess at least if you keep a copy of your NFT you can start serving it over IPFS yourself if whoever is hosting it can't be bothered anymore, or pay a service to on your behalf. It's sort of the ideal use-case for content-based addressing, I would think, since you're trying to prove some sort of connection with/ownership of/patronage over a piece of content. And it should be more long term resilient than a centralized solution as long as the NFT owners themselves don't lose their own files. At least the incentives are aligned (if you own the NFT you will want to keep at least one copy, if only so you can show it to potential buyers!)
It seems a substantially less silly idea than pointing a token at a url that you don't control. I guess I'm surprised that NFTs aren't all hosted on IPFS or something like it, if only as a backup. Like, have these people not heard of linkrot?
But I guess as long as the buyers don't realize yet that their immutable ledger entry can become a dangling pointer in a puff of smoke, it doesn't matter.
> But I guess as long as the buyers don't realize yet that their immutable ledger entry can become a dangling pointer in a puff of smoke, it doesn't matter.
I was surprised too, but only for a moment. In the end it's basically just a record that you "own" a small amount of data (url, ipfs hash, 'coin'). Unless my ownership gets me some utility (like exclusive access to the jpeg, maybe? Ability to transfer the ownership to El Salvadorian govt to pay my taxes?), I don't see how it has value
Yes, not dissimilar from torrents. Instead of being name-addressed and requiring the name owner to provide the infrastructure to serve the data (as with HTTPS), data are content-addressed so that anyone can serve the data.
Many NFTs are hosted by NFT platforms, and also by services such as https://nft.storage/ (backed by IPFS & Filecoin). It's quite trivial though to take the IPFS CID and pin it somewhere else (local computer, a pinning service like Pinata, etc.), and anyone can do it at any time. If all you want to do is be able to prove ownership at some point in the future, you don't really need to host the content indefinitely on IPFS...just host it when you need to.
Arweave nodes can choose not to store data (and will likely drop data that's not profitable over time also), so I'm not sure that it's really a solution.
Individual nodes can choose not to store it, but your data is sharded amongst many nodes. Usually it's something like 64/96 redundancy - it's sharded across 96 nodes and at least 64 must be online to retrieve the data. It gets re-distributed if some nodes are offline for a while (not sure on specific numbers)
This was insanely surprising to me - I actually always thought the jpeg/art was stored as a kind of ‘blob’ on the blockchain that it was authenticated against the owners wallet/private key.
Some NFTs are stored this way (e.g. Blitmaps, Terraforms, Corruption(*s), &c); it's a more restrictive artistic medium since storage costs are high and technical limits feel like a trip back to the 80s. If you can fit nice art into the constraints then it can become quite popular/valuable since fully on-chain NFTs are actually decentralized (rather than the more common practice of linking to an external image).
We need a version of Freenet, where the network _guarantees_ that your content is always highly available. Well, at least as long as the tech/network itself is still alive.
Every user of the network has to provide some storage for the network itself. If there's not enough storage to safely store your new content on the network as highly available, the network would just say sorry, can't do right now, please wait on the line while we get new storage (users).
Sure, it would need some massive network effect to work at scale, but we have now, what, billions of devices connected to Internet? That ought to be enough.
I never really understood this current "decentralized" tech. Decentralized hashes with centralized gate keepers, and mixed with "old school SPOF tech", e.x. the VPS's that store the actual content. wat.
> Sure, it would need some massive network effect to work at scale
And nobody wants to participate. These projects are doomed to be extremely niche. As TFA points out, even nerds do not want to run their own servers at this point.
It could have worked in the days of casual piracy (kazaa, napster, certain private torrent sites etc had a shitton of users) if you managed to sell it as a way to do exactly that..
But getting people to install apps today to donate their bandwidth and disk space for.. what cause? Let alone when they figure out that gasp your storage may then be used for illegal material. Nah, it just doesn't work.
>your storage may then be used for illegal material
Then forget about the anonymization features of Freenet, and build something that ties to your Google Auth, Facebook ID, Government ID, whatever.
And let LEA access all of the content and seize/prosecute illegal content. Really not that different than storing your content on any of the cloud storage providers. With the exception that your data would be always guaranteed to be highly available, and not on just one or two centralized cloud storages.
>But getting people to install apps today to donate their bandwidth and disk space
> And let LEA access all of the content and seize/prosecute illegal content. Really not that different than storing your content on any of the cloud storage providers. With the exception that your data would be always guaranteed to be highly available, and not on just one or two centralized cloud storages.
It’s not that simple: if you host anyone’s content, you’re taking on personal risk (do you want to have to convince law enforcement that the pirated Disney movie or child pornography served from your home IP was served entirely without your knowledge?), giving up your resources (“Netflix is slow, turn off the mirror and see if it gets better!”), and getting slower performance/reliability (e.g. why OpenSea uses GCP instead of IPFS) immediately in the hopes that it will at some point in the future become worthwhile.
Note also that cloud storage is centralized administratively but distributed for reliability. I would give very long odds that you’re more likely to lose data through random IPFS nodes disappearing / dropping your data than on S3, and if you have to run your own geographically replicated nodes it’ll cost more in your time until you have a very large amount of data.
Statistically nobody does that, and because P2P networks need to significantly over-provision to compensate for unreliable nodes it’s hard to get anywhere close to competitive. The Linux world has the freedom ethos, no concerns about copyright/malware/etc., and still few people torrent ISOs because it’s usually slower.
No, we don't. IPFS guarantees that the owner can host their own NFT forever (there are multiple pinning services if they don't want to run a server). This is the best possible model. If even the owner doesn't give a shit, why should anybody else?
It's true that most NFT buyers have zero idea how this works. In 2 years multiple shitty NFTs are going to turn into 404. This is fine - people will learn to only buy images that use ipfs.
Your response is different from what I posted. You can always pin the image on your ipfs node and it's going to resolve to the same, unique, hash (well, unless preimage resistance of sha2 is broken...) allowing everyone in the world to download it. That doesn't mean it guarantees availability - nothing does - someone has to host it.
Ultimately, the owner has to host it, or pay someone to host it, or hope someone else hosts it. Although nfts are small enough that any semi-popular ones may stay alive potentially forever as long as someone, somewhere, hosts it on an ipfs node. Potentially long forgotten by literally everyone alive.
Well the image could also be embedded in the data of the blockchain and/or a irreversible (currently) hash made for the image sitting on the server. Now will a court enforce that digital contract as a legal contract if the person takes down the server or puts up a different image? shrug I doubt it under current law.
I definitely agree that most people/projects/etc gloss over that fact that there still needs be a 'start of authority' to be trusted with NFTS. I think a major upside of doing the digital transactions on a Blockchain (as opposed to the system you described) is that the start authority does not need to be present or keep track of any future transactions. In your Rolex example, I believe that there would be no way of person A selling their Rolex (and digital rights of the Rolex) without notifying Rolex and Rolex having to keep track of transaction. With a Blockchain, the people could agree that the 'start of authority' matches the public address that is associated with Rolex and then proceed with the transaction with no need for any middle party.
I played a decent amount of Runescape growing up, so when I first heard of NFT's I naturally thought of that game. I would definitely find intrinsic value in truly owning an NFT of some of the rare in game items. And knowing that even if Jagex (parent company) disappears that I still have ownership over the items definitely adds a lot of value.
But see, this is where I get lost in this concept.
Should Jagex fold and the game become unplayable, what do you own? An entry in a database that says that you once had this item but you can't do anything with it? Why is that valuable?
I can sort of see the argument if other game developers allow for these items to be reused in other environments, and that's something pushed by NFT enthusiasts, but I don't see how that makes economical sense.
For one thing that puts a lot of work on the table of other game developers. If every NFT of every game needs to be usable in other games, can you imagine the headache? It's a combinatorial nightmare.
Besides devs want to make money selling their own NFTs, not adding items made by others for free, so what incentive is there for adding support for your rare Runescape item in some other game? Seems like devs would rather sell you a special "Runescape retro item set pack, only $9.99!"
And then we haven't even touched on IP issues. If you have an NFT of Lara Croft, can the devs of another game just clone the model in order to let you import her?
I feel like all of these issues by far dwarf whatever convenience NFTs bring to the table. The problems I outline above are the ones that need solving, and if you find a way around those you could very easily achieve what you want without "web3" tech (see Steam trading cards and Nintendo's Amiibos for instance).
>Should Jagex fold and the game become unplayable, what do you own? An entry in a database that says that you once had this item but you can't do anything with it? Why is that valuable?
Sometimes just ownership of something is valuable in itself. That's the whole idea of collectibles, it's not always tied to its original utility. Think having an original SNES versus an emulator on a computer or an original Picasso vs a digital jpeg copy.
>For one thing that puts a lot of work on the table of other game developers. If every NFT of every game needs to be usable in other games, can you imagine the headache? It's a combinatorial nightmare.
Every NFT of every game doesn't have to be usable in other games, but the option to easily access the in-game ownership records of another game can allow for some asset sharing.
>And then we haven't even touched on IP issues. If you have an NFT of Lara Croft, can the devs of another game just clone the model in order to let you import her?
No but maybe I can give a Croft-esque outfit to an in-game character if the player has the Lara Croft NFT. It could be a selling point to some players to be able to play with assets inspired by another game they love. It could also add some unrelated mechanic to a game in which case the NFT is just used as a marketing ploy to advertise to a certain demographic. Re-using NFTs could also be completely unrelated to 3rd parties and can allow developers to allow easy migration of old assets from old games to new ones without having to maintain teh records themselves.
>I feel like all of these issues by far dwarf whatever convenience NFTs bring to the table. The problems I outline above are the ones that need solving, and if you find a way around those you could very easily achieve what you want without "web3" tech (see Steam trading cards and Nintendo's Amiibos for instance).
Again, the idea is to have a digital asset that can be traded (in terms of ownership) like a physical asset would -- without the need for a centralized mediator. Just because certain applications typically act as centralized gateways doesn't mean the blockchain itself is centralized. The hope is for the blockchain to be used as a reliable source of information for decades to come with the ability for anyone to participate if given the very accessible minimum resource requirements.
> Sometimes just ownership of something is valuable in itself. That's the whole idea of collectibles, it's not always tied to its original utility. Think having an original SNES versus an emulator on a computer or an original Picasso vs a digital jpeg copy.
But with a Picasso the scarcity is inherent in its physicality: there is only one in existence. With digital data, it is infinitely reproducible and fungible. If I replaced a JPG with a bit-for-bit copy, no one would notice nor care. Not so with a Picasso. So, NFTs are supposed to come in a make a record of your purchase of this JPG, but unlike the Picasso, this JPG does not physically exist. It must be stored somewhere and, unlike the Picasso, this has an ongoing cost. You don’t need to pay to store the Picasso (although most collectors certainly don’t just keep it in their house, they could). But you do need to pay someone - whether a company or a decentralized network - to keep storing your JPG and once you stop, it’s gone forever. It seems like it would be more future proof if Jagex just mailed you a physical print of the JPG and a certificate of authenticity.
I think saying "an original Picasso vs a high quality knockoff" would better clarify my point. I would also like to add that scarcity is not inherent in physicality, especially when a physical copy of said physical item can be made. I would argue the recorded ownership and verifiable provenance of the item make an original Picasso valuable. People don't care about just having the art because the art can be easily replicated, physically or digitally.
And yes there may be an ongoing cost associated with storing a digital image, but you could also download it on your computer, print out the image, or try one of the decentralized solutions. Ideally the metadata and image would be stored on something like Arweave (which only requires a one-time payment) since reliability through decentralization is one of the goals of the web3 movement.
>It seems like it would be more future proof if Jagex just mailed you a physical print of the JPG and a certificate of authenticity.
If the hosting of the image goes down then you still have the attestation of owning the asset on the blockchain (signed by a private key that has been associated with Jagex on creation of the NFT). As for the physical print option, I'd say since physical things can be destroyed much easier than digital items, I'd prefer it if the certificate of authenticity was just an NFT (trying to enforce an NFT to belong to the same owner of a physical asset is a losing battle).
All in all I'd say NFTs bring value to asset collection by providing stronger attestations of ownership, public provenance, and resilient record-keeping.
> No but maybe I can give a Croft-esque outfit to an in-game character if the player has the Lara Croft NFT. It could be a selling point to some players to be able to play with assets inspired by another game they love
Why would a company do this? They spend a load of dev time to create a valuable in-game asset linked to a non-fungible token created by a third party which only one person can possess at a time and then... hope the NFT owner pays $34.99 for a retail copy of the game, otherwise the asset goes unused?
That doesn't sound like a scalable marketing strategy.
Typically people don't build features around individual NFTs but NFT collections. If 20k Lara Croft NFTs were minted in a special Tomb Raider NFT collection, then the access to the new skin would be available to any of the owners of the 20k Lara Croft NFTs in the collection. I think the misunderstanding here is that an individual NFT gives unique access to an in-game asset, sometimes NFT collections give unique ownership to a copy of the same game asset.
That doesn’t really change the question, though: the Tomb Raider developers don’t need an NFT to do that, and any other company isn’t going to spend much of their money giving something for free to a handful of someone else’s customers. Why spend time on that instead of, say, charging $10 for the homage DLC which gives them actual revenue and from a much larger number of people?
For example, how many of those NFTs would have been lost or stolen — and do you want to tell potential buyers “sorry, nothing we can do about it - blockchains mean no margin for error!”
Fair enough, creating an asset which 20k people with access to a collection theoretically might use is more attractive than creating a unique asset for a unique token. It does seem strange that the supposed "killer app" for NFTs in exchangeable game stuff wouldn't have any use for their core feature (uniqueness on the blockchain) though.
If a developer wanted to market games by offering inducements to players of other games in the form of unique content it seem like a lot of other solutions would be more attractive than the blockchain. Partnership with other developers or platforms like Steam gives you an actual marketing channel to hype the special add on for Tomb Raider players, and to a lot more than 20k people. The only case where I can see them preferring to attract small numbers of players of a third party game who paid that developer for NFTs rather than every player of that game is if their game is pure pay-to-win bullshit and there's no point in targeting the sort of player who doesn't buy NFTs...
Indeed. What's more, even if publishers wanted this, it's all possible without a blockchain. If game publishers decided to coordinate on respecting shared digital assets they could just agree on a common "digital item" spec where a connected client could prove item ownership using public key cryptography and digital signatures, similar to how JWTs let a client prove claims about another system. The same spec could allow users to trade digital assets in a peer to peer manner by signing a record of transfer to another user's public key - it'd then be up to the buyer (i.e. the software they use to verify the signing) to register the updated signature chain with the relevant game vendors.
> In your Rolex example, I believe that there would be no way of person A selling their Rolex (and digital rights of the Rolex) without notifying Rolex and Rolex having to keep track of transaction.
What does "digital rights of the Rolex" mean? Also, why is it harder to notify Rolex of this transaction than it is to notify some blockchain?
> Couldn't Rolex issue a PGP signed CSV of all valid Rolex serial numbers once a month on IPFS and you'd get the exact same security and trust profile without having to involve any "web3" feature?
A serial number can be copied and engraved onto a forged watch, so not really.
A more analogous scenario would be if Rolex embedded an NFC hardware chip with a private key inside the watch, such that anyone could wave their phone over their watch and verify that the chip’s cert was indeed signed by Rolex.
