[kwlug-disc] Peak crypto 2 ?

[Chris Frey]

On Tue, Jan 18, 2022 at 09:41:15PM -0500, Mikalai Birukou via kwlug-disc wrote:
> Have you seen this hack with NFT's:
> https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

Thanks for that link.  That was a great read. :-)

Quoting from the article:

	These client APIs are not using anything to verify blockchain
	state or the authenticity of responses. The results aren’t
	even signed. An app like Autonomous Art says "hey what’s the
	output of this view function on this smart contract," Alchemy
	or Infura responds with a JSON blob that says "this is the
	output," and the app renders it.

	This was surprising to me. So much work, energy, and time has
	gone into creating a trustless distributed consensus mechanism,
	but virtually all clients that wish to access it do so by simply
	trusting the outputs from these two companies without any further
	verification.

This made me literally laugh out loud.

It stems from "people don't want to run their own servers".  But that's
only true until Youtube demonetizes and deplatforms you.  And sometimes
not even then!

Which was made even more hilarious when his NFT experiment got removed
from OpenSea AND from his wallet!

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at his report that the NFT spec contains
nothing to guarantee the veracity of the object, but I was.

What a house of cards.

Quoting:

	This isn’t a complaint about OpenSea or an indictment of what
	they’ve built. Just the opposite, they’re trying to build
	something that works.

I'm thinking, "You call this working??" :-)

It certainly takes work to paddle in the opposite direction from all this
stuff.  I don't deny that.  It's a spectrum of labour and control:

	own server & network > cloud server > service site (like youtube)

- Chris