This response is technical and appears a little naive to me. The reason why NFTs are currently hot is because there's a gold rush and people fear missing out. I don't think anyone who buys an NFT wants that NFT; they just hope to flip it for more money than they spent, or maybe diversify their portfolio (use it as a store of value). I could be wrong of course, but I seriously doubt it.<p>Which means, the technical solutions to the questions raised in the original article this responds to, will probably not have time to be implemented before the rush is over.<p>Also, one of the main points of the first article, if not the main one (and certainly the first one) is that <i>centralization is a feature, not a bug</i>. People want a central authority and not bother themselves with running their own server/infrastructure.<p>So the only way for OpenSea to "die" is if it's replaced by a different, but similar, central authority.
Standard blockchain apologist. Always jam tomorrow, never jam today.<p>It's always "early" for some definition of the word "it". Any decade now we'll have PoS, or an actual use case for smart contracts, or NFTs etc.<p>But no, every year just seems to bring a new "invention" that is "still early" while implying that this, unlike every single other use of distributed blockchain, somehow is the first of all of them to not be pointless (outside of a way to find the bigger fool).<p>Blockchains are just scam generators.<p>Well, they are of great utility to ransomware, so i guess they have found one use case in over a decade.<p>Edit: and of course this rebuttal found like one possible mistake in statistics and calls it a "lie". That should tell you all you need to know about the author's intellectual honesty.
The author seems to miss that one of Moxie's central criticisms is that, all else being equal, distributed solutions tend to lag centralized ones.<p>The reason for OpenSea et al. providing centralized services isn't accidental--it's not that it's "early days"--but that <i>whenever</i> there's an opportunity to innovate, those innovations will first appear for centralized services.<p>If we hope for distributed solutions to be <i>on par</i> with centralized, we are in effect hoping for an inefficient market, or one without innovation (giving distributed services time to catch up).<p>This criticism, in a way, has little to do with "Web3" at all. Instead, it's justification for the <i>alternative</i> solution Moxie has been working toward: one where crypto(graphy, not currency) allows the cost and feature advantages of centralization while preserving (or in fact exceeding) the user privacy of distributed solutions.<p>(I have <i>some</i> criticisms of Moxie's vision, but the author seems not to engage with the argument's real substance.)
> Both of the proposed solutions solve this.<p>Moxie spoke about how web3 currently works. Not about the hundreds of proposed solutions. And no, proposals don’t “solve” anything, until they’re actually implemented and tested.
> “Axie Infinity and how it’s bringing entire nations out of poverty” <a href="https://www.notboring.co/p/infinity-revenue-infinity-possibilities" rel="nofollow">https://www.notboring.co/p/infinity-revenue-infinity-possibi...</a><p>No way I can take someone seriously if they think Axie Infinity is saving the Philippines/Vietnam from poverty.<p>Edit:<p>Crypto maximalists don’t understand history, economics, or globalism. All while claiming that crypto will solve for globalised economies and save people from poverty.<p>Do they know why these countries are poor? Do they understand colonialism and modern slave labor? Or that colonising countries dictate the global economy and devalue developing world currencies? And that these countries are poor by design, and their weakened economic status is a result of colonial history?<p>How does a “Play 2 Earn” game that is provably negative sum by making money from fees - where the poor ”scholars” have to rent tokens from the rich “lords” and share 30% of their income with, help the poor come out of poverty?<p>This is crypto colonialism for crying out loud!
> Illegal images being sent to your wallet, forcing you to go to prison in some places.<p>My god, I hadn't even considered that, but they're right, there's currently n established blockchain the requires permission to send anything. That's fine with money, but with NFTs that actually represent something that could be a serious risk.
> A lot of NFTs do use Google Drive or Imgur or whatever. However, I can promise you that one of the first things people do when making sure they are not rugged (crypto-term for scammed) is to make sure it’s not possible for the author to suddenly delete or change the image.<p>I'm curious about this point; if the only thing stored on the chain is a URL (including Drive/Imgur) then there's no possible way to actually preclude the content from changing right?<p>It actually does seem very weird that people aren't at least putting a #sha1= in the NFT URL to be able to verifiably know if the underlying content did change.
> <i>The sooner Opensea dies, the better.</i><p>From my understanding of the space and the original article, it seems OpenSea will not die and this is pure wishful thinking.
> This is true, wallets suck so much it’s funny. I was sent a £2k NFT the other day which I can’t sell because Opensea has glitched and my wallet won’t show me the NFT, which means I can’t send it or sell it!<p>This is not true. An NFT that follows the ERC721 contract standard has a `safeTransferFrom()` function that a token holder can call to initiate a transfer. You do not have to depend on OpenSea: <a href="https://etherscan.io/address/0x5754f44bC96F9F0Fe1a568253452a3F40F5e9F59#writeContract" rel="nofollow">https://etherscan.io/address/0x5754f44bC96F9F0Fe1a568253452a...</a><p>You can also use an alternative NFT swapping protocol, such as the ZeroX-backed Trader.xyz: <a href="https://trader.xyz/" rel="nofollow">https://trader.xyz/</a> (fully open source) to initiate a swap.