Well sure but that's the "analog gap" problem. NFTs don't fix that, do they? In the end there'll have to be something that will tie a given NFT to a given watch, and one way or the other it'll be the same issue as tying my CSV to a given watch.
I agree, one can’t easily tie an NFT to a physical object. Nothing guarantees that the watch and NFT change ownership in tandem.
All I’m saying is that a serial number doesn’t really prove anything because it’s trivial to copy. A private key inextricable from the object would be better, because it could generate timestamped signatures as proof.
Yes. I regret not being more clear in my original comment, because the scheme I alluded to is an application of public key cryptography, such as Certificate Authorities, and is not about cryptocurrencies specifically.
The point of a signed timestamp (and/or challenge string) is that it demonstrates the signature is freshly generated, proof that the device is authentic right then and there. An old copied signature would not have this property.
This is sort of true.
In the case of the watch, if you read the blockchain for the serial-number on the Rolex, you could engrave that too? The storage medium of the data wouldn't make a difference.
The same could be said for the NFC chip. Those are copied all the time. Just purchase a blank and overwrite it with an original.
> NFC hardware chip with a private key inside the watch, such that anyone could wave their phone over their watch and verify that the chip’s cert was indeed signed by Rolex.
This is an excellent idea and I am now wondering why luxury brands haven't started doing this. It would be super hot. One would do it and suddenly they would all be doing it. Watches, handbags, shoes, whatever
This is one of the few usecases of crypto that kinda make sense. If those certs were on a blockchain, Rolex could fold and people in the future might still be able to check for authenticity.
There's more steps involved that I'm not sure could be solved, like, who controls the authenticity Oracle? Is it an API that gets pinged? Do you have to pay a gas or network fee to check authenticity? Could a smart contract be made to automate the work? Maybe it could work like credit card chips, which give out a one-time code to the retailer, who then gets it checked by an online service... except somehow replace the web API with a smart contract.
For larger scale operations, tagging individual items with NFC chips might be cost prohibitive.
So the idea would be to create a giant file of every Rolex transaction made in the future. And then search through that file for a given NFC tag to determine authenticity. Doing all of this in case Rolex goes out of business and can no longer maintain a hypothetical authenticity server?
Couldn't agree more. Supply chain verification is inherently authority-based... if only at some point in the creation of the internet we had invented a system for verifying authoritative claims on things ;) Not to mention that with certificates... Rolex can totally disappear into the wind, yet you can still verify the certificate provided you know Rolex's root. And all this for <$300M year in mining fees!
>Rolex could fold and people in the future might still be able to check for authenticity.
That's why I mentioned distributing the file over IPFS so that it could be easily backuped by anybody forever. If eventually there's no longer any interest in this database it could be lost to bitrot of course, but this is also true of blockchains.
> Rolex could fold and people in the future might still be able to check for authenticity.
Well, what if Rolex folds and sells their private keys, and an unscrupulous buyer then starts minting Rolex NFTs for fake watches? What if this happens surreptitiously, and not out in the open?
Further, it's far more likely at the moment that Rolex will exist 50 years from now than that Ethereum or Bitcoin will.
The problem with traditional authority models is that the authority may disappear or be subverted. In regions with unstable governments you cannot rely on the government to keep saying that your house is your house.
This is why I think the really valuable and underserved use case of the blockchain is decentralized identity. You can prove you are who you say, you’ve studied where you claim, you’ve worked at the places on your resume, and do this in ways that cannot be subverted or lost. This would be invaluable for refugees who often struggle for months or years with proving they are who they are.
For people that live in stable countries with reliable governments and strong enforcement of contracts this does not provide much value however, and I think this is why this subdomain of web3 remains underserved.
> This is why I think the really valuable and underserved use case of the blockchain is decentralized identity. You can prove you are who you say, you’ve studied where you claim, you’ve worked at the places on your resume, and do this in ways that cannot be subverted or lost. This would be invaluable for refugees who often struggle for months or years with proving they are who they are.
That's a very interesting use case, but it's hard for me to see exactly how this can be made to work.
Suppose you study at the National University of Unstabilia, which is located in a disaster-prone and conflict-riven environment. You complete your B.A. there, and you get the NUU to record this fact on a public blockchain.
A few years later, things are really bad in Unstabilia, so you move to Belgium. After you arrive there, you tell someone (maybe a prospective employer?) "hey, I'm Joeri, I'm a refugee from Unstabilia, and I have a B.A. degree!". For some reason this person is skeptical, so you say "it's OK, just look up the blockchain record with the following hash!".
Sure enough, the public blockchain contains an entry reflecting that someone named Joeri did, indeed, earn a B.A. at NUU a few years back. This is great, because maybe
* Unstabilia City was mostly destroyed in an earthquake, making it hard to contact people there, and many of the people who would have known you during your studies have likely died or become refugees themselves; and
* Lately, the new NUU administration really hates your ethnic group, so much so that it prefers to deny that people of your ethnicity were just recently widely represented among its student body; and
* Many of NUU's records were previously lost in a fire; and
* Before that, someone reputedly hacked NUU's computer systems and stole all of their records, and probably all of their cryptographic keys.
But thanks to the blockchain records, your new Belgian friends can still confirm that you actually studied at NUU, right?
But, how do they know that that record is really from NUU? How do they know that NUU really exists? How do they know what its signing keys were, and how long they remained under the university administration's control? How do they know whether it's a legitimate university? And, maybe most significantly, how do they know that you're the same Joeri who earned that degree back in the day, as opposed to some other Joeri? Are these records including some kind of digitally signed biometrics?
> But, how do they know that that record is really from NUU? How do they know that NUU really exists? How do they know what its signing keys were, and how long they remained under the university administration's control? How do they know whether it's a legitimate university? And, maybe most significantly, how do they know that you're the same Joeri who earned that degree back in the day, as opposed to some other Joeri? Are these records including some kind of digitally signed biometrics?
Asking blockchain to solve those problems is a bit ridiculous. Those are problems that need to be solved in any system, and are solved enough in many today. For starters, its not hard to archive your signing keys somewhere safe and public, especially on the blockchain - the group of Universities and employers who care about that validity will have some central organization in identifying that archive.
The issue being discussed is putting college degrees on the blockchain such that viewers can be sure they are genuine and robustly hosted without tampering - no revocation.
The blockchain solves the last two, but if your conception of them is as a magical technology that can solve every issue by virtue of hosting data then you're going to be a dissapointed simpleton.
Your core issue is that colleges are a centralized institution which decide who gets rewarded - that's what it boils down to when you say "all the value" is in trusted authorities issuing things. For starters that's a ridiculous assumption that trust is still necessary for value, but more importantly stating that blockchains are useless because they cannot replace colleges is disingenuous.
My problem with blockchains as the proposed solution here is that they solve none of the hard problems, introduce some new problems, (and no they are not an irrevocable record (as if that were even desirable), look up the DAO Hack or Bitcoin Cash fork and they certainly aren't proven to be permanent or reliable) and removing them would make the solution simpler and cheaper - the essential problem here is trust, not recording and sharing data.
You have not demonstrated any added value, and the straw-man insults sprinkled with spelling mistakes do not help persuade.
Yes I am straw-manning when you've built your original critique off a single niche use case (I believe the progenitor even used the phrase 'what if') and cite failing projects at least attempting to innovate as evidence of the uselessness of a technology which has achieved its original goal and continues on.
Well the example clearly stated an issue of redundancy. Things which can be done off chain which as little trust should be done off chain - that doesn't mean a distributed file storage protocol which runs off some chain and uses economic and cryptographic incentives isn't the solution.
None of that requires a blockchain. The same level of investment in digitization to get all of this info on to a blockchain could be used to publish it to the cloud, secured and authenticated by cryptography.
The blockchain gets you exchange, with completely transparent meditation, in the form of the smart contract / script code.
> In regions with unstable governments you cannot rely on the government to keep saying that your house is your house.
You can say it's your house all you want, but if the new regime sends soldiers to evict you, no amount of evidence that it belongs to you is going to help you.
Do you propose that "all" authorities provide digital certificates, in preparation for the region becoming unstable? If yes, paper certificates already exist, and seem to go missing -- why would it be harder for digital certificates to go missing? Or for the thing that ties one person to their digital certificates?
Or do you propose that authorities in unstable regions provide digital certificates? If yes, how can you trust them, given the unstable nature?
I value thinking about these things, but somehow I still struggle to see where the proposed extra value comes in. Maybe I'm thinking too much in extremes, and the value breaks down in extreme cases.
> I don't see why the IP owners would play ball and accept the loss of control).
The main reason would be if they could make more money on their digital goods by floating them in a large, open, heterogeneous market rather than in their smaller walled-garden. That's what traditional capital markets are good for, and the name of the game here is figuring out how to recreate those benefits in decentralized digital markets.
I am only interested by money aspect of crypto and especially on ability to fund companies easily via labor (actually that worked well in Communism). Will see if central bank currencies will allow for the same. That could be big boost to economy and big hit to VCs so I expect this to come from EU.
All those creator economy apps show that there's a need to democratise economy. I am again tempted to quote hustlers here.
>>Rolex issue a PGP signed CSV of all valid Rolex serial numbers once a month on IPFS and you'd get the exact same security and trust profile without having to involve any "web3" feature?
This doesn't enable real-time transfers of NFTs.
Ideally, the blockchain allows the NFTs to be traded without Rolex relying on another company acting as a trusted third party platform keeping track of ownership, or Rolex itself running its own transaction database. The blockchain is a common open platform for transactions, and that's useful.
> Couldn't Rolex issue a PGP signed CSV of all valid Rolex serial numbers once a month on IPFS and you'd get the exact same security and trust profile without having to involve any "web3" feature?
They totally could. But what’s interesting about NFTs is they standardize this process across all kinds of assets and issuers. Instead of a CSV for Rolex, a Twitter history for an artist, a deed for a house, a rental agreement for an Airbnb, it’s all just one format.
In the past, there’s been tremendous value that’s come out of standardizing stuff, allowing infrastructure and new kinds of businesses to be built on top.
It would be easy to create standards for Digital Asset and Identity so that producers could represent ownership on their servers and allow for trade. The only thing NFTs give you is hosting for this in a logically centralized network. Hypothetically, this allows for operations on different contracts to be composible, but I don't think this happens much in practice.
While it's refreshing to hear critique from someone who actually built something on web3, there are a couple of points where I'd dare to disagree, somewhat.
Particularly, regarding "early days". It really is, still, early days, because there is a lot of complexity in getting all the pieces built. It took years to get overall blockchain going. Then, to understand the need of programmability (smart contracts). Other pieces too: more efficient consensus mechanisms and clever ways to express commitments, decentralized storage, etc. And the space is so far from being done.
Particulary, about servers being clients. This is true today, but it would be wrong to say that nobody cares about it. Ethereum developers spend considerable effort on pushing the idea of light clients, going as far as re-architecturing the way whole blockchain state is stored, so that browsers could actually become fully valid clients, and services such as Infura would become a lot less necessary. This requires cryptographic innovations (verkle trees), client implementations, consensus between participants, etc. It is likely to require 2+ years to get there. Early days.
Another moment I would critique is the clever NFT, that displays different things. Yes, ERC-721 allows any URL as metadata file, so you can put traditional DNS-resolved URL there. But I would struggle to find any "respected" NFT collection that actually does that. Almost every high quality NFT project (Art Blocks, BAYC, so on) has IPFS as metadata URL, and goes as far as to freeze metadata, so it couldn't ever be changed.
Lastly, his discussion about value of decentralization is very valid. Yes, Ethereum developers spend a lot of effort on light clients. Will anyone care to use them? Yes, best NFT collections freeze metadata pointed to IPFT... does anyone care? Success of OpenSea and Binance Smart Chain shows that for many, idealistic goals are irrelevant, as long as money can be made. That's fine. But there are some of us who actually care. Majority has uninteresting goals (money). There are still amazing gems to be found.
Re "early days," servers as clients, etc: There are a lot of very real problems with crypto, and the solution always lies in new technologies. Slow settlement and high gas fees? L2 networks. Limited global TPS? More L2 networks or alternative L1 chains. Wasteful energy use? Proof-of-stake. No connection to real world data? Oracles. Relying on centralized APIs? Light clients are in the works. Can't trust that you'll get an untampered version of the dapp? I don't even know the solution for this but I saw a very complicated flowchart about it, so I assume there is one.
Every layer adding more complexity and more fingers in the pie.
All the while, nothing ever actually seems to get fixed. Like, high gas fees has been a conversation for years and clever people have made dozens of solutions, but everybody seems to still use vanilla Ethereum.
And these problems don't seem to be the usual problems of new technologies dealing with limited feature sets and primitive tooling, these problems fundamentally undermine the whole point of blockchain. It's not like you can only make simple distributed apps and more advance stuff will arrive as the space matures, you literally can't make a practical, truly distributed app at the moment.
The more I learn about web3 the more it seems like vaporware, and the end result will be a bunch of web3-in-name-only, VC cash-grab apps.
I'm sorry, it's difficult for me to find a truly charitable interpretation of this response. But I'll do my best.
Blockchains started very simply. Famously, Bitcoin's whitepaper is just a couple of pages long. Simple systems are nice, but they can't solve every problem. As problems were discovered, solutions were proposed. Most solutions were themselves the simplest solutions to a given problem, so naturally, as new problems are found, new solutions almost always introduce complexity. This is not unique to crypto - see, for example, HTTP, or HDMI…
I can't see a world where this wouldn't happen. Ideas usually start small and simple. Additional capabilities introduce complexity. That is not a bad thing.
Also not a bad thing: people taking different approaches to identified problems. Ethereum saw congested L1 and didn't want to sacrifice decentralization, so they focused their effort on L2. Other developers thought differently, and adopted faster, less decentralized L1s. Great!
> you literally can't make a practical, truly distributed app at the moment
Another issue is that the goalpost is ever-shifting. We have truly distributed apps. Because they were successful, they got used, and on one particular L1 that meant expensive competition for block space. Does that make the achievement invalid? Or does the fact that most popular browsers currently don't have built-in integration with ENS and IPFS, allowing for decentralized frontends, also make the effort invalid?
Again, I struggle with truly charitable interpretation of your argument.
> This is not unique to crypto - see, for example, HTTP, or HDMI…
HTTP and HDMI provided actually useful things to regular people despite their shortcomings. Crypto has been solving technical problem after technical problem for over a decade but has yet to offer anything useful to a non-enthusiast.
> Another issue is that the goalpost is ever-shifting. We have truly distributed apps.
And the only thing they are useful for is moving crypto around between enthusiasts. "Make something useful for regular people" should not be difficult goalpost for something that claims to be world changing.
>Crypto has been solving technical problem after technical problem for over a decade but has yet to offer anything useful to a non-enthusiast.
This is too dismissive of Crypto. I’m not a crypto bro but Bitcoin did actually solve a real problem: a completely digital decentralized immutable record. I hesitate to call it a currency, but it created something that was digitally scarce . The economic value it created can be seen in the Silk Road or in ransomware.
At one point the internet was also a problem looking for a solution too so I don’t think it’s a fair criticism of the technology.
> Bitcoin did actually solve a real problem: a completely digital decentralized immutable record.
That doesn't describe a problem though, it describes a technical solution.
> I hesitate to call it a currency, but it created something that was digitally scarce.
