7 ms·

Why We Need Web 3.0

41 points by bpierre 8y ago

overcast 8y ago
Here's hoping Web 3.0 goes back to minimalism. Unless you're building a fully interactive web application, let's get back to server side rendering, optimized images, and minimal web requests. Now that everyone is getting faster and faster internet speeds, the web has turned into the old sloppy coding practices, where CPU speeds were doubling year after year. Just give me the information we need without all of the magical fluff around it.
- highesttide 8y ago
  I honestly don't think I would want to keep working with webdev if I had to go back to relying on server side rendering for everything, the workflow is just _so_ much worse (to me).
  - pjc50 8y ago
    Why is that, do you think?
  - overcast 8y ago
    Your priority as a developer, shouldn't be what is best for you, it should be what is best for your end user.
  - rpdillon 8y ago
    I'd like to hear more about your experience. I was in a technical presentation yesterday in which a web developer working on a Rails codebase that has been transitioning from backbone to React over the past couple of years talked about her experience trying to add a single page to the app. In the end, it required 14 steps, and I couldn't help but wonder whether all the scaffolding, code generation, and wiring to enable both dynamic and static rendering to work correctly (static for search engines) really provides a better experience for anyone. I get why companies like Google and Facebook developed these frameworks, but for a site of moderate size (say, a million monthly uniques), is it really a win? I look at sites like https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/ and feel like they really hit the sweet spot on utility, user experience, performance, and development workflow. But most of my experience is on the backend. What am I missing?
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Fully agree with you, I want the same things. Sadly, TFA is not about this. TFA is about even more bloated Internet, backed by one the most ridiculous way of wasting energy ever invented.
realPubkey 8y ago
What precisely is wrong with the web today? In short, it’s a big baby. It has grown old without growing up. That's exactly what I think about most of the cryptocurrenciy ecosystem today.
- blocked_again 8y ago
  Ethereum is only 3 years old.
  - MrEfficiency 8y ago
    It had the lessons of Bitcoin and hundreds of dead alt coins. Every time ETH gets used for an app, it takes down/log jams the network. I dont think it will be possible to use blockchain to power the web. Slow, unreliable, and expensive.
    - blocked_again 8y ago
      There were hardly a dozen alt-coins before Ethereum. I mentioned specifically Ethereum because it was Ethereum that introduced a Turing complete virtual machine that allowed people to execute code in Blockchain. Before Ethereum came into the picture people used Blockchain only for storing value. So Ethereum was a game changer and it is only 3 years old. Ethereum developers are currently working hard on making Ethereum more scalable. It cant definitely power the web anytime soon but its getting better and better. Read about Sharding, Plasma, Raiden etc if you are interested.
      - MrEfficiency 8y ago
        There were hundreds of alt coins before ETH, they were bitcoin copypastes and no one cared. When you start talking about offchain ETH solutions or using multiple ETH systems to scale, you are removing the only thing that provides value from Blockchain - Trust. When an ETH sidechain can get 51% attacked or the entire system is verified through a few centralized locations, you remove the only reason you should use blockchain. I used to drink the ETH koolaid, I now realize blockchain shouldnt be used for apps.
octosphere 8y ago
I experimented with Beaker Browser[1] and explored some dat:// pages. It reminded me when I first used the Tor Browser. Most of the pages looked like they were Geocities pages, and the same goes for dat:// pages - they are like something from the late nineties web. So much for the term 'Web 3.0' [1] https://beakerbrowser.com/ https://beakerbrowser.com/
- tyingq 8y ago
  "dat:// websites work just like any other webpage. They’re a collection of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files that come together to form a webpage" So there's nothing technical driving that dated look and feel...
  - solarkraft 8y ago
    It might be the user base.
  - octosphere 8y ago
    Yeah but I think it's the type of users creating the webpages. They sloppily throw together some HTML & CSS and it leads to this dated Geocities look and feel. (No jQuery powered single page application which hogs memory and heats up your CPU)
- staticvar 8y ago
  I love the geocities feel :-). I'm not expecting Web 3.0 to look any different from the Web we know today. Instead it will be a Web that respects user's privacy and at the same time a Web that is more cost efficient for large companies who want cut their hosting costs and stop forking over heaps of cash to their competitors (Amazon, Google).
chooseaname 8y ago
If "Web 2.0" was already coined, can you really coin something so derivative as "Web 3.0"?
anvandare 8y ago
