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&#x27;s give it a go.If you&#x27;re going to comment, please focus on specific, interesting things in the article that you&#x27;re curious about.Please don&#x27;t post generic, shallow, obvious, indignant, and&#x2F;or dismissive comments—those are repetitive and predictable, we&#x27;ve had more than enough of them, they&#x27;re tedious, not what this site is for, and we don&#x27;t need more.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>

&gt; Both sides of the debate could elevate their arguments if they ponder what Moxie has written.I appreciate that he fairly tried these different things out and reported his experience. But I don&#x27;t think he has noticed anything particularly interesting or novel.It&#x27;s common knowledge that the plentitude of blockchains out there now make compatibility between them almost impossible. This is how Bitcoin &quot;maximalists&quot; came to be in the first place. If reputation and trust is the game, it defeats the purpose to have a million different blockchains.

This is not what I expected from Moxie. A writes very good account of his experience trying to do some dapp &#x2F; NFT stuff. He eloquently draws attention to the problems that are based in human behavior.Definitely worth the read. Both sides of the debate could elevate their arguments if they ponder what Moxie has written.

I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s necessarily any contradiction. This is a critique of the Web3 paradigm (crypto all the things) and not cryptocurrency itself for say, payments.

&gt; at the same time, adding crypto based payments to Signal...Damn, and just when I&#x27;d been thinking how much I like Signal.The goldrush when Keybase added crypto completely ruined what had been a pretty good tool.

I&#x27;m perplexed with him writing this piece and, at the same time, adding crypto based payments to Signal...Has he written anything on Signal and payments?

I&#x27;ve known Moxie to often be right. And I think he happens to be right about this.

No, the issue is that he is against a decentralization generally.He opposes it for Signal.

His argument here is that web3, as it exists today, isn&#x27;t actually decentralized. Also:&gt; These technologies immediately tended towards centralization through platforms in order for them to be realized, that this has ~zero negatively felt effect on the velocity of the ecosystem, and that most participants don’t even know or care it’s happening. This might suggest that decentralization itself is not actually of immediate practical or pressing importance to the majority of people downstream, that the only amount of decentralization people want is the minimum amount required for something to exist, and that if not very consciously accounted for, these forces will push us further from rather than closer to the ideal outcome as the days become less early.Per the post, he&#x27;s in favor of decentralization that &quot;uses cryptography (rather than infrastructure) to distribute trust,&quot; he&#x27;s just skeptical that web3 will head in this direction.

If you read the section &quot;Recreating this world&quot; it addresses this pretty directly

Some people say they want this, but in practice, why you should trust someone you&#x27;ve never heard of?Network effects aside, consider the difficulty of deciding that the people behind a fork of Chrome or Signal are trustworthy. The average person doesn&#x27;t have the knowledge to do due diligence, and many of us who could (in theory) don&#x27;t want to bother.How do you get to the point where people think your team of software developers is legitimate? Decisions like this are based on what everyone else is using.One reason that app stores serving sandboxed apps are popular is that you don&#x27;t have to evaluate each software developer&#x27;s organization just to play their games.

And his arguments in favour of centralization are flawed. Sure, regular people do not want to run their own (email, chat, etc) servers. But they DO want to be able to chose from a handful of available servers the one they like best (or the one they trust most), without losing connectivity with their contacts. Tired of Google&#x27;s shenanigans, move from Gmail to Protonmail, tell your contacts your new email, set up an autoresponder, all is fine. When you move away from a centralized silo like Signal, you&#x27;ll have to move all your chat buddies with you to a new platform.

You might be interested in the refutation of some of those arguments by Daniel Gultsch: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gultsch.de&#x2F;objection.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gultsch.de&#x2F;objection.html</a>

It seems that with Signal he actually prefers that people trust specifically the organization that he founded, and not compatible implementations of the protocol, or even self-built copies of the same binary.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;fdroid&#x2F;comments&#x2F;q1jnbb&#x2F;why_isnt_signal_at_fdroid&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;fdroid&#x2F;comments&#x2F;q1jnbb&#x2F;why_isnt_sig...</a>

At least wrt Signal, I think he prefers the trust be in the protocol and not the organization or business model.

Moxie is no fan of decentralization. And he made why very clear with concise and incisive arguments.

It feels like there’s alot of get rich quick types involved (is a gold rush as you say) but over time the decentralised principles will play out

This is a really interesting breakdown of web3 (or as he calls it later on web2x2). I haven&#x27;t dove into the world of web3 yet but it does seem incredibly ironic that there&#x27;s already seemingly a large amount of consolidation around platforms to make web3 more accessible to people. This is good for early adopters and artists who are generating wealth during the gold rush but I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s good for &quot;web3 the idea&quot; as a distributed protocol.

How is that a flamewar? Literally talking about the content of the article.

With the greatest respect, I disagree with this reading of the parent’s comment. It doesn’t seem particularly inflammatory to me? Or at least enough to warrant this call out…It’s expressing a strong view yes, not necessarily one I disagree or agree with
(I don’t know enough on the topic yet to take a view), but this doesn’t seem to blatantly break the guidelines.If it wasn’t for the superb track record for what I view as quite impartial moderation on HN, I’d worry that the mention of “VC” here was a trigger for moderation…!

Please don&#x27;t degenerate into flamewar.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>

If you read why indeed, it is because metamask calls the OpenSea API.All one has to do is call a different API for the same information. It&#x27;s not like it was actually gone

This&gt; After a few days, without warning or explanation, the NFT I made was removed from OpenSea (an NFT marketplace)Then&gt; What I found most interesting, though, is that after OpenSea removed my NFT, it also no longer appeared in any crypto wallet on my device. This is web3, though, how is that possible?How indeed:&gt; You don’t own “web3.”&gt; The VCs and their LPs do. It will never escape their incentives. It’s ultimately a centralized entity with a different label.&gt; Know what you’re getting into…&gt; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jack&#x2F;status&#x2F;1473139010197508098" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jack&#x2F;status&#x2F;1473139010197508098</a>

Really great article, it&#x27;s so nice to read a nuanced article on such a flame war topic.

Exactly,and it&#x27;s also intentionally misnamed as web3 as if it&#x27;s an inevitable extension of current internet practices, rather than a scifi buzzword fantasy of a small pocket of investors (or small to moderate hedge of larger investors).

A deep dive into this stuff is certainly useful. The question is, of the people who were offended by shallowness of people saying &quot;this is obviously garbage though I can&#x27;t be bothered to investigate it&quot;, how many will say &quot;ah, so here&#x27;s a thorough, technical and soft-spoken explanation why this is all garbage, thanks&quot;.

I find these articles to be a lot like criticizing tcp&#x2F;ip because Facebook exists.

Yes - a bit over-simplifying I admit. And Moxie said that it&#x27;s &quot;early days&quot;. However it turns out, it&#x27;ll be fun to watch.

I keep reading that there are a ton better blockchains than eth, but then it seems that all dapps continue to use just eth, even at the cost of insane gas fees. Why is that?

I think you are over-simplifying the conclusions of the article. The article presents a much more nuanced view, and while it points to certain limitations and deficiencies of Web 3.0 (and that only on the Eth part of it; we are in a multi-blockchain world now), it also points to several strengths of the growing ecosystems, and mostly comes across as humble; not knowing how its all going to turn out.

This article helped me understand why OpenSea was able to raise money at a $13 billion valuation. They&#x27;re even more centralized than I had assumed. VCs look at that and see an impressive moat.

The first article on Web3 that I&#x27;ve read that drills into the details and was written by someone who&#x27;s not only kicked the tires but taken the thing for a spin. And the conclusion: It&#x27;s mostly the bad stuff of Web2 combined with the bad stuff of Crypto.

Concise, well thought out analysis by a cryptographer on Web3. If you believe in Web3, then you shouldn&#x27;t dismiss this out of hand as a hater. He truly tried to understand how it works by actually building dApps. And the holes seem glaringly obvious.What you should do if you believe in Web3, is take this as constructive criticism and improve so that they holes are no longer there.

