jakiro
Author: moxie
Although I consider myself a cryptologist, I am not particularly interested in “crypto”.I don’t remember whether I actually said “get out of my territory”, but instead of clicking on the latest NFT release information, I prefer to browse the nostalgic “Pepperidge Farm Remembers” (Pepperidge Farm Remembers)) ) scented memes, lamenting that “crypto” used to mean a good time for “cryptography”.
Also, frankly, I don’t agree with the intergenerational excitement that transfers every aspect of life into an instrumental economy.
Even from a technical perspective, I have not been able to become a believer yet.So, given the recent widespread focus on so-called Web3, I decided to explore some developments in this field more deeply and see if I missed anything.
My opinion on Web1 and Web2
Web3 is a relatively vague term, which makes it difficult to strictly evaluate the goals of Web3.But the overall view (https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/why-web3-matters/) It seems to be,Web1 is decentralized, Web2 will focus everything on the platform, and Web3 will be decentralized again.Web3 should be able to provide us with the same rich experience as Web2 on a decentralized basis.
First, it is a good thing to figure out why a centralized platform appears, and in my opinion, the explanation is very simple:
1. People don’t want to run their own servers, and never want to run them.Web1The premise is that everyone on the Internet is a producer and consumer of content, and a producer and consumer of infrastructure.We all have our own network servers, our own websites, our own mail servers, our own status message servers, our own charger servers, and our own character generation servers.However, I don’t think this is too much emphasis:This is not what people want.People don’t want to run their own servers.
Even geeks don’t want to run the server themselves now.Even organizations that develop software full-time are not willing to run servers themselves now.If there is one thing that can summarize our perception of the world, it is:People don’t want to run servers themselves.Companies that provide server hosting services have been successful, while those that continue to iterate new features based on the possibilities of these networks are even more successful.
2. The evolution of the protocol is much slower than that of the platform (https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/).After more than 30 years, emails are still not encrypted; meanwhile, WhatsApp has moved to full end-to-end encryption in a year.People are still trying to standardize videos to reliably share with IRC; while Slack allows you to create custom reactive emojis based on your face.
This is not a funding issue.If something is truly decentralized, it becomes very difficult to change it and tends to stagnate..And this is a problem for technology, as other parts of the ecosystem are developing rapidly and failing if they can’t keep up.There is a whole parallel industry focusing on defining and improving methodologies like Agile development, trying to figure out how to organize large teams to act as quickly as possible, because that is crucial.
This is a problem when the technology itself tends to stagnate rather than develop.One way to be proven successful is to centralize a protocol that was stuck in the 1990s and then iterate quickly.
But Web3 wants to be different, let’s take a look.To quickly understand the field and better understand the possible future developments, I decided to build several dApps and create an NFT.
Make some decentralized applications
To experience the Web3 world, I made aAutonomous Art(https://autonomous.graphics/) dApp, anyone can mint tokens by making visual contributions to NFT.Over time, the cost of making a visual contribution increases, and the coin funds paid by the contributor are allocated to all previous artists (visualizing this financial structure as a pyramid-like shape).At the time of writing, more than $38,000 has been invested in creating this collective artwork.
I also made a “first Derivative” calledhttps://firstderivative.market/)dApp,It allows you to create, discover and exchange NFT derivatives that track underlying NFTs, similar to financial derivatives that track underlying assets?
Both made me feel how this field works.To be clear, these applications themselves don’t have anything particularly “distributed”: they are just ordinary React websites.“Distributed” means the location of the state and the logic/permissions for updating the state: on the blockchain, not in the “centralized” database.
One thing that makes me wonder about the crypto space is the lack of attention to the client/server interface.When people talk about blockchain, they talk about distributed trust, leadershipless consensus, and all the operating mechanisms, but often obscures the reality that clients can’t eventually participate in these mechanisms.All network graphs are servers, and the trust model is between servers, everything is related to servers.Blockchain is designed to be a peer-to-peer network, but it is not designed to make your mobile device or browser truly one of these peer-to-peer networks.
With the paradigm to mobile, we are now living in a world of clients and servers, the former is absolutely irreplaceable to the latter: these issues are more important to me than ever.at the same time,Ethereum actually calls the server “client”, therefore there is not even a word to describe the actual, untrusted client/server interface that must exist, and it is not realised that if successful, the number of clients will end up being billions more than the server (!).
