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Author Topic: FPC on Web3  (Read 7426 times)

Blacha

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Re: FPC on Web3
« Reply #75 on: October 13, 2024, 07:57:21 pm »
I give up. :)
There are so many contradictions in what you wrote that I would have to spend a lot of time trying to untangle it. Especially since you are stretching reality a lot. I have provided a lot of links, references and simple examples that an attentive and not negatively inclined reader will use to independently analyze the information.
You are not doing this analysis because... you don't want to. You are adding incoherent pieces taken out of context that fit your arguments in such a way that they sound as credible as possible. I have the impression that you are looking for information that you can use to manipulate less aware readers.
I am not so determined to show the lack of coherence in your statements.  My goal here is not to explain the absurdities. It would be a waste of my time and the time of my readers. And I assure you that Web3 will manage without you and your SSD drive. End of story.
I will patiently wait for substantive and coherent arguments. :)
« Last Edit: October 13, 2024, 08:01:09 pm by Blacha »

zeljko

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Re: FPC on Web3
« Reply #76 on: October 13, 2024, 08:00:40 pm »

Warfley

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Re: FPC on Web3
« Reply #77 on: October 13, 2024, 08:42:20 pm »
You are not doing this analysis because... you don't want to. You are adding incoherent pieces taken out of context that fit your arguments in such a way that they sound as credible as possible. I have the impression that you are looking for information that you can use to manipulate less aware readers.
You were the one who claimed to have 100% on chain apps running, yet the example you gave required an off chain webserver to be connected to, where the trust into the connection is established through TLS, which is also running off-chain. You just have a very interesting definition of 100% on chain, if the most important part of the whole app , the thing that makes it actually usable,is not running on chain.
It's like claiming you have a 100% renewable energy powered train, because the lights and air conditioning in the train are running on renewable energy, while the cart itself is moved by a Diesel engine.

I'm working in identity architecture, and I know people like you. Every other day someone comes and says the revolutionized the world of identity ecosystems through blockchain. But when you look at it closer, it either is completely vulnerable to fraud, or requires an external trust framework like a PKI to function.
You cannot establish trust in anything outside the blockchain from the blockchain. Which makes it completely useless as a trust infrastructure.

Just tell me, why do you use a TLS certificate? If the root of trust is the chain, shouldn't the chain be used to verify the authenticity and integrity of the data? Why need a seperate PKI to establish the trust in the data?
« Last Edit: October 13, 2024, 08:44:28 pm by Warfley »

MarkMLl

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Re: FPC on Web3
« Reply #78 on: October 13, 2024, 08:57:33 pm »
In short: "The only constraint on his armwaving about holes in his designs is that his fingertips can't exceed the speed of light."

MarkMLl
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Blacha

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Re: FPC on Web3
« Reply #79 on: October 13, 2024, 09:05:15 pm »
You were the one who claimed to have 100% on chain apps running, yet the example you gave required an off chain webserver to be connected to, where the trust into the connection is established through TLS, which is also running off-chain.
What is the difference between an HTTP server and an HTTP/API gateway in your opinion? Or, analogously, is a proxy server designed to host content?

P.S. You have no idea who I am and you have no right to judge me based on your assumptions. If we met in real life in the environment I work in, I am sure you would consider my words and recognize my formal authority. I respect every person and I do not dare to judge anyone here or personalize my opinions, so I kindly ask you to do the same. I can criticize the opinions presented here, but your identity is the highest value to me. Howgh.
« Last Edit: October 13, 2024, 09:11:29 pm by Blacha »

MarkMLl

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Re: FPC on Web3
« Reply #80 on: October 13, 2024, 09:26:06 pm »
P.S. You have no idea who I am and you have no right to judge me based on your assumptions. If we met in real life in the environment I work in, I am sure you would consider my words and recognize my formal authority. I respect every person and I do not dare to judge anyone here or personalize my opinions, so I kindly ask you to do the same. I can criticize the opinions presented here, but your identity is the highest value to me. Howgh.