It&#x27;s really not that hard (or even expensive) to run your own.Here&#x27;s[0] an example doing it on k8&#x27;s. I had something similar running on GCP in a couple hours. It&#x27;s been running for a month with no issues.0 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;messari.io&#x2F;article&#x2F;running-an-ethereum-node-on-kubernetes-is-easy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;messari.io&#x2F;article&#x2F;running-an-ethereum-node-on-kuber...</a>

&gt; I don&#x27;t think we&#x27;ve seen that fast consolidation in other early techI actually struggled with this point throughout the article. I&#x27;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&#x27;re comfortable with. It doesn&#x27;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.

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&#x27;s (excellent) blog post, i.e decentralizing the node-&gt; NFT-&gt;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.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ceramic.network&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ceramic.network&#x2F;</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tally.cash&#x2F;community-edition&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tally.cash&#x2F;community-edition&#x2F;</a>

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.

Metamask lets you enter your own RPC endpoints

&gt; The centralization of apis (infura&gt; 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&#x27;s already plenty of competitors in that space. QuickNode and GetBlock for instance, if you want mutualised&#x2F;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&#x27;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.

&gt; The centralization of apis (infura, opensea and ethscan used by metamask) is the biggest problem. I could be wrong, but I don&#x27;t think we&#x27;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&#x27;t happen overnight, and there wasn&#x27;t a search engine dominating 90% of the market within a few years of the beginning of mainstream acceptance.&gt; How hard is it to create a competitor to infura? MetaMask should be incentivized to do this as they&#x27;re core offering is controlled by one party.&gt; [edit] Never mind, metamask and infura are owned by the same company (ConsenSys). It&#x27;s even worse than it appears...Currently working in the space (graduated from doing systems-level . My hot take is what is considered a &quot;full node&quot; 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&#x27;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&#x27;re going to have 32-byte random reads invalidating entire 4K or 16K pages out of ~3TiB of read&#x2F;write space. I&#x27;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&#x2F;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...

I would argue consolidation and centralized elements are inevitable, the promise of true decentralization is like socialism: a promising theory but failed application.

The centralization of apis (infura, opensea and ethscan used by metamask) is the biggest problem. I could be wrong, but I don&#x27;t think we&#x27;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&#x27;t happen overnight, and there wasn&#x27;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&#x27;re core offering is controlled by one party.[edit] Never mind, metamask and infura are owned by the same company (ConsenSys). It&#x27;s even worse than it appears...

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.

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 &#x2F; web 3 conveniently leaves this crucial piece of information. E.g. it&#x27;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&#x27;m afraid the gold rush is not driven by the excitement for having options, but rather for the excitement of becoming rich quick.

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&#x2F;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&#x27;t so far is that most of these things are not terribly useful to begin with.

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&#x27;t think they would fall into the pool of financial or corporate structures.

Do you know of any financial structures or corporate structures that are not pyramid shaped?

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.

This is a really well-thought-out, nuanced take. I really appreciate mixture of &quot;but there are still servers&quot;, 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:&gt; (visualizing this financial structure would resemble something similar to a pyramid shape)Pyramid-shaped financial setups indeed :).[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;MessagePartyApp&#x2F;status&#x2F;1479151001181376514" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;MessagePartyApp&#x2F;status&#x2F;14791510011813765...</a>

Hmm, you&#x27;re quite right. Poor word choice. Perhaps &#x27;skewers&#x27; would be more appropriate.

I don&#x27;t think this article &quot;lampoons&quot; web3 in any way.While the article is on the whole critical (but not completely), it did not do so using sarcasm, ridicule, or irony.lampoon: publicly criticize (someone or something) by using ridicule, irony, or sarcasm.

Thanks for the detailed and comprehensive writeup. I think you make some very valid points that help to understand some of the context that he elides.&gt; everyday I interact with protocols, work and vote in daos- 4 years ago those things were in whitepapers as a possible idea, but now they are reality.This is a pretty important point. He states that it&#x27;s not really &quot;early days&quot;, but if this is the kind of momentum we&#x27;re talking about it feels like it is early days still. You don&#x27;t see this kind of innovation in a stale field.&gt; I think a lot of his criticism is valid, but it also kinda falls flat on what is being built. It is a surface layer &quot;i&#x27;ll be a web3 dev for a day&quot; overview and response. So it reads like if i followed a tutorial on neural nets in python then complained that my car still cant be driven by ai. Those of us in the space are well aware of all of this and it is all being worked on, but people unfamiliar read it as some kind of smackdown, which isn&#x27;t helpful either.This is the money quote for me. Just because there are issues currently doesn&#x27;t mean that they won&#x27;t ever get fixed.My takeaway is that this subject is a lot more nuanced than his article is claiming, and although he&#x27;s certainly right in a lot of his criticisms, that doesn&#x27;t mean Web3 as a whole is doomed to failure.It also does make me reconsider the movement as a whole. Sure, there are bound to be golddiggers, but that doesn&#x27;t immediately render the whole concept invalid.

&gt; Even nerds do not want to run their own servers at this point. Even organizations building software full time do not want to run their own servers at this point.I want this to be wrong.Broadband providers make it very difficult to run your own server. Server construction is also in a very bad place as well, so this has spread from consumers to companies. There are just too many externalities from all of your vendors that are left to you to solve and that opens up space for a small number of companies who have people who work on those problems as a full time job, amortized out over X vendors and Y customers.Until or unless that changes, a bunch of things I&#x27;d like to have happen won&#x27;t happen. I should be able to pull files from my home computer when I&#x27;m stuck in an airport in Paris. That was the original promise, but we ended up with something else that has a lot of rent-seeking involved.I think there are a few people working on the servers problem, probably nowhere near enough, but Broadband companies are also largely to blame for this. I&#x27;m not sure if Starlink or municipal broadband that is run like power and water, are ways out. But what we have isn&#x27;t going to work, and consolidation is just going to get worse and worse until someone fixes it.

&gt; That sucks, up till now we have &quot;too bad you got delisted from this platform, all your content is gone&quot;. But that isn&#x27;t the case here, his contract is still on chain, and will work with anyone who calls itWell, it is still &quot;content on a platform&quot;, which is Ethereum. If another blockchain comes into existence and most people say that this new blockchain is the source of truth for digital ownership, your old NFTs are worthless, because nobody cares about old Ethereum.The same is true for wallet apps. If 90 % of people use one specific thing (OpenSea) and think that only this thing is the source of truth, it simply doesn’t matter that your NFT is technically on the chain.The sense of ownership and the value comes purely from where the attention is right now – and this being the internet, everything can change.Compare this to the physical world. Here, the attention and trust is in your local laws. If this changes, you can lose ownership (government seizing properties).The solution is actually to acknowledge that there is no ownership without society.With Ethereum, people want to build another society, again based on trust&#x2F;attention. That society has not much overlap to the physical world.It is not much different than any group of people doing a thing together, like say, an open source project, a clan in EVE or whatever with the only difference that web3 enthusiasts think their hobby has some link to the real world.

