Richard Bartle explains Web3's flaws at a Web3 conference. It doesn't go well
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It's interesting to see exemplifiers of the kind of 'this contradicts my interior logic so I shall ignore it' behaviour from the participants. They look very plausible.
I think AGW denialism and pre-AGW fury, the people trying to deal with religious objections to evolution had this in spades: no amount of good logic and reasoning can overcome somebody who is determined to recast what "time" means to make the fossil record align with God's work over 6 days. (nobody ever asks what contract gave him a day off on the 7th)
The "we don't want to pay tax" movement, loves in-game NFT type value transfer precisely because they believe there cannot, will not be any intrusion of tax levying bodies into the space. Contrariwise, the people I know in the forensic accounting space say they really like the naievity of people who forget "the cloud" is shorthand for "somebody else's computer" which naturally, is subject to MLAP requirements these days.
Sharing your goods in runescape is not invisible transfer of wealth, and speaking to each other in runescape is not secret communication. 12 year olds know this. Maybe grown-ups need to remind themselves of it from time to time?
Maybe people need a reminder REAMDE is fiction? Plot devices don't always translate into real-world well.
I am also reminded of Varoufakis' work on in-game economics and inflation.
If all you take are short-term measurements, then this would seem to be true. In my experience, the longer-term results are more achievable then popular thinking might suggest.
Less facetiously, I do think de-radicalisation works, and so a long term commitment to listening, being accepting of difference but encouraging wider thinking might work to bring committed anti-vaxx and AGW denialists back into the fold, but it demands a patience I probably lack. A geologist friend said its a life burden to commit to trying to change people's minds in his field (paleo) few can endure. He'd rather talk to people he doesn't have to argue with.
I don't know Web 3.0/NFT proponents have the time free to engage in a long-term de-programming exercise. They'd be very busy actualising their net worth, one tik-tok at a time.
This applies to all the web2 naysayers as well
To the point where if someone even says 'Web3' I assume it's rubbish, even though I accept there are some neat ideas there. NFTs - laughably ridiculous.
The funny money times are over, it didn't work, time for a new game, let's make it more practical.
Here, web4 is just everyone sending me 10 dollars. You wouldn’t want to be a Luddite now would you? Get on the bandwagon everyone
Or am I wrong about what Web 3.0 is?
But "Web3" means stuff with blockchain and similar.
[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
SDSI, for Super-Duper Scale Integration, maybe.
Anyway: Fourth-Generation languages were "Steal ideas from Lisp", Fifth-Generation languages were "Steal ideas from Prolog", so Sixth-Generation languages will be "Steal ideas from everyone the ML model was trained on". Github/Microsoft is ahead of the curve on this sort of thing, as usual.
Functionally every single page request on HN is dynamically generated - I feel like you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what "static" means in this context. A static site is where the web server is serving html files as they appear on disk - as opposed to a dynamic site, where LAMP-like stack dynamically generates html responses based on query and session.
This could be just me but in my mind web 2.0 is solving the problem of form submission/link clicking redirecting users away from the current page.
Thus web 1.0 are static sites where the only way to get new content is to manually refresh.
Web3, on the other hand, appears to be a whole lot of horseshit that is going away now that it's no longer essentially free to borrow money.
Ajax and database were commonplace before. The 2.0 moniker was about "social" (user generated content.)
Edit: I'm afraid I'm taking for granted that people remembers this, but it's possible that a good portion of you weren't even born. Web 2.0 was something like "you should adopt the Web 2.0 ways in your web presence" being sold to all kind of companies. You have an online shop? You should include a support forum where users can share their experience with your products. In other words: a "web page" is not enough, you need the whole pack. Sometimes it made sense, sometimes it didn't. As with many of this trends, it used to sound a little cult-ish at times.
Possibly part of the reason that tables got well overused.
web3 got it's name before... well it's not here yet so I can't tell what it is
Web3? It skipped straight to marketing, the tech is tedious, kludgy, and seems to make more problems than it solves. The space is saturated with cons and rubes. Outsiders are skeptical because it's apparently garbage, and gets worse any time I look closer.
So is alchemy
But if I'm building something like Diablo I'll have a carefully crafted progression system for my game. If the "content" is in-game items then the best items will be the most powerful - that is, the ones which let players skip to the end of the game. And if my game's progression system can be completely ignored because someone owns a space laser they bought in another game for money, it ruins the game for everyone.
- The art becomes a non-cohesive mess.
- The players who don't have a space laser feel like their in-game progression has suddenly become meaningless. Clearly the real progression is being able to afford items with real money out of the game - and they don't play diablo to feel poor.
- And the player who has the cool space laser has all the struggle and progress taken away from them. A sense of fulfillment is created by struggling at something then eventually succeeding. You can't feel fulfilled if you don't first struggle. (Thats what the middle of a game is for.) If you skip that by spending real money, its not fun. Even pay-to-win games have loot box mechanics and a money based progression system for the people who pay.