You started off talking rubbish, presumably expecting to dazzle us with your command of new technology. We collectively kicked you until you tried to explain yourself in English, and failed to make a convincing case. The fact that you have "formal authority" simply means that the people who endowed you are utterly clueless. Nos da.

MarkMLl
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Warfley

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Re: FPC on Web3
« Reply #81 on: October 13, 2024, 10:35:46 pm »
What is the difference between an HTTP server and an HTTP/API gateway in your opinion? Or, analogously, is a proxy server designed to host content?
From a trust perspective yes. As a user I cannot distinguish if the data that is sent to my browser was generated from a Blockchain, read out of a Database, or generated on the fly by chatGPT. So I trust the content of the website because I trust the endpoint usually secured through TLS.
How do I know that this website is the genuine Lazarusforum? Because I trust the TLS infrastructure that enables an end to end encrypted channel between my browser and the server that owns the TLS certificate issued by Let's Encrypt.

Blockchain is a form of trust anchor, similar to web of trust or PKI systems. Meaning the value of blockchain comes from the fact that the data is (supposedly) unchangable (well there are rollbacks as I pointed out in the past). So the selling point of blockchain, in theory, is that the data is independently verifiable and no third party can change it. You trust the data on the blockchain because you trust the consensus mechanism.

The thing is, this only works as long as you are on chain, as soon as you get the data off chain, anyone in between can modify it. You tell me that the server in switzerland thats behind that URI does nothing other than reading the data from the Blockchain and sending it to me right? But how do I know that the data wasn't tampered with? Well the simple answer is, I can't, I need to trust the owner of that server.
And this is why the trust model of Blockchain fundamentally breaks down. Because you cannot transfer the trust relationships established through the consensus mechanism outside of the environment of the  chain. As soon as the data leaves the chain, the trust is broken and anyone in between can change or alter the data.

This is the one problem with blockchain, which is why the only successful application is on chain finance, because here all transactions are within the chain and therefore trust is not broken.

The other problem is in the other direction. You "host" that website on chain. What prevents me from cloning your website code and pushing it on the same chain or a different chain myself? I mean all the data on the chain is public so it's easy to just copy data. How does a third party know which is the real site and which is the fake one? Both are on the chain, both are "authenticated" through the consensus mechanism.
The answer is, you can't. You need some off-band way of communicating which is the real one. This is solved in the internet by PKI structures. How do I know if I'm on a genuine website of the European union? Because it has the domain europe.eu, which the governance framework of the EU in cooperation with IANA ensures that only the EU institutions will have access to that domain.
For anything on chain to also be trusted you similarly need a governance framework which is off chain, which allows any user to verify which addresses are genuine and which are fakes. This is the fundamental flaw of DID. Yes if you know someones DID you can uniquely authenticate them on chain. But how do you know that a DID belongs to the correct person or organization in the real world? You need an off chain governance framework which establishes that trust.

And this is where these on chain apps completely fail. I can easily verify if a domain ends in "europe.eu". But I will never be able to remember 6ec2p-paaaa-aaaal-ai45q-cai if you gave me literally any other ID string I would not know of the top of my head if it was the same or different one.

This is why web3 has failed. You can establish trust on chain, but as soon as you have to interface with the real world those trust relationships break down.

Blacha

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Re: FPC on Web3
« Reply #82 on: October 13, 2024, 11:54:28 pm »
Theorizing, we fall into a certain, quite significant trap - idealizing concepts.

When writing about decentralization, I suggest not assuming its ideal state in our considerations, but striving to maximize this phenomenon. There is no ideal decentralization, because various events (even on a global scale) can cause the loss of value of any infrastructure. The more difficult it is to violate the operation of infrastructure elements, the more we can talk about decentralization. However, there are no ideal solutions.

As programmers, looking at each new technology, we are more willing to build our trust in it by having access to the code. For a long time, as part of building trust, various blockchain projects have been publishing their code for public review. If you have carefully read the materials (which I have linked) on the subject of boundary nodes, you have reached the published code of this node's modules. The most important thing is that the change/update of software in the network occurs as a result of a vote by the ICP community (within the DAO and based on the blockchain), which has insight into the changes, and the result of the vote starts the updating process. All of this is done transparently.