I guess as some counterpoints:I kind of agree in some ways but i think he underplays the critical point that you have an option for voice and exit from the forming centralising forces (which do get established because people like convenience&#x2F;reliability&#x2F;familiarity) without sacrificing your data or belongings, you can leave without losses. That is a critical difference.His nft is delisted from a platform and his wallet calls the api of that platform. That sucks, up till now we have &quot;too bad you got delisted from this platform, all your content is gone&quot;. But that isn&#x27;t the case here, his contract is still on chain, and will work with anyone who calls it. He can still get all the data, there are other wallets, you can run them in your terminal if you like, or you can set your metamask to use your own - or someone elses - node (instead of infura). There is a choice. There are things like TheGraph making distributed indexers&#x2F;search engines and something like that will replace opensea as the main nft api (if they arent building it themselves).Add to this the more recent developments of light clients, which are coming along great and which allow us to run in-app&#x2F;in-browser direct connections to the chain for calls&#x2F;transactions without needing infura or a third party node.&gt; Personally, I think enough money has been made at this point that there are enough faucets to keep it going, and this won’t just be a blip. If that’s the case, it seems worth thinking about how to avoid web3 being web2x2 (web2 but with even less privacy) with some urgency.Absolutely agree. there are a lot of people in this space who have made enough money to spend the rest of their lives pursuing their interests in it, and they will. It isn&#x27;t going away and we should engage with making it as good as we can. Will it be a big thing in ten years? who knows, I can say that everyday I interact with protocols, work and vote in daos- 4 years ago those things were in whitepapers as a possible idea, but now they are reality. What will we see in the next 5?We can absolutely bring better privacy too. Layers like aztec are working on exactly that, and zero knowledge proofs and other forms of commitments (sismo) are exploring how to do that. I think a lot of people in the space follow the ideal of &quot;privacy for the individual, transparency for the institutions&quot;. We will get there.&gt; We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure.i sort of agree with this, we can accept that full nodes will be ran be organisations, businesses, and nerdy individuals who also have their own funkwhale instances and homelabs. those commited to the ideals -&gt; same as home email servers or mastodon communities.but we can also find ways to distribute infrastructure to bring resilience to those who dont think much about these things and just want to use an app. (again with things like light clients replacing api calls to third parties). so that we care for the non-committed users and make sure the points of fragility are lessened as much as we can.I think a lot of his criticism is valid, but it also kinda falls flat on what is being built. It is a surface layer &quot;i&#x27;ll be a web3 dev for a day&quot; overview and response. So it reads like if i followed a tutorial on neural nets in python then complained that my car still cant be driven by ai. Those of us in the space are well aware of all of this and it is all being worked on, but people unfamiliar read it as some kind of smackdown, which isn&#x27;t helpful either.I&#x27;d be much more interested in his thoughts on Whisper&#x2F;Waku and messaging protocols, tradeoffs in validity&#x2F;volition&#x2F;optimistic rollups, distributed indexers, etc. He is smart enough and involved in similar things to just take that extra step to the dev forums and discussions and maybe give meaningful, helpful critique. I&#x27;m not sure what response he is expecting tbh?The rest on gold rush and money i don&#x27;t have much to say on, but mass speculation and desperation to make money is, imo, a symptom of the abusive system of work and finance that we are all forced into and everyone wants to escape. That didnt just appear with crypto&#x2F;nfts. So sure, people are using something because they are making money and might not actually care about the details and the ethics - but we are also building a free(libre) opensource p2p programmable value network, and there are lots of people who also think that is amazing and worth indicating as different from the current stacks with the &#x27;web3&#x27; tag.

This article seems like it neatly encapsulates and explains why I&#x27;ve subconsciously held off from jumping into the Web3 space.It might be confirmation bias speaking, but I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve seen anyone lampoon Web3 so thoroughly, and it&#x27;s nice to have some well-reasoned explanations for why I feel the way I do.EDIT: A further thought: this article is the first I&#x27;ve read on Web3 that feels like it&#x27;s actually important and I&#x27;m looking forward to the discussion. Are there any real counterpoints to be made against his reasoning?

Note, I didn&#x27;t claim that. I&#x27;d love to put a box in my house next to the cable modem that did all that stuff in a manageable, understandable way, that wasn&#x27;t some underhanded subscription service that is going to try to squeeze me in the future or whoops my data amongst its constant, silent upgrading itself. But alas, no such box exists, and the software components that would go in that box seem to need constant babysitting and arcane configuration. Worse, it seems like all those overcomplicated things keep having critically bad security vulnerabilities and I&#x27;m just wondering what the actual fuck is wrong with having a damn thing on my computer that receives my email and serves a webpage.

Yes. Just because it&#x27;s possible doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s easy.I&#x27;d love to see appliance-level servers become standard, but you&#x27;d need Google or Apple to throw their weight behind such a thing to make it usable, since decades of server software&#x2F;hardware development has failed to produce things that require less-than-professional-level users.I&#x27;d love to buy an off-the-shelf box for my network, have it act as a back-end for all my Google cloud-based apps and email and serve my blog and my photos and automatically encrypt and back it all up to a cloud storage system. But none of the big players are interested in that kind of thing, and the small players can&#x27;t create replacements for the entire Google or Apple or Microsoft server&#x2F;client architecture.

This smells like the classic &quot;you can build your own Dropbox easily&quot; comment. Just because it&#x27;s technologically feasible doesn&#x27;t mean people want to do so.

&gt; 1. Getting different software to all play nicely from the users perspective. I can&#x27;t even give my users SSO because most software doesn&#x27;t accept reverse proxy authentication!It sounds like you&#x27;re referring to something specific here but I&#x27;m not understanding. What kind of software doesn&#x27;t play well with SSO? And what is reverse proxy authentication? Do you mean give users SSO as in give them an account on an SSO system like Google&#x2F;Okta&#x2F;LDAP or do you mean use SSO as authentication for a web app you&#x27;re running? Even if in the latter case I still don&#x27;t understand what you mean by reverse proxy authentication or what that has to do with SSO. (I&#x27;ve set up SSO on my apps before and I&#x27;ve run SSO auth servers.)

I run a homelab, and also run a shared server for a few folks.The hardware is easy. The software can be easy (if you let it). The things that are tricky:1. Getting different software to all play nicely from the users perspective. I can&#x27;t even give my users SSO because most software doesn&#x27;t accept reverse proxy authentication!2. The gap in average computer skills. Some of my users are engineers, most of them are not. My average user needs help with password resets, remembering URLs and very basic tasks. &quot;Upload a file&quot; is a _difficult_ task for the average user.3. Feature requests and keeping maintenance reasonable. A lot of my technical users will ask me for feature after feature.. but not put in any time or effort to set things up or maintain. I&#x27;m one person and I set a hard cap of how much maintenance I&#x27;ll do in a week, and that is a big limiter of stuff.I have toyed with just charging my users a bit per month and hiring someone as a basic tech, and honestly more of my users would rather pay a monthly fee than actually work on the servers themselves.

I mean, I get that. I have a mailbox on my house. Letters come to it. I don&#x27;t think about it too much. Bits come to my house all the time but somehow those trillions of computations keep flubbing this basic functionality.

Yeah and I think the point here is that the cognitive overload is unnecessary.Most people don&#x27;t want to build their own car but most people would rather own their own car instead of rent one every time they need to go somewhere. In the server world, the options are to build or rent, there&#x27;s no real option to just buy one that works already. Even having to set your rear view mirrors and seat position is worthwhile, even having to check tire pressure periodically is worthwhile, to continue the car analogy. If we could buy a box that we plug into the wall, and have simple minimal maintenance and setup UX, like a car, or even like a desktop or mobile device, is not impossible. But it doesn&#x27;t really exist.

His point is that a majority of people don&#x27;t want to bother with the cognitive overload of running a server. Just like you could build your own car, very few want to. Often they don&#x27;t even care what kind of car they have. As long as it can get them from home to work and back again without killing them.

I just did a speed test and got 175mbs up. That is ridiculously fast and i don&#x27;t have an out of the ordinary home internet connection. Entire data centers use to run on internet connections slower than that.A mac mini, ups, and that connection is plenty to run any kind of server for personal&#x2F;family use.

Are you talking about physical On-prem systems or just buying a basic ec2 type server and renting some storage space? Because wouldn&#x27;t the first one require a specific business line to an ISP for networking, which would require an office space and other associated costs? Or are you referring to renting a vanilla server and rolling everything yourself vs using some automated deployment and build pack system?

You can&#x27;t receive email this way because your spam filter wouldn&#x27;t work; Gmail&#x27;s works because they can see what&#x27;s being sent to multiple people at once.You can&#x27;t send email (reliably) locally because other email servers don&#x27;t trust you like they do Gmail.

