nft financial speculation is not the problem, it is a symptom.
you dont hate non fungible tokens, you hate the abusive financial system that we all live under.
the funny thing is that p2p programmable money databases and things like nfts could offer us something different. it does seem that a lot of attention (and vc money) goes to people rebuilding existing things 'but on blockchain'. but there is a lot of interesting anti-speculation crypto protocols/standards being built too -> things like circles ubi.
"Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. That tension will not go away." - Stuart Brand
The "Zero-Knowledge Proofs Starter Pack" section is most up my alley. I read "Zero Knowledge Proofs: An illustrated primer by Matthew Green" about a year ago so am starting by re-reading this. https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/11/27/zero-kno...
as the article mentioned, web3 was a term coined back in 2014. It was very much a reaction to "web2.0" silicon valley years which was probably felt a lot stronger back then.
the term flew under the radar for a while, but the past six months people suddenly got annoyed by it.
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/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.
imo these nfts that are "host it on an endpoint on our apache server" will die away as their fragility fails them. its mostly quick-buck thinking.
yes you can do a bad job with your nft contract and not think about metadata location etc. but you could also do a good job (ipfs/arweave). There are plenty that will last as long as the chain they are on with no problems.
Opensea shooting themselves in the foot. But its ok Zora and Foundation and others are stepping up and leading the way.
I kind of agree in some ways but i think he underplays the critical point that you have an option for voice and exit from the forming centralising forces (which do get established because people like convenience/reliability/familiarity) without sacrificing your data or belongings, you can leave without losses. That is a critical difference.
His nft is delisted from a platform and his wallet calls the api of that platform. That sucks, up till now we have "too bad you got delisted from this platform, all your content is gone". But that isn't the case here, his contract is still on chain, and will work with anyone who calls it. He can still get all the data, there are other wallets, you can run them in your terminal if you like, or you can set your metamask to use your own - or someone elses - node (instead of infura). There is a choice. There are things like TheGraph making distributed indexers/search engines and something like that will replace opensea as the main nft api (if they arent building it themselves).
Add to this the more recent developments of light clients, which are coming along great and which allow us to run in-app/in-browser direct connections to the chain for calls/transactions without needing infura or a third party node.
> Personally, I think enough money has been made at this point that there are enough faucets to keep it going, and this won’t just be a blip. If that’s the case, it seems worth thinking about how to avoid web3 being web2x2 (web2 but with even less privacy) with some urgency.
Absolutely agree. there are a lot of people in this space who have made enough money to spend the rest of their lives pursuing their interests in it, and they will. It isn't going away and we should engage with making it as good as we can. Will it be a big thing in ten years? who knows, I can say that everyday I interact with protocols, work and vote in daos- 4 years ago those things were in whitepapers as a possible idea, but now they are reality. What will we see in the next 5?
We can absolutely bring better privacy too. Layers like aztec are working on exactly that, and zero knowledge proofs and other forms of commitments (sismo) are exploring how to do that. I think a lot of people in the space follow the ideal of "privacy for the individual, transparency for the institutions". We will get there.
> We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure.
i sort of agree with this, we can accept that full nodes will be ran be organisations, businesses, and nerdy individuals who also have their own funkwhale instances and homelabs. those commited to the ideals -> same as home email servers or mastodon communities.
but we can also find ways to distribute infrastructure to bring resilience to those who dont think much about these things and just want to use an app. (again with things like light clients replacing api calls to third parties). so that we care for the non-committed users and make sure the points of fragility are lessened as much as we can.
I think a lot of his criticism is valid, but it also kinda falls flat on what is being built. It is a surface layer "i'll be a web3 dev for a day" overview and response. So it reads like if i followed a tutorial on neural nets in python then complained that my car still cant be driven by ai. Those of us in the space are well aware of all of this and it is all being worked on, but people unfamiliar read it as some kind of smackdown, which isn't helpful either.
I'd be much more interested in his thoughts on Whisper/Waku and messaging protocols, tradeoffs in validity/volition/optimistic rollups, distributed indexers, etc. He is smart enough and involved in similar things to just take that extra step to the dev forums and discussions and maybe give meaningful, helpful critique. I'm not sure what response he is expecting tbh?