You can make the art be cosmetic only, but that has its own set of problems. Fashion is valuable in part because of scarcity. Fortnite, Team Fortress and Dota2 create that scarcity by controlling what assets are included in the game. Scarcity is ruined if anyone can mint another NFT of the same jpeg with a single pixel changed. And you have the obvious problems of people drawing "adult content", and so on. It works for VRChat, but most of VRChat's content is off limits to most players (on devices like the Quest) because of how non-child friendly it can be. An in-house art team could easily be cheaper than the moderation team you'd need.
Virtual worlds with cryptocurrency derived items seems to be a lot of smoke and not a lot of fire. Given how many people are excited by the idea, and how much money there is to be made if someone gets it right, I find it telling that there still aren't any compelling games built on these concepts.
However, I think you're wrong to lump all those people in with anti-Darwinists.
AGW comes freighted with Green baggage, and some of the people who reject it are largely rejecting the Green baggage. They suspect, not without good reason, that the "cures" for AGW are measures that Greens wanted anyway. And calling them "denialists" just insures that they'll never listen to you.
Some of them are, of course, religious objectors who think the world was created in 6 days. The task is to separate those people from the rest.
The largest rejectors of nuclear energy are the environmentalists, some of which are very anti-climate change.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-10-09/what-shade-of-...
So, 'because you are green I oppose all the things you believe in because I hate the green/left agenda' is a form of denialism of the legitemacy of the underlying concern. Finding the bridge to "I agree it exists, I just disagree about solutions, like I want nuclear and you don't but we agree the problem exists' is now almost unsayable for some people.
An observation I've made to others is that old school feminism is really tainted now for a younger cohort. They reject all the achievements of their aunts, mothers, grandmothers, because of a disagreement over the non-binary status in gender/sex. The language used here is (to me at least) comparable to the language used in the 'hate the greens' thing.
We have a tendency to choose sides. Once we do, we easily remember the good things about our side, and have a hard time believing the bad things. This is exactly reversed for the other side. It takes active work to remain balanced.
So if you're on the side of technology, it is easy to talk about all the ways it improves our lives. And easy to discount the environmental impacts. Conversely if you're opposed to technology, you can easily quantify the harms. But will have an unduly rosy image of the benefits of natural things.
Likewise it is hard for those who have lined up with web3, crypto, and so on to even hear well-informed and reasoned skepticism.
By virtual of being a privileged first-adopter in Richard's MUDspace, I got to see a glimpse of a future that was, in my mind, overdetermined. I didn't know what future "MUDs" would be like, but I was absolutely sure that multi-user games would be a thing; it was just a matter of either waiting for them to appear, or working to make them arrive myself. In the meantime, the glimpse gave time to sketch out some invariants, based on experience: a rough shape of things to come.
I had the same experience with the web: by engineering things so that I could access the Internet and the Web early on, I got a sense that it would be inevitable, and some insight into what that inevitability might look like. Not much, but enough to ride that wave too.
Now I'm in the (waves air-quotes) crypto/web3/dweb world. I just did a demo to some non-profits of some of the tools being used in this area -- mostly IPFS, a bit of Filecoin (I work at the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web now). Unlike perhaps many in this space, I caveat the hell out of this tech, because I recognize it as being far far closer to that MUD (or 1993's Web) than, I don't know, Fortnite or Gmail. But I genuinely see this space full of technology that gives the glimpse of a direction; a thing that's not going away; and a thing that it's hard to describe and easy to miss unless you're staring straight at it.
I feel like people caught in these moments often ignore the past, and overvalorize the future: I realise in retrospect I should have listened more to the people who loved amateur radio, television production, state-run communication systems, centralized publishing. But you really do have to keep listening out for the future, even when you have so much past experience to convey.
From the brief description it just sounds like your run-of-the-mill cryptocurrency enthusiast conference and mostly for “investors”. It’s not a builder conference where it's mostly hackers or technical leaders, and those do exist.
I’ve been to both types of conferences and I’m not surprised Bartle got the cold shoulder by most of the audience if the conference is of the former. People are usually there to seek alpha or cut deals, not talk about how to improve the tech or processes. Could be argued that having tech people a the helm could make things better in this case.
...none of them use or need NFTs or a blockchain, and in every instance I know of, the existence of such would be actively harmful.
For a blockchain to make sense, you need a number of factors, probably chief among them that there is no single trusted entity that can run the DB. For bitcoin, that makes (some) sense. There is no Bitcoin Inc that could plausibly track the balance of every BTC wallet, after all!
For World of Warcraft gold it makes no sense; Activision Blizzard is already running a centralised database of how much gold every player has, and every player WoW has obviously trusts Activision to run the DB, just like they they trust them to run every other aspect of the game (eg, content creation, balance tweaks, competitive content, etc.). WoW (like any MMO) is an extremely tightly curated experience.