I don&#x27;t want to maintain my own mail server, but I definitely want to run my own server.The irony is that modern internet infrastructure makes decentralisation _more_ feasible, but software lags behind. Why can&#x27;t I buy some device for 200€ or so where I store all my data and I receive email? (with the cloud being used only for optional encrypted backups). One can even imagine a decentralised social network running in these devices, with my friends getting updates by polling it periodically (or my device sending updates to their devices). The device would be powered 24h&#x2F;365d, and if it breaks you just replace it. When I&#x27;m out of home, my phone apps would just query the device to get new mail and updates.We shouldn&#x27;t really _need_ the cloud for many things yet we use it for everything.

None of the regular people I&#x27;m familiar care about their data at all. If you use any of the popular social media apps (Twitter, TikTok, FB&#x2F;Instagram, Snapchat), then you can&#x27;t really claim that you care about your data, and most of the people I know use those apps on a weekly if not daily basis.

I think they key is: despite regular people not wanting to RUN their own server, they do want to CONTROL their own server. Current incumbents treat your data like tier asset, not like custody.This is because you pay nothing. The beginning of regular people having empowerment begins by paying some fee to own the product.

Take a look at Tailscale and open-source alternatives.

You’re going to run into a problem right off the bat: Your home network is likely behind a NAT and has an IP assigned by your ISP that can change at any time. You’ll need to tunnel through a server in the cloud somewhere (or use a tool like ngrok that tunnels through a server in the cloud). And now that proxy server is “really” the server, because if the business providing the tunnel decides you’re using too much of their bandwidth, they can throttle you, and if you don’t want to get throttled you’ll likely need to pay by the GB&#x2F;month for a premium tunneling service. You could make your own tunneling service with an EC2 instance, but it’s the same difference: You’re paying AWS, and the EC2 server is now your “real” server.As far as I can tell (and I’ve looked pretty hard) there’s no good way to run a website from your house without tunneling unless you have a very unusual house or a very unusual ISP.

&gt; We’d all have our own web server with our own web site, our own mail server for our own email, our own finger sever for our own status messages, our own chargen server for our own character generation. However – and I don’t think this can be emphasized enough – that is not what people want. People do not want to run their own servers.I must be stuck in the past.It&#x27;s true. No one wants to run an arcane, buggy, insecure, wonky POS that needs constant patching. This is really a failure of software and shoving all that up a level into the cloud is not fixing anything. At least with your own hardware you can nuke it and start over from scratch. With your own hardware (and disks), you at least know where your data resides.We live in a time where you can get a 4 TB NAS for essentially nothing. You can drop a 8 core, 32GB RAM server on top of that for less than $1k. I don&#x27;t know what other people&#x27;s scaling needs are--who knows, maybe they need to serve 100 PB?--but it&#x27;s a mind blowing amount of computation. Most people can probably serve their silly websites off that. If you can&#x27;t handle your own email load on a server like that, I honestly have no idea what you&#x27;re up to.I kind of do want to run my own ones of those things...but I know (with today&#x27;s software) I&#x27;d hate it. Because even after all these years, it kind of terrifies me, the metric shitton of stuff I have had no clue how to do, and I know is way over complicated...because everything is way overcomplicated.

Well, this is already the second web3, (the first being semantic and micro-formats) so maybe we can just use it yet again?

I don&#x27;t like that when an actually good successor to web2 comes along it won&#x27;t be called web3 because of this bullshit that they call web3.

Pretty much any additional freedom facilitates crime.

And perfect law enforcement means a stagnating society. Think where we would be now if gay people were discovered and punished instantly as soon as they kissed a person of the same sex, or interracial couples were punished as soon as they started dating, etc.

What is the real problem underlying such crimes?

Untraceable digital cash facilitates crime, money laundering and tax evasion.None of these things are good for a stable democracy.

&gt; Untraceable (eg Monero) digital cash that settles instantly? That has the potential to disrupt societiesWith where the world is with Debit&#x2F;Credit cards and all other trackable digital payments, the world going back to untraceable physical cash could have the potential to disrupt societies (people should make sure to put their phone&#x2F;watch&#x2F;entire car in a faraday cage so their cell phone providers don&#x27;t have real time access to where they spent their untraceable physical cash)

As much as I hate cryptocurrency as-it-exists, I&#x27;m very much into its potential. Untraceable (eg Monero) digital cash that settles instantly? That has the potential to disrupt societies.The problem is that most societies don&#x27;t have a particular need of being disrupted, so people are perfectly content paying with their credit cards, and why shouldn&#x27;t they be? The UX is better and the banks are fine as long as they don&#x27;t piss off a too-large portion of the population.Still, I would love it if I could use, say, Nano (as it has very limited PoW) to pay for things instantly and securely. I&#x27;m hoping a miracle happens, but I don&#x27;t think it will, or it would already have happened.

Can you point me to where this insightful discussion happens? And where can I educate myself? 99,99% of content and forums I find online about crypto only care about promoting coins, nfts or services basing only on futuristic visionary promises, hyping up the users and attempts at FOMO. It&#x27;s almost literal spam. This is the first time I read something that just explains how thing works from a technical standpoint and what challenges are there.

People are certainly free to use alternatives, but if they aren&#x27;t spinning up their own nodes what will they be using, another centralized node service? Most people aren&#x27;t going to run their own node and for good reason, its expensive and profitless. Sure a cryptographic&#x2F;economic layer on top of Ethereum could incentivize people to run nodes and have users pay for decentralization, but at the end of the day people will use Infura or a competitor because it is cheaper, and when these companies control who gets transactions they also influence who can make blocks.Ethereum is fundamentally flawed in this sense - it only pays for mining (and in the future, staking). The work of routing and storing data is done by the most prolific miners and businesses reliant on Ethereum to keep it from collapsing; there is no sustainable model where a decentralized cohort of nodes can run Ethereum without fundamentally changing how Ethereum pays for infrastructure.

MetaMask is a wallet, its not ingrained into any blockchain, your free to use alternatives, and many protocols don&#x27;t support it. The centralized aspect of a chrome app and marketplace like opensea is very well know issue and talked about a lot in crypto, the problem of course comes down to lack of education, which is apparent in this very post.

And that&#x27;s one of Moxie&#x27;s points: how exactly is web3 supposed to be avoiding the centralization that occurred on the web, when it&#x27;s already at that point.

It&#x27;s a step up from the &quot;crypto isn&#x27;t crypto&quot; mantra that many used to repeat, refusing to even look at how it works. Not sure why it took something as silly as art NFTs, but it does seem that now even those who previously tried avoiding cryptocurrencies at all cost have at least started looking at them critically.He does point out some real problems. Yes, all this has been discussed in the Ethereum community already and many in the community have voiced the same criticisms as well. But a lot of the issues are still unsolved for regular mainstream users, who rely on a lot of centralized services and are often herded into solutions that may bring more convenience but are also less secure. It&#x27;s good we&#x27;re having discussions about this, and the more people that point out flaws the better. After all the entire point of a blockchain is to be public and robust. If this is our future money or notary service, the more probing the better.

&gt; is tying web3 to several centralized front ends (Metamask&#x2F;OpenSea).You can&#x27;t really lump both of those into the same bucket of &quot;front-end&quot;. Metamask is a front-end, a user interface. OpenSea is more like middlewear that connects various front-end clients like Metamask to the backend database, and provides some additional functionality that&#x27;s in any of the database&#x27;s stored procedures or views. OpenSea also has its own front-end UI to its own service, but its core service is its API to the Ethereum database.

