Nft Web3
Otilia Mojarro
When they hit the top of the S-curve, their relationships with network participants change from positive-sum to zero-sum. To continue growing requires extracting data from users and competing with (former) partners.
For third parties, the transition from cooperation to competition feels like a bait-and-switch. Over time, the best entrepreneurs, developers, and investors have learned to not build on top of centralized platforms. This has stifled innovation.
Uniswap famously retroactively airdropped 15% of its governance tokens to early users of the protocol. Community grants like this have become common in web3 as a way to build goodwill and incentivize adoption.
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That turned out to be pretty emblematic of web3 projects as I dug deeper. What were they going to do? Who knows, but there was definitely going to be a blockchain involved. And the rest of it was pretty fuzzy.
As I researched more, I came across a few common buzzwords. Democratization. Decentralization. Censorship-resistance. The goals all sounded compelling, and really not unlike what I had in mind for the future of the web myself. But when it came time to find out how blockchains and cryptocurrencies were going to deliver us there, that was less clear.
The oligopoly of Andreessen Horowitz, or its investments in the same Big Tech companies that they now decried, including Facebook, Instagram, and others, went conspicuously unmentioned. The slides underscored how now it was platforms like the OpenSea NFT marketplace that would help fix this terribly broken, unfair, monopolized web again, conspicuously failing to mention that Andreessen Horowitz had led several funding rounds for OpenSea and that OpenSea, at the time, held an outsized portion of the NFT market share. But they had nothing to fear if OpenSea lost its monopoly because Andreessen Horowitz has invested in other NFT platforms too.
So in my research, I gave up on the smooth-talking founders, the venture capitalists with their slide decks and the tech journalists in the mainstream media who regurgitated sales pitches without much critical analysis and I moved on to something a little more concrete. I started looking at individual projects and asking, okay, how is web3 going? And what I found was: web3 is going just great.
I looked for projects that actually needed a blockchain and were credibly changing the paradigm in the direction of these stated web3 ideals. More often than not, I found projects that were rowing in the completely opposite direction.
Play-to-earn games introduced a rentier class of managers who oversaw low-wage workers in countries like the Philippines, Vietnam, and Venezuela and took a cut of their earning in exchange for just letting them play the game in the first place.
So-called web3 publishing firms sought to reinvent DRM, imposing even more limits on how textbooks or other material could be resold so that companies could squeeze out even more money from their users at more steps along the way.
Platforms that promised to empower artists who previously struggled to sell their digital art were full of stolen artwork, siphoning money away from the same digital artists that they claimed to empower. And those artists had to take time away from creating their artwork to find the stolen art, and then submit onerous takedown forms to OpenSea, and LooksRare, and Rarible and an endless list of other NFT platforms. Some of those platforms honored the takedown requests and removed the sales listings. Others had policies of not removing listings at all because, after all, if you want to go all-in on censorship resistance, that means everything. Your sales pitches might focus on controversial art, or empowering artists under oppressive regimes, but it also means welcoming stolen artwork, copyrighted material, spam, abuse.
There will be a web3. The web has been evolving ever since its inception, and there is no doubt in my mind that we are overdue for a fundamental shift. Will it be blockchains and crypto? Venture capitalists and blockchain startup founders really hope that you think so.
As technologists, our duty is to develop responsibly, and we should be striving for more in the web, pushing to evolve it into whatever web3 may turn out to be, and chasing those ideals that could make the web truly wonderful.
We encourage users to use only required individual packages listed in following table, for making lightweight application instead of importing main web3 package, and if you don't need functions from most of the packages that are implicitly included with main web3 package.
Today, we have other options, and in particular, we have blockchain technology. Blockchain is a relatively new method of storing data online, which is built around the two core concepts of encryption and distributed computing.
Trustless means that interactions and transactions can take place between two parties without the need for a trusted third party. This was not necessarily the case on web2 or below because you would have to be certain that whoever owned the medium you were using to interact or transact was not manipulating your communications.
The Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO) is a web3 concept describing a group, company or collective that are bound by rules and regulations coded into a blockchain. For example, in a DAO-based shop, the price of all of the items, as well as details on who would get pay-outs from the business, would be held on a blockchain. Shareholders in the DAO would be able to vote to change prices or who gets the money.
However, no individual could change the rules without having permission to do so. And no one who owned the physical infrastructure, such as the server owners, or the owners of the facilities where the profits were stored, could interfere in any way, like running off with the takings!
Most people believe that AI will play a big part in web3. This is due to the heavy involvement of machine-to-machine communication and decision-making that will be needed to run many web3 applications.
But in examples here , I see javascript integrated into HTML code that should be executed in the browser. Can somebody explain how it works, what interacts with what, which code executed at server-side and which in browser.
Another question from here, if I use Mist it connects to the local node. But if I want to use web3 in the browser (not mist) I have not node for web3.js to interact with. So the question is - how can I use web3 for the browser(not for Mist)?
Web3 is designed to work both server-side and client side. The client side must be a preprocessed JS bundle, because browsers can't handle advanced JavaScript. You can grab a bundle distribution or create one yourself.
Web3 communicates using XMLHTTPRequest when run in a browser. If you do not have your own node to communicate with the situation is grim at the moment. EtherScan.io provides API key based services that also exposes some of Ethereum JSON-RPC bindings. However as far as I know they are not providing native Web3 provider, so you need to call their specific APIs using their client instead of Web3.
In summary, Ethereum can be accessed by a browser, or by a server; anything that can speak the protocol. The Mist browser is more tightly integrated as one might expect, but others can work as well if the right requirements are loaded.
To help put this into perspective, it's possible to create fully distributed web app (Dapp) that uses Ethereum Smart Contracts. The Browser will speak directly to the Smart Contracts, usually through the Web3.js API. The browser will, of course, load the API to make this possible and it will need a local node so the API has something to talk to.
In the case of Mist, this is automatic, but other browsers can download it. So, the html would include a to load it. The author might choose to add a little detection so the browser page acts a little differently in the case that Mist is detected or "Other Browser" is detected.
It's also perfectly acceptable for a server to interact with Smart Contracts. As you have seen, nodejs would load it with require("Web3"). In this case, the browsers would (normally) not need a blockchain node or any special library because the server will be getting the on-chain information. Integration with other languages is possible, e.g. python, using a python-ethereum library built for this purpose.
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