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One aspect that I strongly dislike about "web3" is that it poisons the discourse with its incentives.
I don't believe that every person on Twitter with $BTC in their profile understands or can knowledgeably argue the benefits of Web3, but their crypto holdings make them a hard-lined crypto zealot in the hopes of multiplying few hundred dollars they've put in.
It's fairly widely known how laughable it is to look for unbiased opinion in the interviews of pundits talking finance. This is since it's become expected that none of their advice is going to be untethered to their investments, but given the opportunity they're talk their book all they long. I don't see that much wrong with talking your book, but desperately trying to cover it up under the guise of "knowing the tech is superior" while only having superficial understanding of what's going on - makes intelligent people reading your stuff distrust you immediately.
I know people on both sides of the fence. I know of only one person that's skeptical of Web3 but still hedges on its success. I'm surprised that there is no middle ground - there are either fervent advocates or fervent opposition, and with very few exceptions (!), the opposition seems to think more clearly and is better informed.
It's pretty weird, isn't it. Web3 discourse is a seething pile of cryptobros trying to tell me this thing I've been building on for two decades as openly as humanly possible should now be done using technology they just happen to have put a stake up in... Because... Blockchain. It all feels very 2018, people trying to jam "Blockchain" into every product feature list.
Everything I've seen so far are either people trying to get rich quick, or people trying to be, or trying to be seen to be _edgy_.
I'm ignoring it until somebody breaks the existing internet. Oh good, we're incentivising that now...
> I'm surprised that there is no middle ground - there are either fervent advocates or fervent opposition, and with very few exceptions
The middle ground would be people who aren't invested in crypto, but have tried a few dApps and think they can be neat sometimes but maybe are rough around the edges and might be better in a few years.
These people don't exist because web3 technologies have nothing appealing to end users, only to investors. This might change eventually, but for now there's literally no reason to use blockchain if you aren't looking to invest or speculate in something.
Non-invested middle ground web3 fanboy here.
There’s definitely a lot of potential. Judging a technology based on what the first few applications to materialize is extremely short sighted and has never been a good estimate of its future usage.
Personally I dislike full blown crypto zealots and also I dislike the Perl clutching tech crowd.
Just remember distributed tech has never been the most efficient way to get something done so if you’re looking at web3 from a purely better faster cheaper perspective then you won’t get it.
However, lucky for us, these aren’t the only problems to exist.
One dApp (or whatever blockchain application) I would love to see some traction is liquid democracy, from a government POV. The votecoin or adhocracy4 experiments exist but were not even in the right ballpark for a federal voting system that bypasses or changes Congress and constitution at its roots. I can see this huge someday, as zero trust is great and all, but it is a huge effort nobody has really started.
Sorry if this seems a bit ranty.
I'm kind of a middle ground person, perhaps leaning slightly 'against' rather than 'for', over predominantly environmental concerns. I've distanced myself from crypto since I learned what the chinese were up to, and since china is putting a stop to that now (allegedly?), and the rest of crypto seems to be quietly moving in a PoS direction, recently reintroduced myself.
Most of the objections I have, other than the climate concern involve valuation, stability vs. valuation, etc.
Because I have some experience in the open source virtual worlds arena, and because 15m square plot of decentraland just sold for over 2 million $US, I decided to make a personal investigation of decentraland and it's relationship to ethereum. I went into this quite optimistic and hopeful, because I enjoy such things. What I found, however, was no cause for joy.
Perhaps my expectations were unrealistic. In any case, as I said before elsewhere, they have fallen victim to the touch of Midas: Their various holdings became extremely overvalued in a very short period of time, to that extent where no one else can afford them.
When I posed this issue to them directly, the general attitude was 'well, Walmart and Nike can afford us, so...', but zero acknowledgement that their entire value to those corporations is based on the number of product consuming users they can bring to the table.
Their self-governance machine, the DAO, is a thing of beauty, in that it could be employed to actually produce an autonomous, self governing organization that embraced everyone on equal terms and let everyone involved behave as the peers they should be in an ideal community; instead, they have pretty well implemented everything bad about today's governments, arriving at a functional oligarchy made up of those with the most land and currency, which they call 'voting power' - and the so called officers of the various supporting and ideally moderating concerns (their foundation, their DAO, and, due to the concept of voting power, their property holders), are all the same people.
They do a steady job right now in their discord channel of gaslighting these concerns where ever they are indicated, to the extent that they tossed me out this morning for calling them out on it; I haven't troubled myself to see if they just tossed me out or banned me, because I really don't much care.
I do know that their behavior in every respect will alienate users not just to virtual worlds and cryptocurrency, but to the whole endeavor they are labeling 'web3'.
DAO or not, this is not The Way.
The thing that cryptocurrencies have really successfully decentralized and democratized is becoming a shareholder — of cryptocurrency schemes.
Anyone can buy a share of a coin, and make a profit as long as the amount of fiat currency put into the chain keeps growing. Every new user convinced it's going "to the moon" pays dividends to existing holders. This automatically creates a financial incentive to become an astroturfer for the project.
The thing is , that side of things in practice, isn't really decentralized. Where do you buy and sell those "shares"... exchanges (e.g. binance, coinbase, bitfinex etc), which essentially just replace the centralized stock exchanges and banks of traditional finance.
Whilst it's _possible_ to avoid those, I'd guess it's beyond many participants to do technically, so the exchanges become defacto centralization, and instead of regulated stock exchanges that operate in the same judicial location, in many cases these exchanges explicitly try to avoid regulation or accountability.
Have you really not heard of decentralized exchanges?
Sounds like MLMs with a lower barrier of entry.
How does any of that differ from the current US stock market?
Insider trading and wash trades are legal. You can legally lie to your "investors". And it's all untaxed if you're lucky.
Sounds like the housing market
Indeed. Or, as the OP says:
> This is not really that rare online, where basically all discourse is subconsciously understood to be people taking speculative positions on various topics (called "takes") against the value of their online brand, but it's particularly acute in the web3 world, where every project and community is blockchain-based, and all of your beliefs can be and usually are securitized into crypto tokens that can rise and fall in value
And also, as I agree with the OP, about blockchain and about our world in general right now:
> But my feeling is also: Why do I have to bet at all?! Why am I in this awful, ugly, unfun casino in the first place?? Is there a way out of the casino?? And if not, can I at least just get slowly tanked on free booze and annoy people with a reminder that the house always wins?
I'm a strong believer (and investor) of web3 but can be thought in middle ground as I hate all those scammy projects/shitcoins with impossible value propositions. I hate Ponzi/Pyramid schemes disguised under investment oppourtinities using smart contracts. I hate pump and dumps. They all poison the whole ecosystem.
But I love and value actual (sadly minority) projects that solve (or realistically aim to/can solve) real problems in genuine ways. I love how I can use my money that isn't regulated by a corrupted government (I'm from a country between Europe and Asia with an extremely corrupted government so this has extra importance), without a middleperson/controlling entity without trust where I can only trust mathematics and fully public code. Sure they bring their own problems and risks, but I'd still prefer them over current "real world" system of corrupted governments, banks, and evil corporations.
I think the problem is that some people seem to know the future.
Either they are sure crypto is a scam or fad and will soon go to 0. Or they know for sure banks and fiat will go out of business.
I see this mentality more on the anti-crypto side.
My opinion is that there is a small chance that web3 can be huge. So I'm on the pro-crypto side. But a lot of people seem to have a hard time with this "SMALL chance it can be HUGE".
Sure, let’s accept that cryptofinance creates bizarre incentives for people to irrationally support a change.
Consider on the other side of the table how the economics and network effects have created incentives for everyone to depend on centralized architecture to the point where if you’re not acting through any of the top two companies in any given market, you’re effectively shut off from large parts of modern economy and social life.
Incentives are broken all over, that doesn’t mean the cause is wrong.
I quite like the idea of being skeptical of something but still hedging on its potential success. Thanks
there's middle ground people just choose to ignore it. So many similarities to the dot com bubble. As more time passes I truly feel I would have been one of the people who could spot out Amazon from the webvans and pets.coms. The strength in web3 is bitcoin and ipfs.
Bitcoin isn't really part of Web3 as it's just a currency. You realize this yes? If you really are betting on Web3 then be careful and be prepared for a lot more research.
Reading through the linked article on "real world uses for Web3", most of them seem to consist of things that public key cryptography has been able to solve for decades (persistent identity, multiple persistent identities) or things you could do anyway ("right now, people can only go to facebook or Google. With Web3, everyone can have their own space!!") because the writer has apparently never heard of a web server.
Another HNer made a good point recently: Compute power is nearing post scarcity. Web3 is people trying to make it scarce again.
> because the writer has apparently never heard of a web server.
This is a constant issue I have with crypto advocates. Most of the use cases can be done with crypto, but also with other techs (sometimes it's as simple as "we need a database for this"). But there's never a serious analysis of why those use cases have not been covered with previous tech, and when you point out that there might be issues other than the tech then you get labeled as a "crypto hater". And I wouldn't care too much if random people called you a hater, but when all crypto people label dissent as "haters" it makes me think it's like a cult where all you need to do is believe.
I love pointing out that if it becomes a serious currency banks would offer bitcoin-denominated loans (causing an increase in money supply); and if there's then a credit crunch the Fed could offer bitcoin-denominated (but unbacked) bonds.
It would be like the gold standard all over again.
Exchanges and stablecoin issuers are already involved in fractional reserve banking.
It's free money to them, why not?
I'm curious why you think this is the case. It's close to impossible (good luck convincing people to devalue their money) to increase the Bitcoin supply other than through minig.
Loans create “virtual money” in a way, which does contribute to inflation (in fact, controlling lending is a primary way the federal reserve controls inflation)
Yes, in the current fiat system that is the case, but there is no way for someone (a bank or government) to inflate the supply in world where Bitcoin is the currency everyone uses.
No, you increase the amount of IOU's. I own 1 bitcoin, and everybody knows I'm good for my bitcoin (e.g., that is what a bank is. An institution everybody trusts to have money and they pay their dues.)
I know write you an IOU for 1 bitcoin, and you buy a car with that IOU, because anyone who owns that IOU can come to me and get their bitcoin, and everybody knows that I am good for my money, because that is the whole condition of this thought experiment.
I now write another IOU and give to my uncle, who buys a house with it, because everybody knows I'm good for it.
Now the money supply has increased, without minting new bitcoins, and this is exactly what happened to gold (which, as you know as well as anybody, you can't just print)
There's no way to create "unbacked" bitcoin. You either have the transaction outputs pointing at your wallet address on the public blockchain, or you do not. Nobody wants or will accept FedBTC.
Celsius offers interest-bearing bitcoin accounts which they use to do margin lending, so this already exists.
> because the writer has apparently never heard of a web server.
But blockchains _do_ introduce a technical capability that never existed before: shared, “trustless” access to and control over data.
Previously, you could run your own webserver, your own email server, etc, and you could trust your own data, but other people collaborating with you would need to trust you to manage that data, and trust that you hadn’t manipulated the data in some way. What if they don’t know you well enough to trust you?
Sure, other people could keep their own copy of that same data, and sync with you somehow, but most pre-blockchain data services lack replication capability out of the box, and as far as I know there are no non-blockchain data services that can give you any assurances at all that data has not been tampered with.
And on top of the issue of trust is the issue of network size. If you personally know who you want to collaborate with, you can share a single server, but what if you want open collaboration and discovery to be part of the application?
Federated application services capable of competing with big tech have been a dream and an objective of open-source advocates for decades, but no one has been able to deliver. I would say the major reason is because trustless data syncing at scale is orders of magnitude harder than running a single standalone server, and all of the solutions until web3 attempted to perform data syncing at the application layer—which means a lot of duplicated effort, and almost zero opportunity for reuse between projects.
Blockchain tech moves replication and tampering protection to the data layer, as a generalized service that is relatively trivial to set up. The promise of web3 is that shared-data applications can be built on top of that data layer in the same way that complex centralized applications can be built on well-defined centralized data layers like the file system and the relational database.
A robust and abstracted data layer allows application developers to spend more time thinking about application logic and less time thinking about data.
> A robust and abstracted data layer allows application developers to spend more time thinking about application logic and less time thinking about data.
I don't think you can fully replicate a general database in blockchain, at least not to any decent performance/size level. And interacting with the blockchain will always be more complex than interacting with your own database. A blockchain app will always take more developer resources than a non-blockchain app.
Also, another problem with federated services is money. In a centralized app, one party controls the app and can exploit it for money and use that money to pay developers. They can even run at a loss the first years to create a good product until they start making money. With federated apps, it's harder to invest and blockchain doesn't change the fact that people don't like to pay for services they have gotten for free previously. Crowdfunding existed before too and not too many projects got enough to even start.
The third point is... people just don't care about decentralized/centralized. So insisting on going blockchain is a technology choice that's probably not going to bring you too many users (other than fans of the tech) and it's going to cost you more developer time. It doesn't make too much sense.
> But blockchains do introduce a technical capability that never existed before: shared, “trustless” access to and control over data.
But that's not a new capability. You can do that with existing tech. At most, it seems to me, what blockchains introduce is convenience, but it comes with a pretty heavy cost in terms of computational resources.
pBFT research existed since the 90s, but I'm not sure if they had good leader election mechanisms or an incentive to participate as a node.
Ok, I’ll bite. What existing tool does this?
> But blockchains do introduce a technical capability that never existed before: shared, “trustless” access to and control over data.
I don’t think blockchains control access over data at all without the integration of other technologies (i.e. using public key authentication to prove to some third-party service that you hold a key that performed a blockchain transaction). They only control permissions to update things on-chain and everything on the chain is still publicly readable anyway. PKI is capable of doing the same thing and has existed for a very long time.
> Sure, other people could keep their own copy of that same data, and sync with you somehow, but most pre-blockchain data services lack replication capability out of the box, and as far as I know there are no non-blockchain data services that can give you any assurances at all that data has not been tampered with.
Look at the existing NFT mess. The problem here is that the blockchain _doesn’t_ replicate anything other than a bit of metadata for these types of applications — the content still has to be stored elsewhere, often on a classic web server which is centralised and can go down any time.
If you want an example of something that replicates data and guarantees integrity then look at IPFS.
> Federated application services capable of competing with big tech have been a dream and an objective of open-source advocates for decades, but no one has been able to deliver. I would say the major reason is because trustless data syncing at scale is orders of magnitude harder than running a single standalone server, and all of the solutions until web3 attempted to perform data syncing at the application layer—which means a lot of duplicated effort, and almost zero opportunity for reuse between projects.