For a non-tech regular user who just want to get some work done Internet Explorer was indeed the internet.In India even to this day for a vast majority YouTube&#x2F;FB&#x2F;WA is all the internet is. It&#x27;s not at all unusual for people to walk up to a mom-and-pop store to top-up their data plan asking them to &quot;recharge my WhatsApp balance&quot;. Even carriers have specialised data packs that are tied to a specific product&#x2F;service.And to be fair this is just how it&#x27;ll be with any product&#x2F;tech. As an example, in India Xerox literally stands for photocopy <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;66TnCog" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;66TnCog</a>

Seems like you (and a vast majority of HN including Moxie) is tying web3 to several centralized front ends (Metamask&#x2F;OpenSea).I saw this back in the 90&#x27;s when a lot of people thought the internet was &quot;Internet Explorer&quot;.

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.

I keep saying that there are exactly two kinds of people in the crypto space: scammers who know exactly what they are doing, and gullible fools

&gt; Feels like the &quot;distributed web&quot; 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.

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&#x27;s interesting how tightly coupled Metamask is to all of the other big crypto &#x2F; NFT marketplaces. Feels like the &quot;distributed web&quot; portion of it has just been an over-exaggeration all along.

&gt; rather than give up and give in to centralizationAs for why Marlinspike might have abandoned the goal of decentralization, I think Upton Sinclair might have some insight.

Same. I&#x27;d like to make this experience better rather than give up and give in to centralization. I know others have different priorities, but I don&#x27;t need them to use my servers. I just need them to interoperate minimally.

I want to run my own servers.Honestly.It has always been a somewhat easy task if you pick an OS that is secure and stable.And today with all the Foss&#x2F;oss there are plenty of reasons why I would do it.More Decentralised Please.

&gt; 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&#x27;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&#x27;s more steps involved that I&#x27;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.

Well sure but that&#x27;s the &quot;analog gap&quot; problem. NFTs don&#x27;t fix that, do they? In the end there&#x27;ll have to be something that will tie a given NFT to a given watch, and one way or the other it&#x27;ll be the same issue as tying my CSV to a given watch.

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&#x27;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.

&gt; Couldn&#x27;t Rolex issue a PGP signed CSV of all valid Rolex serial numbers once a month on IPFS and you&#x27;d get the exact same security and trust profile without having to involve any &quot;web3&quot; 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.

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&#x27;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&#x27;s costs are ~$2&#x2F;GB to store content in perpetuity, which seems insanely cheap to carve off as part of a transaction (Eth gas fees aside).

Some NFT platforms operate with IPFS whose URLs are hashes of content. This solves that problem.

This is trivially solved by including a hash of the object in the ownership certificate.

This was insanely surprising to me - I actually always thought the jpeg&#x2F;art was stored as a kind of ‘blob’ on the blockchain that it was authenticated against the owners wallet&#x2F;private key.

Well the image could also be embedded in the data of the blockchain and&#x2F;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.

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&#x2F;network itself is still alive.Every user of the network has to provide some storage for the network itself. If there&#x27;s not enough storage to safely store your new content on the network as highly available, the network would just say sorry, can&#x27;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 &quot;decentralized&quot; tech. Decentralized hashes with centralized gate keepers, and mixed with &quot;old school SPOF tech&quot;, e.x. the VPS&#x27;s that store the actual content. wat.edit: 10GB per device&#x2F;user and 1 billion devices. That&#x27;s 10 exabytes.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wolframalpha.com&#x2F;input&#x2F;?i=10GB+*+1+billion" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wolframalpha.com&#x2F;input&#x2F;?i=10GB+*+1+billion</a>

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&#x27;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 &quot;yours&quot;. You just own a sequence of bytes, the ones in the URL, not the ones that the URL (temporarily) points to.

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&#x27;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&#x27;s something pushed by NFT enthusiasts, but I don&#x27;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&#x27;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 &quot;Runescape retro item set pack, only $9.99!&quot;And then we haven&#x27;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 &quot;web3&quot; tech (see Steam trading cards and Nintendo&#x27;s Amiibos for instance).

&gt; 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 &quot;digital rights of the Rolex&quot; mean? Also, why is it harder to notify Rolex of this transaction than it is to notify some blockchain?

I definitely agree that most people&#x2F;projects&#x2F;etc gloss over that fact that there still needs be a &#x27;start of authority&#x27; 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 &#x27;start of authority&#x27; 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&#x27;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.

&gt; the subset of problems that can only be solved using NFTs is incredibly tinyWhat problems can only be solved by using NFTs?

The NFTs are useless. The watches - the thing people care about - can still be traded without relying on Rolex or any other company.

&gt;&gt;Rolex issue a PGP signed CSV of all valid Rolex serial numbers once a month on IPFS and you&#x27;d get the exact same security and trust profile without having to involve any &quot;web3&quot; feature?This doesn&#x27;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&#x27;s useful.

ehh.. why sell the item once to a person in a large open market, when you can sell the item multiple times to the same person in multiple markets.

&gt; I don&#x27;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&#x27;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.

&gt; 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&#x27;s a very interesting use case, but it&#x27;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?) &quot;hey, I&#x27;m Joeri, I&#x27;m a refugee from Unstabilia, and I have a B.A. degree!&quot;. For some reason this person is skeptical, so you say &quot;it&#x27;s OK, just look up the blockchain record with the following hash!&quot;.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&#x27;s records were previously lost in a fire; and* Before that, someone reputedly hacked NUU&#x27;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&#x27;s control? How do they know whether it&#x27;s a legitimate university? And, maybe most significantly, how do they know that you&#x27;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?

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 &#x2F; script code.

&gt; In regions with unstable governments you cannot rely on the government to keep saying that your house is your house.You can say it&#x27;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.

I don&#x27;t really see how that works.Do you propose that &quot;all&quot; 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&#x27;m thinking too much in extremes, and the value breaks down in extreme cases.

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.

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&#x27;t think this happens much in practice.

&gt; Couldn&#x27;t Rolex issue a PGP signed CSV of all valid Rolex serial numbers once a month on IPFS and you&#x27;d get the exact same security and trust profile without having to involve any &quot;web3&quot; 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.

&gt; and especially on ability to fund companies easily via laborNot sure I&#x27;m following. How would that work, and how would crypto facilitate this?

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&#x27;s a need to democratise economy. I am again tempted to quote hustlers here.

&gt;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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 &quot;who is Rolex exactly?&quot; 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&#x27;t Rolex issue a PGP signed CSV of all valid Rolex serial numbers once a month on IPFS and you&#x27;d get the exact same security and trust profile without having to involve any &quot;web3&quot; 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.

What he says about NFTs is embarrassing, lmao. I&#x27;ve personally never bought them myself but I am enthusiastic about blockchain tech. Is there really no commitment saved for an art work? You would think this was basic shit. Maybe there is more than one NFT protocol?He also has a good point about centralization in &#x27;blockchain oracle&#x27; services. In major wallets I&#x27;ve often seen them just make calls to blockchain &#x2F; TX lookup services -- no cryptographic proofs there (though in theory easy to add with &#x27;spv proofs&#x27;?) I also like that he went as far as to make two dapps before critiquing it. This is one of the better criticisms of &#x27;web3&#x27; out there.I don&#x27;t think what he says about OpenSea being better as a &#x27;centralized&#x27; service is valid. Most of his critiques for the downside of blockchain-tech seem to be Ethereum-specific. For example, Solana transactions are blazingly fast, low-cost, and there are nice stable coins on there. OpenSea seems like it would be &#x27;better&#x27; if it were an actual cryptographic protocol. Maybe link it with IPFS + Filecoin.

I doubt it. Definitely 2-3 standard deviations. But that leaves something like 0.05% of the population.

&gt; I am happy to leave &quot;normal&quot; (tech illiterate and politically apathetic) people behind to reach my decentralization goals.You realize this approximates to roughly &quot;everyone that isn&#x27;t you&quot;?

Email is inherently centralized due to DNS being centralized. Furthermore there is no rule that says I have to federate with any particular entity.They will take the loss.

What does it mean to leave normal people behind? Surely you need to interact with them.For example, you can run your own mail server, but you will need to play by Google’s rules if you want anyone on Gmail to get your emails.So, it’s hard for me to picture what it means to personally decentralize without caring what the bulk of people do.