The rest on gold rush and money i don't have much to say on, but mass speculation and desperation to make money is, imo, a symptom of the abusive system of work and finance that we are all forced into and everyone wants to escape. That didnt just appear with crypto/nfts. So sure, people are using something because they are making money and might not actually care about the details and the ethics - but we are also building a free(libre) opensource p2p programmable value network, and there are lots of people who also think that is amazing and worth indicating as different from the current stacks with the 'web3' tag.
> 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'd like to have happen won't happen. I should be able to pull files from my home computer when I'm stuck in an airport in Paris. That was the original promise, but we ended up with something else that has a lot of rent-seeking involved.
I think there are a few people working on the servers problem, probably nowhere near enough, but Broadband companies are also largely to blame for this. I'm not sure if Starlink or municipal broadband that is run like power and water, are ways out. But what we have isn't going to work, and consolidation is just going to get worse and worse until someone fixes it.
Groups like DappNode are doing good work here. You can buy a nuc from them with their os installed and then pick from a list of apps to install (owncloud/ eth nodes/ ipfs pinner/etc) and it handles the messyness of dyndns/openvpn/updates and all of that. Anyone can contribute docker packages with their markup for people to install new programs. I’m working on a funkwhale port so I can pull my music back locally and not digital ocean
> That sucks, up till now we have "too bad you got delisted from this platform, all your content is gone". But that isn't the case here, his contract is still on chain, and will work with anyone who calls it
Well, it is still "content on a platform", which is Ethereum. If another blockchain comes into existence and most people say that this new blockchain is the source of truth for digital ownership, your old NFTs are worthless, because nobody cares about old Ethereum.
The same is true for wallet apps. If 90 % of people use one specific thing (OpenSea) and think that only this thing is the source of truth, it simply doesn’t matter that your NFT is technically on the chain.
The sense of ownership and the value comes purely from where the attention is right now – and this being the internet, everything can change.
Compare this to the physical world. Here, the attention and trust is in your local laws. If this changes, you can lose ownership (government seizing properties).
The solution is actually to acknowledge that there is no ownership without society.
With Ethereum, people want to build another society, again based on trust/attention. That society has not much overlap to the physical world.
It is not much different than any group of people doing a thing together, like say, an open source project, a clan in EVE or whatever with the only difference that web3 enthusiasts think their hobby has some link to the real world.
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.
> everyday I interact with protocols, work and vote in daos- 4 years ago those things were in whitepapers as a possible idea, but now they are reality.
This is a pretty important point. He states that it's not really "early days", but if this is the kind of momentum we're talking about it feels like it is early days still. You don't see this kind of innovation in a stale field.
> I think a lot of his criticism is valid, but it also kinda falls flat on what is being built. It is a surface layer "i'll be a web3 dev for a day" overview and response. So it reads like if i followed a tutorial on neural nets in python then complained that my car still cant be driven by ai. Those of us in the space are well aware of all of this and it is all being worked on, but people unfamiliar read it as some kind of smackdown, which isn't helpful either.
This is the money quote for me. Just because there are issues currently doesn't mean that they won't ever get fixed.
My takeaway is that this subject is a lot more nuanced than his article is claiming, and although he's certainly right in a lot of his criticisms, that doesn't mean Web3 as a whole is doomed to failure.
It also does make me reconsider the movement as a whole. Sure, there are bound to be golddiggers, but that doesn't immediately render the whole concept invalid.
Raised Catholic, but never seriously and after high school the only churches i attended were for weddings and funerals. But at some point in my twenties i lost a close friend, had some weird experiences of suffering and bliss and acceptance. Then started reading all over the place to try understand my experiences. I found the tao to be very helpful, and thomas mertons writing also very helpful. I often come back to his writing on desert mystics to start the day. And I always allow myself the time to watch the sunlight glinting off the leaves of the trees outside my window.
> PS: Please buy mine - the market price has already dropped 99%
fwiw the floor price is up from 0.04($160) to 0.14($560) overnight lol. seems these articles and sharing got the whole thing more attention, as they say no such thing as bad publicity.
you dont hate non fungible tokens, you hate the abusive financial system that we all live under.
the funny thing is that p2p programmable money databases and things like nfts could offer us something different. it does seem that a lot of attention (and vc money) goes to people rebuilding existing things 'but on blockchain'. but there is a lot of interesting anti-speculation crypto protocols/standards being built too -> things like circles ubi.
"Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. That tension will not go away." - Stuart Brand
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free