Do you really think that the dApp frontend code is that important from the perspective of property rights? The frontend is nothing more than a UI/UX effect. The essence of protection is the backend and the data processed by it. As I wrote earlier, the backend has the ability (or rather the functions contained in it) to check who is calling it. Copying the frontend is not worth it for another reason, because each dApp gets a certificate signed with the user's key (in a very simplified way). What does this mean? If someone authenticates (Internet Identity) in your dApp, they will get their PrincipalID, which goes along with the data that is entered by this dApp. Copying the frontend makes no sense, and access to the data and backend is impossible.

I like that ICP has various ideas for protecting property rights, but not only that. Recently, ICP successfully attempted to launch AI as a smart contract. One of the ideas is to specialize an AI model used to conduct security audits of software introduced to the network. In the same way, you can verify property rights.

We already have the ability to verify humanity in ICP. Thanks to this, for example, as part of a decentralized messenger, we have the ability to protect dApp users from bots. I really like the identification/authentication protocol implemented in ICP. There are also some cool ideas related to KYC requirements. But that's a topic for another conversation.
« Last Edit: October 14, 2024, 12:41:54 am by Blacha »

VisualLab

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Re: FPC on Web3
« Reply #83 on: October 14, 2024, 10:44:08 am »
We already have the ability to verify humanity in ICP.

In what way?

Warfley

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Re: FPC on Web3
« Reply #84 on: October 14, 2024, 01:03:12 pm »
When writing about decentralization, I suggest not assuming its ideal state in our considerations, but striving to maximize this phenomenon. There is no ideal decentralization, because various events (even on a global scale) can cause the loss of value of any infrastructure. The more difficult it is to violate the operation of infrastructure elements, the more we can talk about decentralization. However, there are no ideal solutions.
I fully agree, which is why I think blockchain based web3 is a bad idea, because it abandons the decentralized nature of the web for a central component, the blockchain.

The blockchain is not decentralized, it's one central component. Transactions in China can increase the gas prices on the ETH chain here in Europe. If you have some app on the chain, and you need to interact with that app in any writing capacity, you need to spend gas (only reading is free). So your margins as a buisness are highly reliant on the global state of the chain.

Let's take an example, I want to place an order for some online retailer on the chain. The enormous privacy implications of making my purchase of a Thrustmaster Warthog public to everyone to see on the chain aside, on average this will cost like 25€ in gas prices. If there is now a big event in China, e.g. some big retailer making some marketing event where you get benefits for paying in crypto, suddenly these gas prices can spike massively, in the past we had ETH gas prices in the tens of thousands during exactly such events. So while you could argue that 25€ is not that much for a 400€ purchase (it's still orders of magnitude higher than amazon which is free), 10000€ transaction fees on a 400€ purchase is.
Also note that this is not a one time fee, but one I need to pay for every (write) interaction. So if I want to cancel that order, it's another 25€-10000€. Had a typo in my address field? Another 25€-10000€. Decided to want to get it wrapped as a gift? Another 25€-10000€.

And these transaction fees directly impact your sales and therefore your revenue margins. Because for the customer it does not matter if they pay extra for the good, or have to pay transaction fees. If you put your buisness on the blockchain you become vulnerable to such instabilities... Which is why no one does it.

So if you are using blockchain because of decentrality, instead of hosting it on a server you personally control, you are doing the exact opposite of that. You are now fully relying on a centralized infrastructure for the hosting of your app compared to self hosting which is decentralized.

Quote
As programmers, looking at each new technology, we are more willing to build our trust in it by having access to the code. For a long time, as part of building trust, various blockchain projects have been publishing their code for public review. If you have carefully read the materials (which I have linked) on the subject of boundary nodes, you have reached the published code of this node's modules.

