[Nicholas]

https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

really, really good breakdown of both the bullshit and excitement surrounding “web3” and crypto and NFT stuff

[Alice]

If we do want to change our relationship to technology, I think we’d have to do it intentionally. My basic thoughts are roughly:

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. This means architecture that anticipates and accepts the inevitable outcome of relatively centralized client/server relationships, but uses cryptography (rather than infrastructure) to distribute trust. One of the surprising things to me about web3, despite being built on “crypto,” is how little cryptography seems to be involved!
We should try to reduce the burden of building software. At this point, software projects require an enormous amount of human effort. Even relatively simple apps require a group of people to sit in front of a computer for eight hours a day, every day, forever. This wasn’t always the case, and there was a time when 50 people working on a software project wasn’t considered a “small team.” As long as software requires such concerted energy and so much highly specialized human focus, I think it will have the tendency to serve the interests of the people sitting in that room every day rather than what we may consider our broader goals. I think changing our relationship to technology will probably require making software easier to create, but in my lifetime I’ve seen the opposite come to pass. Unfortunately, I think distributed systems have a tendency to exacerbate this trend by making things more complicated and more difficult, not less complicated and less difficult.

[Sharon]

I like this take he says

“So much work, energy, and time has gone into creating a trustless distributed consensus mechanism, but virtually all clients that wish to access it do so by simply trusting the outputs from these two companies without any further verification. It also doesn’t seem like the best privacy situation. Imagine if every time you interacted with a website in Chrome, your request first went to Google before being routed to the destination and back. That’s the situation with ethereum today. All write traffic is obviously already public on the blockchain, but these companies also have visibility into almost all read requests from almost all users in almost all dApps.

Partisans of the blockchain might say that it’s okay if these types of centralized platforms emerge, because the state itself is available on the blockchain, so if these platforms misbehave clients can simply move elsewhere. However, I would suggest that this is a very simplistic view of the dynamics that make platforms what they are.”

[Jean]

And when his NFT was banned from OpenSea it literally disappeared from his MetaMask wallet because they use the OpenSea API lol… pure bullshit folks

[Jordan]

The YouTube and gamer bros embracing and hyping NFTs don’t understand the first thing about the technology, they just pass around the same apps and tutorials to get things working and then back to hyping whatever they are hyping with Logan Paul et al

[Jordan]

honestly if you showed this article to someone in 2010 they would be like uuhhuhghhhg mmmkkkk

[Author]

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