&gt; I&#x27;m not ready to give in. I am happy to leave &quot;normal&quot; (tech illiterate and politically apathetic) people behind to reach my decentralization goals.Which should be already possible with with the current offerings around selfhosting applications and p2p technologies.But as the same time you need to accept that the &quot;normal&quot; people would probably be happy to, in turn leave you behind to reach their goal of being able to use all service available without needing to concern themself with running their own server.

&gt; Is someone seriously telling me that a dedicated engineering and marketing effort couldn&#x27;t build a similar consumer-centric device that functioned as a serverThey already have, and their name is Synology:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.synology.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;products&#x2F;DS120j" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.synology.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;products&#x2F;DS120j</a>

&gt; I&#x27;m not ready to give in. I am happy to leave &quot;normal&quot; (tech illiterate and politically apathetic) people behind to reach my decentralization goals.I don&#x27;t think we have to &quot;leave &quot;normal&quot; [...] people behind&quot;. I don&#x27;t like devices like Alexa, but FFS, look at what millions of people have installed and running 24&#x2F;7 in their homes. Is someone seriously telling me that a dedicated engineering and marketing effort couldn&#x27;t build a similar consumer-centric device that functioned as a server (purposes to include but not necessarily limited to http and smtp).

NNTP with enforced GPG authentication and PoW like spam prevention could work today (in the narrow technical sense, not in the wide product sense.) It wouldn&#x27;t even be that large of a lift from current NNTP architecture. Create a moderated Usenet group that only accepts posts that complete a PoW challenge and that sign their messages.

&gt; Including allowing a &quot;server&quot; to be offline for months at a time, come online for a minute or two, then disappear again. Neo-NNTP!

I like Moxie&#x27;s work and writings, and this article has some great points, but I can&#x27;t get behind this:We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure.I&#x27;m not ready to give in. I am happy to leave &quot;normal&quot; (tech illiterate and politically apathetic) people behind to reach my decentralization goals.I think instead of building centralized infrastructure that does not require trust, we can make it easier to host decentralized infrastructure. Including allowing a &quot;server&quot; to be offline for months at a time, come online for a minute or two, then disappear again. P2P networking is also an area we can improve on, IMO. Too much information is going across the internet instead of point to point. Bluetooth is a terrible protocol, but airdrop (and reverse engineered implementations) seems to be promising.

Some of this echoes Matt Levine&#x27;s take on crypto and DeFi generally: you will repeatedly see the re-learning the lessons of hundreds&#x2F;thousands of years of traditional finance.I&#x27;m not sure that the &quot;mobile device can&#x27;t act as a node&quot; is fundamental (it&#x27;s more a quirk of the current systems), but &quot;nobody wants to run their own server&quot; =&gt; &quot;centralization&quot; is a great reminder:&gt; I think this is very similar to the situation with email. I can run my own mail server, but it doesn’t functionally matter for privacy, censorship resistance, or control – because GMail is going to be on the other end of every email that I send or receive anyway. Once a distributed ecosystem centralizes around a platform for convenience, it becomes the worst of both worlds: centralized control, but still distributed enough to become mired in time.

Good to know! I don&#x27;t know much about the blockchain space and have only looked more closely at Ethereum so far.

But there are other L1 blockchains already that aren’t like that (eg. Mina) and who knows in future what will come..

I think you can use geth --syncmode snap to get a snapshot quickly with which you can interact with the Blockchain.

That&#x27;s the size now. If web3 manages to take off, the requirement will grow exponentially.

But that&#x27;s just it.. One would have to stand up a server that hosted the 200gb, so their Iphone users could consume the data. Or they&#x27;d go through a central server.

You can do this locally though, it just takes like 200 GB. I&#x27;ve run an Ethereum full node + eth2 beacon chain node on my Macbook Pro for local development, took like 10 hours to sync IIRC and just worked afterwards. I still use Infura for projects though bc I don&#x27;t really see the value in running my own hosted client for pet projects. If I was doing a production app I&#x27;d likely use my own w&#x2F; a 3rd party service for backup&#x2F;HA.

Doesn&#x27;t matter how easy it is if no one wants to do it to begin with.I hate running servers even for my business. I want someone else to do that as the article pointed out.

Running nodes is pretty easy with setups like DappNode. Full eth nodes arent that big, i synced a new one in a couple of days last week onto an old ssd.Most heavy contract data is stored offchain on ipfs, so you can just pin the stuff you are interested in.Where i would agree is indexing&#x2F;searching lots of data is a pain. You cant just give an address and get a list of tokens associated with it, you have to call every token and get its balance. It makes sense, but its annoying, and is why opensea api is so popular for nfts. But i have hope with services like TheGraph growing that search and index also has distributed and resilient design and we become less dependant on one endpoint api.

The views on centralized services such as Infura really resonate with me. A few months ago I looked into how Ethereum and smart contracts work and got excited that there is basically this shared &quot;virtual machine&quot; with persistent, public state that can only be altered by interacting with those smart contracts.But soon after it became clear that it is not really possible for me (or any regular &quot;client&quot; as the article calls it) to look at the state of the virtual machine and evaluate view functions myself. The block chain is so large already that we need to rely on big servers which are operated by other people to do this.

This is the first enlightening article I have read about Web3. Maybe that says more about how little I have read than about how good the article is.Anyway, Moxie seems very focused on the decentralization aspect - that Web3 doesn’t decentralize as much as we would like.An alternative aspect is the “global ledger of ownership and transferrence” though. Yes, interacting with blockchains is hard so it is some through APIs… but there does still seem to be something important about the idea that my ownership of something on a blockchain is permanent, and exists outside of any corporate notion of ownership, in a deep mathematical way. That’s fundamentally appealing!But is it appealing enough to overcome market forces? I think Moxie is right to spend a lot of time on the “nobody wants to run servers” thing because it shows that most users are powerfully motivated by convenience; if the mathematically-beautiful blockchain ownership records remain inconvenient then they are likely to be a niche attraction (like running your own mail server).

I should have said archival nodes, the ones that keep state back to the genesis block. I don&#x27;t know if that number is even tracked anywhere. I&#x27;ve read estimates ranging from 2 to 5. I&#x27;m trying to find where I read that, happy to be wrong - or right, if anyone has data.[edit] Here. [1] And here. [2]<pre><code> 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].
</code></pre>
[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;librehash.org&#x2F;ethereum-archival-node-review&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;librehash.org&#x2F;ethereum-archival-node-review&#x2F;</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.blockcypher.com&#x2F;ethereum-woes-d9b2af62da67" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.blockcypher.com&#x2F;ethereum-woes-d9b2af62da67</a>

<pre><code> only one or two true Ethereum full-nodes
</code></pre>
source?

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?

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.

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.

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&#x27;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&#x27;s no guarantee that anyone would use it.&quot;In theory&quot; the data is open. but I believe that the point of the article is that unless I&#x27;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&#x27;s NFT and they have no recourse.

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 revenue2. anyone can host one of our blockchain crawlers for a share of our revenue3. anyone can contribute storage to our platform for a share of our revenueWe 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.

Bit that it&#x27;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&#x27;m still not clear on the actual benefit of the cryptocurrency web other than the concept of &quot;owning things without legal protection or oversight&quot; 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&#x27;s an awesome solution in search of a problem.

You&#x27;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.

&gt; As far as I know those two services don&#x27;t do anything to try to force you to use them, and people just use them out of convenience because &quot;People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will.&quot;Indeed, but one could make the same claim re any Web 2 juggernauts like Google and Facebook. You don&#x27;t need to use them, sure. You can start your own social network. It&#x27;s just expensive and inconvenient. This is what causes centralization and gatekeeping in the first place. It becomes self-reenforcing.

The concern is that since these companies are iterating faster than the protocol and providing their own API services that apps&#x2F;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&#x2F;NFT between you and another party.