For example, whether running on a mobile device or on a web, likeAutonomous ArtorFirst DerivativeSuch dApps all need to interact with the blockchain in some way in order to modify or present state (collectively created artwork, their editing history, NFT derivatives, etc.).However, this is actually impossible to execute from the client.Because blockchain cannot exist on your mobile device(or actually exists in your desktop browser).Therefore, the only option is to interact with the blockchain through a node running remotely on a certain server.
server!!!However, it is well known that people don’t want to run their own servers.It happens that some companies have emerged, selling API access to the Ethereum nodes they run as services, while providing analytics, enhanced APIs built on top of the default Ethereum API, and access to historical transactions.This sounds… very familiar.Currently, there are basically two companies.Almost all dApps are usedInfuraorAlchemyInteract with blockchain.In fact, even if you connect a wallet like MetaMask to a dApp, and the dApp interacts with the blockchain through your wallet, MetaMask is just calling Infura!
These client APIs do not use anything to verify the authenticity of the blockchain state or response.There was no even signature as a result.An application like Autonomous Art will say “Hey, what is the output of this view function on this smart contract”, Alchemy or Infura will respond with a JSON blob “This is the output”, and the application will render it.
This surprised me.A lot of work, effort and time are invested in creating a trustless distributed consensus mechanism, but almost all clients who want to access it simply trust the output of both companies without any further verification.This doesn’t seem to be the best privacy situation either.Imagine that every time you interact with a website in Chrome, your request will be sent to Google first, then routed to the destination and returned.This is what Ethereum is today.All write traffic is obviously already public on the blockchain, but these companies can also view almost all read requests from almost all users in almost all dApps.
Blockchain proponents might say that if this type of centralized platform appears, it’s nothing, because state can be viewed on the blockchain, so if these platforms are not behave properly, customers can simply move elsewhere.However, I think this is a very superficial view of the platform’s development trends.
Let me give you an example.
Making NFT
I also want to create a more traditional NFT.Most people think of images and digital art when they think of NFT, but NFTs usually don’t store data on a chain.This is too expensive for most NFTs of most images.
NFT does not store data on the chain, but contains aPoint toThe URL of the data.What surprised me about this standard is that the data on the URL has no hash promise.Looking at many NFTs on the popular market for dozens, hundreds, or millions of dollars, this URL usually just points to a VPS running Apache somewhere.Anyone with access to the machine, anyone who purchases the domain name in the future, or anyone who destroys the machine can change the NFT’s images, titles, descriptions, etc. to whatever they want at any time (whether they “have” or notThis token).There is nothing in the NFT specification that tells you what the image “should” be, or even allows you to confirm whether something is the “correct” image.
So as an experiment, I made an NFT that would vary according to the viewer, because the web server that provides the image can provide different images based on the requester’s IP or user agent selection.For example, it looks like this on OpenSea and it looks like another on Rarible, but when you buy from a crypto wallet and view it, it always shows up as a big ? emoji.What you bid is not what you get.There is nothing unusual about this NFT, but the way NFT specification is built.Many of the most expensive NFTs can become ? emojis at any time; I just made it clear.
A few days later, without any warning or explanation, the NFT I made was removed from OpenSea (an NFT marketplace):
The removal indicates that I violated certain terms of service, but after reading the terms, I did not see any terms that prohibit NFTs from changing depending on the location of viewing, and I publicly describe it so.
However, what I found most interesting is that after OpenSea deleted my NFT, it alsoNo longer appear in any encrypted wallet on my device.But, this is Web3, how is this possible?
Crypto wallets like MetaMask, Rainbow, etc. are “unmanaged” (the keys are saved on the client), but it has the same problem as my dApp above: the wallet must run on a mobile device or in a browser.at the same time,The idea behind Ethereum and other blockchains is that it is a peer-to-peer network, but it is not designed to make your mobile device or browser truly one of these peer-to-peer networks..
A wallet like MetaMask requires basic things like displaying your balance, recent transactions and NFTs, and more complex things like building transactions, interacting with smart contracts, etc.In short, MetaMask needs to interact with the blockchain, but the blockchain is built in such a way that clients like MetaMask cannot interact with it.So, like my dApp, MetaMask does this by issuing API calls to three companies that integrate in this space.