My comment was about web3 really and the associated hype, not so much cryptocurrencies themselves. I agree there's something there, though not entirely convinced it won't always be illegal sales or scams.
> At one point the internet was also a problem looking for a solution too so I don’t think it’s a fair criticism of the technology.
I see this repeated a lot but it's just not accurate. E-mail was invented within like 2 years of the internet and immediately allowed universities to exchange messages with one another. It doesn't take a networking enthusiast to see the value in sending a textual message instantly across the globe. Meanwhile I've never seen even a description of a web3 product that doesn't rely on architecture or politics to explain why it's useful.
As a non-enthusiast I agree with your points. I’ve heard a lot about cryptocurrencies since 2010 and I’ve never had a need to use them. Paying for goods or services on a black market might be a valid use case, but I, like vast majority of people, have never needed to do that. Smart contracts sound like an interesting concept, but again, I don’t really have anything in my life that could use them in the foreseeable future.
> That doesn't describe a problem though, it describes a technical solution.
I'll present a problem that that solution solves. That cryptographically backed record establishes a closer approximation to the abstract idea of "ownership" than anything has before.
I was a pretty naïve first-time home owner in that I was surprised to learn about something called "property tax". "property rent" would be a better description, since its not a one time fee (like most taxes) but something you have to pay to a government entity in perpetuity. Don't feel like paying it? You get booted off "your" "property".
Title theft and fraud are also a thing, and we even have "title insurance" to help mitigate falling victim to it.
Neither of these things is possible on a cryptographic blockchain (eviction or theft). Ownership of the NFT cannot physically be altered without the owner's volition. Establishing a link between the NFT and the underlying asset is certainly a problem, but it's not one that blockchains are attempting to solve.
I'm sorry, I still don't get it. What is the problem with a house ownership that crypto would solve? Would it eliminate the property tax? Would it eliminate an eviction if I don't pay the property tax? Would it eliminate one type of ownership fraud without introducing a new type of ownership fraud?
It doesn't need to do much else to be obviously beneficial. Keep in mind that once upon a time the entire internet functioned without https. I have no doubt many of the same arguments against crypto(currency, tokens) were also made against cryto(graphy) not long ago. A vast majority of users of cryptography still subject themselves to side channel attacks (stupid passwords, phishing) and yet somehow still benefit from the existence of https without even realizing it.
Since a lot of people still get hung up on the need for a link between an NFT and an underlying asset, consider that we somehow establish the exact same kind of link between a fancy piece of paper (a title) and a plot of land. If you forewent some of the (imo misled) notions that blockchains need to be 100% "trustless" and decentralized, and you JUST upgraded your county's title database with a blockchain, and you accepted that various forms of government are going to have to enforce a lot of it, hopefully it is evident how (1) (2) and (3) above now go away or at least change significantly.
Only if the authorities ceded their power to the blockchain, in which case this situation is unlikely to arise. If the sovereign power in the area says you don’t own it, a record on someone else’s computer doesn’t matter much.
By replacing it with electronic fraud, which is much easier to do at scale and harder to disprove. If a good phish / zero-day gets you a house’s worth of money, even more people will try it.
It only solves the question of transfers, possibly but currently not at lower expense than your local government. It doesn’t solve the analog problems which are the most important reason to have title insurance, such as surveying errors, and you also have new problems like the possibility of someone claiming a malicious transaction years ago.
> Only if the authorities ceded their power to the blockchain, in which case this situation is unlikely to arise.
Great! Let's do it. It might take a few thousand years but this doesn't represent a problem with blockchain technology. The authority can and should still be around to enforce the blockchain, but they should still have to respect it.
>By replacing it with electronic fraud, which is much easier to do at scale and harder to disprove. If a good phish / zero-day gets you a house’s worth of money, even more people will try it.
This is an argument against electronic records, not blockchain specifically. They are side channel attacks.
> and you also have new problems like the possibility of someone claiming a malicious transaction years ago.
What do you mean by this? Maybe an example would help.
> This is an argument against electronic records, not blockchain specifically. They are side channel attacks.
What makes it a blockchain problem is removing the safeguards. If you are saying the blockchain is an immutable record controlled by individual private keys, you are saying that any mistake is permanent. If you allow corrections, you don’t need the expense of a blockchain.
> > and you also have new problems like the possibility of someone claiming a malicious transaction years ago.
> What do you mean by this? Maybe an example would help.
I go to buy your house. You show me the chain saying you own it. A month later, someone says you phished their grandfather who was in hospice (or that the transaction was made by a spouse without approval, etc.) and now there’s a dispute about whether the transaction was authorized. Traditionally this is handled with third parties who can confirm that, say, they had everyone in the same room and checked ID. Moving to a model where access to a private key is all that matters requires similar solutions before you can say it removes the need for title insurance.
> What makes it a blockchain problem is removing the safeguards. If you are saying the blockchain is an immutable record controlled by individual private keys, you are saying that any mistake is permanent. If you allow corrections, you don’t need the expense of a blockchain.
That makes sense. I think the need to correct mistakes, and mistakes I concede will definitely happen, is debatable. There are benefits to some for correcting mistakes and costs to some for it as well. Figuring out whether the benefit exceeds the cost is way out of my scope.
> Moving to a model where access to a private key is all that matters requires similar solutions before you can say it removes the need for title insurance.
You're right, and I was careful not to say "all" of the needs for title insurance.
I think its worth considering the possibility that not being able to correct even that emotionally charged dying grandfather case, and instead seeking recompense between the two parties most directly involved in the crime (the grandfather and me in your example) is OK. For example, I'm now required to purchase a newly minted and desirably worthless "restitution" NFT from the grandfather for the price I sold the house (or the market value, or w/e is fair), or I go to jail. If we try to backtrack the whole transaction, you are now probably being harmed as well. Is that really better? What if we figure this out 10 years after the initial sale, and the property has changed hands 5 times already. Good luck rolling that back.
Edit: I have just started reading the bitcoin whitepaper and at least half of the introduction is about the possible benefits of the irreversibility of transactions. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Looking at this thread it's not clear if any one of the 3 examples you provided (civil forfeiture, title fraud, need for title insurance) would benefit from crypto technology today, and it's not clear if they would ever benefit from it (3 thousand years from now is not a good argument).
I hope you realize how unconvincing all this sounds to a non-enthusiast. Without a killer application (like email for the internet) I'm afraid crypto isn't very useful, and it's been 13 years without a killer application.
What exactly isn't clear? How cryptography works / benefits people? How applying cryptography to ledgers and ownership databases works? Or how it's all going to be enforced?
By the way I'm not pro crypto in that I'm not trying to convince people to put money into it. I think the energy costs of all crypto token systems are prohibitively high right now. That, and the deflation problem I personally think are the biggest unsolved problems in Bitcoin right now.. But somehow I can't even get past what a cryptographic ledger is and how it's beneficial on this forum, of all forums. Yikes.
I've been patiently explaining my understanding of the ideas behind crypto. 3Blue1Brown seems to be favorably received on this forum, so maybe this will help educate you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4 NFTs are a natural extension of a cryptographic ledger as it's explained in that video. It's just adding non fungible tokens to the otherwise fungible bitcoin tokens being exchanged on the blockchain, and we'd like those non fungible tokens to represent real world objects, rather than just USD.
Aside: I feel like we're in the dark age of cryptocurrencies right now. People are just incredibly unimaginable. I imagine 7,000 years ago there was a guy named Bob who wanted to trade his apples for some oranges. A girl named Alice wanted some apples but didn't have any oranges so instead she offers a piece of gold jewelry. Most of the Bob's on this forum would tell her to ** off. But there was some Bob who accepted the gold jewelry realizing he could then exchange that jewelry for Tom's oranges. Suddenly we went from a barter society to one that uses a currency.
Eventually we stopped using gold as a currency and started using slips of paper with lots of fancy counterfeit protection mechanisms like blue and red threads and fancy inks. Along comes cryptocurrency with mathematically provable counterfeit protection mechanisms, and no one sees the benefit. I just don't get it.
It's very clear how cryptography benefits people. We are not discussing that, we are discussing cryptocurrencies and blockchains and cryptographic ledgers. And we are not looking to explain how all that works, because first we need to identify real world problems which would be solved by those technologies, and yes, somehow you can't get past how they are beneficial. You have provided three examples, but others have questioned whether crypto would solve them, and I don't believe you have provided adequate arguments to defend your position. It was fairly easy for me to understand the motivation behind cloud computing, or stock market, or credit cards. Blockchains originally sounded like it might be something as significant. Yet many years later nothing particular useful has materialized. And it's not even clear if it ever will.
> and I don't believe you have provided adequate arguments to defend your position.
We'll have to agree to disagree then. Maybe a more relatable and simpler problem would help, this one exclusively with cryptocurrency (no NFTs):
I can print a piece of cotton/paper that looks like a US dollar bill, manipulate it and with enough effort make it look convincing enough to fool someone in to thinking its a real dollar, then go to the store and exchange it for some good. I simply cannot do that with a Bitcoin.
If you want to debate whether or not fabricating a dollar bill out of something significantly less valuable than a dollar bill is a problem that needs solving, find someone else.
If you want to debate whether or not you can fabricate a Bitcoin out of nothing, you're now entering the realm of theoretical mathematics. I am not an expert in that, but the crypotgraphy and cryptology classes I took as an undergrad ~15 years ago were good enough for me to trust it.
If you want to debate whether that singular problem is worth a system like Bitcoin, you're probably on to something but it seems like we haven't gotten to that point yet.
> I can print a piece of cotton/paper that looks like a US dollar bill, manipulate it and with enough effort make it look convincing enough to fool someone in to thinking its a real dollar, then go to the store and exchange it for some good. I simply cannot do that with a Bitcoin.
This is true but rare because it’s harder to do than it might seem and the U.S. Secret Service is quite good at shutting down counterfeiters. This costs less as a fraction of the economy than operating the Bitcoin network does, and it still provides true anonymity.
Thank you. All I was looking to do was convince someone that crypto does indeed provide a theoretical benefit, so that the conversation could evolve from "crypto SUCKS, and it doesn't do ANYTHING GOOD, and its a SCAM (read: I lost money speculating), and I DON'T LIKE IT", to: are the problems that crypto solves worth the costs.
Other problems/solutions aside, there is probably some gas fee that would make crypto worth it just for anti-counterfeiting. Do you have any sources for a numeric estimate on what counterfeiting costs the US economy?
Yes, counterfeiting is a problem. But just to clarify, to solve it - are you proposing we replace US dollar with bitcoin? If you are, have you thought this through? Has anyone? Do you think this will happen in the foreseeable future?
Thinking this through is exactly what I want the conversation to be about. I'll help you out:
[2006] "Counterfeiting of the currency of the United States is widely attempted. According to the United States Department of Treasury, an estimated $70 million in counterfeit bills are in circulation, or approximately 1 note in counterfeits for every 10,000 in genuine currency, with an upper bound of $200 million counterfeit, or 1 counterfeit per 4,000 genuine notes.[1][2] However, these numbers are based on annual seizure rates on counterfeiting, and the actual stock of counterfeit money is uncertain because some counterfeit notes successfully circulate for a few transactions."
(source: https://www.treasury.gov/about/organizational-structure/offi...)
I think Bitcoin representing the totality of USD is infeasible, but there may be some adjustments or optimizations to the transaction costs associated with it that make a new currency seem more reasonable (no less scary, certainly, but fright is an emotion and economics is mathematical).
(edited quote to be more relevant to cryptocurrency specifically)
> That makes sense. I think the need to correct mistakes, and mistakes I concede will definitely happen, is debatable. There are benefits to some for correcting mistakes and costs to some for it as well. Figuring out whether the benefit exceeds the cost is way out of my scope.
> This reminds me of another problem that I've I haven't seen mentioned yet. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/13/half-a-billion... In a fixed supply cryptocurrency like bitcoin these kind of losses will inevitably lead to deflation.
This to me is the big question: you could solve a lot of these by introducing trusted third parties but once you've done that it really raises the question of whether you need the full blockchain level of processing overhead or some kind of distributed ledger. Lots of people have been in situations where they were mugged, an elderly and/or impaired family member made a mistake or was taken advantage of, etc. and they were able to recover by proving this to a bank or similar institution. It can be painful but it's an important option to have for most people and I think that's going to be a key impediment to people trusting a system. I do this professionally and I'm not sure I'd want to commit to something where someone who gets my private key with a zero-day can do whatever they want.
> The authority can and should still be around to enforce the blockchain, but they should still have to respect it.
Why?
I’m serious, by the way. This seems like the same sort of thinking I see in supporters of various anarcho-x-isms, where whichever x is substituted in, it is somehow retained despite the anarchy.
You might like the shiny new thing, but anyone whose job it is to enforce the things shiny does, can do that at much lower cost by using the current mechanisms instead of the shiny.
Because that cost is, at least theoretically, offset by additional benefits. I'm not arguing in favor of reduced authority. People seem to conflate decentralization with anarchy.
I'd like to know that when I sell something on Craigslist, the currency I'm receiving for my good isn't counterfeit.
I'd like to know that when I receive $50 on Venmo/Paypal out of the blue:(https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/q60vnv/ven...) I don't have to wonder whether that $50 is legitimate, or about to vanish when Venmo realizes they got scammed. Better hope you didn't send the $50 back to the scammer, because somehow your transaction is more "authentic" than the scammer's, and Venmo's still going to disappear $50 from your account.
Oh and if someone writes me a fraudulent check and I cash it out, I'd better have some lawyers ready.
> People seem to conflate decentralization with anarchy.
Heh, I’m sorry I guess I phrased that badly. I’m saying there is an authority in all anarcho-x-isms, one which proponents ignore.
My intention was to suggest an analogy of that hidden authority in blockchains, in that everything blockchain can do, can also be done cheaper by having a trusted party do the conventional stuff, and in some cases — such as legal disputes, where you have to bring in a trusted mediator — you end up with all the weaknesses of both the conventional approach and blockchain.
We all would, but blockchains don’t prevent that. If anything it makes the problem more likely, because the current status quo is reversible in a court when sufficient evidence is supplied, but in the blockchain, possession of the private key is ownership.
Private keys get lost and stolen all the time even for relatively trivial things; in the case of property ownership, even if the private key is permanently offline — e.g. existing only in the form of a QR code on a sheet of paper in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying “Beware of the Leopard” — for something as valuable as property, you can bet it would be stolen.
> I'd like to know that when I receive $50 on Venmo/Paypal out of the blue:
To which the direct counterpart is: what happens on a blockchain if you get scammed and want your money back? Do you really want the authorities to do what the blockchain says, or do you want your money back?
>To which the direct counterpart is: what happens on a blockchain if you get scammed and want your money back? Do you really want the authorities to do what the blockchain says, or do you want your money back?
I think you're misunderstanding this particular example. If someone sends me ~$50 BTC out of the blue and then somehow contacts me to say "oops can I have that back?". There are only two options with a block chain: (1) I send it back or (2) I'm up $50. With Venmo, and this has happened to people, there's (3) I send the $50 back, but the original $50 was from a pending deposit that was fraudulent, so Venmo decides I owe Venmo $50, and now I'm down $50, the thief is up $50, and Venmo is square.
This will probably come as a tremendous shock to a lot of people in this forum but Venmo is going to look out for itself before it looks out for you. There are many cooperative scams (of multiple people vs Venmo) and it is not always easy for Venmo to determine exactly what is going on or who is scamming who.