Keep in mind:
1) I "own" some cards in MTGO. That is, there's a line in a DB run by Wizards that associates them with my account ID. I can log in and confirm they're in my collection, and I can trade and sell them to other people. It feels a lot like I own them right now, and it's hard to see how that feeling can be notably enhanced.
2) Of course, all that goes away if the MTGO servers shut down, or if my account is banned, etc. My MTGO cards are mine only as long as Hasbro cooperates, which is...exactly the same as if they were using ERC-721 tokens. Nobody else can run an MTGO server, and the hypothetical token showing that my account owns a valuable card is useful only to the extent that Hasbro lets me use it or trade it to others, which they could stop doing at any time. The token has no possible value or use outside the MTGO ecosystem, and if Hasbro has blacklisted the token (or shut the MTGO servers down), no value inside it either.
Blockchains can have significant value, but they are fundamentally a DB technology (certainly in this context). There are very, very few times where it makes sense to argue that a game would be better if the devs had just used a different DB tech. And this doesn't seem to be one of those times.
Let me rephrase in realpolitik terms: why would Epic let anyone move their stuff out of Fortnite and into Apex Legends?
So Sony wants playstation players to give money to them but don't really care which game they're playing - and if Timmy is tired of Fortnite and is thinking of moving to Apex Legends on PS5 or Escape from Tarkov on PC, they would rather give a little and let Timmy bring a Fortnite shirt into Apex instead of losing him forever.
But then I don't think "web3" has any use here, it's just a business decision "oh you own item X on fortnite and you're a ps5 player? well now you also own item Y in apex if you play it on ps5".
There are a lot of marketplaces (trading platforms) for in-game items. This exists. I fully agree that NFTs don’t bring any benefit to the table, and that game companies won’t enable transferable NFTs.
Same thing with the web3 conference described in the OP where it seems it was predominantly for cryptocurrency investors, not hackers.
Most of the hacker-focused web3 conferences I've been to have had a healthy amount of debating and criticism over things that are not working in the space. I can't deny them looking very much like a cult though…
However the sheer starry eyed ignorance in this sector is worrisome. Whilst optimism helps in keeping going in a startup, refusing realism in general, in an almost religious fashion, is overall not good. How widespread that is, is a systemic risk, in my opinion.
In general speakers who are talk about their solutions to problems are interesting, while speakers who take a defeatist attitude of course are going to get ignored.
Fair enough but not a flaw.
> There is no reason why a game would accept any non-worthless NFT object minted by a different publisher
No reason? Surely you can be more creative than that.
> The longer the blockchain, the more time it takes to check if someone owns an NFT
Not true on Ethereum.
> Dupe bugs are ruinous
The general point of bug damage and lack of central control is valid and dangerous yes. Duping though is not a practical concern. NFT contracts have stood the test of public interest and time.
> Tax implications
Finally, an actual flaw.
> Fair enough but not a flaw.
...a lot of game developers want people to enjoy their games, either out of a sense of artistry, or just because enjoyable games attract players and make money. If you're considered implementing a piece of tech and it reduces the enjoyment players get from the games, that's a huge drawback that needs to be balanced out by a major advantage. If there is no such counterweight, then yes, it's a flaw.
> > There is no reason why a game would accept any non-worthless NFT object minted by a different publisher
> No reason? Surely you can be more creative than that.
I mean, we've been talking about the idea for years now, and no one has articulated a single plausible reason so far, but...
> Duping though is not a practical concern. NFT contracts have stood the test of public interest and time.
The concern isn't duplicating an NFT, eg, when it is transferred, it's about incorrectly minting too many NFTs if they're being minted by in-game actions.
Imagine if you, say, kill a boss that drops rare loot and it mints an NFT for each drop. A replay attack against a poorly coded game server might mint multiple NFTs as if you had actually killed the boss multiple times. A traditional game architecture makes this easy to rollback.
More broadly, if you've ever played a large MMO, you might have noticed that there's a fair amount of support requests to resolve things like: "I killed the boss, but a bug meant I didn't get loot" or "I accidentally sold a piece of loot and I want it back" or "I picked up a piece of loot that cannot be traded, but I meant to let my friend pick it up instead, can you transfer the item to them" or "I finished a quest that gave me a choice between two items, but now I've changed my mind" or "my account was compromised and all my gold and items are gone". Popular games have good customer service, which routinely resolve all those issues, hundreds or even thousands of times a day.
If loot is represented by NFTs on a blockchain, and the blockchain is the actual source of truth, then none of that can be done, certainly not easily, and in most cases at all.
A large number of contracts have had multi-million-dollar vulnerabilities. Even one vulnerability in a cross-game-item contract would affect not just the game where the item was created, but literally every single "connected" game. Those in-game-economies would all die simultaneously, and players would abandon en masse.
Bartle's point is valid; this is not something you just issue a patch for in a game. It is a fundamental catastrophic flaw with trying to transfer objects from one virtual world to another, blockchain or no.