For example, MetaMask displays your most recent transactions by making an API call to etherscan:
GET https://api.etherscan.io/api?module=account&address=0x0208376c899fdaEbA530570c008C4323803AA9E8&offset=40&order=desc&action=txlist&tag=latest&page=1 HTTP/2.0
…Show your account balance by issuing an API call to Infura:
POST https://mainnet.infura.io/v3/d039103314584a379e33c21fbe89b6cb HTTP/2.0{ "id": 2628746552039525, "jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "eth_getBalance", "params": [ "0x0208376c899fdaEbA530570c008C4323803AA9E8", "latest" ]}
…Show your NFT by issuing an API call to OpenSea:
GET https://api.opensea.io/api/v1/assets?owner=0x0208376c899fdaEbA530570c008C4323803AA9E8&offset=0&limit=50 HTTP/2.0
Again, like my dApp, these responses are not authenticated in some way.They don’t even have signatures, so you can’t prove that they are lying later.It reuses the same connection, TLS session tickets, etc. for all accounts in your wallet, so if you manage multiple accounts in your wallet to keep some identity apart, these companies will know they are related.
MetaMask doesn’t actuallyDoToo many things, it’s just a view of the data provided by these centralized APIs.This isn’t a question unique to MetaMask: do they have any other options?Rainbow etc. are set up exactly the same way.(Interestingly, Rainbow has their own data for the social features they are building in their wallet: social graphs, presentations, etc., and chooses to build all of this on Firebase instead of blockchain.)
All of this means that if your NFT is removed from OpenSea, it will also disappear from your wallet.Functionally, it doesn’t matter whether my NFTs are permanently present somewhere in the blockchain, because the wallet (and more and more other things in the ecosystem) are justUse the OpenSea API to display NFTs, and for the NFT that query my address has, it starts returning 304 No Content!
Reshape the world
Considering the history of Web1 becoming Web2,I think Web3 is strangely a technology like Ethereum has many of the same implicit features as Web1 when it is built.To make these technologies available, the field is integrating around the platform.Again.People will run the server for you and iterate over the new features that appear.Infura, OpenSea, Coinbase, Etherscan.
Similarly, the development of the Web3 protocol is slow.When building First Derivative, it would be great if the minting price of derivatives can be set as a percentage of the underlying value.This data is not on the chain, but it is in the API that OpenSea will provide to you.People are excited about NFT royalties because they can benefit creators, but there is no royalty specified in ERC-721, and it’s too late to change it now, so OpenSea has its own way of configuring royalties,This method exists in the Web2 space.Iterate quickly on a centralized platformAlready surpassed distributed protocols and integrated control into the platform.
With these dynamics in mind, I think we are already in a situation where your crypto wallet’s view of NFT is OpenSea’s view of NFT, which is not surprising.I don’t think we should be surprised that OpenSea is not a pure “view” that can be replaced, as it has been busy iterating the platform beyond what can be achieved by strictly following impossible/hardly changing standards.
I think this is very similar to the situation with email.I can run my own mail server, but it doesn’t matter to privacy, censorship resistance or control, because GMail will appear on the other end of every email I send or receive anyway.Once a distributed ecosystem is centralized around a platform for convenience, it becomes the best of both worlds: centralized control, but still dispersed enough to get stuck over time.I could build my own NFT marketplace, but if OpenSea mediates views of all NFTs in the wallets people use (and all other applications in the ecosystem), it doesn’t provide any additional control.
It’s not a complaint about OpenSea, nor accusation of what they have built.Quite the contrary, they are trying to build something that works.I think we should expect this kind of platform integration to happen, and given the necessity of this situation, we should design systems that provide us with the functionality we need in this way of organizing.However, my feeling and concern is that the results expected by the Web3 community are different from what we are seeing at the moment.
It’s too early now
“It’s still in its early stages” is the most common saying I’ve seen in the Web3 field, especially when discussing similar issues.In a sense, cryptocurrency fails to break through relatively preliminary engineering phases, which is what allows people to regard this period as an “early phase”, because objectively, it has been around for ten years or more.
However, even if this is just the beginning (and most likely!), I’m not sure if we should think it’s comforting.I think the facts may be the opposite; we should seem to note thatFrom the beginning, these technologies tend to be centralized through platforms in order to achieve them, which has little negative impact on the speed of the ecosystem, and most participants don’t even know or care about it happening.This may indicate thatDecentralization itself is not actually direct practical or urgency for most people downstream,The only level of decentralization that people want is the minimum level that something needs to exist, without considering this very consciously, these forces will move us further and further away from the ideal result over time, rather than closer to the ideal result.