Replace "Venmo" with "Coinbase" and you could have the exact same scenario in the future. "Oops, sorry we messed up, the fraudster's transaction got rejected and he didn't actually send you $50 in BTC like we said he did. What, you already initiated a payment of $50? Tough luck".
This is a Venmo problem, not a "fiat currency" problem.
I agree that it is a "Venmo problem", but more broadly it is a "human controlled/authority financial system problem". I do think something analogous could happen with Coinbase, particularly because your interactions with Coinbase require the use of centralized financial systems (bank account info or credit card info). I also think Coinbase holds and can access your private key. Correct me if that's wrong.
What's more important is that you aren't required to use Coinbase, or even anything like it, to use cryptocurrency. In fact sites like Coinbase defeat at least some of the point.
> you aren't required to use Coinbase or even anything like it, to use cryptocurrency
That's a purely academic argument; It's like saying that "you aren't required to have a Visa or Mastercard card in order to make purchases online". Technically speaking that statement may be true, and you may even find hermits that don't have a card... but, in any practical sense, everybody does, and that's how they do their online purchases.
> you may even find hermits that don't have a card... but, in any practical sense, everybody does, and that's how they do their online purchases.
It never stops. :( A person's tiny subset of experience is rarely indicative of anything but that, a subset. I conduct every transaction I can via credit card for two reasons: cash back and protection via the ability to revert fraudulent transactions. But I also have known rational, "techy" (SWE) people who refuse to use them. And I know way better than to attempt to project my experience on "everybody".
I mentioned "in every practical sense" - I'd bet that those that don't have credit cards don't do online purchases either, in the vast majority of cases (>95%). But indeed, that's true in the western world - I might be worng for Africa and Asia/China where mobile-only payments are more prevalent.
France is an example of a western country with < 50% prevalence according to that site. I think you might still be biasing your estimates (the 95%) due to your own experience.
Amazon.com, for example, accepts checking accounts and retail purchased gift cards for US residents.
It’s not a misunderstanding per se, rather I’m saying there are other scams besides the one you’ve listed, specifically ones which have basically the same effect, but if you follow the blockchain as word-of-God you they’re not fixable, and if they’re fixable you’re not following the blockchain.
The reason I started listing problems that I think crypto solves is because it seemed like many people were either not aware of or not acknowledging the existence of them. This was leading to lots of misinformed discussion. I'll summarize what I think are my least controversial conclusions, primarily for my own sanity.
Cryptocurrencies have the following benefits:
- No one (authority or otherwise) can seize assets that exist and belong to you on the blockchain, from the blockchain, without knowing your private key. People can seize your assets only outside the blockchain. People can lay claim to your assets inside the block chain, and attempt to coerce or induce you to transfer them, but they can't do it themselves. How useful can that be in practice? I don't know and am not discussing it. It's a discussion worth having, but only if people truly understand and acknowledge the prior statements.
- Some subset of all scams, namely those involving reverted and repeated transactions, become impossible. Because by definition blockchain transactions are "non-reversible" and prevent "double-spending". (control F either quoted term: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf)
- Counterfeit is impossible (ex: you cannot fabricate a bitcoin out of nothing).
Cryptocurrencies have the following drawbacks:
- Immense energy consumption.
- Increased complexity over almost every existing financial system.
- A propensity to attract scammers that build scams on top of or around blockchain technology (but with a few notable exceptions, not IN it).
- Mistakes can't be fixed by an authority. They have to be fixed through the cooperation of all those involved.
>In the digital world, everything can be copied. There is no ownership.
Actually I think you've got it backwards. In the physical world, molecules are fungible. I can take one carbon atom out of the Mona Lisa painting, replace it with some different carbon atom, and most people would call it the exact same Mona Lisa. Maybe one day an atom-level reproduction of the Mona Lisa will be possible. The whole point of the Non Fungible in NFTs is that they are mathematically not interchangeable.
I'm getting philosophical now but I'd argue ownership in the physical world is inherently flawed, to the point that "ownership" is a meaningless ideal. You are extremely limited in your ability to affect various forms of matter in the universe. This includes affecting matter in a way that most people would think represents "ownership", for example transporting some good from one location to another location that we'd say puts it in your "possession". Some individual can come rob you. A government can seize your assets. A meteor can annihilate the planet. And there is next to nothing you can do about it.
But you have supreme power to affect the data that is associated with your wallet on a cryptographic ledger (subject to another person/wallet that you are engaging in transactions with), as long as your private key is truly private, and as long as cryptography is mathematically sound. I think that's kind of cool.
This strikes me as a very strange argument. If physical ownership is moot because we don't have ultimate control over physical reality (at least, not to the point of bossing giant meteors around), why does that not also apply to the physical interface to the systems that allow a more "pure" form of ownership?
You have supreme power "as long as your private key is truly private", but that is obviously impossible. At minimum, your key must be known to at least one device that you did not design and don't fully control - the one signing transactions on your behalf.
Let's suppose that you completely eliminate all supply chain issues by building your own hardware wallet from a box of scraps in a cave or something. Congratulations! You have now embedded your "supreme power" in a physical object, and your ability to exercise control depends entirely on the model of physical possession and ownership that you have declared unsound. Hooray?
> why does that not also apply to the physical interface to the systems that allow a more "pure" form of ownership?
Maybe it does. My argument is that the best we can possibly do wrt "ownership" is this mathematical ideal. Maybe a more natural conclusion from this argument is that ownership of any form is moot. The optimistic interpretation of this is that one day we'll end up in some kind of star-trek-esque universe where no one wants for anything. The pessimistic interpretation is that we are all ultimately slaves to the powers that be.
> at least, not to the point of bossing giant meteors around
Completely aside, I realize you are just using my own example here, but this made me chuckle because after I wrote what you are replying to I learned of https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/dart
> Ownership of the NFT cannot physically be altered without the owner's volition.
Yes it can, if something nefarious happens - phishing, an account hack, etc. As soon as the account changing the record is compromised (e.g. NFT owner account), the NFTs are gone with no central authority to get them back. E.g. https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjb4nq/investor-says-bored-a...
The real estate example is interesting, how does changing a record work? Does the home owner do it, or some central authority?
Finally an interesting problem. Off the top of my head I'd guess you'd issue a new token to executor of the estate and establish that token as representative of the underlying asset rather than the original token.
If that can be done, can it be done through other processes? Like eminent domain? failure to pay property taxes? divorce settlements? property lien?
If a title-token on the blockchain can be changed through external systems that don't involve the transfer the title-token itself - saying that the old token is no longer valid, this new one is the valid one, how does the blockchain protect against title theft or fraud?
If there is the ability to mint a new title-token for a given property, what's the point of it and what advantages does it have over the existing records?
I suppose it could work a little bit like freezing your credit report. There is a school of thought that a credit report should be frozen by default (to deter identity theft) and only unfrozen for certain major events.
So with crypto, you could get benefits analogous to a default-frozen credit report, plus the ability to do some transactions, and would only "unfreeze" (ie give up the protection of crypto) for these rare, ultra catastrophic events such as loss of life, loss or compromise of private key.
> If that can be done, can it be done through other processes? Like eminent domain? failure to pay property taxes? divorce settlements? property lien?
So no it wouldn't be done for any other processes. You can still attempt to induce transfer of assets (there is still a legal and punitive system). But "ownership" now has a stronger meaning.
There absolutely could be rent/tax as well. Say you had to interact with a smart contract to do things with your title. That contract as well as having fees to execute at all can also take a cut. This is quite common already.
I used the example of property tax to challenge the idea that I had (and assume a lot of people have) of "ownership".
With blockchains, you own an NFT. Period.
With literally every other form of ownership in this world: You own things subject to your adherence to laws and rules, and your trust in the person or entity at the other end of your transactions, and various other people/entities involved in the transaction.
The difference is actually quite subtle, but still important.
What you say of NFTs isn't true. You could absolutely be legally compelled to transfer an NFT. All the blockchain makes trustless is the transaction. You know that the person sending you tokens in exchange for your NFT can't pull a fast one mid-transaction. Outside of that your ownership is still only as firm as your ability to defend it. As we see from everything from rug-pulls, NFTs being stolen and markets (with by far the most significant volume) banning them.
Being compelled to do something legally (do this or go to jail) and having it spontaneously happen to you without your consent or knowledge (a government entity gains access to your checking account and you lose access to it) is still a distinction worth making in my opinion.
I thought the idea underlying all of crypto[currency/graphy/whatever] is that as long as you have exclusive access to your private key, you control what happens to your information.
> I see this repeated a lot but it's just not accurate. E-mail was invented within like 2 years of the internet and immediately allowed universities to exchange messages with one another.
But it is true. It is pretty clear that "Internet" in this context means "ARPANET", built in 1969. First email was sent over ARPANET in 1971.
ARPANET was built to solve a very real and clearly defined problem - connecting computers over a shared network. Here's the original problem statement:
For each of these three terminals, I had three different sets of user commands. So if I was talking online with someone at S.D.C. and I wanted to talk to someone I knew at Berkeley or M.I.T. about this, I had to get up from the S.D.C. terminal, go over and log into the other terminal and get in touch with them.... I said, oh man, it's obvious what to do: If you have these three terminals, there ought to be one terminal that goes anywhere you want to go where you have interactive computing. That idea is the ARPAnet.
But still, the point is that even ARPANET solved real problems: instant message exchange in text form, without the need for specialized telegraph operators, is a real problem with real value for anyone who can afford it - even at the scale of ARPANET.
>> Bitcoin did actually solve a real problem: a completely digital decentralized immutable record.
> That doesn't describe a problem though, it describes a technical solution.
The problem is that we can't seem to form consensus in a world inundated with technology. Bitcoin and other chains have shown that you can create a state that reaches consensus under specified rules that are enforceable by computation and not violence.
Yes it has many problems, and the consensus is limited to the blockchain "world", but I envision a future where block chains can be valuable "truth" layers to the computation stack that society operates on.
>1. The internet was a solution to a very specific problem. Go and educate yourself on what ARPA was doing, will you?
In the same way the original Bitcoin paper was a solution to a very specific problem. I was referring to the amount of useless companies that were created during the original dotcom.
>2. Crypto peddlers keep equating cryptocurrencies to the internet. And never ever equating it to Juicero or Enron even if all signs point to that.
Not sure what this has to do with my comment. My comment was specifically there is a decentralized solution to do commerce that is powered by crypto. To pretend that this doesn't exist is absurd. NFTs, and Defi are literally just asset speculation but at the very least there was a platform that transacted billions of dollars on top of Bitcoin (Silk Road). I can't say that Juicero ever created a million dollars of value for its customers.
> I was referring to the amount of useless companies that were created during the original dotcom.
No, you weren't. You literally said this: "At one point the internet was also a problem looking for a solution too"
At no point was the internet a problem looking for a solution.
> >2. Crypto peddlers keep equating cryptocurrencies to the internet. And never ever equating it to Juicero or Enron even if all signs point to that.
> Not sure what this has to do with my comment.
It has everything to do with your comment. Under an article criticising web3 you immediate response was to draw comparisons with the internet. All cryptopeddlers always draw comparisons between crypto and the internet. Or crypto and cars. Or crypto and some other world-changing invention.
And never ever do they draw comparisons between crypto and Juicero, crypto and Enron etc.
> My comment was specifically there is a decentralized solution to do commerce that is powered by crypto.
There is no such solution.
> at the very least there was a platform that transacted billions of dollars on top of Bitcoin (Silk Road).
1. I very highly doubt there were billions of dollars traded on SilkRoad
2. SilkRoad relied on a very centralised reputation system even as merchants there accepted bitcoin
3. All bitcoin "solved" was moving money for illegal activities, but not "commerce". Because actual commerce requires institutions of trust (even SilkRoad had a reputation system). And for legal activities it also needs reversebility of transactions and enforcement of rules.
Juicero was something nobody wanted – clearly not true of crypto.
Enron was a deliberate fraud where things were faked – certainly true of many (most?) crypto projects, but not true of the underlying technologies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc) and therefore not even close to being true for all projects in the space.
Equating crypto to Enron is like equating Enron to the stock market – "the stock market allowed Enron make money off their fraud, therefore we should get rid of the stock market".
People thought other people wanted Juicero enough to invest $120M into it, but they were wrong. People actually want crypto, for various reasons.
You're not going to get many people agreeing with you on the removal of stock markets, and therefore I think that conversation is outside the scope of this conversation about crypto.
"Successful" is an ambiguous descriptor. What do you have in mind when you say that? From where I sit, ENS and IPFS are unambiguous failures. Do you disagree?
> it's difficult for me to find a truly charitable interpretation of this response
> I struggle with truly charitable interpretation of your argument.
It’s the same for everyone when they come across a comment they don’t like. No need to tell us, just make your reply and everyone else can determine for themselves whether the response was charitable.
"All the while, nothing ever actually seems to get fixed."
Meanwhile, Bitcoin just works, and it is fairly easy to understand.
Every once in a while I try to get excited about Ethereum. They really do seem to think about a lot of interesting things and try to address them. But at the end of the day, it all just seems way too complex.
As for NFTs, I think they could just be colored coins on the Bitcoin Blockchain, which would also be easy to understand.
I’m sorry but to clarify a few points here, Bitcoin “works” technically, and it works as a speculation and black market vehicle. It has not replaced the US dollar. I don’t see people having a need to use it when shopping groceries, paying for concert tickets, etc even when the option to do so is there.
The comment I was replying to was about technical problems, like high gas fees.
You can use fiat for speculation and black markets.
It would be weird to define "crypto works" as "people have to use it for shopping". It would be nice to be able to use it with more shops, but that is another matter. I know people who keep their savings in crypto and pay with credit cards that are backed by crypto.
Whether you "need" for example becomes an ideological question. If you agree with governments monetary politics, I guess you don't need it.
I don't buy the early part either, but "3 years into the internet we had emails and tcp" is the wrong way to critique it IMO. The "Internet" meaning IP was already the 3rd or 4th (or more) attempt at trying to create a computer networking standard. Predecessors to the internet include: ARPANET, Usenet, FidoNet, BBSes, and CYCLADES, if not more. By the way, Email existed on _all_ of these platforms before TCP or even IP. Usenet used UUCP to transfer Internet Messages (the format used by Email later on). FidoNet had EchoMail. BBSes had their own custom mail message like standards. The Internet also had a direct competitor in the form of France's MiniTel.
In hindsight, it seems like "3 years into the internet we already had emails and TCP", but the seeds for these things had been in the works for a decade plus. It's a testament to the massive success of the internet that we _think_ in hindsight that "3 years into the internet we had emails and tcp".
"3 years into the internet we already had emails and TCP", but the seeds for these things had been in the works for a decade plus
I'm not sure what you mean. Nothing has been in the works for a decade plus in 1971 when the first email was sent - it just two years after the very first internet connection was made. In contrast, it's been 13 years since bitcoins appeared, and aside from a potentially easier way to pay for illegal goods, I don't see any useful applications of crypto technology.
In your other post to my comment you mentioned that "the internet" was referring to ARPANET so I'll use that version of your argument. Electronic mail [1] was already being used on private networks to mainframes 1962. Before that, data messages were being sent over Teletext, so these private networks were just trying to do away with requiring a Teletext printer. Before Teletext, you had telegraphs being sent.