Blockchain’s answer to “federation is hard” is just to replicate the entire chain to all participants and have all participants repeat the exact same work to arrive at the same position. This is not exactly a glamouring success story of how to avoid “duplicated effort” — in fact, duplicated effort is a fundamental part of the blockchain architecture.
> Blockchain tech moves replication and tampering protection to the data layer, as a generalized service that is relatively trivial to set up. The promise of web3 is that shared-data applications can be built on top of that data layer in the same way that complex centralized applications can be built on well-defined centralized data layers like the file system and the relational database.
This isn’t really true though — it’s more like the blockchain provides a tamperproof metadata store. Putting actual quantities of information onto a typical blockchain is either prohibitively expensive computationally (it needs to be replicated everywhere) or prohibitively expensive financially (Ethereum gas costs as an example).
I often feel like I’m missing a key piece of technological or intellectual insight when I read bullish articles like the linked one. I cannot see a single use-case in there that would definitively be improved by the use of blockchain, and in most cases, I’d expect the opposite to happen.
The key insight you are missing is that someone makes a lot of money trying to convince you that this stuff is the future of the internet.
What do you think about cryptocurrency enabled sports betting and prediction markets? There's a pretty clear technical path to these replacing traditional sports betting market makers and I personally cannot wait. Current market makers like DraftKings still put out betting lines with insane spreads, because in the US atleast, their markets are protected by regulatory capture.
This [1] is one of the projects I have my eye on in this space but there is many that are starting to get to work now that a lot of the technical issues around Oracles are being sorted out.
1.
* No affiliation
Since the use of an oracle introduces a source of information external to the blockchain, we’re left with centralization issues again. I feel like this removes the unique advantage of using the technology in the first place.
I suppose there are ways to gamble exclusively using the blockchain, but I don’t think sports betting is among them.
Suppose they use a fully centralized oracles, isn't there still a huge benefit in having much lower fees and tighter spreads, even if it's not decentralized? For the end user, having settlement, custody, and market making decentralized while having centralized oracles is still a huge advantage.
Then consider that people are tackling the issue of decentralized oracles. The most common platform for that is Chainlink [1]. In this space specifically, Augur [2] is among those who has attempted to make decentralized sports reporting Oracles. I'm not sure if their solution is fully fleshed out, but regardless it doesn't seem to be an insurmountable technical issue for something that is as easy to verify as outcome of a game.
If your willing to accept that the Oracle problem will be solved, I'm not sure how you would say this doesn't create value for consumers.
1.
https://chain.link/education/blockchain-oracles
2.
You aren't, no worries.
One more point from that article I noticed: in a section talking about taking on multiple projects, the author writes "This is how much of Hollywood works."
How can you not think: well, if this is how much of Hollywood works now, isn't that proof that you don't need a blockchain for it?!
Not to mention that "how Hollywood works" is seriously problematic as it is. I'm not sure it should be replicated.
Add to that - it really is talking "how Hollywood works" - on the movie set. It disregards all that happen before and after and outside of movie set.
It also disregards that loads of projects/works are not "how Hollywood works".
With the added benefit every transaction you do with a "persona" isn't on a blockchain that almost everyone has access to into perpetuity.
> Compute power is nearing post scarcity
Nearing? 99.9% of the Internet content I care about is pure text.
In quantities could be served and stored on SBC or a phone from 10 years ago.
Think of text messaging, IM rooms, forums like HN or mailing lists, activitypub.
Do the math around how much text a person can consume in a day and how much data can a SBC handle in a day.
> Do the math around how much text a person can consume in a day and how much data can a SBC handle in a day.
A $0.80 microcontroller would get you pretty far.
The way I see it this scarcity thing is exactly the point, and I'll go a bit deeper.
Capitalism can only work with scarcity to monetize. With scarcity nearing an end, there's now two camps:
* those that are excited for the post-scarcity future where we can freely share data and culture
* those who are deeply bought into capitalist ideology and who are terrified of capitalism ending with scarcity.
The first group hates all the crypto stuff because it's a technological attempt to put the genie back in the bottle and undo the progress we've made in eliminating scarcity.
The second group hails crypto as their savior and thinks it will revolutionize everything by reintroducing scarcity everywhere, giving capitalism a life line.
I think that's the core disconnect.
I don't think capitalism is going anywhere. "Web3" might succeed but, absent a political fight, only if it can be assimilated into existing capital and power structures.
I'm not sure you fully got the point I was trying to make.
Despite all the claims from crypto advocates about crypto freeing us from existing power structures, I think the truth is actually the opposite.
Crypto _entrenches_ existing power structures, where capital = power. You can see that formalized in various decentralized organizations where votes are allocated by token count, or in other words, more capital means more power.
Crypto is an effort to _preserve_ the status quo, not to change it. If the "web3" were to succeed, moneyed interests would still be controlling everything, with the only change being that some early crypto adopters would also rise to their level. Crypto advocacy comes down to an attempt to rise to the ruling class by serving it, not to topple it.
Yes! That's what I've been saying. If crypto succeeds, it will be _because_ it serves capital (what crypto believers refer to as "centralixed authority") not in spite of it.
Ah! It was I who misunderstood you then. Glad to hear we're on the same page!
> because the writer has apparently never heard of a web server.
This gives me the initial dropbox dismissal comment (you can do it trivially with ftp) vibe...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Sure but the difference was that Dropbox was an order of magnitude more accessible and convenient in its experience. web3 has yet to make anything tangibly _better_ than the thing it wants to replace - only more convoluted, risky, and expensive. It turns operations that were free and instant into operations that cost significant money and take minutes/hours
It's been years, over a decade since bitcoin came out, and still nothing useful came out of it. Dropbox was well understood to be useful shortly after it came out and the initial reactions were over.
I have the impression that most comments here are either biased against cryptocurrencies or trying to push for them blindly.
That's a bit sad considering we should at least be discussing the technology here.
web3 is a marketing brand that defines a future version of web apps where the frontend is a compiled SPA possibly hosted on decentralised platforms (IPFS) and where the backend is a decentralised blockchain (and in its purest form only that).
This goes a step beyond web 2.0 where you would build a SPA with a cloud backend, e.g. Firebase / Google. With web 2.0, you have to trust the backend (so again in most cases Google or Amazon) and that is a limiting factor for sensitive apps, or simply if you care for decentralisation.
Another addition of web3 is the payments, which could have been standardised in the web platform (I am a former W3C member and there were lots of discussions on that), but instead of the browser implementing payments, we ended up with a few centralised processors like Stripe. Same goes for identity.
Quite interestingly, web3 solves both Identity + Payments with a technically elegant solution. Many people got rich by holding AMZN stock, which is in great part due to AWS -- the cash cow of the company. Why would you have a problem with a cryptocurrency token being used to pay for the backend infrastructure i.e. paying for accessing a database-as-a-service?
There's a question that isn't answered and that's why would users care about those details of the backend. In the end, a solution can be as technologically elegant as you want, but the thing it really needs to do is improve from the users' point of view. And I don't think it does.
For most people, a decentralized platform will usually be worse (speed, latency), and only very rarely better, than a centralized server. The "paying to access a database" will introduce a lot of issues both for users and developers, no matter how you implement it, for barely any user-facing improvement. And centralized processors appeared to make things easier, so you'd need a payment platform that is as least as easy and, also, that protects you against scams (AFAIK, you can't do too much if someone steals your crypto wallet or you forget the password).
So while I agree that web3 could provide identify + payments, it doesn't need to be technically elegant, but user-facing elegant.
Crypto is not binary.
The vast majority Og people will likely use a custodian for their crypto. For them it will feel like banking feels now.
Just like coinbase provide a visa card with collateral i your crypto.
So essentially these questions really are answered -- it is not an all or nothing. We will keep, eg. Visa to facilitate retailer transactions with collateral in, eg., bitcoin. Bow you can dispute and everything and you pay in crypto.
The parent is talking about using blockchain not just for payments, but as a building block for the web providing both identity and payments.
Also, why would we want bitcoin or any crypto if most people will just use Visa? How does that achieve decentralization? I doubt the goal of cryptocoins is just "replace the financial backend that big companies use".
A BTC wallet is infinitely more user friendly than a banking website that only works in chrome xor firefox and constantly locks you out for reasons they don't want you to know about and severely limits your transfer sizes. If you do EFT and wait between 3 and 10 days each time, even bitcoin is better than this.
Centralized web is horrible and dead. Literally _anything_ is a better alternative. The user can be convinced to adopt superior tech even if he does not explicitly know the problems. It just has to feel better.
> it doesn't need to be technically elegant, but user-facing elegant.
dont worry bro. the "set user = happy" voodoo dance has already been done. every cryptocoin wallet is a browser plugin or mobile app with 90% of code for themeing with all the bugs and slowness smartcrap/web users are accustomed to. you are even discouraged from rnunning yoyr own node
> A BTC wallet is infinitely more user friendly than a banking website...
Until there is fraud, a dispute, or an innocent mistake.
Same for traditional banking + if you happen to be a journalist ( or whatever ) living under an oppressive regime, they can freeze your assets on a whim, because you criticised the wrong people. If someone still prefers trusting a central authority, for whatever reason, they can still use something like coinbase.
If you're living under an oppressive regime, they can freeze turning your crypto into state-approved currency at a whim, and you have the same problem.
You mean scammed with a bad or not shipped product? what is "fraud"? this is a statist buzzword. cryptocoins literally defend against all the bullshit i hate banks for:
- if i give someone an address, they can withdraw money from me
- if i eat pizza with someone, they can recover my bank account (since they ask obscure trivial like "how much and where did you last spend money at")
- company #30 that asked for my ID can just use my ID to get my bank account
- if i click two buttons too fast (on the website, or at the ATM), they will freeze my account for "hacking attempt"
- they record my voice on the phone to "recognize" me, yet will still give out my account to some random person for some bullshit reason
but aahhh, i see you're from the "everyone is an idiot and needs a personal cop to protect themselves from themselves" school of thought.
edit: btw your idea doesn't even work. corpos who pretend to be "knowing" every user for their security literally just have 1 person for 10000 customers, who gets replaced monthly, and 100% of the time when you go in, they will not be able to correctly identify if the client is you or not
> With web 2.0, you have to trust the backend (so again in most cases Google or Amazon) and that is a limiting factor for sensitive apps
And this is where the assumption is wrong. Web3 is about gatekeeping for profit, and additionally you not only have to trust a single vendor...but literally every other peer on the decentralized internet to be trustworthy with your data.
Computational security is not the same as data security, and this is where the marketing BS is happening.
As long as there's no permission management and no deletion feature built into the blockchain, your precious private data is as publicly accessible as it never was before.
You think encryption will hold forever? SHA might disagree.
You think 20 years ahead of time the password will still be secure and not leaked anywhere else? Ha, good luck.
The problem that I have with web3 is that 99% are ponzi schemes for gatekeeping ...and the 1% that are left try to market it as a privacy thing, which it cannot be by definition of how a blockchain works.
There are so many broken software programs out there already, and now we made those bugs persistent and unfixable for eternity (with respect to "how secure" user data is stored).
If the web3 would be about real distribution (not the same as decentralization), there could be much much easier solutions for having a local copy of your old myspace photos.
The problem with web3.0 is decentralizing all the things is super hard and really user unfriendly. At this point i'd be happy with something more like web 2.5 where the important bits are decentralized from a central authority (identity management for eg) and able to integrate nicely with centralized platforms.
Indeed it's hard to build a truly decentralised app right now, that's why I referred to "future version of web apps"...
Most people deploy a backend proxy and use APIs for indexing, etc. Originally, these APIs were centralised (e.g. Infura) but decentralised alternatives now exist (like The Graph).
Yeah, even if the web3 moniker has been spearheaded by Ethereum and Parity/Polkadot related projects (it’s been a thing since ~2015 and until about last year its use has mostly been following Gavin Wood and crew), in my mind for a typical web3 app that doesn’t involve payments, the only blockchain/crypto-related functionality would be the built-in key management and using it for authn/authz. Possibly signing messages that are relayed p2p or c2s, no need to post transactions on the blockchain or hold any cryptocurrency at all.
For web2 (which was also abused to death as a buzzword), the defining technical component was asynchronous requests through js and dhtml. Decoupling the rendering of views from data.
For web3 it’s decoupled frontends and backends (the frontends should support being self-hosted/run locally), peer-to-peer and federated architectures, having not SPoF.
Js and Ajax calls where useful to everybody, including the companies paying for developers time. Web3 with P2P and federation seems exactly the opposite of how companies make money. So it's what I'd like to use but it's not what I'm expecting to be paid to develop.
Actually I've got a customer using Ethereum first and then Algorand to timestamp events but it was only a little more than calling a HTTP API for us.
Imagine a world where infrastructure, libraries and developer tooling are all there. Imagine the reduction in costs for infrastructure, security (sure you still have to do it but the body looks completely different) and all that goes with having a "backend". Suddenly you don't even need to run a business to afford supporting an app that loads of people use.
Sure, you will still have backend processes but the exposure to "the app" is greatly reduced.
That sounds great if it lowered costs, but it takes gas to run services on blockchains - it’s still “someone else’s computer” that has to be incentivized to do work, whether that’s executing a smart contract or paying to pin files on IPFS.
IMO there’s room for small benevolent communities where people choose to share in the cost of infrastructure (e.g. hosting seedboxes in torrenting communities where you are expected to keep your up/down ratio even) but expecting users to run full nodes is a tall order, computation and bandwidth-wise you’re offloading costs to your users. I always thought something like wikipedia could work like this since there’s thousands of committed super-users that could afford to run a background process, and indeed there’s IPFS mirrors of it, but IIRC the edits still happen on jimmy wales’ computer.
I kind of mentioned it already, but apart from payments or other transfer of digital ownership, there shouldn't be much need for on-chain transactions. In some years when, hopefully, L2 technologies have matured and grown to live up to their promise, those won't have to either (there is always the initial on-boarding of course, but credit cards and mobile payments have those too)
As for "who's going to run the nodes", if cryptoeconomics or users don't take care of it, I assume businesses will. The nice thing is that regardless, the payment for this infrastructure is also facilitated through cryptocurrency transactions on L2 networks. For someone who doesn't want or need to take ownership of that, it can just be proxied through to the client and not need to be the concern of the developer of publisher of the app.
Of course businesses can still choose to pony up for it proactively of they have the finances to support it, potentially running it themselves or through a third party. You can always fall back to "the old ways" for certain things when it makes sense.