But you can’t stop the gold rush
Think about it carefully, OpenSea would actually be much better if all the Web3 parts disappeared.It will be faster, cheaper, and easier to use.For example, to accept a bid on my NFT, I would have to pay more than $80 to $150 or more Ethereum gas fees.This sets a artificial threshold for all bids, otherwise you will lose money by accepting bids below the gas fee.Credit card payments often feel expensive, but they are cheaper compared to this.If people want records of public transactions, quotes, bids, etc. to verify their accounting records, OpenSea can even publish a simple transparent log.
However, if they built an image buying and selling platform that is not nominally based on cryptocurrencies, I don’t think it will become popular.Not because it’s not distributed, because we’ve seen that a lot of the things needed to make it work are no longer distributed.I don’t think it’s going to be popular,Because it’s a gold rush.People make money through cryptocurrency speculation, and these people are interested in spending these cryptocurrencies in a way that supports their investments while providing additional returns, so this defines the context of the wealth transfer market.
People who are at the end of the line and resell NFTs are not fundamentally concerned with distributed trust models or payment mechanisms, but they care about where the money is.So money draws people into OpenSea, they improve the experience by building a platform that iterates over the underlying Web3 protocol in the Web2 space, and they ultimately provide the ability to “mint” NFTs through OpenSea itself rather than through your own smart contracts, and ultimatelyThis all opens the door to Coinbase, through your debit card, their own platform to provide access to the verified NFT marketplace.This opens the door for Coinbase to manage tokens by itself through the dark pool held by Coinbase, which helps eliminate transaction fees and makes it possible to completely avoid interaction with smart contracts.Ultimately, all Web3 partsdisappear, you have a website that buys and sells JPEGS with a debit card.The project cannot start as a Web2 platform due to market dynamics, but the same market dynamics and the fundamental forces of centralization may prompt it to eventually go there.
At the end of the stack, NFT artists are experiencing this progressFeel excited, because that means more speculation/investment in their art, but if the purpose of Web3 is to avoid the pitfalls of Web2, then we should worry that this is already a natural trend for these to offer new protocols that are different in the future.
I think these market forces may continue, and in my opinion, the question of how long it lasts is whether the accumulated cryptocurrency is ultimately inside the engine or in the leaky bucket.If funds flowing through the NFT are eventually directed back to the encrypted space, it may accelerate forever (whether it is just Web2x2 or not).If it pours out in large quantities, it will be a flash in the pan.Personally, I think that having made enough money right now and having enough faucets to keep it going isn’t just a flash in the pan.If so, it seems worth considering how to avoid Web3 from becoming Web2x2 (Web2 but with less privacy).
Creativity may not be enough
I’m just a first step into the Web3 field.However, looking at these small projects, it’s easy for me to understand why so many people think the Web3 ecosystem is so beautiful.I don’t think it will get us out of centralized platforms, I don’t think it will fundamentally change our relationship with technology, I think the privacy issue is already below the internet’s standards (that’s a pretty low standard!), but IAlso understand why geeks like me would be excited to build for it.At least, this is something new at the geek level: it creates space for creativity/exploration, reminiscent of the early Internet age.Ironically, part of the creativity may have stemmed from the limitations that make Web3 so bulky.I hope the creativity and exploration we see will produce positive results, but I’m not sure if that’s enough to prevent all the same dynamics of the internet from unfolding again.
If we do want to change our relationship with technology, I think we have to do it consciously.My basic idea is roughly as follows:
1. We should accept the premise that people do not run their own servers by designing systems that can allocate trust without a distributed infrastructure.This means that the architecture can expect and accept the inevitable outcome of a relatively centralized client/server relationship, butUse encryption (rather than infrastructure) to allocate trust.Although Web3 is built on “encryption”, I was surprised that it rarely seems to involve encryption!
2. We should work hard to reduce the burden on developing software.Currently, software projects require a lot of manpower.Even relatively simple applications require a group of people to sit in front of the computer for eight hours a day, day after day, never ending.This is not always the case, and there was a time when 50 people working on a software project was not considered a “small team”.As long as the software requires such a coordinated effort and so much highly specialized human attention, I think it tends to serve the interests of the people who sit in that room every day, rather than the broader goals we might think.I think changing our relationship with technology may need to make software easier to create, but throughout my life, I saw the opposite.Unfortunately, I think distributed systems tend to exacerbate this trend, making things more complex and difficult than simpler and easier.
Original link: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