ARPANET was built with the idea to allow remote access to expensive computing resources, mainframes, at universities and government research institutions. This is far from the idea that "the computers of the world should be connected", which is roughly the idea behind the internet. Electronic mail was reimplemented in parallel on multiple different networks. But for a long time, the internet was indeed a solution looking for a problem. Why do Joe and Anu's computers have to be connected together, who cares when they can call each other on the phone or meet in person? I mean, can Joe or Anu even afford a private computer?? Private networks for research or commercial purposes were already in regular use.
> I don't see any useful applications of crypto technology.
I think in your anti-crypto zeal, you're assuming a position I don't have. I don't actually think it's valid to say "cryptocurrency is early". The early computer networks were created at a time when huge monopolies, state-run or corporatist, owned most telecoms networks around the world. It was bound to take time when entrenched interests had interest in maintaining the status quo. I also think that comparing blockchains to the Internet is silly; the Internet is the Internet, blockchains are blockchains. My point here is simply that "we had emails and TCP in 3 years" is plain factually incorrect. The internet as we know it now (a system of networks connected via L2 links that are then bridged using IP/L3 on an IP virtual address space) actually took a long time to be developed. If you're looking for an analogy to show that 13 years is too long for usable innovation, then the Web would be a better one, as the Web legitimately was used within a mere couple years of its inception. I still think making analogy between the Web and blockchains is silly for the same reason I think making the analogy between the Internet and blockchains is silly.
OK, you have a point, I agree that comparing blockchains to internet is not very useful. And I'm not actually anti-crypto, simply because I don't know enough about it or its potential. What do you think, where is this technology going? Clearly a lot of smart people are trying to build something. What are they building?
> What do you think, where is this technology going?
I think the technology is "early" but that is also a risk. If the problems can't be worked out before the space develops a reputation for fraud and malarky, then few people are going to be excited to transact in that space. I think there's potential if crypto can figure out how to switch from PoW to a less hungry algorithm (like PoS) and if crypto can make development easier (deploying and testing smart contracts on Eth is a gigantic PITA which is why there's so many security vulnerabilities in smart contracts), if crypto can address Moxie's criticisms, and if chain fees can go back down to ~ 2016 BTC levels. There's chains like Algorand that show potential but I'm not sure if it's too little too late. Maybe with the amount of investment capital lying around, they can weather the storm, but plenty of otherwise perfectly good technologies have tanked due to too slow execution.
When writing code for a blockchain today, even on an Ethereum L2, you're in a very resource-constrained environment where you end up using bitpacking tricks and the like. That's how it was for early computers, too, of course — they may serve as a better analogy. Programmable computers have taken decades to develop, beginning in ~1950, and I expect that decentralized computation will follow a similar path.
There simply are numerous hard problems to solve to make this all work at greater scale. In a healthy ecosystem like Ethereum's, there are frequent research discoveries (discovery of the concept of data availability, the application of BLS signature aggregation, proposer-builder separation, zkevm, data availability sampling, ...). The software engineering effort required to implement such research is colossal as well. Eventually we'll even see e.g. specialized hardware for efficiently producing or verifying zero-knowledge proofs.
It would be easy to look at the very early computers, which were perhaps not all that useful, and shrug — but that take wouldn't have extended well into the future as the technology scaled.
There simply are numerous hard problems to solve to make this all work at greater scale. In a healthy ecosystem like Ethereum's, there are frequent research discoveries (discovery of the concept of data availability, the application of BLS signature aggregation, proposer-builder separation, zkevm, data availability sampling, ...). The software engineering effort required to implement such research is colossal as well.
Ok, so there is a massive amount of effort to be put forth to
get something out of this, and even then it is still kind of up in the
air what that "something" actually is.
Would it not be prudent to have at least some sort of roughly sketched
map of what all this effort is supposed to bring about? other than
Lambos...
Or maybe ask if we would be better served if all that effort was put
forth in some other direction? Man hours are not a limitless resource.
In the limit, all this effort brings about an artifact that could be thought of as a "magic" computer where:
- Everyone trusts that the computer operates to spec,
- Anyone (or any user interface) can type whatever they want into the terminal and press "enter",
- Anyone (or any other computer program) can read state out,
- The computer has immense amounts of storage and compute,
- Anyone who wants to change the computer's state in some way that cannot be achieved by using the terminal can freely make a copy of the computer with whatever changes they want, and encourage others to use their version instead.
What, one might wonder, would the use be? There are many, many potential uses — it almost boggles the mind — it's kind of like trying to imagine the uses of the internet when it was first invented.
To name one example: you could use this magic computer to operate a VR metaverse, instead of relying on a centralized Facebook one. Failing to do that would lock meaningful sections of our lives into a single vendor whose motivation is profit. Using the magic computer instead would mean that the metaverse would operate according to its predefined rules (which could leave plenty of space for human elections or other forms of collective decision-making), and that if things went awry anyone could try to set us back on track by making a modified copy of the machine and raising awareness about using it instead.
Just like regular computers, this magic computer could also have plenty of negative consequences. It depends on how people opt to use it. I think we'll probably have more luck adopting technology and trying to drive it in the right direction, though — the alternative is widespread Luddism, which might actually be a good idea, but I don't see a realistic path to achieving it.
A lot of folks who are very skeptical of web3 due to its dark sides are probably people who probably have great values and, if they adopted web3, could probably do a lot to improve its trajectory.
> It would be easy to look at the very early computers, which were perhaps not all that useful, and shrug — but that take wouldn't have extended well into the future as the technology scaled.
Early computers solved problems they were designed to solve. So they were plenty useful. Your statement is nonsensical.
Early blockchains have also solved the problems they were designed to solve. For example:
- Bitcoin offers a transferrable store of value which cannot be inflated by governments,
- Stablecoins, thanks to being cross-border, are often used in e.g. Argentina where the local currency is unstable and it's not legal to buy dollars,
- Proof of Humanity + universal basic income has provided extra income to Argentinian people (e.g. heard of someone who was able to purchase a ticket to visit their family for Christmas thanks to crypto UBI),
- Crypto has been used to send remittances to economically unstable places (Lebanon, Turkey, Venezuela)
- Gitcoin has provided public goods funding and advanced our conception of mechanism design,
- Helium has created a new 5G network that people can actually roam onto,
- NFTs have provided a new funding model for artists (who create public goods),
- Zcash and Monero have allowed for fully private digital transfers,
So, the thing is, all of these things fall into two categories.
Either purely technical solutions, or previously solved problems.
For example, IoT scale global 5G networks you can roan into? That's a solved issue already. Same for programming bounties, proof of humanity, UBI, transferrable assets (though Bitcoin is in some ways more transferable) etc...
Others are fully technical problems, like fully private digital transfers.
Others yet are pretty much just temporary workaround. The fact that you can send remittances to Lebanon or Venezuela was never inherently problematic because of the instability of their currency, rather, it's because the government (in some cases other governments) decided to make it more difficult.
If a government wanted to, they could make sending remittances via crypto just as difficult as by any other way.
NFTs as a funding model is not inherently different from the existing comission and copyright system. What NFTs brought was hype, which made people who wouldn't previously comission artwork to now do so. Attesting ownership or transfering ownership of a piece of art with a contemporary author is not more difficult without than with NFTs. Especially because you still need to trust whoever minted the NFT.
There are few, actual, real world problems that have been solved by Web3 tech. I wish it wasn't the case, but it's true.
The fundamental issue is that Web3 tech can't fully replace centralised institutions. So we need to build centralised institutions anyways. If those fail, it can provide some palliation, as long as they don't fail so hard the government tries to fight it. So in the end, it doesn't truly solve any problem in the real world, though it can in some situations act as a Bandaid.
Sure, its useful, but that's temporary. There is no actual fundamental difference between sending crypto and sending fiat to Lebanon, Turkey or Venezuela, it's just a temporary workaround.
> - Crypto has been used to send remittances to economically unstable places (Lebanon, Turkey, Venezuela)
This would be cheaper if you didn't use the crypto part. The reason people use crypto is just that the governments have not yet noticed they're running an illegal money transmitter.
Sure, S3 is also cheaper than torrents. And HTTP/Telnet is cheaper than HTTPS/SSH. But some people do see value in math-based guarantees over those given by governments and courts. And others don't. We need both approaches to keep each other in check.
Isn’t S3 actually expensive because cloud computing platforms charge so much for outbound bandwidth? That’s how they stop you from moving across providers.
On what formula? Because if I have a 500 MB video file and I want to distribute to some tens of maybe even hundreds of people, I don't see S3 being cheaper. Just sending out 500 MB from S3 to the Internet 10 times costs between $0.25 and $0.45.
There's a reason why I didn't touch S3 when I had to transfer up to 1 TB of video content per day to clients.
"Cheaper" for a use-case like hosting static assets for your website/webapp. Torrents have high overhead which only becomes justifiable for big files and high latency being acceptable.
> P.S. the tone of your comment made me a little sad :(
Good. You're trying to hock snake pyramid schemes and claiming it's a revolution. Blockchains are slow and expensive databases. That is it. They have no authority over anything so the only
Cryptocurrencies are burning through the power usage of a small country for bullshit. The worthless shit being "created" is fueled by breathless hype of hucksters looking for the next sucker to trade actual useful money for their Geoffrey dollars.
You're part of a giant scam, or multiple scams. You're listing a bunch of shit which has existing prosaic solutions. You think the blockchain solutions are new and innovative because you never looked into the issues before. Someone came up with a wasteful "solution", slapped the word blockchain on it, and you've uncritically accepted it as some super great thing.
Your comment broke the site guidelines egregiously. Attacking another user like this will get you banned here, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. Perhaps you don't feel you owe people you disagree with better, but you owe this community much better if you're participating in it.
You've also been posting in the flamewar style in other comments too. Please stop doing that. It's not what this site is for, and it poisons what it is for. We want thoughtful, curious conversation here—not people smiting enemies and bashing each other.
It’s extremely disingenuous to say we have “nothing”. The EVM and smart contracts really are amazing technology that I hope any technical person could appreciate, even if they don’t see a practical application.
I think OP was implying something of real world value.
I can see the hypothetical value in decentralized computing/public database.
Certain types of data could in theory be stored publicly, and anybody could build APIs around them. In particular, it would be cool if there was some common protocol and storage format for something like tweets, such that anybody could build Twitter client. Common protocol would especially benefit social media IMO.
We've long collaborated on open source code, but this would be more akin to open source data.
But all that being said, why has nothing real world value oriented materialized yet?
The decentralized experience is worse, and there are privacy concerns around storing certain data publicly, I would guess. Can those problems be solved?
> But all that being said, why has nothing real world value oriented materialized yet?
Because Ethereum was founded by early Bitcoiners to raise bitcoin for themselves, and the technology always came second to the pursuit of self-enrichment. Software projects can never lose their soul. If the soul was rotten from the very beginning, as the saying goes: “garbage in, garbage out”.
I sincerely doubt if any of the inventors of the marketing phrase “web 3” ever thought it would come to this: where their investors are so desperate for yield that they begin taking the term seriously. Not that it matters to the founders of Ethereum, many of whom have long since become secretive Bitcoin billionaires.
The Ethereum project is best described as a series of cynical courtship displays designed purely to bootstrap the “network effect” for their newly created confidence game called ETH, which in 2014 they sold to — to borrow their own legal terminology — “philanthropists” in exchange for “donations”. A process they swore up and down bore no similarity at all to a securities offering.
People not privy to the way cryptocurrency works are shocked to find the various buzzwords hatched by the Ethereum people for their own self-enrichment in the described legacy era of ICOs turn out to be a whole lot of nothing. They shouldn’t be shocked, they should be embarassed for lowering themselves to investing in such a system, or angry if they did so in ignorance.
Well, I fully expect cryptos to implode akin to 2018 in the near future.
There's no tie to real world value... Everything is self referential and only implies value within world of crypto.
I do think there's potential behind the concept of standard protocols for "open source data", but blockchains have not delivered on the premise very well.
It's just one pyramid/ponzi scheme after the other, designed with self enrichment in mind first, as you say.
> The EVM and smart contracts really are amazing technology
Are they, though? What's amazing about them? The amount of overhead per unit of useful work is mind boggling. So much so that a single raspberry pi 4 is 5,000x more powerful than the entire EVM network. And the initial smart contract language Solidity is notoriously poorly designed for the job.
Truly honestly what is the technology here that we're supposed to be appreciating?
There is nothing amazing about being able to run a computer program. That's what computers do. EVM is also not a distributed computing service since every node has to run the same thing. It is slightly interesting watching people try to reinvent high-assurance computing from scratch without doing any research first, but it's not technically interesting.
Actually, the more "interesting" crypto projects are the more likely they are to be a scam using a "courtier's reply" defense.
I'd add that having a globally readable ledger encourages interoperability in ways we can't yet appreciate.
I believe that ERC-731 is valuable for the same reason that GIF89a is valuable.
I don't think anyone in 1989 could have predicted meme culture and the importance of the gif, but it happened because an enabling technology (communicate with animations) arrived and people started experimenting.
NFTs will probably become part of daily life in unexpected ways, because an enabling technology (cryptographic ownership of assets) has arrived and people are starting to experiment.
> I believe that ERC-731 is valuable for the same reason that GIF89a is valuable.
GIFs can be created, parsed, read, played, copied, deleted on commodity hardware for free. GIFs became popular because they were so easy to exchange because video formats were so heavy and patent encumbered at the time (less so than GIF was, anyway). The cultural phenomenon of reaction GIFs arose because of its accessibility.
Tell me how a child is supposed to safely do the following: easily create a wallet, somehow get some Ethereum, and starts minting and/or buying NFTs. None of that is even remotely comparable to ease of use of GIFs on the internet.
If you want to argue that "cryptographic ownership of assets" is going to be commonplace, that's fine, but only for strictly digital onchain assets. It's never going to apply to any asset in meatspace because humans have sticks and stones to get what they want and renders your claims irrelevant.
If you lose access to your wallet for whatever reason, be it fire, flood, social engineering, forgetting your password, death, solar flare, it's gone forever. If you depended on it for anything important, there's no recourse. Let's say there are cryptocoin insurance companies. How do you prove that you don't secretly still have access to your wallet?
>Another moment I would critique is the clever NFT, that displays different things. Yes, ERC-721 allows any URL as metadata file, so you can put traditional DNS-resolved URL there. But I would struggle to find any "respected" NFT collection that actually does that. Almost every high quality NFT project (Art Blocks, BAYC, so on) has IPFS as metadata URL, and goes as far as to freeze metadata, so it couldn't ever be changed.
The problem with digital art is that it is infinitely copyable (at no cost) and untraceable (with little effort, and a huge/impossible effort to trace backwards). There's nothing stopping an artist from selling a work of art as edition 1 of 1, and then a month later "minting" another copy or 10. Secondly, there's no way to prove the image uploaded is from the original owner. What happens if someone steals someone else's work, mints an NFT and sells it, and the buyer finds out the next day?
Thus, I cant be convinced a "respected" NFT collection / distributor can exist.
> There's nothing stopping an artist from selling a work of art as edition 1 of 1, and then a month later "minting" another copy or 10.
There is a social cost to making a promise and breaking it.
> What happens if someone steals someone else's work, mints an NFT and sells it, and the buyer finds out the next day?
Don't buy from random sources. You have similar problems with Pokemon cards, for example. Lots of fakes and it's often hard to tell a fake. However, people have found ways around the issue.