For my job I've spend weeks analyzing different use-cases for blockchain, and the reality is, there are pretty much none.
If you think there is a concrete buisness case for using an on-chain app, feel free to share. I haven't seen one. If it's decentralized hosting, you could use IPFS instead (infact a lot of blockchain applications rely on IPFS because storage on chain is way to expensive to be useful). If it's about trust management, you always need a PKI on top, so just use a PKI to begin with.
Like there is not a single use-case thats enhanced by blockchain. Even finance is only useful as long as you discount any form of regulation. As soon as you require a regulation authority, all the decentralized trust model is gone. So the only use case for blockchain is getting scammed....

Blacha

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Re: FPC on Web3
« Reply #85 on: October 14, 2024, 02:37:17 pm »
Sorry, but why do you keep forcing me to analyze the problem based on the outdated ETH when ICP is at least 15.5 million times more efficient than Ethereum?

The ETH blockchain is running less than 109B instructions per day (as of September 2024). At the same time, the ICP blockchain has executed over 110 billion replicated WASM instructions per second. With the simplifying assumption that all instructions are comparable, this means that ICP runs the daily number of ETH instructions in less than 1 second. So why should I participate in your ETH analysis?

Since you mention ETH, I suggest calculating the real costs by assuming some common denominator. A good reference is the cost of validating the EdDSA signature (native to ETH). The advantage of the ICP protocol is the fact that it has the ability to verify EdDSA on its network. Putting a dollar cost on this comparison, with a conservative assumption that 1 Gas costs 40GWEI and 1 ETH being ~$1800 (significantly underestimated) means the cost of an EdDSA verification on Ethereum currently costs $36. Considering the cycle cost (4211120 cycles/1 ICP) with an XDR rate of $1.3476 yields a cost of $0.00000567490 to run an EdDSA verification on the ICP. Overall, this suggests that the ICP is 6343718 times less costly for a standard computation.

Is there any access to the results of your professional blockchain research? Some kind of report?
Or maybe you deal professionally with matters that are supposed to increase institutional control and limit the rights to freedom under the guise of taking care of "not being cheated"? If so, you probably went into your research with a ready-made thesis that skewed the credibility of the research, and if not, just as you researched ETH, research more modern blockchain solutions.

Warfley

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Re: FPC on Web3
« Reply #86 on: October 14, 2024, 03:25:20 pm »
Sorry, but why do you keep forcing me to analyze the problem based on the outdated ETH when ICP is at least 15.5 million times more efficient than Ethereum?
The reason I focused on ETH is because people are actually using it. You can tell me as much about how great ICP is, but unless it's actually used it's just academic theorizing. ETH is a great example because it's a great case study. Many businesses have tried to use ETH smart contracts for their business, so we have a lot of data. With the DAO case and the resulting rollback we even know what it looks like when theres a systematic failure on the system.
We do not know any of that for ICP because it's some niche development thats not really used in production by many businesses.
Also of course ICP is much cheaper than ETH, because ETH transactions are a valuable resource, because ETH is valuable. Because for ICP there is orders of magnitude less demand, the price for operations is low.

But more importantly, you focus on the transaction cost, which yes ICP changes because of it's different fee model. But the underlying problem,  is still the same ICP still only has a fixed number of transactions per second globally, meaning demand rises anywhere affect the whole system. This is a fundamental flaw in the system. If demand for Tailor Swift tickets is high in the US, it should not effect the cost of ordering a coffee in Germany. No other system works like this. Amazon doesn't work like this, Visa and Mastercard don't work like this, etc. and the reason for this is that it's completely stupid.
The problem is not the absloute value if it's 25€ or 0.00001€. The problem is that there is price fluctuation of a factor 10k possible. And thats also not fixed with ICP. The only reason we don't experience this with ICP is because theres no demand like ther was for ETH.

The whole point is that your claim that it's "decentralized" is just plainly wrong. If it were decentralized, unrelated actions on the other side of the globe would not effect the operations here. This is why cash is decentralized. It doesn't matter how much cash is spent in Australia, my euro coin is still a euro coin here in Germany.
Blockchain is not decentralized. The value and transaction costs of each block in the chain depend heavily on the global state of the system.
With blockchain the chain itself becomes single point of failure.