In what sense is it &quot;gate-kept&quot;? Isn&#x27;t the complaint that in practice most people probably use those two services? As far as I know those two services don&#x27;t do anything to try to force you to use them, and people just use them out of convenience because &quot;People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will.&quot;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&#x27;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.

&gt; There are more Ethereum full nodes than two, but how many will accept web queries? That&#x27;s a service.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thegraph.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thegraph.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;</a>

&gt; 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.

You need to know what NFT you have, it&#x27;s all about the contract.e.g. the EtherFreakers contract is immutable and contains a git commit hash (line 83: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;etherscan.io&#x2F;address&#x2F;0x3a275655586a049fe860be867d10cdae2ffc0f33#code" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;etherscan.io&#x2F;address&#x2F;0x3a275655586a049fe860be867d10c...</a>), so you can prove you have the code which generates your freaker.

Me either. I had no idea that accessing a link to NFT-described content went through OpenSea for content that isn&#x27;t even hosted by OpenSea. That&#x27;s apparently a MetaMask thing. Supposedly a MetaMask wallet can connect to any willing node, but in practice they use the Infuria-&gt;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&#x27;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&#x27;s a service.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;media.consensys.net&#x2F;how-to-install-and-synchronize-your-own-remote-ethereum-node-5d875c684504" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;media.consensys.net&#x2F;how-to-install-and-synchronize-y...</a>

Sure, but if everybody just uses the two big guys, does it matter that the little guys exist?

It&#x27;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&#x27;t really done much research, outside 5 minutes of google.

Full nodes contain the same data as archival nodes do, they just don&#x27;t have it unpacked out to disk.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29846272" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29846272</a>

full nodes have access to all the data in an archive node.

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.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;bugout-dev&#x2F;moonworm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;bugout-dev&#x2F;moonworm</a>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.).Intellectual property is theft.

Analysis of blockchain transactions is also consolidating around middlemen too! If you&#x27;re trying to read data off of the blockchain for professional analysis purposes, you&#x27;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&#x27;t be surprised if they&#x27;re slurping from middlemen services themselves)

FYI it’s already happening <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-47130268" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-47130268</a>

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&#x27;s primary use case is too remote from data sharing ?

I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x2F;addresses, there&#x27;s going to be big questions about what is the true view of the blockchain.

It&#x27;s not gate-kept, it&#x27;s just that it&#x27;s not easy to run your own node and synchronize to the chain (especially if you&#x27;re on mobile) so people don&#x27;t do it and instead decide to trust public nodes.It&#x27;s the early days, remember how long the internet worked with <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;</a> ? It&#x27;s only in 2009 I believe that Facebook switched to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;</a>Check my other comment to see that the future doesn&#x27;t look that bad: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29847881" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29847881</a>

Check out Pocket Network, it&#x27;s a web3 network protocol that incentivizes node operators to run ethereum nodes (and other blockchains). Effectively decentralizes Infura &#x2F; Alchemy <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pokt.network&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pokt.network&#x2F;</a>

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&#x2F;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.

I&#x27;ll be honest I had no idea that access to Ethereum is effectively gate-kept by two centralized entities (Infura, Alchemy). I knew there were only one or two true Ethereum full-nodes, but the impact of that never quite clicked.[edit] By &quot;full node&quot; I meant &quot;archival node.&quot;

I do not look forward to immense backlash against &quot;techies&quot; when normal people have been grifted out of what they thought were their &quot;savings&quot; in crypto and NFT&#x27;s.

With regard to the last paragraph: Take a look at what Agoric is doing. Basically making programming smart contracts less difficult with JavaScript. Very interesting, worth a look.

For sure. I ran my own servers for many years. And I still enjoy playing with hardware at home. But a couple years back I shut down my last colocated physical server and I do not miss it. The background stress of knowing that at any point I might have to wake up, haul my ass down to a colo, and swap a motherboard just got to me.Now all my must-stay-up stuff is built via Terraform in a a public cloud. If there&#x27;s a hardware failure, it&#x27;s not my problem. It&#x27;s such a relief!

It&#x27;s worth making a distinction between running a server and managing it. People don&#x27;t want the hassle of managing all the complexity of server infrastructure, but they appreciate the benefits of owning your data, and the hardware it is stored on. It&#x27;s just that right now the centralized solutions that store data centrally are the only ones available for web-scale applications.However, that doesn&#x27;t have to be the case. If you look at consumer appliances and mobile computing, you can build managed environments that are physically distributed but partially or fully managed, with the actual code and data as close to the user as possible.

It&#x27;s refreshing to read an article that admits this:&gt; &gt; Even nerds do not want to run their own servers at this point.I actually enjoy build and running servers, but only for hobby purposes. When it comes down to anything business related or critical, I have zero desire to run and maintain it on my own. And I especially don&#x27;t want to have to handle security for large amounts of money that could disappear in an instant if I make one wrong misstep.

Amen. I don&#x27;t even get why most companies have Dev-ops. For the price of one Dev-ops you can get the most expensive plan on many providers. Running the most expensive Heroku plan (with a concierge service) is cheeper than an employee, and office space, and medical insurance, and .... 
And that&#x27;s just the one provider I know.I want to type git push master, and that&#x27;s the end of my involvement in standing things up.

&gt; Like this author says, most people don&#x27;t want to run their own web server...I know I certainly don&#x27;t. I want to write my software and I want to be able to deploy it somewhere and manage the things I may care about for that specific software. As much as possible I don&#x27;t want to have to care about hardware, or routing, or server administration, or user permissions, etc. Learning it once? Sure. Dealing with it every time I have a new project? No thanks.So, I totally agree. decentralization and privacy on their own are difficult to market, as they aren&#x27;t nearly as in demand as convenience.

Being easy to use is not usually thought of as a feature. Just look at the reaction of telephone hardware vendors to the original iPhone: There&#x27;s nothing new about this, there have been tons of devices with touchscreens, we already know the customer does not want those, yada yada. They did not even consider the possibility that the selling point was not a list item on the spec sheet, but the user experience.

&gt; The wants of someone who is driven enough read and write about the bleeding edge of technology are very, very different from the general population.This is very insightful. I wonder what else it applies to. I bet there are tons of media sectors writing to irrelevant but interested audiences.&gt; People who write these articles need to be thinking about the middle aged woman who still calls every video game system &quot;a Nintendo&quot;. There will always be some users for technologies like web3, but until you can clearly demonstrate to that woman that this new technology has value and is easier to use than the status quo, you&#x27;re never going to get mass adoption.I don&#x27;t get it. I thought this used to be common knowledge. I mean it&#x27;s basically a TV trope, so why and how do industries &quot;forget&quot; this?

I’m not sure I agree with that. People wanna pay as little as possible but they gladly pay for Netflix or whatever. People spend a lot of money on Amazon because they make it really easy to pay. One of the original promises of cryptocurrency is it would make micro transactions easy and painless (with something to do about trust, but… that goes in the opposite direction than consumers would like as it’s the provider that doesn’t have to trust the consumer instead of the other way around like with credit cards which allow you to back charge stuff).The key is still making stuff easy to pay for. Low transaction fees. Low risk to the consumer. Low friction overall. Ideally we would want to enable that without enabling monopolies like Amazon. Because the low friction is Amazon’s real moat.

people don&#x27;t want to pay anything for digital goodsWhich brings up a different problem: Web3 assumes that everything you do online will cost money. Even assuming that fees go to zero, virtually nobody wants that. Web3 advocates will say that the money you earn will offset what you spend, but you only have to look at Patreon&#x2F;Substack&#x2F;OnlyFans earnings to see that it won&#x27;t happen for most people.

Fortnite made $50 million selling NFL skins alone:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sportskeeda.com&#x2F;amp&#x2F;fortnite&#x2F;the-fortnite-skin-grossed-50-million-epic-games" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sportskeeda.com&#x2F;amp&#x2F;fortnite&#x2F;the-fortnite-skin-g...</a>And the total sales volume since release is in the billions.Maybe a generational thing?