If by L2 you are referring to proof-of-stake, I don't think that technology can ever be made to work without needing to exist alongside a proof-of-work coin due to the "nothing at stake" issue.
No, I am not talking about PoS. One example of "Layer 2" is Lightning Network for Bitcoin. You "lock up" an amount of BTC in a channel that you can then use over the p2p onion-routed liquidity network. Payments are practically instant and fees are low (and can be made 0 if you open a direct channel with the counter-party).
It's orhogonal to consensus so works equally well on PoW/PoS.
There are a couple of competing and complimentary solutions for L2 on Ethereum. I'm quite sure it will converge at some point.
> where the frontend is a compiled SPA
This is pretty much just the same thing we do today, but wait...
> possibly hosted on decentralised platforms (IPFS)
We can use a filesystem that is extremely slow, and also loses all our files if we stop paying AWS to mirror them in S3!
> the backend is a decentralised blockchain
And we can use a really slow database where each write costs $100s in gas fees!
... see, much better!
Decentralisation is hard - never told the contrary.
However, transaction "gas" fees with some chains (Polygon, Solana) are less than 1 cent and you probably know that.
You can pay as much with DynamoDB if you don't optimise anything (and reads are free with the chains, still costly with DynamoDB). Of course, you can say that AWS is overpriced too... maybe that's just inflation going on.
1 cent per write to a database is insanely expensive, and no, you can't pay that much for DynamoDB. DynamoDB is free tier for 10 writes/read per second.
If you go with AWS's most expensive option for access (DynamoDB on-demand, infrequent access), the pricing is $1.56 per million write request units. That's 0.000156 cents per write. That doesn't include data storage, but that ranges between 10 and 25 cents per month, per GB.
Where does this preoccupation with payments come from all of a sudden? Personally I don't want "payments" implemented in my web browser, and I seriously doubt that that would be in anyone's interest.
I found it pretty eye opening to be able to make payments freely and (practically) pseudonomously, in contrast to which all other digital payments systems are heavily permissioned. Crypto UI may not be great but try sending a wire internationally in the banking system and you are presented with 2-3 massively leaky abstractions (why should I the consumer have to research the difference in ACH, electronic wire) with various fees, delays, and possible invisible censorship issues (blacklists, whitelists, reports triggered) PER bank.
I make international payments pretty often and have never been presented with a leaky abstraction, suffered from "censorship" or anything like that. "Permissioned" is simply a consequence of that fact that most countries establish barriers to the free movement of people, goods and capitals in and out of their territory. You're not going to solve that with technology, because it's not a technological problem. It's not even clear that it's a problem.
I’m sure many people haven’t experienced that kind of censorship but lots of people have. I used to play online poker which was made illegal in the US through payment channel crackdowns(for reasons at best paternalistic but realistically just physical casino lobbying). Given that the internet facilitates pretty much any kind of information transfer I have to ask mysef is it more likely the future will be a future where I can only transfer value by requesting 20th C institutions to proxy for me or is it more likely I will be able to freely transfer value in my own right.
Micro payments may prove to be a compelling alternative to. Or at least that is the hope.
Alternative to what? I think you forgot a word there
ads, sorry the word got dropped
Ads
Ah! I can kind of see the idea, but crypto seems... kind of overengineered for that?
There was flattr [1] a while ago, with a similar concept, but it didn't really take off. I'm not sure a more complicated solution with a higher barrier of entry would.
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr
I've been Googling the word SPA and I keep finding places to go for a holiday, but nothing relevant to what you're talking about.
SPA in this context would likely mean Single Page App. A Javascript module, to be run in a browser.
If you include a context word like "web" it pops right up.
I tried a bunch of additional keywords before asking. I also did think of "Single Page App" but I doubted how it could be relevant.
I agree that posters need to be careful about undefined acronyms, but, pro-tip, you can always check Wikipedia for overloaded terms to narrow down to the right one. Here it will give you a section for the meanings in the context of computing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPA
Edit: also, I suspect you’re being cheeky there, because when I Google “SPA”, the top results are local spas (even in private mode), and thus not “places to go for a holiday/vacation”, as if you only guessed what a Google search would give and had decided to make a joke about the ambiguity and most common lay meaning of (case-insensitive) SPA, rather than express an actual frustration at an honest attempt to look up the meaning of that term.
There's more than one technical meaning. One is web-related and another is cryptography-related. All possibly relevant.
Yes, the other one is a small stub article about a proprietary Microsoft protocol for authenticating email logins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Password_Authentication
I guess that’s what led you to “keep googling” the same term over and over?
Who's maintaining the service instead of AWS in the web3 scenario?
Well usually whoever deployed the web3 product is collecting fees for its use in some capacity so they have a vested interest in developing it.
Either that or they are holding a huge bag of some project-native token and so they have a vested interest in developing it because increased usage usually correlates to the price of said token increasing as well.
There might be more, but the only one I checked out is
For the ones that don't know:
SPA = Single Page Application
why it has to be SPA?
Crypto fans are always hurling accusations of FOMO on those of us who just "don't get it".
But web3 strikes me as those very same people experiencing FOMO because they missed out printing a bunch of money for themselves in the early days of the web by actually providing novel value - which in hindsight now all looks like really obvious low-hanging fruit, hence the FOMO - so they're hoping to "get in on the ground floor" by rebooting the web and inserting themselves into and extracting a payment from every single transaction and interaction on this new web, hoping we use their magical tokens - which oh by the way are also speculative investments that they currently own a bunch of and you don't - as the currency.
Of course, I'm just a hater who doesn't get it.
And conveniently they reserve for themselves double digit percentage amounts of future assets by the way of premine. The levels of hypocrisy in crypto are mind boggling.
And not a single one of the cryptocurrency developers in the entire enterprise has a single finance class under their belt. They are naĂŻvely using pragmatic logic when they write their new distributed financial systems, yet finance does not follow pragmatic logic- it follows social and contractual agreements that are often nonpragmatic and nonlogical - as the contract holders intend. This entire concept is so ill formed it should be a Money Python skit with silly voices.
The capacity of crypto believers to ignore social and political context is limitless. It has to be, because if you bring that context into your thinking, all their hopes for the technology fall apart.
Given how Wall Street has turned out, I think many would argue that a lack of finance degrees is a plus, not a negative.
I think you get it better than they do. The biggest difference I notice is that in the early days of the web, people solved problems they had or saw and benefited from it. Now with crypto, all I see is a solution in search of a problem.
> Crypto fans are always hurling accusations of FOMO on those of us who just "don't get it".
That's just a cheap way to dismiss critics and has no actual basis in reality. The best thing to do is ignore it.
It saddens me that they chose "web3" for the latest crypto pyramid scheme.
Call it what you want, but please don't sully the _web_ with your plat du jour crypto antics.
Also for what it is worth, the web has been decentralised from the very start, I don't see what the fuss is about apart from just everyone getting rich selling the next hot coin/token/whatever.
If the crypto community wants to demonstrate that it isn't a giant Ponzi scheme, why not come up with a non-deflationary token, which will not massively reward 'early adopters' at the expense of everyone else, in perpetuity? (A non-deflationary token would be one where the supply grows by some reasonable percentage every year, effectively acting as a flat tax on one's holdings).
In reality, non-deflationary cryptocurrencies have been tried on various occasions. Surprise! None of them have taken off because "number doesn't go up".
Exactly. I would consider a token that follows something like Friedman's k-percent rule (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman's_k-percent_rule
), a legitimate token.
A token like this would jettison its pyramidal character. If it took off, it might convince me that there is value beyond scamming late adopters.
I haven't seen any gaining much traction however.
Tokens are neither deflationary nor inflationary. The idea that an asset is deflationary or inflationary implies that the supply of the asset determines its price. This is incorrect from a theoretical standpoint, as well as from what empirical evidence tells us. It's a misapplication of the Quantity Theory of Money. QTM is a theory of money, it doesn't apply to stocks, tokens, assets in general, or in situations where there are competing currencies.
> The idea that an asset is deflationary or inflationary implies that the supply of the asset determines its price.
Isn't this one of the most basic properties of supply and demand, though?
I mean,what do you expect to happen if your supply is artificially capped and early adopters start to pump up demand for the stuff they own?
In fact, isn't that the whole point of these schemes? I mean,do you know anyone who decided to waste their own money subsidizing anything related to crypto? Each and every single evangelist and proponent of crypto is invested in getting in cheap and pumping it up to get out with the maximum possible markup.
> Isn't that one of the most basic properties of supply and demand though.
The most basic property of supply and demand is that price is determined by the interaction of supply _and demand_, so a fixing the supply alone determines nothing at all about its value, which is why the incessant pumping is necessary. The cryptoproponent's argument that cryptocurrencies must increase in value because there are hard limits on their growth rate is a cargo cult version of the law of supply and demand made to serve the pump
How would I rectify that against the model of supply and demand, where increasing supply without increasing demand would result in its price deflating?
I don't understand the question.
If you were to take an introductory economics course the first day would prove you wrong. Resouce scarcity combined with increasing demand means prices go up. It most certainly applies when all currencies are designed to operate in the same way because they then move in concert and there is no alternative to counter this.
> Resouce scarcity combined with increasing demand means prices go up.
And? The demand for an asset is tied to its utility. You can't just assume that the demand will continue to increase forever, but that's exactly what the notion of "deflationary asset" implies.
>If the crypto community wants to demonstrate that it isn't a giant Ponzi scheme, why not come up with
a product that does _anything_ at all?
> In reality, non-deflationary cryptocurrencies have been tried on various occasions. Surprise! None of them have taken off because "number doesn't go up".
I am curious to see what will happen when the everything bubble pops
If people don’t react in an angry way that’s the clear signal from society that it wants a certain % of ponzi and scams to be allowed and tolerated
Much like it tolerates gambling , lottery and games of chance which are all zero sum games
> I am curious to see what will happen when the everything bubble pops
… the market is flooded with cheap video cards and we finally have a feast. Unless I die waiting, which is what will probably happen. Please, God, Jesus, Allah, Rama, whoever; I've been waiting far too long already.
The video game industry is literally 10x more scummy than the cryptocoin industry.
edit: keep downvoting me morons. what is microtransactions? literally the same bullshit you bitch about like NFTs and IPOs.
and the video game industry is not just scum for that, but for the terrible code they write and how they drag down the entire computing industry with pervasive poor engineering
what is steam? origin? epic store? literally webshit like a cryptocurrency wallet + vendor lock in + a bunch of mutually incompatible software deliberately made that way in the interests of the vendors instead of using open standards
Monero is inflationary, but it has some other features (untraceability) that drive demand. It hasn't experienced the same swings that the gold-like cryptos have, though.
Isn't Ether (on ethereum), the second most valuable token after bitcoin, non-deflationary? There's no cap and the monetary policy changes regularly. I don't think anyone believes that there is a hard cap. Same is true for BNB, Tether and SOL the third, fourth and fifth most popular coins.
What are you talking about? Random shit-coins that have deflationary economics?
after EIP-1559 eth is now deflationary, part of/related to the switch to proof of stake.
https://btcpro.com/2021/09/05/eth-becomes-deflationary-burn/
Isn't that Dogecoin? (although inflation rate itself is deflationary - dropping from 5% pa about now to 2% in about 20 years)
Yes, sort-of, the supply grows by a fixed absolute quantity every year. I don't really consider it to be a serious attempt at a useful cryptocurrency though.
I suspect any coin attempting price-stability (minimum requirement for a useful currency) would need some kind of central bank to control and guarantee the supply. (We have that already too! It's called Tether and it ain't great.)
> I don't really consider it to be a serious attempt at a useful cryptocurrency though.
was being widely used for tipping when the lightning network was just a twinkle in btc's eye
seems to have declined for that purposed, but was the reason i have a small bag still. maybe missed my chance to sell at $0.70 but my original $70 bag i got to tip an openra server ended up doing quite nice ;)
someday my doge will hit $1
Dogecoin is a copy+paste of bitcoin with a few config values changed.
That's why it shares the inflationary model.
The reason bitcoin is often described as deflationary is that many coins are lost, and the inflation is somewhat priced-in.
How is Bitcoin inflationary? Even without coin lossage (a ridiculous concept in any other financial system, short of literally setting your money on fire), the network is programmed to eventually stop minting coins. Fixed supply on increased demand (if it’s the economic substitute we’ve all been promised) is _the_ precondition for deflationary movement. No amount of “pricing in” changes that.
Even if we assume a fixed _global_ supply of bitcoins (which is a big assumption because it assumes bitcoin deposits at institutions will always be backed by full reserves), that doesn't mean that the supply of bitcoins in a particular economic area will be fixed. It most certainly won't, unless international trade stops.
> which is a big assumption because it assumes bitcoin deposits at institutions will always be backed by full reserves
Where is this assumption coming from? I have never heard this before.
> that doesn't mean that the supply of bitcoins in a particular economic area will be fixed. It most certainly won't, unless international trade stops.
Putting non-competing sectors of the economy in competition against each other for a slice of a fixed monetary supply is another _basic_ and sufficient precondition for deflation. There’s a very good reason we don’t do that currently.
> Where is this assumption coming from? I have never heard this before.
The global supply of bitcoins is fixed _if and only if_ financial institutions are not allowed to hold fractional reserves against deposits.
Maybe I’m missing something obvious here, but it’s not clear why (1) any bank would offer a Bitcoin denominated account, or (2) how it even makes sense to perform fractional banking against Bitcoin. You can’t change the underlying amount in the ledger and the ledger _is_ the value source, unlike physical Federal Reserve Notes.
Well, crypto-exchanges already offer deposit accounts backed with reserves. If at any point the reserve ratio falls below 1 (we don't know if this has already happened), the quantity of bitcoins in circulation will increase as a result of that.
I know of some cryptocurrency exchanges that offer _stablecoins_, which are a dollar-denominated asset that’s (theoretically) backed by cash in the bank. We’ve seen plenty of evidence that the largest stablecoin players are actually fraudsters.
I don’t know of any exchange that offers a deposit account that’s dollar-denominated but backed by cryptocurrency. I can think of lots of reasons for that, FDIC regulations being the _least_ of them. But again, even that wouldn’t make the number of bitcoins in circulation increase: it would be an unstable (and illegal) financial fiction.
I'm talking about bitcoin-denominated accounts backed with bitcoins. These are the standard exchange accounts that most people have.