> You still have to verify that what you're buying is legitimate
That it is challenging to evaluate the legitimacy of a seller with a potentially obfuscated identity living who-knows-where is the reason middlemen are inevitable. Even with blockchains.
My understanding of IPFS is that there is some DNS-and-HTTP translation step that resolves content to IPFS locations. Is that correct, and is it immutable? How does that work?
There are many gateways that allow viewing IPFS content over HTTP (e.g. ipfs.io), but the "true" IPFS experience is not over HTTP, it's done via P2P and addressed using content hashes. For example, one of my NFTs has content hash of
QmTqkpmbKmciQgqhUWpML7dsJ59MBEjgQd7wH853n4ASZM
I keep a copy of it on my computer (+ backups). If for some reason it were to be unhosted by every IPFS participant, I could become one, and re-establish my NFT. Image content -> content hash, so everyone would agree about content re-establishing.
Content on IPFS is keyed by hash values. The data is immutable at least to the extent that it's impractical to find a hash collision with sha256 (today). The content will also only remain up so long as someone (either the initial submitter or others) has it pinned. Otherwise, the content will, eventually, disappear.
> It took years to get overall blockchain going. Then, to understand the need of programmability (smart contracts)
When was this need "understood"? When was it realized? How exactly?
I find it a bit paradoxical to say that "we understood the need for smart contracts right after the blockchain was invented". What problem did smart contracts solve when they were invented?
That's not quite right. The JS source code is committed on chain via a contract interaction and every minted token gets a token hash which, when run through the JS source, can recreate the art.
But...the execution environment is still your web browser and non-animated Art Blocks NFTs still have a "preview" stored off-chain like most other. Neither running the code in your browser or retrieving the preview is an on-chain operation.
it is pretty trivial to retrieve JS code and the hash from the ArtBlocks smart contracts, and save them into a HTML file to run it locally.
probably a more reasonable concern (rather than the on/off chain question) is one of dependencies (some depend on common libraries like p5) and possible incompatible changes to JS and/or browser spec in the future. At which point emulators may need to be created to continue to display this work.
Generally, the burden of maintenance for AB pieces is quite low and archivability quite accessible, relative to many other digital real-time artworks in museums and galleries today.
Agreed. I think the biggest "existential threat" to Art Blocks is that browsers change very quickly and different browser engines do things differently. In that respect, the art is truly just the code and not the visual product the code produces. If Art Blocks pieces are goin to live forever in "live view" it will probably be up to some digital archivists to make that happen.
Moxie makes so many good critiques (some are so subtle, it might be worth a second read). I got the sense he’s trying very hard to be even handed and constructive about a situation he feels pretty badly about, but his true feelings are bleeding through in some of the side points / parentheticals.
One point that I disagree with is his almost axiomatic premise that decentralization is an inherent good and the implication that the Internet went wrong because it failed to stay decentralized. To hint at great cryptography as the solution, as he does im his conclusion, is baked deep in his bones as an amazing cryptographer, but I think he’s prescribing the wrong cure. The problems with the Internet are fundamentally not about decentralization - they’re about trust. It’s a people problem, not a technology problem. Because of this, cryptography (I do not mean crypto) simply cannot be the answer - even the best cryptography is, like a great legal system, only capable of dramatically reducing the overhead costs and risk of operating in a given environment. When it comes to what great cryptography can achieve, I think HTTPS and maybe some E2E stuff that’s happening with Signal is as good as it can get (interestingly, HTTPS is good in large part thanks to Moxie) - it cannot bring us back to some golden Internet age.
It’s pretty interesting to consider the intersection between what counts as “people” and “technical” problems.
For example, concurrent version control systems (like perforce) were horrible. This can be thought of as a technical problem, but it was actually right at the intersection of something technical and a people thing. What git understood is that having a canonical repo was a people issue, and it correctly abandoned a central “source of truth”… basically no amount of technology can fix what is a people problem, so no repos are “special” or “the one” from a technical point of view. It then forced people to sort their shit out. However, because of this insight, git was able to get the technical aspects spot on. It correctly recognized that what was needed was the right data structure. Git is extremely simple software, that basically does two things really well: branch and merge, but it needed the right data structure.
I think talking about centralization (APIs and infrastructure) vs decentralization (protocols) as a people vs tech problem is exactly the same sort of thing, and to get the correct view on it you have to really mail in detail where the people/tech problems begin/end.
it's impossible to talk about trust without talking about cryptography.
from an implementation pov "trust" is a distraction where anyone can quickly derail any argument citing "Trusting Trust" or "the show me the root of trust" ...
So to avoid meta-discussions talking about cryptography instead of trust skips the noise and goes straight to the heart of the issue.
Consider this:
- Talking about cryptography is hard but it's unambiguous.
- Talking about trust is easy but ambiguous.
Cryptography forces us to look at the reality of implementation instead of a "meta-psychological concept" from meat space. Problem with talking about trust in engineering is that we like to lift things from meatspace and model it within the digital space.
But we forget trust isn't "a thing", it constantly changes, it's useful only as a tool to accept randomness/chaos of life. And so we'll perpetually fail when discussing trust in the digital space or try to pin it down in order to allow converting it into a spec or an implementation.
And I think Moxie understands this and so skips the noise by going straight to cryptography which is the only "tool" that is meaningful when we talk about the things we base trust assumptions on (cia triad).
we need to bring back "Clippy" but instead of a paperclip it's the ghost of Ken Thompson chasing your mouse pointer around and slapping it with a copy of "Trusting Trust".
To be fair, the vision of crypto isn't to revert the web back to when it was better, that is pretty much not possible. That doesn't mean it can't lead us somewhere forward, different from the past, that is also better.
> One point that I disagree with is his almost axiomatic premise that decentralization is an inherent good and the implication that the Internet went wrong because it failed to stay decentralized.
But isn't decentralization one of the points of crypto and Web3? It doesn't matter if Moxie agrees with decentralization or not. If the direction everyone is charging in is "decentralization", and it's not really decentralized, then it's a movement that isn't heading where it thinks (or where it claims). That's still true, regardless of what Moxie thinks the direction should be.
The golden internet age was innovation and community. You wanted your own X? Code it yourself. You looking for a certain subject? You may find a forum.
Web2 has been polluted by frameworks, modules, libraries and that the generic website now looks like the next. It hasn't gotten any easier its gotten harder. Where do you actually start if you want to create a new website or "app"?
My mother knows html, she has her own website. When it comes down to wanting a gallery to display her portfolio the easiest answer is to say "install wordpress". Which isn't easy in any shape or form.
And then if you wish to be part of Googles Search Engine you have to pay sponsorship.
The golden age was the innovation, the new, creativity, surprisingly freedom. Folk putting work in to developing a new platform.
Sadly we are now surrounded by walled gardens and one of the caveats are that if you want it on display, you have to pay.
Isn't the fundamental discussion we should be having if decentralization embodies trust? Is something decentralized automatically trustful? Or can trust only be established in a decentralized way? Which way is it?
The only thing I see people agreeing on is that centralized setups are never (infinitely) trustworthy.
This is insightful, but a bit depressing. How do you propose solving these problems if cryptography is not the answer? At least Moxie is suggesting that there is a viable path forward by focusing on solutions that decentralize the infrastructure.
We have centuries of data and precedent from human legal systems. How could human and machine governance be improved with the aid of modern technology, including but not limited to, revision control of legislation and public caselaw, graph databases for threat analytics across time/space/network, automated identification of gaps in machine governance which require human intervention, and yes, all the tools of web3/crypt0.
> revision control of legislation and public caselaw
Even in pseudo-democracies, even in many outright autocracies, the information needed to build such a thing exists and is public. I don't know if anyone's built a git repo for all US federal law, but the information is there if you want to do it and it'd probably be a really fun project.
A quick search suggests there are repos but not with all the history.
I wonder if anybody has tried modeling real-world legal systems in a DAO. Probably too complicated, but I think you could pretty much cover the US constitution just as a thought experiment.
"With the shift to mobile, we now live firmly in a world of clients and servers – with the former completely unable to act as the latter – and those questions seem more important to me than ever. Meanwhile, ethereum actually refers to servers as “clients,” so there’s not even a word for an actual untrusted client/server interface that will have to exist somewhere, and no acknowledgement that if successful there will ultimately be billions (!) more clients than servers."
Finally someone articulates the problem with crypto. People don't want to run their own servers, and they sure as shit don't want to run their own banks. So in theory you have a decentralised trustless web or financial system, but in practice, everyone is trusting someone to run a node for them. Which is exactly how the web and finance work now.
If people want banks, they can have them. At this point exchanges have become the banks of the cryptocurrency space. Lots of people just leave their coins in the exchanges, they even have savings accounts.
The ability to withdraw the money and use it directly with no third party involved is still important. Especially since governments are already implementing digital currencies that will be fully under their control.
How is withdrawing your crypto keys from an exchange functionally different from hiding jewellery around the house? At least the value of the jewellery is far less volatile, plus you can wear and enjoy it, which makes you less likely to lose it.
Yes yes you can memorise some encryption key, but that poses its own problems - what happens to your money if you die or become non-compos mentis?
Ultimately any sane person ends up trusting someone, whether a bank, an exchange, a lawyer or safe deposit box. Crypto removes the need for trust with a pretty extraordinary and elegant idea, but nobody actually wants it.
I'm not gonna claim it's different. It's not. Holding funds in a paper wallet means you have a piece of paper that's worth thousands, millions. It's a fact that there are inherent risks to holding that paper.
At some point this becomes about principles. Even if you have banks, even if banks manage to provide a good service without screwing up the economy in the process, you always have the choice to simply opt out of it. You can withdraw all of your money if you want and still maintain the ability to transact with anyone in the world. Now banking is no longer something that's imposed on everyone, it's an individual choice. It's a lot like the right to bear arms.
Your question about what happens to the money if you die is extremely relevant. My father asked me that exact question about cryptocurrencies. I came to the conclusion that if we own crypto then we must somehow make these arrangements ourselves because we can't depend on some government or bank to do it and certainly not some exchange that doesn't even answer emails. It should be possible for family to inherit a physical paperkey but I have to admit I know of no concrete examples of such a thing happening.
This is not a problem with crypto, because there are solutions to this, it's a problem with how people use it. The real danger is that people get too comfortable with this way of doing things and we never switch to more secure solutions.
As the person said, it is not a problem with crypto because there are indeed solutions to the problem. The tool you are referring to are the set of crypto currencies, of which there are many, which do not compensate data handling.
The point I'm trying (and failing) to make is that if a solution to a problem is reliably mis-used by its users, then it's not actually a solution in practical terms. The problems in this space are ultimately social, not technical. Success is measured by usage, not passing tests.
I’m not saying Metamask is a good tool, it’s not that easy switching to a good tool today anyway, we will see what happens in the next years but I expect that this will be an active area of research and improvement.
The same thing can be said of the web in general. The linked article even makes this point! If in the early web users all wanted to run their own servers the centralization of web 2.0 would not have happened. Is there any reason to think that history won't repeat itself and users will choose to use web3 technologies the "right" way?
Without Chrome and their push to force https I doubt that the web would have become so encrypted. But then CDN services did start centralizing https as well (because users don’t want to deal with certificates). Metamask and popular wallets, as well as layer 1 projects, have to decide to invest in these areas.
First of all, nobody participating in a blockchain protocol is running their own bank, no more than you are running the country when you vote for president.
Secondly, you are correct that in Web 2 people do not desire to run their own servers or analogously in crypto today they do not want to run nodes. But many people do want to mine - its a massive industry, but the issue stands, the nodes connecting people to the network and serving the data end up centralized; The Infura Problem is a great example of this. Infura was started by Ethereum founders to run Ethereum nodes that the standard wallets (the biggest of which, Metamask, made by the same organization) connect to by default.
The issue is that the Ethereum network is deeply reliant on both consensus and data-distribution, but it only compensates infrastructure for consensus - the miners - and in the future, stakers. Bitcoin is not as deeply affected by this because of its low data throughput, but its worth noting that non-mining nodes, which are essential to non-miners having a say in the network, are volunteering. These nodes are also responsible for distributing transaction data when miners use a modified Bitcoin Core Client designed to try and gain advantages by selectively sharing.
The miners on each network and those who run businesses around it don't want the networks to crumble, so they end up doing the work of nodes, but at the bare minimum. In Ethereum this means centralized node hosting services - that's a reality of the state of the network at this point. The solution is to start compensating both aspects of the network, because both are important. This not only re-decentralizes the nodes' motives and control, but it also means that distributing data more efficiently offers more rewards, so node operators are rewarded for scaling the network. The key concept here is that if the network does not compensate for its vital functions directly and proportionally to performance, then those functions will simply remain on life support.
The average user (the same user that doesn't want to be bothered with running a server at home) doesn't care about this, I don't think. Most people would prefer to rely on a trusted authority or expert for this sort of thing.
When talking about democratization, the average user is probably the only user that matters.
Yes but the fact that the user will do what's convenient does not mean it is better. The thing about Bitcoin (as an example) is that 99% of people using can't parse the source code, but they all know that if there was an issue in it the alarm would have been sounded by now by someone who could.
This is more a problem with Ethereum rather than with "standard" crypto.
For mobiles you have "SPV wallets" that does communicate with many other nodes while verifying block headers and that the transactions you're interested in are included in the blocks.
So an SPV wallet doesn't contain the whole blockchain, but to cheat it (and make you see invalid transactions), you need to generate a fake block, which is just as expensive as creating a real and valid block.
And all that's needed is for you to find a single node you can communicate with
I'll be honest I had no idea that access to Ethereum is effectively gate-kept by two centralized entities (Infura, Alchemy). I knew there were only one or two true Ethereum full-nodes, but the impact of that never quite clicked.
Me either. I had no idea that accessing a link to NFT-described content went through OpenSea for content that isn't even hosted by OpenSea. That's apparently a MetaMask thing. Supposedly a MetaMask wallet can connect to any willing node, but in practice they use the Infuria->OpenSea server.
Yes, you can run your own Etherium node and server, and connect a MetaMask wallet to it.[1] As Moxie points out, nobody wants to do that.
Worse, the blockchain does not, apparently, contain the hash of the data. You can't even prove you even have access rights to the data if the hosting service goes down. All you own is a link to a URL.
There are more Ethereum full nodes than two, but how many will accept web queries? That's a service.
> Worse, the blockchain does not, apparently, contain the hash of the data.
It very often does, and it is certainly the case for most high-value NFTs. It is indeed not the case if you create your NFT on OpenSea and do not take the additional step of freezing the metadata.
Also, there are many artworks that change, so a hash to a single file is not necessarily the right solution.
So if you purchase an NFT, you need to make a local copy of the actual data? Since the blockchain only has the hash? And if whatever server you originally got the data from the NFT for went down, you'd lose it if you didn't make a backup?
In those cases does the blockchain still have the URL as well? And you might end up with a collection of bits that matched the hash in the blockchain but was no longer at the original URL? What's the next step then?
(The "artwork may change" bit seems like it becomes even more weird and potentially nightmarish edge-case/potentially-losing-your-purchase-wise.)
> So if you purchase an NFT, you need to make a local copy of the actual data?
If you purchase one that’s worth say >4 figures then, yes, yes you should! Also at that point, you’re either part of the 1% or at the very least owe some due diligence to your investments.