IMO this diagnosis is still one level away from a more fundamental truism, which is that people don&#x27;t want to pay anything for digital goods. Running servers can and has been massively simplified over the last couple decades, and I don&#x27;t see any inherent technical barrier preventing it from being as simple as registering for an account on FB (i.e. anyone can do it). The deeper problem is the lack of willingness to pay (directly) for anything online.The reason for this is complex, with lots of unclear cause and effect dynamics (e.g. did our unwillingness to pay push the ecosystem to gravitate towards ad-based revenue models, or the other way around?). The inevitable race to the bottom between competitors, under the massive incentive for platforms to centralize&#x2F;consolidate (if you charged any amount for your service I can always under-price and out-compete you) is likely a major contributor. We do not exhibit such reservations against payment for anything physical, probably because of the innate sense we have that anything in physical reality should have a cost, yet not so in the digital world.

yes, now I use &quot;C-Suite manager&quot; instead.&quot;So simple, a C-Suite manager could do it&quot;

It also seems chronologically wrong since a woman who is middle-aged today would have been in the prime age group for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

&gt; middle aged woman who still calls every video game system &quot;a Nintendo&quot;.Using a middle aged woman as a stand-in for technologically unsophisticated user is a pretty negative stereotype both of older people and women: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;geekfeminism.fandom.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;So_simple,_your_mother_could_do_it" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;geekfeminism.fandom.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;So_simple,_your_mother_...</a>

Does this not prove his point though? Because decentralization is harder to get right on a technical level, centralized alternatives will always outcompete more decentralized ones.

Regarding your last sentence, I think that&#x27;s fine.I know Moxie criticizes people for saying “It’s early days still&quot; but I really do think it&#x27;s early days and NFTs have driven crypto into the mainstream too quickly.Crypto researchers are still chipping away at the math and computer science required to bring the web3 vision to life. What&#x27;s unfortunate is I&#x27;ve yet to see an article on hacker news about this research and, instead, articles about the hacked together shit that is unfortunately the face of web3 at the current moment.If you&#x27;re interested, I&#x27;d recommend people check out some of the following topics:- Smart Wallets for better UX for your average user.- Zero-Knowledge Proofs (and zk-snarks, zk-starks).- Rollups (specifically zkRollups) for scalability.- Single-slot finality for fast transaction confirmation.- Ethereum Sharding and Data-Availability Sampling. Again for scalability.- Sign-In With Ethereum.- And of course, Proof-Of-Stake (specifically Ethereum&#x27;s Casper algorithm which is being tested right now).

FTP is horrible. I&#x27;m glad as a web dev I haven&#x27;t touched it in 8 years not since I worked for a hosting company in tech support.... git, or even rsync over ssh is way better...The upcoming generation..even the &#x27;non-tech&#x27; people are tech-savvy, meaning most could probably get arch linux up and running at least via a distro or follow the docs, etc...where there parents would fail.the problem is they need to create something w&#x2F; a big enough value proposition but at the same time, easy enough for the masses to assimilate and understand it, and that serves enough utility to make it worth it.Something like an actual currency w&#x2F; basic income dividends (taxed $ goes to lowest 50% who have a minimum utilization score), and identity&#x2F;fraud management, that has a built in tax and cap system so whales can&#x27;t abuse it, and zero transaction fees, instead fees are taxes for hodling and lack of utilizing (less daily&#x2F;weekly transactions lower your utilization score, so you might lose a couple coins&#x2F;day until you start spending more). Fraud&#x2F;ID comes in handy here so you can&#x27;t just spend it to yourself or other accounts you own. 1:1 only.It&#x27;d need wide adoption to make utilization scores accessible, and maybe the price be pegged at or near a loaf of bread... and somehow make that global to be a universal price-setter to.. like say it&#x27;s 1000 x currency for a loaf of bread in X country and 100y currency for a loaf of bread in y country, the c (coin) to y trade rate would be 100:1, and 1000:1 for x.I also feel that decentralization can be bad, full democratization is good, and DAO&#x27;s would be good assuming every member gets equal voting rights (protect against whales), but sometimes esp. in the beginning centralized aspects like identity verifiers could go a long way towards building something resilient, and make tweaks&#x2F;iterate changes faster than blockchain tech, and then when the tech is more sound in 10 years, move 100% decentralized... or only parts if that&#x27;s what the org votes on....etc...When this expands to include metaverse it even becomes more important to have liquid democracy at its core, to ensure fairness and that companies don&#x27;t control everything.

&gt; I want my ISPs to give me a static IP more easily so I can more in this direction without worrying about weird dynamic DNS issues.Tailscale appears to have solved this problem. There are related open-source projects.

What do we mean by this?I feel like it&#x27;s a matter of OS improvement that will enable people to manage the software side of their own servers in as little (or less) effort than managing cloud platforms or even VPCs. Ideally in a standard way. Why is learning Dropbox any easier than learning to copy a file to some other FTP serving software? The clouds are just making $$ to support you, though that often turns on it&#x27;s head when they try to protect their interests. This conflict is why everything is shit right now IMO.If we are talking about the hardware... That might be a harder sell. But at the same time, I don&#x27;t see why a company like Apple couldn&#x27;t market a product like the HomePod as a personal server. It falls into the privacy narative and would be a way to make more device sales by supporting faster local services.Personally, I want my ISPs to give me a static IP more easily so I can more in this direction without worrying about weird dynamic DNS issues. IPv6 should have enabled this years ago, but it remains an issue.

You&#x27;re correct about ease-of-use being key, I think.It was easier for &quot;us&quot; (the industry) to build hosted web servers, and so that&#x27;s the paradigm that has won out. It&#x27;s a direct evolution from client-server computing in the mainframe-and-terminal era.But the user doesn&#x27;t need to care what a server is, or what running one involves; it&#x27;s a bit of a red herring.A winning platform wouldn&#x27;t communicate to people that they&#x27;re running a server at all; they&#x27;d upload their messages&#x2F;profile&#x2F;etc, and the application user experience would be akin to that of any other application, with the difference that -- at an implementation level -- their data would be encrypted, replicated and hosted across multiple devices. The platform provider then goes on to win-in-competition because their hosting and bandwidth costs reduce to near-zero.That of course conflicts with the second point: evolving the protocols for that is hard. I&#x27;d wager that a winning platform will get 98%+ of the protocol design and implementation correct up-front, because it would have to be based on simple, iterable, secure and near-correct fundamentals that stand the test of time.

I agree, my distaste of the culture that’s associating itself with crypto and web3 is far outweighing the technical benefits they’re claiming.

It like getting a kid to compost, sew seeds, tend to the veggie patch, pull weeds and 10 weeks later cook and eat the vegetables.Im the sort of person who should be interested in web3 (i dreamt of this kind of stuff years ago although had no technical idea how it might work) but now I’ve seen the culture of the space I have no interest.

&gt; People don’t want to run their own servers, and never willThis kind of gets at the reason why I think a lot of tech articles&#x2F;blogs about what the future will be like are just terrible. The wants of someone who is driven enough read and write about the bleeding edge of technology are very, very different from the general population. Like this author says, most people don&#x27;t want to run their own web server, but I&#x27;d go even farther and say, most people don&#x27;t really care about decentralization or even data privacy. Getting most people to care about privacy and decentralization is like getting a kid to eat vegetables. They know they should, but the alternative has more short term benefits. I think most people care about ease of use over almost everything else.People who write these articles need to be thinking about the middle aged woman who still calls every video game system &quot;a Nintendo&quot;. There will always be some users for technologies like web3, but until you can clearly demonstrate to that woman that this new technology has value and is easier to use than the status quo, you&#x27;re never going to get mass adoption.Connecting this back to web3, we&#x27;re clearly not there yet. Almost anything being done on web3 is slower, more expensive, and more complicated than its web2 alternative. We may or may not get there one day, but until we do, I don&#x27;t see web3 being anything more than a niche product.

My First Impressions of Web3