Okay. In what world would any retail consumer accept a Bitcoin-denominated account based on marginal Bitcoin reserves? Exchanges would be forced to purchase on the open market to meet their withdrawals during demand, which would cause another deflationary spiral. It’s a nightmare scenario with no conceivable upside compared to actual currency.
And again, this is _before_ we get to the problem of “the government lets you do this.”
I don't think you're following me. This isn't some hypothetical scenario. It's common for people who own bitcoin to have their bitcoins deposited at some exchange. Since exchange customers are unlikely to withdraw all their bitcoins simultaneously, exchanges don't have to keep 100% reserves. For instance, they can lend out some of the reserves, or they can use them for whatever purposes they want. When this happens the quantity of bitcoins in circulation goes up. To all effects and purposes, new bitcoins have been created and put in circulation.
I hope that I'm not following, because what you just described is both crazy and illegal.
Cryptocurrencies are currently considered securities under US law. You can't just pop unrealized securities into existence when a prospective investor asks you for them: it's akin to naked shorting. That's why the stock market has "market makers," i.e. firms that provide low-latency settlement of securities in exchange for a small part of the spread.
I can't find _any_ evidence online that any reputable exchange is using its underlying reserves to cover multiple in-kind balances. If you have links to exchanges actually doing this, both I and the SEC would love to see them.
Edit: I'm struggling to even find links to people discussing this _hypothetically_ online. I found this one on a wiki[1], where it's discussed in the abstract. And I found another thought piece from the Atlanta Fed[2]. But no indicator that any current above-board reserve is currently doing this.
[1]:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Fractional_Reserve_Banking_and_Bi...
[2]:
https://www.atlantafed.org/cenfis/publications/notesfromthev...
It can be crazy, in your opinion, but the fact is fractional reserve banking has been a standard practice in banking since the invention of banking. I don't know of any country where it's illegal. Whether it would be legal for crypto-exchanges, which typically don't have a banking license, to engage in fractional reserve banking I don't know. Even if it was illegal in the US, it could be legal in Cayman Islands, or elsewhere, and the result would be the same—an inflated supply of bitcoins circulating around the world. Also a lot of exchanges don't seem to be regulated at all. The ones that are regulated could just get a banking license.
Fractional reserve banking isn't the crazy or illegal part. It's not crazy or illegal because it _makes sense_ in the context of currency, where the purpose is denominational value and facilitating value transfers. The crazy and illegal part is the idea of "fractional reserves" in the context of a fixed-supply security. There's no such thing.
I used the US as an example; what you're describing is illegal on _every single major international exchange_[1]. And as far as banking licenses go: the FDIC won't touch Gemini's actual non-third-party-custodial depository products with a ten foot pole, and they're about as clean as a cryptocurrency firm can be.
If you want cryptocurrencies to "succeed" in some nebulous sense, it would be good to get a start on the "not just good for crime" part of the equation. This isn't it.
[1]:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_short_selling#Regulation...
Yeah, well that's your opinion. I don't think that you know what you're talking about. At any rate, my point isn't about whether crypto-currency deposits backed by fractional reserves are legal or illegal. My point is that the idea that there is a fixed supply of bitcoins is a lie, a marketing narrative to fool gullible idiots into thinking that the price of bitcoin can only go up. And my answer to that is to say that is 1) it's not true that a limited supply ensures that the price can only go up, and 2) it's not true that the supply of bitcoin is fixed, because financial institutions can create additional bitcoins via fractional reserves, and because as a consequence of international trade the supply of bitcoins in different economic areas would fluctuate (sometimes wildly) creating periods of inflation and deflation, just like it happened during the gold standard.
It’s an argument of semantics, really: if it will _eventually_ stop printing coins, I’d consider it inflationary until that point in time and non-inflationary thereafter. In practice, current holders are being diluted to subsidize the security of the network.
This isn’t consistent with the “priced in” position put forward by the original commenter. An asset class that is _going_ to be fixed in quantity for the rest of time is an _obvious_ target for pricing-in.
By that logic the USD has some inflation baked in too, it’s just that in Bitcoin’s case the number is exact and in USD it’s a guess. It’s really just arguing semantics, though. I get both sides’ arguments.
I don’t know about “baked in,” but of course the USD is inflationary: that’s been the explicit Fed policy for decades. It’s been the policy because small amounts of inflation have a measurable economic benefit.
But again: this doesn’t change the fact that Bitcoin is deflationary. It’s a fixed supply of coins on a ledger that _every current stakeholder_ has a strong deflationary interest in. The fact that there might be inflationary forces _internal_ to Bitcoin’s economy doesn’t change that.
I only meant that coins are still being created for now, so the proportion of coins that a specific person owns vs the total is constantly falling, like in any inflationary currency.
If you measure current ownership as a percentage of final issued coins rather than current issued coins, then you've already priced in the inflation.
That's an internal inflation effect, one that appears to have been amply priced into the current value of Bitcoin. Which is perfectly reasonable, since _everybody_ can see that the future quantity of Bitcoin is fixed and/or diminishing, thanks to lossage.
In other words: like the US economy, Bitcoin can have both inflationary and deflationary forces internally. But the overall economic picture of Bitcoin is _intrinsically_ deflationary.
Show me a stock anyone is interested in that isn’t expected to go up and reward early adopters.
“If the stock community wants to demonstrate that it isn't a giant Ponzi scheme, why not come up with a non-deflationary stock, which will not massively reward 'early adopters' at the expense of everyone else, in perpetuity?”
> Show me a stock anyone is interested in that isn’t expected to go up and reward early adopters.
Eve though you framed your challenge as a "no true Scotsman" argument, history is packed with IPOs that tanked after the companies went public.
https://money.howstuffworks.com/10-biggest-ipo-flops.htm
Last year Uber dropped considerably when it's IPO got out of the gate.
The main mistake of your argument is trying to compare something with tangible value with schemes driven by speculation and fear of missing out.
No one was interested in it. :)
I don’t see why stocks have tangible value and tokens used to interact with a network don’t. A stock is a vacuous unverifiable virtual piece of paper. At least if you have a Bitcoin or Ether you can prove what you have and know how many there are.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-02-17/dole-f...
Most stocks don’t even have dividends any more so what else is a stock for other than selling to the next greater fool?
A stock represents ownership in a company that makes things. The value of the stock is relative to the performance of the company, not the amount of fools available to sell to.
Crypto represents nothing and is backed by nothing other than sunk-cost.
> The value of the stock is relative to the performance of the company, not the amount of fools available to sell to.
A company might be destined to make twice their profits, yet if nobody believes they could, nobody will buy their stocks, leaving stock price the same. One might think, the stock price would certainly increase when the company realizes the profits, but it’s not the case either. The market could think that it was a one off event and the company wouldn’t continue growing. Therefore, nobody buys the stock.
> Crypto represents nothing and is backed by nothing other than sunk-cost.
Maybe sometimes. However, if a token is used to pay for blockchain services (such as shared-compute and -data services), the value of the token is at least in part based on the value of those services.
"The value of the stock is relative to the performance of the company"
This is one of the big lies.
> "The value of the stock is relative to the performance of the company"
That's true if companies are evaluated on their fundamentals.
If you start to deal with stocks as if they were meme coins, with no concern of cash flows or business models or profitability, and you add a decade of quantitative easing, then you get stocks like Tesla, and a stock market that's driven by the need to park free cash no matter how risky and absurd the investment is.
> Last year Uber dropped considerably when it's IPO got out of the gate.
Some exchanges or other cryptocurrency businesses fizzle out.
Bitcoin price gets hit on world stability news.
> The main mistake of your argument is trying to compare something with tangible value with schemes driven by speculation and fear of missing out.
People have no idea what TSLA is planning on doing besides "cool car", and ape into the stock because of FOMO. Address this?
Maybe some people behave as you indicate but this is neither the common or original intent. TSLA is only one frothy example but they still (a) make things, (b) have a historical record, (c) report on past, present and forecasted performance, (d) have widely accepted "value", (e) can be readily exchanged for something else of value, (f) have governance that is ultimately responsible for performance, even if they're not the major cause of said performance.
Everybody investing in the stock market is not a Reddit day trader.
Stocks (aka securities) and other products also suffer from Ponzi schemes though. Hence the bureaucracy of the SEC and other governments tasked with regulating and policing the industry.
The SEC could be called many things, but “massive” isn’t one of them. They have fewer than 5,000 employees, which makes them microscopic on the federal government’s scale and virtually nonexistent proportional to the size of market they’re tasked with regulating.
Thanks for that. I had thought they were bigger based on their impact but compared to the FDA (14k) and USDA (100k) they are much smaller by head count. I’ve edited that adjective out of the original post.
I’m disheartened by how small the FTC and SEC actually are upon review.
Then stop acting like it’s a currency and/or infrastructure. If it just spirals indefinitely in value then it can’t be used as either. Pretty straightforward.
It's value is exactly determined by supply-and-demand. It's just as much a "foreign currency" as let's say Vatican Angelbucks. (We know that only a fixed amount of angelbucks will ever exist. So it's deflatory, and it has no earthly uses. But you can send it to your pals via PrayWire, so you can buy coffee with, and so on.)
And if you look at the price graphs it's not always going up. It's a synthetic currency with no real backing economy (and the transaction costs are insane). Pretty straightforward.
Sorry, let me clarify. Stop acting like it’s a _viable_ currency/infrastructure. I get that you can arbitrarily label anything as these.
Right, because I should wait days for banking wire transfers to get rescued out of the slush pile underneath a fax machine somewhere if I want to pay someone with a different bank.
Literal tens of billions of dollars are using these systems to great success. The numbers are refuting your arguments, and will continue to.
When we are all carrying counterfactual wallets, able to hold any number of cryptocurrency, or NFT ownership tokens (of the deed or lease to your house, social club entry etc), with social recovery from your closest family/friends when you smash your iPhone, then what will your argument against technology be, I wonder?
There was plenty of money working successfully in Enron, Madoff Investment Securities, and Evergrande, too.
The traditional systems that are apparently inscrutable to you move, in SWIFT’s case, $5 trillion (with a T) _per day_. These generally settle in a few minutes.
P.S. Transparently resorting to straw men like “if you doubt crypto then you just don’t like technology” is the sort of stuff that prevents people from taking this movement seriously.
Gold has spiraled indefinitely in value and has been used as currency and/or infrastructure for thousands of years.
https://www.thebalance.com/gold-price-history-3305646
Although some stocks have pyramidal like behaviors, these are generally considered fraudulent and collapse in the long run.
Legitimate stocks are expected to be backed by the efficient creation of valuable products or services the company can sell at a profit. These profits are distributed to stock holders as dividends or reinvested in growing the profit potential. The value of a stock crucially stems from the rights to the future profits they give their holders. Legitimate stocks are not just about giving the money of late buyers of stocks to early buyers of stock.
The price of the stock reflects the underlying value though, out of a increasing pool of resources. Companies transmute inputs into outputs of greater future value. Every stock is not a GameStop competing to extract a bigger share of a limited pool of tullip investors.
The price of a stock reflects _beliefs about the prospect for price growth_ [0]. Since these beliefs may be nth-order derivatives (i.e. I believe that other people believe that other people believe that ....), those beliefs have varying levels of connection to "underlying value".
[0] or, alternatively, dividend payouts, but that's a totally different story.
Stocks of boring but profitable companies that pay dividends.
Early adopters in stocks are mostly the risk takers who funded or worked on the business to succeed.
That's not the same as forking something to do a pump and dump scheme.
Except DWAC perhaps, but that's already under investigation by the SEC. Which has no alternative in crypto land.
It's digital gold. Is gold a Ponzi scheme? No.
It's the same as putting money into NASDAQ100 or SP500 and waiting for it to go up only. Is that a Ponzi scheme? No.
It's a volatile synthetic hedge against assets with real fundamentals.
Are speculative gold markets good though?
Not really. But the markets are not bad either. The bad things are all in the context. For these chains it's the insane energy inefficiency. (Storing the same thing over and over by itself makes little sense.)
And the whole "cryptobro culture" (which is the r/wallstreetbet culture, which is a nice essence of how fundamentally small markets are more about the humans who gamble/participate than about the economic properties of the products/stocks/currencies) is not simply bad/good either.
Modern monetary systems are not zero-sum. The central banks (and to a lesser degree the legislatures) can very effectively interact with the financial markets to achieve almost any desired outcome. Furthermore legislatures can and do tax whoever they want thanks to people with money having bank accounts.
The fact that now a lot of money is/was dumped into various blockchains doesn't mean much. It's just sitting here instead of sitting in a money market fund and doing nothing. Or instead of sitting in the central bank as required reserve.
there are a ton of cryptocurrencies where the supply grows every year. dogecoin, tezos, ethereum (this may have changed recently), etc
New Ether gets issued every year
Crypto is not a pyramid scheme, it is not a Ponzi scheme either. Call it a bubble, tulips, "greater fool", pump-and-dump... if you don't believe in the latest crypto-scheme, but pyramid schemes and Ponzi schemes are something different.
For pyramid schemes, the idea is that you have to pay to enter a network, and you make money by recruiting new members. The system breaks down once there a no people left to recruit, which happen quickly due to the exponential nature of the scheme. The core of a pyramid scheme is the filiation system, there is no such thing in, say, a NFT market. You can make a pyramid scheme with cryptocurrencies, but none of the popular trends are. Ponzi schemes are also not pyramid schemes.
Ponzi schemes involve a promise of unrealistic returns on investment, and they do get paid, at least in the early phase. The trick is that the returns come from new investors, and the system breaks down when people stop investing. A Ponzi scheme requires a secretive central authority that pays out the promised interests. And by nature, cryptocurrencies have no central authority and make no promise, so, not a Ponzi scheme.
Instead, crypto-schemes are simply based on speculation. And if it is a scam, it is a different kind of scam.
If we start calling anything a pyramid/Ponzi scheme, the very idea of trade and investment become a pyramid/Ponzi scheme. It will always be the case that early adopters will get more money if the (honest or not) thing takes off, this is a direct consequence of the risks involved.
What did you expect from people who ruined "crypto" by using it for only one kind of system of which cryptography is only one element?
Ironically, the worst part of web3 is that everything that calls itself that, such as web3.js and metamask, are web based.
> The web is decentralized
I know you just want to throw in the invalid "look at me I'm an old school hacker" definition that can't be argued with, but it isn't. To serve content, it has to be hosted somewhere, and that place must be a single entity, and it must have infinite money to replicate the content for infinite users. On freenet or torrent, this isn't the case. Then there are also the other 700 ways the web is centralized...