Reasonable rebuttal to reasonable article. I wouldn't accuse MM of lying, though, I think it's very easy to miss something like whether a thing is normally held on a simple apache VPS.<p>As for dipping your toes, I'd say it's maybe the hardest area of coding to do that in. Generally I find the documentation is lacking, everything is moving really quickly, there's a huge amount of jargon, and there's a huge number of protocols and standards to read about, with very little authority on what is worth spending time on.<p>I have a collection of comments in my side projects where I've discovered various surprising things about how blockchain stuff works. Others I know have similar pages of notes on how particular things in the space are arranged.<p>Moxie captures why this is so: there's a gold rush, and appearances seem to matter more than substance.
Moxie says 'Ys are often X'. This says that's a 'lie' because 'Most Ys are not X'.<p>Hands up if you see the flaw here.
> NFTs are only 3 years old<p>No they're not.<p>I co-founded Fabrica.land in 2017, and in mid 2018 we used an NFT to perform a real estate transaction. That's already 3.5 years, and NFTs were already around.
The first transaction was a bit "rough", but perfectly valid. Lot of progress since then.<p>From [0]: The ERC-20 (Ethereum Request for Comments 20), proposed by Fabian Vogelsteller in November 2015, is a Token Standard that implements an API for tokens within Smart Contracts.<p>Note: yes, ERC-20 has a few flaws [1], and subsequent ERC have improved on it.<p>[0]: <a href="https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/standards/tokens/erc-20/" rel="nofollow">https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/standards/tokens/erc...</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/20" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/20</a>
So far I've read barely one article that mentions web3 <i>and</i> manages to describe the fundamental concepts and problems. Instead, most people writing about this seem to assume that the "problems" web3 is supposed to fix are completely self-evident, and then everyone who is in favor of the current "vision" of web3 simply assume that blockchain is the correct technological answer.<p>It doesn't seem that hard to state relatively quickly and simply:<p>Current ways of handling data online generally result in large centralized databases under the control of relatively or extremely large corporations, which gives these corporations too much control over (a) what data is accessible (b) what can be done with the data (c) the lifetime of the data.<p>Sensible folks generally acknowledge that this either is a problem, or is likely to become one.<p>So the central issue is: how do we have data available online without it under the control of corporations that run centralized databases?<p>----<p>In response to this, cryptocurrency advocates point to blockchain technology and say, in essence, "look! there's an example of a technology that does exactly that"<p>However, for this to be the best solution to the problem requires a few things to be true that are either untrue or not known (yet) to be true.<p><pre><code> * was blockchain designed to handle arbitrary data blobs, or was it designed to handle transaction records?
* does pretending that any arbitrary data blob can be treated as a transaction record help or hinder solutions?
* are there other ways to distribute data storage and access that don't depend on the fundamental technologies/concepts inherent in blockchains?
</code></pre>
----<p>Why anyone feels they can be certain that the answers all indicate that blockchain is the obviously correct technology to use for distributed trusted data storage and access totally escapes me.
> Just to clarify, this is what the author wanted to do. You can create distributed apps easily using Fleek or by manually uploading to IPFS, Arweave or Filecoin.<p>Seems like the author has never build an app before. There nothing easy even with the current tech. It's much harder with the tech they mentioned.<p>Even with that, there's a centralized system anywhere. Liek Arweave's DNS system etc.
I feel like someone should take the phrase “This is true at the moment, but there is work being done on…” and set it to a catchy melody, since it’s clearly the national anthem of the crypto community.<p>For the verses of the song I would suggest lines such as:<p>“The proposed solutions solve this”<p>“But this is not always true, you can”<p>“We are actively building alternatives!”
> This is a lie. Most NFTs which sell for millions use IPFS, Arweave, Filecoin or others for decentralised storage of data<p>Nope - do your research better before you use the word "lie". BAYC did it until very very recently for instance. Definitely as of 27th September they were using cloud functions as you can clearly see in my gist here: <a href="https://gist.github.com/JofArnold/bf2c4a094fcdd4aee2f52983c7714de8#gistcomment-3906906" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/JofArnold/bf2c4a094fcdd4aee2f52983c7...</a> I know there is/was plenty of others too because I looked deeply into this around the time.
> This is a lie. Most NFTs which sell for millions use IPFS, Arweave, Filecoin or others for decentralised storage of data. A lot of NFTs do use Google Drive or Imgur or whatever.<p>This is such a he said she said. Can we get some stats on this? Are NFTs primarily stored on the chain or linked to a URL? I'd like to see the breakdown by platform, Opensea, etc.