In reality, the internet is a big copy machine and you’re probably safe. But you should still back it up.
the data has no value. anyone can right click copy an image. the value is that you own the blockchain address that points to a url. picture of a house = no value. deed to the house = value. even if the house is destroyed (data changed), the deed still has some kind of value
A URL pointing to nothing with no way to view the art that supposedly lives there anymore? I don't think that "deed" is gonna be worth much for long.
Sounds like it has the same value as saying "I used to own this one famous painting before it burned down in a fire."
A hash corresponding to the bits in your file? Sure, that works, you can say "yep, this is the image, I own it." A URL plus a hash + the bits. Sure, that makes sense, even if the URL goes away, you can prove that those particular bits belong to you. A URL that's now dead and nothing else? Nah.
You're not getting it. This is a game where the point is to collect deeds to houses, not the houses themselves. What's valuable to NFT enthusiasts is owning the deed to a famous home, even if the home is destroyed. Like saying you have the deed to Lincoln's first cabin
You can say that this is a stupid game and people shouldn't be playing it. I didn't make it up and I don't take part in it. I'm just trying to tell you what they're doing
This is leaving out the real reason: they hold lots of Ethereum and were concerned that not enough people wanted to buy their tokens. So many NFTs have been made under suspicious circumstances that I wouldn’t take the stated goals at face value.
Many NFTs are hosted on IPFS. If someone hosting it pulls the image, you can just start hosting it yourself instead, and since IPFS urls are based on the hash, it will never be "lost" so long as at least 1 person still has the content pointed to by the NFT.
IPFS is basically Bittorrent plus a financing system. Arweave charges US$5/gigabyte for permanent storage on IPFS. This is supposed to be forever, funded by investing the money and speculating in the declining future price of storage.
You can supposedly put academic papers on Arweave's version of IPFS.[1] But if you try "Browse", nothing appears. This acts like another one of those distributed systems that isn't.
I haven't heard of Arweave before, but yes, the [1] link above doesn't show any results either in the "Browse" or "Search" mode. The premise sounds interesting though. Is this a bug of some sort or does someone with more info know what's up?
A deed is to land, the land still exists if the house is gone. Your example is more like owning a title to a car that's been shot into the sun. It has 0 value.
I'd argue you don't even own the database entry. You own _a private key for a wallet that appears in_ the database entry for the hash of the image.
But to truly _own_ something, all the cryptographic guarantees in the world won't change the fact that true ownership can only be enforced through violence. And if your private key can be stolen by hackers in countries without extradition treaties, one could argue that anything digital is only "owned" in the absolute weakest sense of the word: no one has tried disputing it yet.
The centralised marketplaces themselves (like OpenSea) are able to and might try to police duplicate NFTs, or other counterfeit near-matches. I'm not actually sure if they actually do.
But on the blockchain itself, the NFT is just a smart contract (bit of code, bit of data) that knows it's current owner, it's name and a URI pointing at the image. There zero mechanism preventing duplicates.
Hell, it's such an unregulated market that the NFT might be based on a custom smart contract with a backdoor that allows the creator to steal it back at any time.
Ok, yeah, that's what I thought. So someone could sell a multimillion-dollar NFT, then someone else could duplicate it manually and "re-sell" it, and if they didn't do proper due diligence...
Bit that it'd be very practical, but the data itself is shared so in theory every company could set up their own API to render the blockchain into a readable, quick to access format. Even the vanished poop emoji NFT would reappear once someone else renders their view on the blockchain in the right way.
The problem with this is that running servers that store and process one or even multiple blockchains in a searchable way is terribly costly and inefficient. In theory the public ledgers are all safe against locking away data, like Google or Microsoft could do with your accounts in the real web, but in practice nobody wants to be the guy making a loss on serving blockchain views.
If web3 ever gets off the ground, it needs more of these access provider companies. Perhaps even a prebuilt system you can throw onto your own server to participate, like IPFS and other existing decentralised systems provide.
I'm still not clear on the actual benefit of the cryptocurrency web other than the concept of "owning things without legal protection or oversight" which I (and I believe most people) have very little interest in if it comes at the premium it comes at today. From a technical standpoint all of this blockchain stuff is awesome, but it's an awesome solution in search of a problem.
In practice none of this is happening. All the major wallets query OpenSea to determine what NFTs an account has (according to the article). anyone can access the data but that doesn't change what the wallets query. I can start my own wallet that directly calculates who owns what using the blockchain, but that sounds computationally expensive and there's no guarantee that anyone would use it.
"In theory" the data is open. but I believe that the point of the article is that unless I'm running my own node, data visibility is limited to what someone else tells me. and here, in reality, OpenSea has decided to delist the author's NFT and they have no recourse.
Problem is who cares if you run your own servers when everyone you know is viewing NFTs through servers which are manipulating the data like Opensea is.
That's true, but if the NFTs show up on some places and not on others then you could start a "resistance" against the existing market places. Outside of DMCAs and other such legal requirements, an exchange needs to be impartial about the stuff being sold and published on there to remain credible.
The cryptocurrency crowd is usually drawn to the decentralised, unregulated market, and OpenSea has turned out to be the exact thing blockchains are trying to overthrow.
But that's the point. So many people hyping web3 like it's going to be fundamentally different which is why it's worth all these resources (both people and energy), when it appears already heading down the same path as web2. Consolidated companies growing very large and getting a bunch of already known VCs even richer.
It's like a populist movement whose goal is to enrich the existing rich.
And in theory I can build a social network and become bigger than Facebook.
The reality however is that market dynamics, acquisition costs, network effects etc prevent this from happening. And these aren't things that crypto can really solve.
The social graph is 90% of the value of a social network and the hardest resource to build. Without it an exact copy of Facebook built by someone else is useless.
It's only useless if your goal is to have an archival copy of the entire social network. That isn't the goal for most social networks. The build around communities and grow/evolve over time.
It is costly, but not inefficient. This is what we do at my company and our products monetize our blockchain indexing operations. We are doing it all open source and are in the process of decentralizing our operations, so that:
1. anyone who operates a node can contribute time on their node for a share of our revenue
2. anyone can host one of our blockchain crawlers for a share of our revenue
3. anyone can contribute storage to our platform for a share of our revenue
We currently support Ethereum and Polygon, and are expanding to more chains.
I found this an excellent article, but the HN discussion (not calling out your comment specifically) seems to miss the fact that, as programmers, it is fully within OUR power to create the world we want to operate in.
Edit: To clarify - we run our own nodes. Currently on AWS but we are running out of credits soon so soon in our offices and living rooms, and eventually in data centers.
I'm curious what would happen if somebody uploaded illegal data (e.g. child porn, sensitive PII, or government secrets) to an Ethereum contract. Would these nodes be legally required to filter it? If you look at something like the Pirate Bay, it's not simply enough that you are an allegedly content-unaware service -- once you become aware of your service being used for or distributing something illegal, you are required to mitigate it. At the end of the day, these are businesses which operate within a jurisdiction and must act in self-preservation.
But at the point where they start filtering transactions/addresses, there's going to be big questions about what is the true view of the blockchain.
IIRC this happened years ago on the bitcoin blockchain. I guess that nobody seems to care about that data being shared across every full wallet because bitcoin's primary use case is too remote from data sharing ?
In what sense is it "gate-kept"? Isn't the complaint that in practice most people probably use those two services? As far as I know those two services don't do anything to try to force you to use them, and people just use them out of convenience because "People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will."
The potential for single points of failure (or even intentional abuse) does exist because of this de facto dominance of two service providers, but as far as I can tell there's nothing stopping anyone from running their own node and connecting their various cryptocurrency wallets to them other than the money and inconvenience of running your own server.
> As far as I know those two services don't do anything to try to force you to use them, and people just use them out of convenience because "People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will."
Indeed, but one could make the same claim re any Web 2 juggernauts like Google and Facebook. You don't need to use them, sure. You can start your own social network. It's just expensive and inconvenient. This is what causes centralization and gatekeeping in the first place. It becomes self-reenforcing.
Except that you do need to use Google and Facebook if you want to interact with their data. They literally gate-keep the access to their data. It's not just inconvenient to host your own server that discovers peers and syncs the entire log of all historical events on the Facebook social network and allows you to write new events to that log which those peers will recognize. That's impossible (or at least, it would require some significant and very illegal hacking effort).
Heh. “Illegal hacking effort”? In the EU, it's illegal for Facebook to prevent this. In fact, there's even an export button, which gives you quite a lot of the historical data (though not all of it).
To get events, just scrape the Facebook website using Selenium and Python. There are online tutorials for this. Harder than it should be, I'll be the first to admit, but easier than blockchain-based systems. (Blockchain isn't the appropriate solution for social media; use a proper federated protocol like ActivityPub or XMPP.)
That covers exporting one user’s data at one point in time, sure. But you can’t read all public events without significant work on a scraper, and you certainly can’t contribute without going through Facebook’s servers. Of course you’re not forced to use Facebook, but in order to use Facebook you must go through their computer systems on their terms.
But the goal of most people isn't to use Facebook; it's to keep in contact with their friends. Scraping just the things they care about is fairly easy; scraping what Facebook chooses to put in front of their eyeballs when they're using an account (in practice, what they'd see if they were using Facebook) is really quite easy.
Then you can just reply to Facebook messages on something other than Facebook. That'll annoy your friends a bit, but that's the cost of them still using Facebook.
The problem with Facebook is not that it's hard to get your data off. It's not, really. The problem is that you have to be a programmer to do so; and blockchain stuff doesn't fix that problem.
Totally, but as the article points out, you only have the URL. You can't store more than a few bytes on chain so the link can point to a Facebook URL, OpenSea URL, etc which you don't own. So unless you are going to store small messages, what's different?
The concern is that since these companies are iterating faster than the protocol and providing their own API services that apps/products built on these platforms will not in fact be portable, and in practice will suffer from the same lock-in and network effects as web2.
The point is if you buy a stylized poop icon but the pseudo-gatekeeper company deems they want to shut off that part of the blockchain what are you going to do? Are you going to download and maintain 20 PiB of data on a server to keep your unique one-of-kind poop icon? The same could happen in the future to actually valuable things like a contract/NFT between you and another party.
Analysis of blockchain transactions is also consolidating around middlemen too! If you're trying to read data off of the blockchain for professional analysis purposes, you'll find a lot of working analysts are using sites like Dune.xyz, which stick a SQL interface in front of data slurped from the blockchain and charge a pretty penny to access it.
(Wouldn't be surprised if they're slurping from middlemen services themselves)
We have built an open source tool that you can connect to any node (on an Ethereum-based blockchain) and instantly start building datasets about contracts that you care about. All you need is their ABI.
We are committed to keeping this code free. Our policy is only to charge for our operational expertise, but all the code that we use is open source. We are in the process of opening our platform up for decentralization (so anyone can contribute node time, storage, etc.).
There’s no real reason for this to be honest. The Web3 projects I’ve worked on tends to fall for centralized services like Infura because of development needs at first and then it’s just easier to use it for production. I’ve made a decent living for the last two years setting up test infrastructure for Web3 projects due to its complex nature. This is true across all blockchains, not just Ethereum. It’s an area ripe for new DX products.
New products? Would those be more centralized platforms, or is it feasible for me to connect to the blockchain, verify stuff, and so on if I am running my own server?
It still seems that my users on phones and browsers would need to trust me in that case, right?
Oh it’s totally doable to run your own node on your own server! And thanks to the protocols consensus rules your users can trust that for a transaction to go through your node and be accepted onto main net your node is a good actor.
So one example I’d give - every team I’ve worked on has had to build a local development environment with several nodes to easily spin up with a clean slate for deterministic testing. Teams get sucked into tools like Infura to set these up and then it’s so easy to do the same for deployment they do just that. I think there’s tons of room for Blockchain-as-a-Service tools to improve development and testing processes without forcing centralization on main net deployments.
> And thanks to the protocols consensus rules your users can trust that for a transaction to go through your node and be accepted onto main net your node is a good actor.
Usually, you still have the “server is selectively lying” problem; unless the users are talking to each other, how do the consensus rules help with this?
> Usually, you still have the “server is selectively lying” problem; unless the users are talking to each other, how do the consensus rules help with this?
If you're submitting txs to a node that doesn't communicate to the mainnet (they're isolated from it) then any txs that go to it would be void. You could just use that Eth on the proper mainnet as it wouldn't be on the chain. If the node decided to then come onto the mainnet it's chain would be vetoed by the other nodes states and would fork back onto the main chain. Ethereal has Byzantine-Fault Tolerance up to 50% and you don't gain anything by running an isolated node to try trick people.
That's not the only way to lie. You could, for example, lie that a transaction that doesn't exist has gone through – say, in a cross-chain “currency exchange”. Or perform a double-spend attack. Or many other things, because the Byzantine fault tolerance doesn't apply in this case.
> I think there’s tons of room for Blockchain-as-a-Service tools to improve development and testing processes without forcing centralization on main net deployments.
The big Blockchain-as-a-Services shut down - both IBM and Azure are gone.
I don't mean these sorts of simple host-a-node services but something where you can run custom chains for your dev and testing. For example, this week I had to build a separate Polkadot chain for a client that had reduced governance term durations so they only took 5 minutes instead of 120 day and with a smaller council size so tests are easier to manage. This needs to run in CI so has to be in a position to spin up and tear down on command and the genesis block has to fund the appropriate accounts for testing. This could be pretty easily abstracted to a Web App for people to build this without needing to know how the underlying nodes operate, what to change, etc...
It's way simpler to just connect to Wikipedia.org and download the pages you want to read instead of downloading the whole Wikipedia.org database and keeping it stored and updated on your devices. Same principle.
Mostly the cost of hiring a DevOps engineer to set it up and maintain it and taking on the additional risk of having to deal with upgrading the node etc... It's just cheaper and easier to go centralized at the moment.
Though things are never cheaper to maintain than at the beginning of a tech bloom. Its only going to get more expensive to create and maintain as the node and the APIs get more complex.
Sure but these aren't crazy complicated beasts - a binary installation and some unix experience gets you 90% of the way there! I don't think they'll get far more complex in the next few years at least, and documentation/user support is really good
Yes, but with a few other things! Setting up ad-hoc chains with custom genesis files would be a huge improvement for dev teams as they'd not have to make their own solution (which everyone I've worked with has ended up doing).
It's not gate-kept, it's just that it's not easy to run your own node and synchronize to the chain (especially if you're on mobile) so people don't do it and instead decide to trust public nodes.
It's the early days, remember how long the internet worked with http:// ? It's only in 2009 I believe that Facebook switched to https://
I should have said archival nodes, the ones that keep state back to the genesis block. I don't know if that number is even tracked anywhere. I've read estimates ranging from 2 to 5. I'm trying to find where I read that, happy to be wrong - or right, if anyone has data.
[edit] Here. [1] And here. [2]
After examining every which way we could think of to add the Trie state to our Ethereum state, we asked Vitalik for assistance. His first comment to us was “oh you’re one of the few running one of those big, scary nodes.” We asked him if he knew of anyone else running a “big, scary node” to see if we could possibly sync with them. He knew of no one, not even the Ethereum Foundation keeps a full archival copy of the Ethereum chain. [2].
I've run quite a bit of analytics on ethereum and have downloaded the entire chain multiple times for processing and it's freely available from multiple providers. All the major API providers (infura, etherscan, etc) have the all the raw blocks available readily.