> it must have infinite money to replicate the content for infinite users
what?
imagine you make a website
imagine it blows up in popularity
do you get the problem now?
I agree that cryptocurrency is a pyramid scheme, but the web is incredibly centralized.
The whole point of DNS is to normalize an easy to remember name to an address so that everyone can access that same address easily. That is almost the purest essence of centralization.
In practice if you want to share family photos with your family do you upload those photos to a third party like a social media site or a cloud provider for all your family to access? That is centralized: an agreed upon location for everyone to access.
In contrast decentralization means no third party. Grandma pushing the family photos directly onto the kids hard drive from across the network, for example.
The confusion here is most people confuse the web for the internet. The internet is a big decentralized network thanks to BGP. The web is an application riding that network thanks to HTTP.
The goal of the web, as it was invented. was to allow decentralized content access via hyperlinks. That vision is essentially dead. Content is now an index on a database behind a walled garden.
On the web content is king. In a true decentralized platform autonomy and availability are king while content is trivial.
> The confusion here is most people confuse the web for the internet. The internet is a big decentralized network thanks to BGP. The web is an application riding that network thanks to HTTP.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but aren’t you making exactly that error above? DNS both predates and exposes networking infrastructure that isn’t the web.
And for what it’s worth, I would consider DNS decentralized: it’s a system of different servers that coordinate to share information. No one party owns the DNS network.
Confusing the fact that DNS’s information is _authoritative_ for centralization would presumably ensnare every blockchain as well, since they entire point of a distributed ledger is to be authoritative.
But I figure that’s the least of blockchain’s problems, given that the underlying network topology of even the largest distributed ledgers tends to be around a dozen “big fish.” Not very decentralized in practice.
> No one party owns the DNS network.
The root servers kind of do, along with central authorities like ICANN which gatekeep the TLDs
No, they don’t. The root server owners (who are mostly universities and research groups, last time I checked) have no formal ownership over the DNS network. They cannot seize or stop any participant in the network, including your scummy local ISP.
Confusing the TLD situation for ownership is making the same “distributed, authoritative” mistake.
Despite what blockchains have been showing, decentralisation doesn't have to be painfully disruptive, behave erratically, look like a complete failure or be a thinly veiled centralised system in order to be considered successful. It can also work well and smoothly!
Yep, this is the irony: the Internet (and WWW) are _still_ mostly decentralized and distributed in the classical fault-tolerance senses of the words. They're held together with patch cables, anxiety and pager calls, and they _still_ work better than anything the cryptocurrency space has managed to produce in the last decade.
> _In practice if you want to share family photos with your family do you upload those photos to a third party like a social media site or a cloud provider for all your family to access? That is centralized: an agreed upon location for everyone to access._
As there are multiple places where the family photos can be posted (Facebook, 500px, Google, etc), that demonstrates that the web _is_ decentralized.
What it may not be is _distributed_, where one can easily self-host:
*
https://berty.tech/blog/decentralized-distributed-centralize...
Choice is not a principle concept of decentralization. In decentralization the only quality that matters is degree of autonomy. If I need your common access point to send/receive content the system is highly centralized as autonomy is fully vested in the third party content host.
The presence of choice only means there are multiple centralized systems not interconnecting.
This is why the web is highly centralized despite choice and why Web3 won’t work. Web3 is focused upon federated solutions. A federated solution is semi-autonomous, less centralized than the web but not fully decentralized.
> _In decentralization the only quality that matters is degree of autonomy. If I need your common access point to send/receive content the system is highly centralized as autonomy is fully vested in the third party content host._
Things exist on a spectrum. I have autonomy to choose where to (e.g.) host my family photos, and even self-host on a VPS or even perhaps at home (either with a static IP or dynamic DNS). While things may moved _towards_ more centralization with Big Tech, does not mean it is _centralized_, just perhaps _less_ _de_centralized / distributed.
> multiple centralized systems
This phrase approaches an oxymoron in my mind. (Bearing in mind de/centralization being on a spectrum.)
Earth has multiple governments. Most governments are highly centralized. No oxymoron.
Autonomy is the ease with which people are free to move between those governments.
I suspect people view the web as decentralized because they cannot divorce their thinking from concepts like _content is king_ and a client/server model.
> Earth has multiple governments. Most governments are highly centralized. No oxymoron.
But you wouldn't say that the governing of Earth _in total_ is centralized (e.g., the UN (with their black helicopters/s)).
Going back to my link:
> _As its name implies, decentralized systems don’t have one central owner. Instead, they use multiple central owners, each of which usually stores a copy of the resources users can access._
> _A decentralized system can be just as vulnerable to crashes as a centralized one. However, it is by design more tolerant to faults. That’s because when one or more central owners or servers fail, the others can continue to provide data access to users._
*
https://berty.tech/blog/decentralized-distributed-centralize...
Or Baran (1964):
> _For example, type (b) in Fig. 1 shows the hierarchical structure of a set of stars connected to the form of a larger star with an additional link forming a loop. Such a network is sometimes called a "decentralized" network, because complete reliance upon a single point is not always required._
*
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memorand...
You are confusing terms. Centralization is a noun describing a verb, _centralize_, which means to come towards a collective center, for example a cult. The verb, the action, has nothing to do with a philosophical concept of a total center.
> The goal of the web, as it was invented. was to allow decentralized content access via hyperlinks. That vision is essentially dead. Content is now an index on a database behind a walled garden.
This is a hard truth that web3 will have to face: centralization happens naturally in decentralized systems.
As a recent web3 example, when twitter teased the idea of verified NFT avatars, half the comments were saying things like that they should piggyback on OpenSea verification so that people don’t just re-mint other people’s NFTs.
OpenSea has taken investment a $10b valuation, to me that implies that the people financially backing web3 think they’ll be able to extract rent by being a central player in it.
You can host a server in your bedroom and share photos with grandma by sending her a hyperlink. That vision is not “dead”; there are many companies that provide hardware + software solutions to do this with a few clicks (e.g. Synology, QNAP, others).
My sadness comes from the fact people perceive X N as better than X N-1. As if web got any better with 2 (in a general sense, not in tech). And what’s this anyway, The Web? Are we spiders, or maybe fishermen? Ridiculous. Don’t stick too much to these names.
> My sadness comes from the fact people perceive X N as better than X N-1
Terminator 3
Home Alone 3
Jurassic Park 3
Police academy 3
Alien 3
The list is long...
GPL 3
Gnome 3
All these third iterations…
Half-Life, er, wait a minute...
> the latest crypto pyramid scheme
The client libraries for Ethereum are called “web3”, and have been for half a decade at least. Web3 has been a core concept promoted by the Ethereum team from the beginning.
Say what you will about Ethereum, it is not the “latest crypto pyramid scheme”.
Yes I guess we can drop the "latest".
Regardless as to whether Eth is currently overpriced, real people pay gas fees to the Ethereum network to use the services it provides. And regardless as to how you feel about value of those services, to those people who are paying those fees, those services do have value.
In other words, the price of Eth is derived in part from real demand for the use of the services of the Ethereum network. If speculative interest in Eth were to completely collapse, its price would not go to zero, because demand for the use of the Ethereum network would sustain it.
I imagine that you would argue that demand for Ethereum network services is itself driven by pyramid schemes, and is therefore inflated. Perhaps. That does not mean, however, that Ethereum itself is a pyramid scheme. And certainly not all of the demand for Ethereum services is illegitimate.
A pyramid scheme requires that cashing out of one's investment depend on new _investment_ money entering the scheme. It is not unreasonable, however, to purchase Ethereum with the hope that the price will go up because it will need to be purchased by users of the network, who will pay higher prices in the future when demand for the network's services goes up.
You can disagree with this proposition without calling Ethereum a pyramid scheme. Just because you think Eth is a bad investment does not necessarily mean that it is a pyramid scheme.
You can find have various definitions of what is a pyramid scheme. I agree that etherium is not a classic pyramid scheme, but for me it fits many criteria so I feel like it's a fair simple description accessible to anyone.
I don't think etherium is necessarily a bad investment if you have no moral or are not well informed. Many scams can be profitable.
> I agree that etherium is not a classic pyramid scheme, but for me it fits many criteria so I feel like it's a fair simple description accessible to anyone
I think you can only say this if you believe that the services provided by the Ethereum network are only valuable to individuals perusing illegitimate activities. Do you really think that there is not any legitimate use for Ethereum?
> I don't think etherium is necessarily a bad investment if you have no moral or are not well informed
Is it immoral to invest in Ethereum if you truly believe in the promise of the technology? Are you saying that anyone who believes in the promise of the technology is ill informed?
Yes, yes, and yes.
Ah, well, that’s certainly a timeless way to end a conversation, to call your interlocutor a dumb jerk!
I'm sorry that my rhetoric and eloquence skills were not up to your expectations.
Don’t get me wrong. I only disagree with everything you are saying, nothing more.
Why would I pay gas when a Pi board gives me the same amount of computing power but is cheaper?
So the started their crypto pyramid scheme a long time ago, still a pyramid scheme.
The web is pretty sullied already, no?
> the web has been decentralised
maybe the web per se, but in practical terms it depends on the DNS which is decidedly not decentralized.
always seemed weird to me that the hosts file never became a little personal address book, with some push mechanism to notify me of address changes, “gmail.com is moving to x.x.x.x”
DNS servers do that.
You're just along for the ride.
Dry your tears, then you might see better and see what the fuss is about.
Can you elucidate us with how exactly this is an advancement of web technologies per se? I agree with OP comment that it's strange to adopt web3 as a moniker when it is a distinct stack/infra much akin to IPFS in spirit.
web1 – the original web, decentralized information sharing but everyone is hosting their own stuff
web2 – make it easier for people to create stuff, but it's all centralized (boo), which in turn makes the interop of the original web much less present. i.e. gatekeepers everywhere
web3 – allow the unfettered creativity of web2 with the benefits of decentralizing in web1. You can use one "account" to login to any web3 service, people can send money to that same account, etc, etc.
In other words, web3 allows you to do things that weren't present in web1 at all without all the web2 centralization/gatekeeping baggage.
Web 1/2/3 is a designation of the global structure of web, if you don't see how 1 and 2 differ (like op) then you don't care that 2 and 3 do.
social networking 'web2' had little lot to do with web also
I'd disagree with that. Web 2 was the idea of site content being dynamic and user generated, and not curated by journalists/editors/whoever working a 9-5 or whatever.
For many things like reddit, digg, youtube etc there was _only_ a web interface to these things. They were _of and for_ the web
That was only a small part of "web 2.0". Just as important were syndication, embeddability and APIs. Web 2 were podcasts, blogs, RSS and pingbacks.
Web 1.0 evolved with user generated content and now more of the world's information is locked up behind a login screen than before.
What this has to do with what is being sold as "web 3.0" is not clear. Blockchains have their uses but it's not the web.
Wikis existed long before the term "Web 2" was invented, "Web 2" wasn't about user generated content or "socializing", but simply a commercial land grab.
Can't agree more.
Creating and sharing content in a decentralized way is exactly what the web is about from its inception.
The only change that occured in the era marketed as "web2" is strong attacks against decentralization.
web1 was reading other people's content, web2 was about creating content and handing it to someone else to publish online, and web3 _should be_ about retaining ownership of your own work. In theory, a web3 website could aggregate content produced by users while the users would be free to revoke the site's access, or they could move their content to a different site if they want, or they could delete it entirely. In a web3 world it should be the case that Reddit's access to content is by looking it up on a blockchain to publish, rather than claiming joint ownership of it.
This, obviously, assumes that you believe users retaining ownership of the content they make is a real and necessary benefit. I'm not sure about that yet. I don't really see why people need to.
Unfortunately however, regardless of whether web3 content ownership is a good thing or not, the current cohort of web3 businesses and evangelists seem more interested in shilling their own coins and many-thousands-of-dollars coding courses instead.
This all sounds very noble, but it will last precisely as long as it takes someone to right-click copy right-click paste.
Sure you can verify the hash and signature etc, but no one reading an article is going to bother verifying the signature apart from the real die-hards. Heck my mum can't even verify she typed in the right URI and ends up on all sorts of crazy scam sites (e.g. "I went to google and they said I had to call them about a virus and pay them ÂŁ150 to fix it").
If someone posts something to reddit3, then someone copies it and reposts it again with a different hash and sig, what will happen? Nothing I expect.
The ownership aspect of web3 doesn't fix the problem you outline, sure, but it isn't meant to. Ownership of something isn't proof of uniqueness, it doesn't stop copying, and it would have no impact on what user's are able to do with other user's content. That's the same as ownership in the real world - the fact you own a Picasso doesn't stop me copying it, or photographing it, or telling people it's really by me. Ownership is about control of how legitimate third parties interact with your things, not how people copy them, illegally or otherwise. The control over copying comes from the legal mechanisms we attach to ownership, not the ownership itself. You can sue me for copying something, or report me to the police. The same would be true for web3 (if the courts choose to recognise that aspect of it all).
The benefit of web3 is about users being able to control how their content is published by web3 websites. Reddit3 would not be able to claim ownership of user's creations. Like I said, I don't know if it's necessary or even that useful for users to have that control, but people definitely complain about it a bit. Maybe it would be.
> You can sue me for copying something, or report me to the police. The same would be true for web3 (if the courts choose to recognise that aspect of it all).
So web3 is exactly like web2 then?
Legal system is still playing catch-up with web1.
Web2, in the social media sense, was about advertising and merchandising. Let’s not reinvent history with a fiction that never was.
Yes web was decentralised till it became centralised with big tech gatekeepers. AMZN makes more money from sellers fee than AWS now. Thus killing small businesses - the lifeblood of most economies. Link below.
It is time to get rid of gatekeepers, toll collector and have control of our data & communities. Web 3 is a way do that and will take about a decade as the infra builds out. So it certainly is BS for big tech landlords and their retinue.
Crypto, is part of that plan for payments. Certainly there are scams but no different than scams today - where we are treated like lab rats subjected to data stimuli, our data stolen without permission or compensation.
Sure I will take the Internet of 90s any day over today’s web with its surveillance capitalism. But that boat passed long back, as will the current one. Web3 allows users to be in control of the network(s) or communities collectively. That certainly is good for most folks.
https://www.businessinsider.in/finance/news/amazon-has-a-spe...
What were you able to do in the 90s that you cannot do now on the web? I do not subscribe to this mumbo jumbo about gatekeepers, data stealing, centralised internet etc. While true, you are literally free to use any service you like, nobody is forcing you to spend your dollar here or there.
