[X6S1x6Okd1st]

It was only this year that I actually got excited about Ethereum specifically because of what "web3" enables.

Yes it's a dumb name, and this article certainly doesn't cover all of the issues, shit just look at the confirmation page for metamask, it literally just asks you if you want to spend X to submit a byte array. No link to the contract, the method you are calling, any avaliable adudits etc.

But if you as a reader have any passing interest I'd really encourage you to check out what's happening in the space, the thing that got me excited was the permissionlessness and composability.

Going to uniswap, locking up some funds in an AMM and then depositing that elsewhere to liquidity farm shows off the composability, then the fact that you can see it all tracked on a dashboard like zapper.fi or debank.com really drives the point home.

Word of warning, Ethereum it's self is now so clogged up with NFTs and people constantly arbitraging or performing liqudiations that it's far too expensive to play around with. There is plenty of cheaper EVM based chains though, like Fantom or Polygon

[binarymax]

Your last phrase is really what gets me. Why should any web delivery platform get "clogged up" by content? If this becomes popular, then it just gets slower and more painful to use in ways that aren't fixed by adding more infrastructure?

Also, what is the value add that can be explained to someone who just wants to use the web and leaving the jargon like permisionlessness and composability aside? What reason would anyone have to start using this as a consumer?

[X6S1x6Okd1st]

Long term ethereum is looking at adding more 'infrastructure' but it's early stages, the current paradigm is to move transactions to "roll-ups" that inherent their security from the mainchain. Rollups are expected to increase throughput ~100-1000x (so optimistically getting back to ~1 cent per tx)

All of this is early enough that it's all currently exposed to the user. The fact of the matter is that cryptocurrency is still quite technical and under heavy development (well bitcoin isn't, but you can only do one thing with it). Hopefully as these technical solutions are rolled out wallet software will start abstracting across them so the user doesn't need to worry about whether they are transacting on a roll-up.

The current state is really not ready for general adoption. It's easy to lose all of your funds to some sort of hack or rug-pull, if you lose your keys you've lost your funds, it's hard to determine what is trust worthy, tax day is a nightmare etc.

I participate because I find it fascinating and can stomach the technical complexity and risks

[xtracto]

It reminds me of 90s internet: First, there was the web. Then we got images slowly downloading at 56kbps. Then we got MODs and Midi , and suddenly we had MP3s clogging the existing 56kbps infrastructure. Until we started getting ISDN and broadband: 128k , 256k ! And we got RealVideo ... which kept 'buffering' and clogging the infrastructure. Later we got mp4, bittorrent and whatnot. This absolutely clogged our low speed broadband. Nowadays we've got CDNs, gigabyte size game updates, ultra hi def netflix a d 500 Mbps connections.

I'm so excited to see that we are in the VERY early stages of blockchain value networks, and I hope I live the next 20 years to see this technology when it gets to the "500mbps" equivalent of what we've got now for 'the internet'

[giantrobot]

> Then we got MODs and Midi , and suddenly we had MP3s clogging the existing 56kbps infrastructure.

This is just wrong and not in any way analogous to some blockchain network getting clogged up.

Your first problem is you've got your causation backwards. Fast dial-up facilitated access to larger media files. People didn't get 56k modems to download MP3s, they downloaded MP3s because they had 56k modems. Even then MP3s (and other media) were commonly 64k and 96k rips because people had limited bandwidth and storage space. You'd only find 128k MP3s and the like on specialty F-serves and FTPs.

Your second problem is RealMedia content was very specifically tuned to work over dial-up connections. RealVideo's buffering problems were very often last-mile bandwidth and latency issues. Even great 56k dial-up had quarter second RTTs, single digit percentage packet loss, and topped out at ~45kbps actual payload throughput. RealMedia servers (and the file and stream formats) explicitly supported multiple streams based on your available bandwidth. That's why RealPlayer had a dropdown asking what type of Internet connection you had, a single RM file or stream endpoint could actually serve multiple streams at different bitrates just like today's HTTP streaming. While a single RealMedia server might be congested if it had tons of clients the backbone networks had plenty of bandwidth and were typically not "clogged up" from RealMedia servers.

Lastly, the problem with Ethereum and other blockchains is their backbones are clogged up with speculative transactions. They're not scaling to meet current demands for transactions and only maybe possibly will scale in the future to handle future amounts of transactions. The Ethereum case is in fact the clogged backbone you were trying to ascribe to the Internet of the past.

[rchaud]

Ethereum is getting clogged up because too many people are trading cryptokittes.

That is not the same as downloading an MP3 over dial-up. My download activity is only slowing down my own connection, not those of others.

[X6S1x6Okd1st]

> My download activity is only slowing down my own connection, not those of others.

That's only true because there's spare capacity at the juncture above whatever bottleneck you are hitting.