I've been a massive fan of Moxie's work for maybe 15 years or so now, and have had the pleasure of chatting with him in person a few times, and most of what he says is solid gold. I even agree with most of the points he's making in his Web3 post, but ..

.. that line "People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will" kills me. That's exactly the problem with P2P that Web3 is trying to solve. By strapping a financial layer onto a P2P network, you can build cryptographic incentives for people to run nodes and participate constructively in running and maintaining the network. It's certainly not the intention for everyone to run their own node, but anyone CAN, and even if you don't, you can be confident that the people who are running the network are acting in your best interests.

This, of course, does assume that the incentives are well thought out and properly aligned, which is very commonly not the case, but these networks are an amazing sandbox for people to try to build incentive systems that work, and there are many systems that are working quite well, many of which can run without any central authority over the protocol at all.

I admit, I've not read Moxie's post.

IMO "people" would run many of their own servers if it were easy. At the moment, it's not easy because it's not easy to safely open up to the public a server running on your computer/phone, or home network. ISPs benefit from making this hard, and (as best I understand it) the IP4 address space isn't wide enough anyway.

If "people" could run servers on their phones, safely, with minimal effort, they would. They would, because it would be so minimal effort that no-one needed to think "I'm running a server". They should only need to think "I'm available now" and that be it.

Read it. It’s not long.

It’s not just that running servers is hard. It’s that decentralized control can cause ossification. A bunch of functionality that people want became implemented in OpenSea because they couldn’t roll it into Ethereum itself.

I agree with this. This is what projects like Matrix are trying to do - your own federated server running on your phone.

https://arewep2pyet.com/

There are issues however - mobile operating systems (especially iOS) kill background processes aggressively - and the user has very little control over this. Until that changes, you can have federated servers running on phones which will go offline frequently and will have to sync when they get back online. This is fine for some applications but perhaps not fine for others. The server also needs to be lightweight because of memory/bandwidth/battery constraints on mobile devices.

People were fine "running their own servers" back when Skype was peer-to-peer. Or when Team Fortress 2 let you play with your friends.

because there weren't many alternatives. Dropped calls or latency issues were simply the norm and accepted as a trade off for being able to play. The reason companies used to favor p2p was because it was cheaper for them to not run servers.

But with people demanding more quality, richer content and consistent and stable connections p2p makes not much sense. Look at some Netflix blogs and how complex their infrastructure is geographically as well as in terms of hardware and software to deliver content at the cost to the user that they do.

Division of labor has made sense for hundreds of years and it will continue to do so for many more, the economics of p2p when resources matter doesn't check out.

It's a bad deal for the consumer, though. The complicated Netflix infrastructure is way more robust and stable than SMB+VLC, but I don't need to serve video to millions of people and maintain a complex and rotating streaming library with various publisher contracts determining what shows are available where. I just queue up a show.

Division of labor with companies hosting servers for online games makes sense until the servers go away and then what? No more Warcraft III ever, I guess, the servers are gone.

When we go in on centralization, we lose availability, privacy, and control. The services are more reliable from a technical sense but less reliable from a social sense.

The history of all this has shown us people will choose convenience over those other concerns 9 times out of 10.

Wait, Skype ain't p2p anymore?

Microsoft bought it, removed the encryption and decentralization, and started piping conversations directly to the NSA.

Yup, honestly this is a good argument for web3 as a substrate on which to build an encrypted chat app that's permanently decentralized and owned/funded by the community. (Once someone figures out the encrypted privacy aspect...)

This is coming to Matrix : https://arewep2pyet.com/

Woah, this happened almost two years ago and somehow I missed this.

I need to get more active on Matrix again.

Hasn't been for almost a decade at this point. The p2p protocol was deprecated in mid-2014.

Skype is also pretty much dead now. So the centralisation argument doesn't really benefit from Skype as an example.

Here is a series of headlines that give the best explanation of this architectural change that I've ever seen:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18411779

People are also fine running their own Discord servers, just like they did IRC channels/networks back in the day.

You're not running discord servers on your own hardware, though. You don't have any of the data locally and it all goes through Discord's server. Actual decentralized services are fine as long as users can run it as easily as they can run a centralized application.

Most people didn’t run their own irc network either, they just operated a channel and backed up the data themselves.

