My First Impressions of Web3

Re:My First Impressions of Web3 by Karrot_Kream on Friday January 07, 2022 @08:25PM (#29847535)

While in theory you could change your RPC URL, in practice what difference would it make? At least IPFS offers some form of integrity checking through its generated hash. But there's no way to say, for example, that I karrot_kream at time T fetched a URL pointed to by NFT N with contents C. As demonstrated by Moxie's changing NFT and eventual deletion by OpenSea, who _knows_ what will happen to it? It's possible to at least build cryptographic attestations of fetching a particular NFT (and even maybe placing this attestation on-chain, to have some NFT "provenance" going on) but there's really not that much work going into it right now. That's the critique.

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Re:My First Impressions of Web3 by pshc on Friday January 07, 2022 @08:44PM (#29847657)

Changing your RPC url will make no difference because you’ll get the same result either way. Any service that lies about the state of the chain will quickly be jettisoned like so much carbon dioxide.

The bare minimum for a reputable NFT is to publish the contract source code and use immutable storage. That’s the first step of due diligence in the space.

All of this stuff is super fluid and non-standardized because it’s still super early and everyone’s trying to figure out how it ought to work.

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Re:My First Impressions of Web3 by cormacrelf on Friday January 07, 2022 @09:07PM (#29847815)

OpenSea lied about the non-existence of the jpeg-swapping NFT he minted. They removed it from their API responses because they didn't like it. Do you think they're about to be jettisoned? Or will people largely not care because they actually like the centralised nature of OpenSea with its TOS and extra features and with no viable alternative that doesn't require running your own server?

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Re:My First Impressions of Web3 by shagie on Friday January 07, 2022 @09:13PM (#29847867)

Consider also "what's the point of an uncensorable block chain if the API servers can become untrustworthy and refuse to the serve the data?"

If OpeanSea can blackhole / cancel / hide a NFT on a whim, what does that say about the viability of hosting other services that access the blockchain through similar gateways?

Additionally, if such services can preform those actions, what does that suggest about the viability of financial instruments and company governance accessed through those or similar services?

Yes, this is FUD. I believe it is quite reasonable FUD.

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Re:My First Impressions of Web3 by pshc on Friday January 07, 2022 @09:24PM (#29847949)

That’s fair. I was talking about canonicalized chain state (hence RPC), not consensus about what constitutes spam.

I agree that OpenSea should not have final say in this regard, as clearly that is not decentralized. I would be interested to hear if anyone is trying solve this at scale.

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Re:My First Impressions of Web3 by Karrot_Kream on Friday January 07, 2022 @08:47PM (#29847691)

> All of this stuff is super fluid and non-standardized because it’s still super early and everyone’s trying to figure out how it ought to work.

I understand this and I'm certainly sympathetic to it. Folks are also trying to figure out how to actually stuff art on-chain which I'm a fan of. I'm very familiar with the NFT standards because I was involved in some of the discussions with it. The amount of money this space is seeing though given how fluid representation in the space though, leads to Moxie's other critique, that this is being fed with a gold rush trying to find liquidity for hoarded crypto. I know that builders can't control what these speculators do but it certainly adds pressure for builders to either take the money or operate at a disadvantage to builders who do.

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Re:My First Impressions of Web3 by Loudness on Saturday January 08, 2022 @12:44AM (#29848974)

In regards to keeping the art on-chain, the immutability is a real problem. What happens when someone stuffs illegal data/images on the blockchain? Once a bad actor sneaks trade secrets, doxxing material, or CP onto the chain, it's there forever. By design, deleting data from the blockchain isn't possible.

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