Good products are usually driven by commercial entities. I would love to use something else besides Android or iOS that is not backed by a commercial giant, which WORKS, is not full of spyware and has a healthy ecosystem but nobody is making one, nobody is able to put 2 and 2 together there.
Are the products you buy online going to physically move differently when you use the "decentralised" internet? Are the small businesses going to revive because of that? AMZN did not kill them, the consumer did. It's the consumer that spends the dollar and dictates such outcomes - none of which are going to be fixed by Web 3. For me, the centralisation that amazon provides is a feature, not a bug. You will not kill AMZN until you understand why it works the way it does and start competing with them. Don't tell me it can't be done because AliExpress is giggling in the background.
I have a few friends doing a fortune on AMZN without even seeing the products they sell (FBA). Adapt or die, it's just nature.
You can’t run a mailserver from your home without significant issues.
Oh yes you can, without much technical difficulties, easier than you would in the 90s actually [1][2]. Does it work as you would expect? Probably not because gmail and other ones are blocking/ghosting you (I suspect this to be the issue right?). Nobody is forcing people towards gmail though. I am one that is scared of being locked out by giants like Google and I switched everything (website logins + mail) to something else (my domain email, managed by protonmail). The transition was seamless and I control my mail with my domain right now. I can migrate at will any time I want.
Mailservers not running from your house is not really all that bad...for the rest of us. Imagine all the spammy software that your friends and relatives install on their computer being able to spin one and blast campaigns.
[1]
https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver
[2]
Amazon has been fantastic for my small business.
The fees aren't too crippling (around 15% of revenue) and FBA is an absolute Godsend for anyone based outside of the US trying to crack into that market (similar for Europe).
I could not thank Mr. Bezos more for the opportunities Amazon has given my family. The income from FBA was a major factor in my decision to quit my job back in 2020, and because of that my daughter can be with her daddy every single day.
The problem with Amazon is that a) for every story like yours, there are 5 that say the opposite, and b) it's all enabled by abusive labour practices.
I don't disagree with b, but I'd suspect there are many, many more people like me in the silent majority.
You just don't hear about it much because it's a boring news story.
How much you get for shilling?
You can't post like this here, and we ban accounts that do. Please read the rules and don't do this again.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Web3 is a web of lies. It promises proof or original for digital content which is a) nonsense and b) impossible. It promises easy transfer of digital rights while not doing that at all and it is actually impossible with current crypto tech. It promises decentralized money while making extremely centralized system. It promises severig ties with money printing and then blatantly money prints with zero oversight. It promises investments, but that that is completely manipulated by major player as they wish. It promises security but ”lol, not your keys not your money”. It promises getting rich, but conveniently forgets that crypto is negative sum casino. It promises going green, but is fully conscious that it will never happen because fundamentally there need to be punishment for bad actors and energy is it in crypto.
Basically every tech where inventor looks you in the face and says that ”black is white” can be called web3.
If you've read Anathem by Neal Stephenson; he has an amusing made up word "bullshytt" (
https://anathem.fandom.com/wiki/Bulshytt
) that is being used in the book by the avout to denote exactly the kind of stuff web3 seems to be about.
In the book, the Avout are basically science & philosphy nerds that the rest of society has locked up in monasteries where they are not allowed to use any form of modern technology after a few incidents in the past where they went off and invented things like gene manipulation, nuclear weapons, etc. The outside world still has technology and interacting with them every few decades is hard for the avout because they seem to adopt all sorts of technical jargon every few years (i.e. bullshytt). So, they need to figure out what these people are talking about every time they are allowed out (every 1, 10, 100, or a 1000 years).
Asking the question if it is bullshit is kind of answering it, I would say. But it's definitely bullshytt.
For awhile I insisted that all cryptocurrencies were bullshit and also Ponzi schemes, but given how many people take pleasure in buying them, selling them, and talking about them, I've come round to viewing them as a kind of in-game currency, with the game being a bit like those role-playing games that you play in your neighborhood while interacting with the real world. Anyone who grew up playing some variation of Assassin, especially the multi-day assassin games where you and your friends were still playing even when you went to school, and occasionally you had to tell teachers "I don't want to run this message to the main office because I think my friend Jim has a plan to get me if I go there." Much laughter.
Cryptocurrencies are starting to feel like that, a massive game that people take pleasure in. Nothing wrong with that. I've enjoyed real-world role-playing games, so I don't want to judge anyone else who is into such things.
Is it crazy to make a game currency your main form of investment? Maybe, but not automatically. You should, of course, invest in a diversified portfolio, but if you want to go long on this particular kind of game, it might pay off huge in the end.
I recall when I was a child me and my friends played Dungeons and Dragons -- long running campaigns that went on for years. One of the parents of my friends was upset by this and said it wasn't really a game because it didn't end and nobody could be declared a winner. I'm afraid my initial reaction to cryptocurrencies was similar, not seeing it as a game and rejecting it as not being real.
Of course, a big difference is that we insisted Dungeons and Dragons was a game, whereas the proponents of cryptocurrencies continue to insist that this is not a game. Some make some variation of the argument "there is so much money in this, it's too big to be a game" but that's an incorrect understanding of a game. There is a lot of money in esports, but we are still talking about games.
I've come round to accepting that cryptocurrencies are here to stay. I no longer consider them Ponzi schemes, I do regard them as a kind of play activity, one that deliberately tries to blue the line between play and non-play. To the extent that they enable certain kinds of criminal activity, they become real and can be used in non-play contexts. But mostly, this is a kind of play that some people find pleasure in, and there is no point in berating them for it.
The ratio of crime to harmless fun does concern me. For example if Monero is 90% ransomware and violent gangs and only 10% innocent gambling then I'd rather not use it.
The number 1 choice of criminals is still and will always be fiat. It doesn't require any sophisticated tools or knowledge and is accepted everywhere.
The 'crypto is for criminals' narrative has been debunked so many times, but if you still need convincing just look how crime infested traditional banking is in comparison:
Do you think that the ratio of legitimate uses to criminal use is higher or lower for crypto vs fiat?
They're both currencies. The possible uses are the same.
As far as wel can tell fron panama papers, etc, most money laundering and corryption schemes use 'normal' money
I would like to see more discussion around P2P solutions like
and the fundamental principles around distributed networks/economies.
I really like the idea of being able to "git clone" your data/website into your own local browser and just make it's own webserver. For most of content we generate, that would probably be enough.
I don't see the point of trying to place everything in a blockchain. I understand the power (and need) to decentralization though.
And I'm not sure just one tech/coin/protocol/chain will be enough, but maybe if we pack:
- a P2P browser, with a wallet for authentication+payment (abstracting money away together with authentication is a near idea)
- a versioned content manager that make it easy to pull/push from/to peers
- ways to P2P nodes to sign their own content and give permission or not to peers to read/write, so we can trace ownership through version logs
- a way to run serverless functions to share computational power, but only for complex tasks like ML training, rendering, etc
- a way to automatically (and collectively) parse in-browser data to add annotations (bringing semantics to random data, or labels to ML datasets)
- automate renderers of such data to create (and host) 2D websites, data visualizations, or 3D content (you can call it your own miniverse)
Or what I just described is the Web we're already building, we just need more hands on deck to actually build it instead of wasting our time with bs.
I wish more people said this: P2P is discussed far less than it should be, in my opinion.
Blockchains have their uses - some of which I think offer real value - but from both a utility and ideological standpoint, if many people in "web3" truly stood by their principles they would be working on these kinds of technologies first. (For context, for my small part I'm attempting to build P2P zk rollups to allow users to prove to each other the correctness of their off-chain work)
The "current" use of web3 kind of started like that (at least my impression), it's only somewhat recently that the big noise about it comes from the blockchain corner. Which is kind of annoying, because it drowns out the rest.
Whenever I read about Web3 I always get the idea the feeling it's an entirely self-interested idea or movement, and there is nothing idealistic about it. Instead of control being with a single corporation, control will be with an exclusive limited group of founders who got in cheap, and to which access is sold at a significant premium.
It pretends to democratize things, but rather moves from a monopoly to an oligarchy, which works great for the 'in' group but not necessarily for those outside it.
It’s like that headline about the internet being a glorified fax machine in 1999. [0]
It was wrong to put your name on that piece for posterity to see (and mock you) , but if you listened to that article and shorted the Nasdaq you’d have made 5000% type returns .
And if Krugman himself listened to his own brain , he’d have had enough money not to care about that piece or make people forget about it
The web3 might not be bullshit , but if you want to make money the only trade out there is to bet that it is .
Bulls who say that web3 is in its early days surely mean the technical early days , because financially the web3 is already priced for world domination .
Bulls forget that when you have to learn a programming language to profit off a trend you already missed on life changing money and hockey stick price increase (bitcoin 2010-2020 and Ethereum 2015-2020)
[0]
https://twitter.com/kevincadogan/status/1195521960437932033?...
It always comes back to money, not what cool things you can do with it.
Everybody conceives cool things in their minds but the cooler the idea the more it’s a winner take all market
Web1.0 teaches this just by looking at the big tech giants which dominate. There’s space for only one in each of the big tech sub fields. Search - social media -cloud - Desktop OS - phone OS
The ideal is to bet on a trend instead of a company and do so when the rising tide lifts all boats such as Nasdaq 1995-2000 and Bitcoin 2010-2020.
I get what you are saying but in today society there is not only no glory but outright ridicule and financial trouble for people who have a cool project which gets copied by a giant . It ends up in tears .
I wish it was different . I contacted on LinkedIn the guy who put together the first Facebook like social network in 2000. He works for Sony and nobody knows his name
The crypto ecosystem does have a killer app. Just not one people are eager to talk about. The vast majority who know about it are making money off it. It is a subsidized casino. Casinos are wildly popular even though they take 5% of the betting flow. How popular would a casino that on average pays out 5% be? Where is the 5% coming from? Three sources: money launderers, scammers (tether etc), and longer term speculators, in order of size. Money laundering traditionally takes something like a 30% haircut. Taking only a 5% haircut in crypto is a massive improvement and thus we should expect to see a substantial fraction of all the world's money laundering to move on chain. The other two are self explanatory.
Ironically the people pushing for Web3 are mostly those that do not understand why decentralisation is key^1. The projects pushed by these individuals and corporations are largely very centralised.
Look at the Solana fiasco a while back where the network went down and required a coordinated restart.
Another centralising power in these "smart" blockchains are the stable coin issuers. In the event of a hard fork^2 Tether and USDC essentially have the power to decide single-handedly decide which chain ends up being the correct one. Why? Because they can't support two chains, the value of the tokens would be split in half. So, for example. Let's say Tether decides that Eth 2.0 is not something they would like to support, they would simply say "We will not redeem any coins on Eth 2.0" and that would be it. The value of the DeFi on that chain would evaporate instantly and no one would use it. The fact that almost no-one talks about this is pretty scary.
^1 Only Bitcoin is actually sufficiently decentralised to withstand large take-over attempts and politics, IMO.
^2 Ethereum hard forks every 6 months by design, by the way
> Only Bitcoin is actually sufficiently decentralised to withstand large take-over attempts and politics, IMO.
This is just a meme. If large blockers in the blocksize wars had won, the statement would still be true. Today, you cannot go against Blockstream's capture of bitcoin's IP (whatever happens will happen with the direction of /r/bitcoin, bitcointalk, @bitcoin, bitcoin.org, and bitcoin github owners).
With complete censorship both bitcoin subreddit and bitcointalk site stopped and advocacy of increase in blocksize. I hardly consider this as 'defending a take-over attempts', but if you think that was a fair action then sure bitcoin is 'decentralized' enoguh to withstand take-over attempts and politics, whatever.
No it isn't a meme. Blockstream and some internet forums don't control Bitcoin. This is honestly just a conspiracy theory.
The only real decentralisation is the one constituted of 8 billion brains and 8 billions bodies which are all roughly the the same size and strength
All the other types of decentralisation are marketed to you by early adopters who want you to pump their coin in order for their asset to increase in price
They are ironically using the concept of decentralisation to centralise wealth and power in their hands
Of course even if with their dishonest intent they can never quite beat the real decentralisation provided by nature which makes it so that even the most powerful “human” ever (Jesus Christ) only has an extremely limited amount of power over the totality of humanity.
Matter of fact “he” only gets to be the spokesman of otherwise already popular concepts such as compassion , love and the reward for those who practice them
I think many comments are either missing the point or just use it the article as an excuse to talk about something else.
The key point is that today everything is seen as a kind of speculation, and in order to have a decent life (provide for a family, and have a secure place to live, including in the old age) one has to be good at it.
It is one of the central problems of our society, and whatever is called web3.0 seems to only make it worse. As someone who is extremely unenthusiastic about being bearish, bullish and anything around stock markets I can understand author's sentiment very well
Web2 adoption was organic, driven by programmers and it definitely made the end user experience much better. With web3 we are jumping ahead of what it will be before even there has been consensus on it. For now it's an idea with possibilities. What is worse is VC's, hustlers, influencers (Gary Vee etc),Elite crypto tribes(polka) are selling the 'product' that doesn't exist yet. I say let it organically evolve and not prematurely bring in the marketers to sell it.
If I had a fraction of a bitcoin for every recruiter who has contacted me in the last two months with a breathless crypto startup job posting with boatloads of seed capital, I'd be "rich."
If the tech industry bubble pops in the near future, it will be because of crypto.
(EDIT: As a sidenote, it is interesting that when I filed my taxes for 2020 revenue Canada had added a question about cryptocurrency assets.)
"Web 2.0" was the modern web around 2008, and concurrent with or associated with things like AJAX and Ruby-on-Rails - here is an old article expanding on the term:
https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1310178
"Web 2.0 is a term (or rather buzzword) that you often hear when describing most “modern” web sites; however, it shouldn’t be a new concept to web developers. Web 2.0 is actually a consolidation of many existing technologies that allows you to provide a rich interactive user experience over the web. Examples of Web 2.0 technologies include, but aren’t limited to, the following areas:
- Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), which include AJAX, Adobe Flash, Silverlight, and Moonlight - Web services - Blogs - Wikis - Social networking - Social bookmarking - RSS/Atom"
Just a reminder on how easy it is not seeing the forest because of the trees, and instead focusing on things that are shiny and noisy yet will not last.
What lasted was to move from server-side computing where all the UI was rendered server side as HTML pages, to a world where a lot of the computing and all of the UI rendering was done client-side.
So it meaningful to ask: Are we going into a world where the centralised server gets even less of a role because of things like data storage, payments, authentication are done in a distributed manner or purely client-side?
