Oh wait I hear they're calling it X now.
Yeah anyway so I've been talking a little break from the Internet lately and I realized that I hadn't logged into Twitter for like a week. I hate to admit it but sometimes I get comically addicted to that WEB2 nonsense that is crypto Twitter. I justify spending hours on the platform because it often incepts a good idea for a post after a while, but then I just keep on scrolling like so many other mindless zombies before me.
It actually felt kind of nice to realize that I just sort of forgotten to log in over the last week and do the rounds, and it's liberating to be free of such a timesuck, so maybe I can keep that momentum going. Will it one day be possible to completely replace something like Twitter or Facebook with a purely WEB3 option? Surely that seems to be the goal for a lot of folks, but is it even worth it?
If we are being honest with ourselves, and this is something that has been discussed before at length, then we must admit that securing an 'lol' comment across 100 different nodes redundantly is just a little bit absurd. Most of our social interactions are simply not important enough, or controversial enough, to be stored robustly on a blockchain until the end of time.
Perhaps the future of blockchain is non-permanence.
Like if I'm running a node and I want to free up some space by deleting all the data that's over 5 years old that should be allowed. It wouldn't really affect my node's ability to operate and continue validating the chain within the current state. I'm pretty sure blockchains like Koinos kind of have this idea built in from the ground up so that sharding can occur and scaling is more easily attained.
What about condensing information?
If I wanted to backup my own information locally this would be more than possible. Assume I've written 1000 words a day for 6 years straight. At most that's going to be something like 15 million characters. If a character only requires one byte of storage that's only 15 megabytes of data for my entire blogging career. That's nothing. Google Drive offers me 15 gigs of cloud storage for free and I actually use less than one. Impressive that I get a thousand times more than I would actually need for free from a single provider on a single account. We already live in an age of abundance; the rest of society just hasn't received the memo yet. Text is cheap.
Point being that an entire year's worth of data (or more) could be consolidated into an SHA-256 hash, and anyone storing that data would be able to prove that it existed, along with timestamps and everything else. The idea that we have to store 100% of the data until the end of the universe has always been a bit odd to me.
What difference would it make if Bitcoin created a checkpoint from a year ago, deleted all the data before that, and then just used the checkpoint as the new genesis block? I've seen arguments made to the contrary but from what I can tell they seem to be weak and rooted in blind idealism. And besides, wouldn't deleting all that data actually be good for privacy on some level? But I digress.
Unlike Bitcoin, Hive is more of a text storage blockchain. We even have a very convenient place to inject Javascript directly into our operations. What I can guarantee is that if Hive had the level of adoption that Bitcoin has now the chain would get bloated quite fast and nodes would be much more expensive to run. Luckily, also unlike Bitcoin, Hive actually pays node-runners for their services, so this path is theoretically much more scalable in many regards.
My own @hextech node easily pays for itself several times over at these prices and with the current infrastructure, and I'm only rank #43 on the witness list at the moment (rewards are around twice as much at rank #31, and three times as much at rank #21). Honestly this is a pretty impressive feat considering the spot price is only 50% higher than the local low of 25 cents suffered in September.
I calculated last week that my Hive node makes more money in a day (~$10) than a Monero miner (new CPU) would make in an entire month (probably several months once the cost of electricity is deducted). As Hive price goes up, the reward goes up. Unlike POW chains were if the price goes up hashrate goes up with it and competition is fearsome.
That's truly quite impressive.
And we accomplish it all through DPOS governance, which is inherently a reputation system based on hodling. Whoever hodls the most stake gets the biggest vote. Like POW governance, it's a simple and elegant solution that is not up for debate or prone to election rigging. DPOS is the blockchain's version of a republic (representative democracy) while POW is much closer to a pure form of guided anarchy.
The problem with anarchy is that it completely lacks governance and leadership. This is also a strength depending on perspective so it's not so much of a 'problem' as it is a tradeoff. The magic of crypto as a unified ecosystem is that everything works together and is opt-in by design. Anyone who doesn't like what one network is doing can simply move to another without much hassle or red tape in the way (borderless). We've yet to see the true power of this play out, but that time will come soon as the regulators demand more and more power over the ecosystem. Who will bow to the overlords and who will not? Time will tell, and reputations will continue to evolve.
Conclusion
Will we one day forget that WEB2 exists and live out our experiences on a superior WEB3? Most of us here today view this to be inevitable, it's just a matter of time and logistics before we get there. With the Speak network in beta along with a powerful Bitcoin wrapping bot I'd say next bull run is going to be pretty intense for all parties concerned. In the mean time keep grinding and ignore the noise. Signal only.
Return from I forgot that you existed. to edicted's Web3 Blog