Some Erigon nodes run with pruning enabled. You can't tell which ones those are, or how much pruning.
Technically you can tell which Geth nodes are archive nodes with a GetNodeData query over devp2p, although that call is deprecated and will eventually be removed. Its replacement, GetTrieNodes, cannot be used for this.
Archival nodes also keep state back to the genesis block, it's just stored in delta format so you could say that it's not "unpacked" out to the disk. It's a common misconception that "full nodes" don't have all this data.
> Every now and then someone will argue on CT that Ethereum full nodes are not complete nodes because archive nodes exist. I decided to run a little experiment to disprove a few things
> The goal was to convert a full node into an archive node, demonstrating that Ethereum full nodes contain all the necessary blockchain data.
> 28 days later, I can confirm that it worked. I started with a 150 GB full node and expanded it to an archive node weighting 2.3 TB, without external network connectivity.
A full node lets you fully verify the chain's historical states and it lets you interact with the current state. Unless you're running a service that exists solely to allow people to query historical states (like a block explorer service), I don't see why it would be useful to be able to query historical state.
You need an archival node to see a list of all transaction that transfer eth into an address.
A full node can only give you the current balance, and a list of all transactions that directly transfer eth to that address. Any transaction that transfers eth as the side effect of a smart contract is invisible.
I personally see it as a flaw in the design of eth. You shouldn't need the complete history of states just to find all relevant transactions, but you do.
Besides, the argument that regular users shouldn't need to query such information it doesn't change the fact that the information is unqueriable in a full node, short of spending 28 days transforming it into an archival node.
I'll give you that. If you need to query a list of all contract transactions that have ever transferred ETH to your address, I believe you would need an archive node to do so although don't quote me on that.
> Besides, the argument that regular users shouldn't need to query such information it doesn't change the fact that the information is unqueriable in a full node, short of spending 28 days transforming it into an archival node.
If you don't need to query the data, then the data doesn't have to be unpacked and indexed for querying. Seems simple to me.
It's kind of misleading to claim the archival is packed. It's not compressed into some archival format. Instead, the full node contains all the inputs to regenerate the data.
To transform into an archival node, a full node has to rewind to the very first block, and replay every single transaction.
Since the EVM is Turing complete, this is roughly equilvent to stimulating a computer with years of recorded keyboard and mouse inputs, taking care to record how each input effects state of the computer.
You can't jump to the middle, you have to replay the whole thing.
I don't think it's misleading to call Git history "packed", and the mechanism for regenerating historical states is similar to Ethereum's (though of course Git's delta function is changeset-only with no turing-completeness). In fact, Git calls its own delta-storage "Git packfiles".
The EVM is a very simple and rudimentary virtual computer, so replaying the whole thing isn't an impossible task. According to the tweet, it took this guy's computer 28 days to replay 4 years of history.
Git also adds snapshots to the mix, which makes it possible to rapidly jump to fixed points in history and only use deltas for the fine grained seek. Git also has indexes to find stuff.
Git justifies the viability of it's "packing scheme" by actually making everyday use of it.
A full eth node has no snapshots or useful indexes into the archival data. It has to apply the deltas linearly from the beginning. Applying the deltas is very slow, very IO bound, seeking all over the disk.
The data might be there, but it's practically useless. A user who discovers they need some archival data is never going to consider waiting weeks for the nearly 7 years of history to be replayed before running their query. Instead they will head over to etherscan and trust whatever it says.
Those all sound like local database features that one could add to an Ethereum client if they found them useful enough to bother, they aren't protocol-level concerns or "flaws in the design of eth" as you put it earlier.
> The data might be there, but it's practically useless.
The availability of the packed data is useful, just not to the end user of the node. Having this data widely available on the network means that anyone can spin up an archive node by peering with other full nodes, they don't need to discover and peer with the very limited number of other archive nodes, and the network doesn't need to worry about losing that data permanently if all archive nodes go offline.
> A user who discovers they need some archival data is never going to consider waiting weeks for the nearly 7 years of history to be replayed before running their query. Instead they will head over to etherscan and trust whatever it says.
Call me unprincipled but I don't think it's an issue that if a user needs data above and beyond what's needed to fully verify the chain and read and write to it, they're expected to either spin up a more resource-intensive node or retrieve the data from a specialized history service. Statelessness is on the roadmap, so in the long-term the historical data that Etherscan and similar services serve up to you will come with a validity proof anyways.
I'm fine with you dropping the principles of decentralization and accepting that the current situation is ok.
You can construct many great arguments that the increased centralization is a good thing, or that the upsides are better than the downsides.
What I take issue with is attempts to classify ethereum "Full Nodes" as more than what they are. Yes, they technically contain all the information requires to reconstruct an archival node (at least until statelessness becomes a thing).
They are simply not anywhere near the same thing, and attempts to brand them as the more or less same thing just comes across as denial.
> They are simply not anywhere near the same thing, and attempts to brand them as the more or less same thing just comes across as denial.
They are the same thing specifically when it comes to:
* Downloading, verifying, and storing every transaction that has ever happened on the network
* Maintaining a tamper-proof, data-complete copy of the blockchain
* Interacting with the blockchain in a maximally verified, maximally secure way
I never said that they were exactly the same thing or that they should be branded as the same thing, I said that they store the same data (by which I mean from an information-theoretic standpoint), which is true.
> What I take issue with is attempts to classify ethereum "Full Nodes" as more than what they are.
I take issue with the attempts to classify them as less than what they are.
What needs to be squashed is the common idea in the OP that "full nodes are not actually full" because there's a "fuller" "archive" node that has the states indexed on-disk. The difference between a full node and an archive node is perfomant historical queryability, not security or data-completeness.
OP says that "access to Ethereum is effectively gate-kept by two centralized entities", which is untrue because you don't need an archive node to access Ethereum, only a full node. OP's idea that an archive node is the only "true Ethereum full-node" is common baloney that pops up often in the cryptocurrency community.
This is where the difference between theory and reality start to become an issue.
Yes, in theory the full node contains the full blockchain. Yes, it's all you need to verify that any transaction happened. Yes it's tamper proof.
But in reality, it can't show you the full side-effects of every transaction. In reality there are occasionally things things that require archival data. In reality, it's always easier to go to a centralised block explorer, or pay one of the few centralised API services (And I know this from experience, I've synced a full archival node back in 2019, and build a product that required querying it. It was such a pain that these days I'd highly recommend not doing that and just paying for API access)
In reality, the fact that you occationally need to go to etherscan to get the data you need, results in you just going to etherscan anyway, even for the simpler queries when you have a perfectly fine full node sitting there (again, personal experience). Hell, etherscan actually provides more data than an archival node, where else are you going to find the source code for contracts?
In reality... Most people don't even run light nodes. They certainly don't run full nodes. They just use etherscan, or whatever API their 3rd party wallet uses.
That's why in reality, access to ethereum is partially centralised around API providers. Yes, in theory anyone can go around them, set up their own node or create a competing API service at any time. But that's not what happens in reality, and when it comes to the topic of centralisation vs decentralisation, I'd argue that reality is far more important than theory.
Its a bit of a well kept secret. It does not represent maliciousness on the part of Ethereum or centralized node providers - its a consequence of the network doing nothing to compensate for nodes to deliver data to-and-fro. Miners and businesses stand to lose if the whole network crumbles, so the bare minimum is done to supply nodes, which means centralized node hosting.
A fully scalable, sustainable and decentralized network compensates all infrastructure important to the network, which means mining (consensus) and transaction/data routing. A nice side effect of rewarding data transmission is that you incentivize speed, so scalability can happen naturally with no conflicts of interest between miners and users.
Check out Pocket Network, it's a web3 network protocol that incentivizes node operators to run ethereum nodes (and other blockchains). Effectively decentralizes Infura / Alchemy https://www.pokt.network/
It's not gate-kept by two centralized entities at all, there are a lot of alternatives many completely decentralized. This author is clearly new to the space and hasn't really done much research, outside 5 minutes of google.
All these arguments apply to email as well - there are plenty of small providers and you can run your own email server. But, in practice, almost everybody uses gmail or outlook so we still say it's heavily centralized.
What good is running your own full Ethereum node if OpenSea blocks the NFT you're trying to sell and most of the customers who would want to buy it are going through OpenSea's node?
You're not wrong, but it can be a fantastic experience if you do have your own self-hosted node. I run the geth node on a linux server and can connect to it to send blockchain transactions or retrieve information from the chain. Example: my tax prep software took my wallet addresses and found all my uniswap trades by querying the local node.
At the risk of displaying my ignorance and lack of knowledge about this area, one part I found very familiar in this article is that the action interactions in his apps didn't actually interact with the blockchain, but essentially with two centralized services.
My very limited understanding is that for blockchains essentially the way to distribute them is that every node has a full copy. This sounds awfully expensive in the long run. My intuition would be that once running a node is expensive enough, this would not be truly decentralized. If I can't get the fundamental information out of a blockchain myself on hardware I can afford, the actual properties of the blockchain don't matter anymore as I cannot access them myself.
The moment you need to rely on third parties, you lose any unique properties a blockchain might have. I don't know how this would work if blockchains inherently are inefficient enough that you always need a way around querying them directly. I find the idea of a distributed trust-less database interesting, but if it is so inefficient that I can't actually access it myself that idea doesn't seem that interesting anymore.
Except that as you say, it's too expensive for every node to have a full copy, so there will only be a few dominant players. If that's the case, web3 will be like what we have now, where instead of the dominant players being Google, Meta, and Amazon they will be the two or three dominant web3 companies, with a few smaller people trying to keep up.
You are massively over estimating how much a copy of the entire history of ethereum costs.
You can store the entire blockchain on a 1 tb harddrive.
The cost prohibitive nature is only running an open rpc that you tell hundreds of thousands of people about. Then you will have to deal will letting all those people access that 1tb of data.
Quicknode lets you have a private rpc with the full history of the chain for dollars a month.
That's not how decentralized blockchains work, you participate in staking or as a validator, there are no "companies", it's open source and decisions ar3 made from the ground up, meaning your are a participant. Also to say every node needs a full copy is about 5 years behind what's currently happening in the space.
> blockchain data providers obviously need to provide the exact same data
That's not obvious to me. I'd expect that companies could be asked to censor certain parts of the blockchain, and would then hide those parts in their API. I would also expect that transacting with certain addresses could be blocked, and companies could enforce that in their APIs.
This article also helps me appreciate how important the "small node" approach is. Bitcoin and Ethereum nodes can run on $200 of hardware (a basic Raspberry Pi + 1 TB drive). And even that investment is inaccessible to most.
>> At the risk of displaying my ignorance and lack of knowledge about this area, one part I found very familiar in this article is that the action interactions in his apps didn't actually interact with the blockchain, but essentially with two centralized services.
Absolutely correct. Extremely flawed reasoning regarding blockchains and web3 on Moxie's part. He actually created more confusion than enlightenment.
He's creating confusion by treating front ends or clients like (Metamask, Opensea, and Infura) as servers when they are actually clients.
So dapp -> infura -> blockchain is really client -> client -> blockchain.
When multichain interoperability becomes widely available (See polkadot, cosmos, etc) blockchains will also become clients as well. Clients at any level won't be bounded like they currently exist in centralized networks.
> I think changing our relationship to technology will probably require making software easier to create, but in my lifetime I’ve seen the opposite come to pass.
I don't think I'm disagreeing with Moxie here, but I do like to emphasize that it's less that creating software has gotten harder (which is true in some ways but false in other ways), and more that our standards and expectations for what software should do have gotten higher. If I wanted to make a chat app today, for example, it would obviously need to:
1. run on iOS, Android, and probably also Windows/macOS/Linux or at least desktop browsers
2. have some notion of persistent user identity and message history, including something like passwords and something like an account recovery flow
3. support group communication among these persistent users, hopefully allowing for multiple devices per user
4. be internationalized into many languages
5. with some sort of abuse reporting/detection/response mechanisms and some posture towards law enforcement requests
It doesn't need all those things on day one, but it will need them if and when it gets popular. And of course this is without even beginning to think about discretionary features like
6. searching, sending, and displaying animated GIFs
If my goal is to build an app that me and my friends can use for fun, of course I don't need to do most of this. But if my goal is to compete for market share with apps that do these things, I 100% have to do all this and more.
Chat apps are incredibly commoditised. It also seems natural that improvements to huge tech platforms today takes more time than anything previously.
But for smaller applications that innovatively solve a new problem, feature parity shouldn't be as important. I actually think now is the best time ever to build something, with all the tooling available. You can use Electron, Firebase, Auth0, GetStream etc to solve many of your points.
As an engineer, I feel like this single post helped me better understand Web3 and how it worked under the hood better than any of the heavily hyped Discord and Twitter announcements of new projects over the past year.
It's interesting how tightly coupled Metamask is to all of the other big crypto / NFT marketplaces. Feels like the "distributed web" portion of it has just been an over-exaggeration all along.
> Feels like the "distributed web" portion of it has just been an over-exaggeration all along.
It has, but only a small portion of people with the engineering skills to recognize knew it. Those profiting off it hyped it, and those not either called it a scam or stayed out of the fray.
This somewhat reminds me of reading IPFS documentation (which is fucking excellent BTW) and realizing the same thing: nobody is going to run their own pinning service and Piñata is the only one they mention by name which means it’ll be the platform everyone (to a first approximation) will use.
The lack of a a few "chains" though means an ephemeral node might actually not suck though.
Put another way, even IPFS nodes that for all intents and purposes are "clients" can still speak the same protocal to talk to the pinning service.
The single-ish central chain idea was always terrible. "Trustless" or not, that much synchronization is a misfeature! The real world really is partial-order time/causality, that is a feature not a bug.
I make content. I put it on IPFS. I pin it to Piñata because my laptop isn’t on all the time. Piñata decides my content isn’t acceptable and removes it. You can’t access my content. Not a problem?
With torrents people actually participate. Piñata should not be viewed as the "database of record", but as a something that complements the desktop at home.
I understand that is still not satisfactory.
I think the real goal is to find institutional users who are not interested in a profit. For example I am involved with https://nlnet.nl/project/SoftwareHeritage-P2P/. Software Heritage would be not a high bandwidth pinner, but a pinner of last resort. Universities were very important to the original internet, and should also host public data sets, software artifact, and hopefully if Sci Hub prevails the journal articles themselves.
None of that is a pinning service, but if it catches on the big cloud companies might feel compelled to get into the pinning service game, if only so they can get those university and government contracts! The current cloud computing business as a racket, but them offering support for a protocol that reduces switching costs might make for some real competition.
Basically "web2" problems are Captialism problems, and the stuff needs to become a low-margin business or state-run not-for profit to be better. There is no secret magic short cut, it is a political problem. SV is of course completely uninterested in low-margin businesses. The regular web3 will have a hard time being anything but a Ponzi scheme per its design, but IPFS itself at least doesn't have those characteristics baked in, and so these alternative futures are possible.
Naw, there’s also naive optimists which are similar but distinct from gullible fools. Kind of half and half. They know exactly what they're doing for half the equation.
And that's one of Moxie's points: how exactly is web3 supposed to be avoiding the centralization that occurred on the web, when it's already at that point.
The fact that a problem exists doesn't mean it can't be solved, but any solution which does not go deep enough to address why Ethereum nodes are centralized is simply hype.
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