The difference between Web 2 and 3 is that no one had to write long Twitter threads daily on why Web 2 was the revolution, and what builders should be making with it. It was organic because there was demand from consumers, and people used the tools available to them to fulfill that demand.
Web 3 is artificial, with little to no demand outside of being a vehicle for unregulated speculation. The people most excited for Web 3 aren't builders nor consumers, but venture capitalists and people with a financial stake waiting to cash out.
It feels marketing driven. Like trying to make a thing. I haven't seen an actual change in consumer interaction with the web, which was a defining aspect of web1 -> web2.
specifically, a16z is hyping the hell out of it
I reject the term 'web3'. Let start with the simple fact that blockchain is not web-based. Actually, lets end with that fact, too. This tech, whether or not you believe it is going anywhere, is quite simply not the web.
Ignoring its association with Ethereum and crypto.
I think standards for the following:
- Authentication - Payments - Storage
That could be used without a server-side component would be useful and bring web client-side programming forward.
The question the title asks can be answered with a single word: yes.
I think this is a pretty astute analysis/taxonomy of analysis.
I'm interested in read/study more about: "the broad political-economic or cultural questions: who is participating in, sponsoring, and getting rich off of web3 technologies? What is the particular political or economic dynamic that makes the blockchain attractive? Given this, what will it be used for?", or "the culture, values, and especially the backers of the web3 world."
These are all things to be investigated that don't have a "yes" or "no" answer, but are instead "what's going on and what might it mean.".
The only thing I found myself taking issues with is the author's confidence that the _technical_ issues ("Can the blockchain do anything that other currently existing technology cannot do and/or do anything better or more efficiently than other currently existing technology?") are "difficult to definitively resolve to everyone's satisfaction" but the _second_ category "Will the blockchain form the architecture of the internet of the future" has a simple yes or no answer that will somehow be definitively resolvable.
My own thinking-as-an-engineer reaches the opposite conclusion -- the first category are relatively simple technical answers which can be be evaluated on technical merit, while the second category is future-prediction, political dispute, and narrative choice, and _that's_ what's difficult to "resolve to anyone's satisfaction" with a consensus determination somehow.
Probably both categories are actually a mixture of both.
But what's going on _right now_ is more knowable than predictions of future paradigm shifts, either way. That's actually the main thing I take from OP, let's lessen my interest in arguing about predicting the future, and increase it into looking into "what the hell is going on right now anyway". (Like what are the social and cultural and political factors in the current rise of blockchain interest, and who does it benefit?)
> I'm interested in read/study more about: "the broad political-economic or cultural questions: who is participating in, sponsoring, and getting rich off of web3 technologies?
This is the key question that gets overlooked in these discussions.
Web3 is a vague term, but it’s difficult to get straight answers about who’s using Web3 technologies because most of the Web3 narrative refers to hypothetical future technologies.
But even though these hypothetical future Web3 products don’t exist yet or aren’t actually useful in their current form, there are numerous ways to buy their tokens in preparation for their imagined future usefulness.
More specifically: These projects will sell you arbitrary tokens _now_ that supposedly will become more valuable in the future when other future people actually want to use the service. As an early adopter, you will be well positioned to sell your tokens to them at a huge markup!
The obvious question is: Why does every new service need a new, unique token to pay for it? Why must these products built on chains like Ethereum go out of their way to _not_ use Ethereum as their payment method? The reason is that they can’t generate huge speculative profits unless they introduce arbitrary new tokens, so of course they must play the new token game.
But now the profit comes not from building an actual usable service, but from selling tokens for hypothetical future services. In fact, even the developers understand this and will often jump from one new project to the next, capitalizing on token speculation instead of actually finishing anything because that’s where the money is.
If any of the web3 projects want to be taken seriously, they need to stop introducing new arbitrary tokens and just use the existing infrastructure and coins. Build an actual service, not a new currency with a grand idea of a future Web3 service attached to it.
As with a lot of cryptocurrency stuff, web3 is very overhyped yet also genuinely promising and useful. The ecosystem is not yet at a point where it's streamlined enough for mainstream adoption, but it's possible to build working MVPs for very interesting services with privacy and decentralization guarantees that just weren't feasible pre-web3.
Of course that does come at some cost and from a pure surface user experience level a lot of these services do still feel like "existing things but worse". It takes a while for these kinds of structural changes to catch up in some ways, though there's already plenty of web3 services that are genuinely useful in their own right, too.
Disclaimer: I get paid to develop web3 applications and I like my job
> but it's possible to build working MVPs for very interesting services with privacy and decentralization guarantees that just weren't feasible pre-web3.
Do you have any examples? Because up to this point most web3 projects I've seen fall in one of two categories: "you could do this before" and/or "nobody actually wants this".
Don't forget "solves problem with blockchain that enables one of the first two"
Let's agree on a definition first: web 3.0 is using blockchain tech to replace current server-side computing (static file hosting, functions/processing, databases, etc) and online centralized services (payments, identity, etc).
So, is it bs? No, it is not. If you are a developer, you can go now and build a dapp (a web3 application or distributed app).
So far so good, but:
A simple dapp will cost cents to host/run (even better: will cost only once!) but, can it scale? How easy/cheap would be to run a big, very big, social net? An online store such as Amazon? Uber?
No "password-reset" mechanism. That just sucks.
Keeping the current web safe for your uncle is a pain, yes, that uncle that clicks on every link sent from the rich African prince. Imagine keeping it safe once you help him install a chrome-ext crypto wallet so he can login and consume content from a dapp social net?
It is not really decentralized: you public facing dapp cannot be directly served from the nodes of a blockchain, you need a gateway, that is a centralized web server (good luck making SSL work for your registered domain!).
It would take many years for businesses to migrate/adopt web 3.0 standards. We are barely finishing moving tech to "online versions" from traditional client-server apps.
Miners are businesses, running nodes costs money, they ought to make more of what they spend otherwise they will just disconnect the node. Your data/code may be distributed but its persistence/availability depends on the economic success of whatever project you choose to trust. Early adopters of web 2.0 server-less apps experienced this first hand when they had to port their projects from Parse to something else when FB bought it and shut it down.
Professional miners are needed. You are not going to build your banking dapp on the spare capacities of our laptop's hard drives and CPUs, or are you? Might as well trust the engineers at Google or AWS who have it already figured out and are charging reasonably for it, no?
In sum: web 3.0 tech is here, it is interesting, but it is not a hammer for every nail.
How does the nail for the web3 hammer look like?
Because every use case I heard so far can already be solved more efficiently without blockchains.
As I recall the original conception of the web was such that it was inherently browsable _and_ editable (the first web browser was also a WYSIWYG editor). After people forgot about this and subsequently rediscovered an easier form of publishing user-generated content via web apps (PHP) "Web 2.0" took off. Ever since then I've used "Web 3.0" as a casual tongue-in-cheek reference to emerging web technologies and concepts; I never thought I'd see it seriously applied to technologies like blockchain and asymmetric key cryptography.
The absolute best argument I’ve seen so far _against_ “web3” is this very pro-web3 and very clear article.
https://www.preethikasireddy.com/post/the-architecture-of-a-...
Read that, and make sure you understand the basics of what Ethereum, IPFS and maybe a few more technologies from the article etc actually are, then think about if that sounds like sensible thing to do.
If you can still take it seriously afterwards then I’m impressed!
It astonishes (and saddens) me that someone could design the architecture diagram at the bottom of that article and _genuinely_ believe that what they’ve described is an improvement to the status quo.
The number of middlemen alone is farcical.
Web3 or what is meant by it is just a database in the form of a blockchain. Nothing else.
And to interact with this database, you still need a centralized server.
This is the main problem, having solved which, I believe, we could reach a new level. If browsers could communicate directly with the blockchain, bypassing centralized servers, this would take the technology to a new level.
"web3" certainly looks like BS to me. Or, at least, it's just a buzzword lacking any real meaning.
But perhaps I simply don't understand it sufficiently. No matter how many explanations or advocacy pieces I've read about bringing the blockchain to the web, I don't see what the actual value of doing that is. The cost/benefit ratio of it seems incredibly unfavorable.
I don’t like how web3 supporters divide sentiment towards web3 into “you’re either a cool crypto-aware person or just a normie loser”. It comes off as a pressure tactic, like they’re trying desperately to sell something. This is a tactic used by charlatans, not by engineers.
Something that has frustrated me so far about the debate over web3 is the extent to which it's articulated in the latter terms — those of a prediction market
... all discourse is subconsciously understood to be people taking speculative positions on various topics
... can I at least just get slowly tanked on free booze and annoy people with a reminder that the house always wins?
So clearly the author thinks that "Web3" is just a rebranding of crypto. I didn't see anywhere in the article an explanation of Web3 or any examples.
Let me premise my take by saying that I am not a crypto zealot. If I hear a financial/investing podcast talk about crypto, I will fast forward. I think the vast majority of investors should steer clear. What about Web3?
Let me tell you my story of independently "discovering" the concept now being called Web3 - as I'm sure thousands of others have done in the last few years. In July I was out on my walk and an idea popped into my head. It was interesting enough that I took out my phone and recorded as I thought it though out loud.
Here it is in a nutshell: Distributed smart contracts can empower information consumers.
And here's the specific form that my idea took, and why, when I got home from my walk, I bought some ETH, having never owned any cryptocurrency before. My screens are going to be "Web3 clients". This client will have a new feature that my current TV does not. It will have available an overlay like Amazon X-ray. It will display info about what is on my screen, and most importantly a "truth meter". While I couldn't work out the details of how this would work, I did decide that a) it's a feature that I think will arrive, and b) Ethereum is likely to play a role.
Here's another idea: Discuss Web3 without even mentioning cryptocurrencies. Instead, just give your idea as I did, and explain how blockchain smart contracts will play a role in the implementation, and perhaps at the very end of presenting your idea, mention that it may be considered a form of Web3.
> Let me tell you my story of independently "discovering" the concept now being called Web3
Alright, listening...
> It will display info about what is on my screen, and most importantly a "truth meter". While I couldn't work out the details of how this would work
You are describing dislikes, reviews, stars and similar systems. They exist. They are pretty universally considered bad and when they are not it is not because magic decentralization. I'd also ask why/how a universal "truth meter" would work. Saying "I couldn't work out the details of how this would work" makes this sorta like someone saying "Imagine if we had infinite power, wouldn't that be nice?" or "What if people could just get along?".
> Discuss Web3 without even mentioning cryptocurrencies
I'd love to! But the Magic Internet Money cryptocurrency people seem to have decided it must involve cryptocurrencies so the term is tainted. I consider web3 a term similar to php6 or ipv5. Something that was but also wasn't, isn't rescuable as a term since it implies something that never _actually_ was.
>You are describing dislikes, reviews, stars and similar systems.
No. Not crowdsource. Remember this is to counter the effects of social media.
I mean that every moment of video is fingerprinted, and it's providence back to creator is noted, and the trustworthiness of that creator is reported. The purpose is to counter fake news and deep fakes. So if NYTimes created the video - good truth. If NYTimes showed a video they found on the internet - less good score. Still good since I'm trusting NYTimes to vet source.
In case anyone missed this point too, blockchain technology enables the notion of robotic singularity. Not saying that's what it is, but when your robot (or car) is connected to an immutable ledger, it has access to everything every other robot (or car) senses, so for instance robots connected to a blockchain can synchronize their orchestration (so, for instance, making it more possible to produce self driving cars).
Web3 is not bullshit, nobody actually defined it properly, just like nobody defined properly what is Web0, Web1 and Web2. Web versioning methodology is bs, not the general concept of pinpointing what makes a big leap.
Does anybody here have a link to proper methodology for versioning the Web?
ps. Web is simply referring to a web of connected “pages” through links. Pretty much anybody who claims to work on Web3 says nothing about links.
So far, all "WebX" names turned out to be bullshit (or at best, pointless). Besides, the cryptobros seem to have a somewhat short memory: "Web3" was going to be the "Semantic Web" (which of course turned out to be bullshit too), so if anything, we're now at "Web4" for the next pointless hype cycle.
For context, the definition of web 3.0 from Tim Berners-Lee gives a good idea an the level of hazyness of this concept:
> People keep asking what Web 3.0 is. I think maybe when you've got an overlay of scalable vector graphics — everything rippling and folding and looking misty — on Web 2.0 and access to a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data, you'll have access to an unbelievable data resource.
I think the problem is that we are lacking distinction between Web and the and IT tech in general. Web is just making all this accessible - links. Blockchain adds big benefit to the general usefulness of the Internet - for instance possibility of doing anonymous transactions, with all of its downsides of course.
Not enough for a major version bump though. It’s just a small blip on entire spectrum of IT tech.
> The hazy vision of new decentralized internet, built on the blockchain
Ten years ago, web 3.0 was supposed to be the semantic web (whatever happened to this fad).
So like "agile development", everybody will define it by themselves.
This. As soon as I first heard about web3 I thought did I miss web2?
Web 2 was the idea of user generated content and commenting etc - digg/reddit, twitter, youtube etc have no content of _their own_ (c.f. a news website or whatever) but _everything_ there came from the users.
Now it seems obvious and not worthy of a label, but at least at the time I guess it kinda captured the imagination and people imagined new/different ways to do things (I think it also coincided with a lot better tooling and tech around javascript).
Perhaps web3 will do the same, but so far it just feels like "it's the web as you know it, but now you need to also buy some bitcoin to use it"
To me web3 is financializing internet activities all the way down.
Web3 was data. The money/asset/whatever was still going through classical channels.
> Web 2 was the idea of user generated content and commenting etc
I keep hearing that, but that's been the thrust of the web from well before the term "web 2" ever left anyone's lips.
Quite a good summary!
However, web3 has nothing to do with Bitcoin which does not provide smart contracts or wallets connected with web apps. Most decentralised apps are built with the Ethereum code (either using the original chain or one of the many forks).
Yes, fifteen to twenty years ago, it was used to refer to the emphasis on user-generated content and the generalization of social media.
What is a regular personal "Web 1.0" website other than "user generated content" though. If anything, "Web 2.0" was the perversion of the original WWW idea by "big tech". We already had the "decentralized web" for a few golden years before the bean counters discovered the internet.
> What is a regular personal "Web 1.0" website other than "user generated content" though.
It wasn't user generated. User in this case being the visitor to a website and not its creator.
Your personal page is likely largely static (in content, if not tech) and defined by you, the site owner. Web 2 allowed the public site users to generate/curate the content on the site.