The thing I think that sucks that hasn’t been covered is how you have to have a wallet specific to each blockchain I want to interact with. I have to know what blockchain the web3 property uses.<p>Why can’t I have a like universal wallet? I don’t want my NFTs divided among 4-5 wallets, especially as new chains are created as time goes on. Kinda a sucky user experience.<p>That’s my nit
> Illegal images being sent to your wallet, forcing you to go to prison in some places.<p>Images are not stored in a wallet. NFTs and ERC20s do not actually live in a Ethereum wallet. They live in a smart contract. And that smart contract has a ledger of account for who has the right to transfer that particular asset.<p>The images themselves, unless they are SVGs, are typically stored on Filecoin or Arweave or a centralized server and marked by an IPFS hash.<p>Content moderation is handled by the data storers in those networks: <a href="https://www.arweave.org/technology#content-moderation" rel="nofollow">https://www.arweave.org/technology#content-moderation</a><p>Spam NFTs are just like spam email. The receipt of something illicit or illegal does not mean automatic imprisonment anywhere that I'm aware of. If you live in such a jurisdiction, I suggest you flee immediately.
I wish they would expand on their objection to using tezos.<p><a href="https://hicetnunc.art" rel="nofollow">https://hicetnunc.art</a> is an active alternative to opensea, and the gas fees on tezos are far smaller (pennies)<p>Whats the downside?
One point about NFT metadata and the debate about whether it's centralized or not.<p>NFTs don't all have to be maximally decentralized. It should be perfectly okay that some NFTs are not on-chain, purely immutable artwork. Besides the extreme constraints that places on the art (given that data storage on a blockchain not purpose-built for storage is expensive), there are some advantages to having mutable NFTs.<p>You can create evolving NFTs by making them mutable. Users can upgrade their skins (such as adding a Santa hat during Christmas). The NFTs could respond to real-world events (maybe the weather or the outcome of a sporting event influences the artwork). You can use them as game characters that level up in response to playtime, presumably the artwork for the character would change as the character levels up, etc.<p>It's very difficult to do the above in an immutable, pure fashion, without thinking of all the possibilities beforehand. It's okay that just the mere ownership transfer mechanic is decentralized. Yes, a project could theoretically rug its users and change the art to a poop emoji, but in practice projects develop a reputation over time and those that foster goodwill stand to gain more from community loyalty than they'd gain from pulling B.S.<p>Even in the case that a project were to rug its community, however, it's entirely possible for the community to create a new smart contract that "wraps" the NFT as a new NFT (you deposit an NFT from a particular collection, and get back a new NFT and the old NFT is burned). And if enough members of a community rallied around the wrapped version, then it could be treated as a consensus fork.<p>Escape hatches are one of the features that distinguish Web3 from Web2.
Take the money out of equation, and i'm all for it.
Which is what Moxie is suggesting, more or less..<p>Sadly it's all about money re/distribution, even if all try to dress it in all kind of masks on top..<p>With a wallet substituting my Identity (or trust, or whatever else that is not money).. it's no different to any other substitution - email, belonging to a club (FAANG+oauth), whatever. Except more involving..
In neither of the articles did someone even mention even a use case for something even remotely value creating.<p>I suppose for some, enhanced control and privacy of full decentralization has value, but it's a very niche scenario.<p>Web 1 brought us the internet. It's already decentralized, and it changed everything.<p>Web 3 enabled us to interact a lot more with user-generated content. FB, YouTube. Nice, but it has some downsides.<p>Web 3 ... so far mostly Crypto and NFTs have some possibly interesting characteristics but are mostly giant pyramid/MLM style scams.<p>Web 3, so far, is a lot of hot air and a mostly hollow effort, it's like Tech Buzfeed. We should be doing better than this.
This is a okay response, although the language ain't great.<p>Half of Moxie's post were using the evil YC company OpenSea as an argument against decentralization, which seemed strange. It's like arguing against decentralized email because so many use Gmail.<p>The arguments against Infura etc. especially fell flat, as they are just proxies to the decentalized blockchain, the only value they provide is providing exactly the same decentralized blockchain data as your own node would. It's not as decentralized as running your own node would be, but to call it centralization is still wrong.
>Some countries have unstable currencies and to use USD you need to pay a hefty fee.<p>And the solution to this is using unstable internet money which are being accepted by a handful of stores? Sounds about right.
I should note that while I don't know of a "illegal image lives on-chain" solution, a solution to "illegal image is sent to your wallet" is found in Grin's Slatepacks: transactions have a synchronous component, so the receiver has to accept them.
So in theory, it might be possible to build a "pirate bay" on blockchain (presuming that it has capability to store huge amounts of data) and resist DMCA takedowns?
> Every user will have to pay for everything.<p>Ahahaha. No.<p>More seriously: if "everyone" pays it means there will be a few who are going to reap all the profits. Glorious future, indeed