> "People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will"

Most people. And there's still a ton of "non-technical" (minimal programming/operations skills) but technically literate people who will not run their own servers but prefer to pay for applications and services that are built on protocols like RSS, ActivityPub etc.

Also hosting providers make it much more easy today than ever before. It's not "running your own server" but you get definitely quite a bit of control and ownership if you rent a VPS that runs stuff you created and/or installed.

> "A protocol moves much more slowly than a platform"

That's a good thing.

---

However, I think overall these are very good points. Personally I think there is just too much crap that goes under Web3 to the extend that it is repulsive. I'd rather help people to use computers, even if it is someone else's (AKA the cloud).

Most people wont run their own servers sure, but a large number of people and organisations will (and do). The more meaningful questions are around "how many people do we need to make this work?", there is a limit where the amount of security is good enough (and this is found through adjusting difficulty mining / or reducing block rewards).

There is also a lot of work being done on light clients and faster proofs, so we can bundle them into browsers/apps and not rely on third party nodes for messaging/transacting. This would solve quite a few of moxies concerns right away. Alongside this the work being done on rollups shows us ways of facilitating services for others, without them being dependant on it or locked into it.

For comparison, signal is great example of cryptography protecting users, but users being dependant on signal. there is no exit- so in critical situations what happens? Thats the kind of power-dynamic people working in crypto are grappling with. This is a hard problem but it is something worth attempting to solve.

How can we provide services to users but have them be able to leave with all their assets when then need to (not when its convenient to us who run the servers). I hear a lot from non-crypto people about how they agree with these ideas but you dont need blockchains to do them, but it seems most of the work to do with this is being done in the crypto/blockchain community (look at who is funding/doing the research on zk-proofs/snarks/starks, which can have a much wider impact outside of the crypto space too! => https://0xparc.org/blog/zk-mnist )

Problem with crypto is pointing to all these problems of centralised systems (be they web giants, banking system etc). But not having a practical, working alternative.

It’s always “in development”, “around the corner” etc.

Blockchain is hugely inefficient and for the most part has failed to scale meaningfully. Look at popular networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum. If it weren’t for the Ponzi scams most people probably would have moved on.

Zksnarks might be great, but absolutely private transactions have downsides too. Most of us would like our daily purchases to remain private. But do we want to enable unlimited money laundering and tax evasion too?

Problems like that are social and political and technology alone can’t give a solution.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/05/why-this-computer-sci...

When Matrix will be p2p, people will be running their own server without even thinking about it. I think this is the way to go.

But it is not there yet : https://arewep2pyet.com/

not every user needs to run their own blockchain node in order to benefit from its decentralization. and having the option to do so is a good thing.

Says the same co-creator of Signal shoving a private crypto-currency and wallet into the Signal app by not only pumping and dumping their own coins on an exchange once listed [0], but with the nature of an encrypted blockchain being a road to hell allowing the likes of terrorists, extremists, scammers and criminals to easily hide their funds used for illicit activities.

At this point, Moxie's fans and minions are not even aware of this involvement of the darker sides of that cryptocurrency project which have even (allegedly) plagiarised some of their privacy features from Monero. [1]

To Downvoters: So this is not true? Care to explain your reasons why as now I have added sources backing up these claims? [0][1][2]

[0] https://amycastor.com/2021/04/07/signal-adopts-mobilecoin-a-...

[1] https://twitter.com/fluffypony/status/1379559273504641025

[2] https://twitter.com/sethforprivacy/status/137979120155827814...

> At this point, Moxie's fans and minions are not even aware of this involvement of the darker sides of that cryptocurrency project which have even (allegedly) plagiarised some of their privacy features from Monero. [1]

The idea of crypto backers getting mad about "plagarizing features" is ridiculous in the extreme. Maybe what you want here is... a statist patent system that gives you a legal monopoly on particular kinds of math? Am I getting that right?

But then, this is a world where crypto people get mad about other people using the JPGs they "own" a link to... which is basically describing the need for copyright, isn't it?

If you believe in crypto I don't see how your position here should be anything other than "let crypto systems compete in the marketplace of ideas". And it is fundamentally ridiculous how crypto bros are slowly re-creating every aspect of a state except slower, more expensive, more energy intensive, less accountable, and worse for users in every way. Truly Libertarians do yearn for a feudal society, but one where they're the one on top...