Also your calculation is ridiculus. In ETH you don't pay per operation, you pay per transaction, independently how many instructions this executes. Meaning yes if you only perform a single Signature Verification you have this price difference, but I've never written any application that only performs singe Signature verifications without any other functionality.

But let's do the same computation for the server I rented in a datacenter: I pay 30€/mo, which is 0.00001157407€ per second. It has 10 cores with 2.2GHz which are 5.2609428e-16€ per CPU cycle. According to googles summary result performing an eddsa signature verification takes 87548 to 273364 CPU cycles, taking the upper bound this means a cost of 1.4381524e-10€ per signature verification.
And this cost is not dependent how many people are doing a transaction at the same time. It's a fixed price I'm paying for years.

But again thats a stupid example, because my server, like any real application is not just doing Signature Verifications every day. Instead they perform complex operations. So let's stick to my example placing an order, which needs the following:
1. validate the user inputs syntactically, e.g. correct email and address format,etc.
2. Validate the request integrity by computing the hash over the request and validating the signature
3. Lookup the article ID in and the availability in stock and check the price
4. Compute the total price for the order from the price of the articles from the database
5. Try to retrieve the costs from the users wallet
6. Mark the selected articles in the stock as onhold/in preparation so they are not marked as available anymore
7. Store the order for later inspection

This is much more than a single EdDSA signature. Feel free to compute how much resources this costs on either chain. I can tell you already it's orders of magnitude more than it costs self hosted on a run of the mill server, without even cosidering sudden price hikes.

Like I said, tell me a use case where on-chain provides any benefit from doing the exact same the traditional way. I do not know of any. And you are clinging onto details like the exact price, without addressing the fundamental issues that I bring up which make it inherently unusable.
« Last Edit: October 14, 2024, 03:35:26 pm by Warfley »

Joanna from IRC

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Re: FPC on Web3
« Reply #87 on: October 14, 2024, 04:02:02 pm »
I’m curious about who invented blockchain and it’s sponsors..
✨ 🙋🏻‍♀️ More Pascal enthusiasts are needed on IRC .. https://libera.chat/guides/ IRC.LIBERA.CHAT  Ports [6667 plaintext ] or [6697 secure] channel #fpc  #pascal Please private Message me if you have any questions or need assistance. 💁🏻‍♀️

Blacha

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Re: FPC on Web3
« Reply #88 on: October 14, 2024, 04:09:59 pm »
The reason I focused on ETH is because people are.......
Well, I honestly laughed when I imagined the scalability and speed of your server's operations compared to blockchain while maintaining the same level of security, data integrity, and network consensus mechanism (any automated one).  :D :D :D
And one more thing - wantingt to take care of at least a semblance of decentralization, you have to come to an agreement with a colleague from China (who is increasing the price of ETH gas) to set up the same server in his location (it would be good if the system and application layer were at a comparable, if not the same level). It's worse if the colleague from China gets mad at you and turns off the electricity (which has a completely different price than, for example, the one in Europe). With ICP, I don't worry about the server costs, system and server software updates, and I have access to all the available blockchain functionalities without having to waste time installing them. I simply call them with my backend in WASM.
You're manipulating us a bit.  ;)
Let's do a simple experiment - run the dApp I described earlier, OpenChat (some brave people from this forum have already done such a test. Greetings to them!). With OpenChat you can be sure that no one will sell your data, as is the case with some free messengers. Next, send a text message using this messenger (yes, sending a text message in blockchain is also a transaction), and then write here to everyone how much you paid for this transaction. If you have time and desire, we can make a test voice or video call. And we'll also write here to everyone how much it cost. Let the theory be supported by practice.
Do you want to learn? Test more, theorize less (especially on false assumptions or phobias).
« Last Edit: October 14, 2024, 04:33:43 pm by Blacha »

MarkMLl

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Re: FPC on Web3
« Reply #89 on: October 14, 2024, 04:13:11 pm »
I’m curious about who invented blockchain and it’s sponsors..

Well look it up on Wikipedia then and stop trolling here.

MarkMLl
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