> Web 2 allowed the public site users to generate/curate the content on the site.
This distinction only matters with centralized platform like AOL, Medium or Facebook though. Wikis existed long before big companies hijacked the web.
This is either outright bullshit or a clumsy attempt at historical revisionism. Web2 didn't introduce technology that wasn't existing before. It was the unwashed masses flooding what had previously been a space of high SNR AND the big corporations seizing control (and terms like "web2" were used to that effect) in order to exploit the herd.
This is happening again now with the web3 fad. A new generation of gullible idiots and sociopaths to take them for a ride.
You’re commenting on a website, so no, you did not :)
I remember people saying WEB 2.0 / AJAX was bullshit too. It's easy to lampoon the buzzwords / early failures of a new paradigm. People will be tinkering to learn new ways to working. Personally I believe Web3 has a huge future.
Most of these people will be working on and investing in web3 backed projects within 5 years.
There is a lot of effort being made to discredit web3 because existing players are aware that it means a loss of control.
I don't know what Web3 will be represented by, but Web4 will be operated with sticks and stones...
I think, web3 has potential.
Is it full with grifters?
Sure, but I wouldn't call the stuff that happened in the last 20 years on the internet as sound, even if it was often law abiding.
Web3 is full of ponzi schemes and, at least to me, the rich people web2 "created" tell there is something wrong too.
Decentralization is an opportunity, and I know this doesn't require blockchains, but I had the impression that OSS, and software in general, lacked in terms of "payment on the protocol level".
So, I think, this could lead to a new, better, era, for the internet. If we take the right steps.
I keep wondering where all those millions invested in NFTs (fairly insanely, it seems to me) are actually _coming from_, and one plausible potential answer is "all those rich people web2 'created'" who now have more money than they know what to do with.
I don't think they are somehow separate things in that or other ways, as if "web3" is like some new counter-power to "web2".
Yes.
I think so too.
In the best case it will be some kind of redistribution of value.
I dedicated the last 3 years of my life to build "web3". In my case it means building a new democratic Internet (whatever that means) on top of ENS+IPFS. I a few projects in this direction, the current one is Esteroids.
Is this a good idea? dunno yet. Is this BS? I hope not, my intentions are surely good, no BS in them. Are there plenty of BS web3 projects? Yes, of course, same as in any other area of IT. But I really don't think the web3 idea is inherently BS, there's really plenty of value to be found in it.
Maybe web3 is not only about crypto bs. It's probably more about accountability and repudiation. To remove the control to central corporations like the FANG. To stop spreading hate speech and encourage to destroy the planet.
I really hate the web 2.0 personally and I stay far away from it. I'm not trying to convince anyone to follow my path, but I'm hoping that the true meaning of Internet will shine soon. Maybe the 3.0 is the way to go and in my opinion it cannot be worst than 2.0.
Not quite sure what web3 stands for, but seems like decentralization is suppose to be a big part of it.
But I think all the proponents of stronger algorithmic decentralization ignore the fact that the web doesn't quite live in a vacuum, and "real world" power will mostly like be translated into virtual/web power as well, and the decentralization will just make it less transparent, and with even less accountability.
I'm surprised there's so many comments here. My usual reaction to anything "Web 3.0" is usually "nothing to see here, move along".
I think it’s reached a critical point where everyone feels they need to have an opinion on it.
I think a lot of web3 products thus far are bullshit, but I can't deny the sort of eventual absolution of re-federating the internet. Things can't continue to FAANG forever.
The ever-marching disappearance of offline-only humans also points towards a higher standard of understanding for the average internet user. Someday everybody might run their cloud or at least be involved in a direct way somehow
A new technology will not kill FAANG. What supports them is not "web2", it is a social and political structure. To defeat them requires working in, or around, those structures.
Is Web3 Bullshit?
Yes.
I don't think we need to make this longer than it should:
Yes. It's bullshit.
I don't know whether it is or (more importantly) will be bullshit but one aspect of web3 I think has been a victory to webstandards: an actual decentralized SSO standard.
I know it must be easy to use Google's or Facebook SSO. But why rely on a Third party for this? And why - as user - must i open new accounts on all these webservice?
Jury is out. I agree the speculative part of web3 is pointless.
What I love? Young entrepreneurs diving head first into an opaque technology stack looking to build something good.
"First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you." Recently it feels like the general sentiment toward Web3 has been moving from the ridicule phase to the attack phase. Then finally comes the acceptance. In my view, the entire Web3 movement (not just the speculative virtual currencies and NFTs) is so big and covers so many new areas that it's here to stay forever. It's going to fundamentally change the way that people work together all around the world. In the coming decades there will be huge inventions around Web3 that we have no way to predict yet.
A lot of what seems jargon and bullshit is because of the initial applications sprouting on top. Do creators need to have better ways to retain ownership, monetize their work? Does open source creation need a better monetization model? I guess we would all be in sync with this.
Do we see the initial applications of web3 about creating these decentralizing apps to decommission centralized infra & taxation ? I guess not. The web does need to fundamentally evolve from already now being turned into walled gardens.
Web3 with decentralized protocols around not only comms but value will hopefully be a spur and movement towards this. Time will tell
Web3 makes great sense when energy is abundant [1] and we're more concerned with the "ownership problem" and who should become wealthy and who not and its socio-economic (and political) justifcation, which was largely what we had occupied ourselves in the past 100 years, but in a different lingo: eg communism/socialism vs capitalism.
[1]: when we reach Type 1 as a civilization with eg large-scale application of fusion power. (According to mass–energy equivalence, Type I implies the conversion of about 2 kg of matter to energy per second
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#Type_I_civiliz...
)
It'll never be a perfect system. But overall we shouldn't under-estimate the impacts of the wealth transfer [2] created by BTC, ETH, etc, to the hands of young and tech-believed optimists. And what this means from an evolutionary consumer-market perspective and how cultures are being shaped very differently (in US, EU, China, etc). (I’m in Hangzhou now and it's quite surreal to hear random people chatting about NFT in a cafe here despite CCP's ban of cryptos.)
[2] There were ponzi schemes for sure. But there are (a larger number of) honest people that became wealthy simply because they bought some BTC at $10 and are holding to this day too.
> It'll never be a perfect system. But overall we shouldn't under-estimate the impacts of the wealth transfer [2] created by BTC, ETH, etc, to the hands of young and tech-believed optimists.
The wealth transfer is through ponzi schemes, shit coin pumping, and luck. There's no new merit here--instead of lucking out and making a fortune because you majored in finance, you lucked out and majored / are interested in computer science at an opportune time and place. The systemic issues still exist, and the same class of people are still benefiting.
Framing this as the money is going to tech bros instead of finance bros, like that was a quality we wanted in the system, is hilarious. Please recognize your own bias.
(Not you directly, but the people who are justifying this after the fact)
Yes.
Yes. Metaverse also.
The phrase "social media" has become passé and even toxic.
The language around BTC & Crypto have political & other baggage.
Web3 is an attempt to re-package the past 10-15 years of web trends in a hip new label that leaves behind the baggage and allows for the appearance of "new stuff happening". But nothing much new is happening.
Web3 seems like a response to every facet of Facebook. Facebook offers valuable services for free in exchange for data about its users. Web3 pays users for data they own and control with money grown on trees. There are limitless forests where money grows on trees if you just close your eyes and dream hard enough. Advertisers will pay users for their data, cutting out the middleman who creates any sort of meaning about them. Who needs valuable services, after all? Just send the money directly from advertiser to user.
Advertisers don’t pay for data. When I advertise on FB, I get no data on who I am advertising to. I am paying for actual clicks and purchases and brand Awareness
the user can then use the money he earned to buy the valuable service , or another service, isn't that better?
web1: information
web2: information, people
web3: information, people, value
(value as in money and other valuable assets)
Eh that sounds kind of forced.
Web always had value exchange from the beginning - in fact a big part of the largest companies we have today were built around that value.
In fact I was naive enough to think the web would eventually become more free of that "need" for value exchange (like processing power and network speeds would be enough for everyone to have their own "node" to host and share what ever they wanted), but the endgame o web3 seems to be to have micro transactions everywhere.
web3 = people, information, value = a man, a plan, a canal = panama
or let's just say, fuck taxes
Yes
Yes it is bullshit. Any of you positive activists have any financial literacy? I've not met a single person who is positive about cryptocurrencies that also has a finance degree, that is not also a conman selling crap securities. Every respectable financially knowledgeable person I know calls them a fraud.
This is laughably false and easily disproved by even a cursory search of who is putting time and money into this space.
Elon Musk might think web3 bs because even he's rich, but Web3(or blockchain) operating out of his control.
web3 is a complete marketing marvel. the only goal is money and more money and more..
Is an article that starts with an Elon Musk tweet quote bullshit?
well the article is certainly bullshit. but someone there wrote a useful and accurate comment:
people who claim to be working on web3 and crypto desperately try to fit their technology to user problems. none of them seems to be working on the fundamental issues or the foundation needed to solve the existing problems.
Most of them are half baked product/ marketing guys
pretty much they create glittering websites and post tweets threads like "here is why web3 is a big thing" and nothing else they do
web3 can be proven bullshit the moment you realize all the implementations require web browsers instead of coming up with a solid foundation. this has caused major issues in ethereum (such as realizing their shit is completely broken and replacing it with metamask which is still bullshit). this on top of the fact that it's all MVP half working crap. almost all cryptocoin applications (and basically 100% of things titled "web3") require a web browser, which means you are trusting google/mozilla with all your money, on the web which is the most insecure, error-prone possible way to develop an application.
even from a layman perspective it's crap. you get something competing to be a standard web app, with all the same bugs and slowness, instead of a properly developed "native" GUI. example:
last time i tried to do something with metamask (a browser plugin), it didn't work on firefox. oh yeah, this was a top 10 (i.e, multi billion dollar market cap) cryptocoin's main use case which requires you to run code from a webpage on the internet that interfaces with metamask and you have to trust both of course as well as CA infra which is the opposite of decentralized. so i went with chrome. it tries to be a popup menu you're meant to just open and click one button in and close. if you open another window (like a text editor), it closes and you have to reopen it. so when i tried to open it to do some stuff and cross reference some number, i had to repeatedly: reopen metamask and press a bunch of buttons to bring me back to the same screen within metamask.
let's also look at the standard web3 "onboarding" user experience:
- they assume you're a giant moron (and are correct)
- they make you setup a password to encrypt your private key and not tell you this will be used as an encryption key (do they really believe I as a giant moron will come up with a password with sufficient entropy to be used as an encryption key for the 5th application today that asked me to make a password?)
- next, they display the seed used to generate your password in the form of 20 or so words and ask you to write it down
- next, they force you to input the words to "prove" you wrote it down, typically with some hack to disable copy/paste
- at this point you may have lasers and spaceships flying around your screen as well as animated 3D polygons, to emphasize how cool it is to go through this step (and lessen the chance the user understands what is going on)
- they do not provide an option to skip any of the above (typically, you may need to go read undocumented internal API)
let's look at web3.js
- it's terribly documented
- it's js
- a language that does not support numbers
- go-ethereum ships with a version that is several years old, i don't remember the numbers, but it's on an order of magnitude like 0.4.0 vs 2.3.4
- in go-ethereum, there is no real way to find documentation for the web3 JS APIs you can use from its shell. but that's fine since the web3 JS API largely is an incoherent mess anyway
- it's full of quirky shit (largely for the sake of snakeoil) like: every time you use a function in the "personal" namespace, like personal.listAccounts, it erases that line from your shell history
- in fact, they dont want you to use the shell, they want you to be a mindless consumer and use premade web applications (hosted behind web pages "secured" by CAs) to do everything
- i never used it outside go-ethereum, because why would i want to use js. may as well just use the node API at that point
- all these are a multi billion dollar companies that could easily have allocated resources to these problems
let's look at how web3 wallets work:
- it's a web app in electron, that takes between 4 seconds (eternity) and several minutes to display the main GUI
- on most coins, there is no official wallet. not CLI. not GUI. so it is indeed an electron app by a 3rd party
- the text "undefined" is written everywhere
- menus mysteriously fail to open on certain occasions
- it has several hundred thousand lines of code to do animations like lasers flying around the screen, yet the program literally has no features aside from "transfer in" and "transfer out", and "recover from seed"
- the code is written by a mix of teenaged script kiddies, dot com boomers, and silicon valley startup hipsters (actually this applies everywhere in blockchain stuff, not just GUI wallets)
- they do not tell you how you are synchronizing to coin #35. is it using an internal server owned by the wallet vendor? is it doing light sync?
- they do not provide you with an option of *how* to connect to the coin's network, it "just works"
tl;dr web3 is not real software
Note to people reading these comments: HN Is notoriously anti-bitcoin and crypto. It was within hacker news discussions that I first heard about bitcoin, back when it was trading for less than one dollar. I did not buy bitcoin because I figured the hacker news crowd was very intelligent and knew a scam when they saw one. Just Keep this in mind when reading these comments make sure you take them with a grain of salt.
Just because you can earn money on something, does not make it good.
I think that bitcoin is actually a good solution to the double spending problem in decentralized currencies.
Um, what double spending problem? Do you mean the problem that the US has with cashing paper checks?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-spending
hey you could have lost a lot of money if you tried to cut losses when it crashed to a quarter
every dollar made in bitcoin is someone else’s dollar lost, it’s a casino, nothing more
Honestly.
This community has a pretty terrible track record when it comes to this space.
It’s obsession with web3 lately is just another indicator of web3’s growing acceptance as a major disruptive force in tech.
Back when slaves were cheap HN was not recommending investing in slaves. /s
So that said, the hivemind has the right reasons, but that doesn't really mean much, since the world is not run according to the HN technocrat ideology. Plus, HN is not an investment forum. Aaaaand, HN loves startup stories about companies that create real proper disruptive bona fide value, like UBER/Amazon, but the early UBER/Amazon not the late sexist/market-size-abusing labor-exploiting one, you follow right?
Yes. Now let’s move on to more worthwhile endeavors
i'm listening
Yes.
Yes.
Gonna save you a click. The answer is yes.
Anytime I see a crypto post, I open the comments to see what the HN masses have upvoted this time as the top crypto bashing / skeptic comment. This one doesn't miss the mark either.
Arguably the real innovation of the blockchain seems to me to be at least as cultural as it is technical, in its spooky ability to gather and organize a group of incredibly motivated people and continuously reward them for spreading the gospel of the blockchain.
So, it's a religion.