>[...] We see wealth, power and influence placed in the hands of the greedy, the megalomaniacs, or the plain malicious. [...] the same old dynamics. Insanity is running the same program over and over again and expecting different results. You can tweak the configs a bit and change the running environment; but until we start editing the sourcecode (our DNA) you may expect the crooked wood of humankind to always act like humans always have.
pjc50 8y ago
Ah, Ethereum. Web 1.0's idealism was focused on liberal, unilateral sharing of information. People just put things up without any real commercialisation, until the dotcom era of the very late 90s. Not all the internet was the web: there was a decentralised censorship-resistant messageboard system known as USENET, and people tended to access email with local clients. Web 2.0 was the commercialisation and polishing of the above; everything became a web app. The downside of this was everything being infested by advertising. Web 3.0 likes to claim it's a return to 1.0 ideals of information-sharing, but if it's built on cryptocurrency it will inherit its flaws: appalling waste of energy, fundamental capacity limitations, and a tendency to collapse in fraud.
- MrEfficiency 8y ago
  Using blockchain for a web database is a gigantic waste of bandwidth and money. Ethereum flopped as it couldnt scale, and outside casino games, people dont care about decentralized verification. My programming circle likes bitcoin but is totally against using blockchain for everything else.
- jsutton 8y ago
  There are flaws in every evolution of the web, but none that can't be mitigated and presumably the good that each evolution brings to the world far outweighs the bad.
- platz 8y ago
  > a return to 1.0 ideals of information-sharing Jaron Lanier often makes the point that the goals of free information didn't turn out quite the way they intended > The internet was built on a socialist model that everything should be free and accessible to all. But it also celebrated visionary tech entrepreneurs who made it big with their world-changing ideas. “How do you celebrate entrepreneurship when everything is free?” he mused. Tech companies looked to advertising to fund their operations, and that’s where all the corruption began. Ads powered by algorithms that perform behavior-modification on it's subjects is the only model left when all that "information" is free. > A monetized information economy will create a strong middle class out of information sharing—and a strong middle class must be able to outspend the elite tip of an economy for democracy to endure,” https://qz.com/1249955/jaron-lanier-at-ted-2018-to-fix-the-internet-we-have-to-start-paying-for-google-and-facebook/ https://qz.com/1249955/jaron-lanier-at-ted-2018-to-fix-the-i... https://qz.com/87795/free-information-as-great-as-it-sounds-will-enslave-us-all/ https://qz.com/87795/free-information-as-great-as-it-sounds-...
Numberwang 8y ago
"It was over four years ago that I coined the term “Web 3.0.”" Pay heed, as today I the great Numberwang coin the term "Web 4.0"
- pupppet 8y ago
  I couldn’t get past that first sentence.
losvedir 8y ago
I used to be much more positive about decentralization. I even wrote this little decentralized side project[0] that did well on HN a few years ago. But lately, I've become more cynical about it. I fear it just doesn't map that well to the real world. From an abstract/logical architecture it makes a ton of sense, and would be beyond amazing to have a decentralized, unstoppable, computing platform that anyone can hop on, like Ethereum promises. But there's real computation happening in physical machines somewhere, real fiber connections between servers, real electricity costs, real national borders, real laws, etc. These days I'm much more enthused, I think, by federation, as that seems to map more cleanly onto the real world, putting the ownership and costs and responsibilities on those who control the hardware. I was extremely excited, for example, by sandstorm.io, but it seems like it's winding down lately. I haven't really seen an equivalent that's caught my eye, but maybe I'm missing some. I really do support the "Web 3.0" vision as defined here, and best of luck to them. If they can get that "killer app" that makes everyone want to join, and provide a little defense against detractors trying to use physical means to shut down the logical decentralization, then it would be a revolution for sure. But it looks hard to get there from here, to me. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9531265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9531265
- lylecubed 8y ago
  > [federation] seems to map more cleanly onto the real world, putting the ownership and costs and responsibilities on those who control the hardware. This is both the biggest strength of federation and its biggest weakness. How do those who control the hardware profit from federating open and free services? Federation will be a contender when (if?) somebody figures that out.
blunte 8y ago
He begins by claiming to have coined the term "Web 3.0". Reminds me of when some other guy recently claimed to have coined the phrase, "priming the pump". When I see a statement like this, one which seems clearly absurd, I have a hard time taking whatever follows seriously.
- nradov 8y ago
  Tim Berners-Lee labeled the semantic web as "Web 3.0" in 2006. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web#Web_3.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web#Web_3.0
- Slartie 8y ago
  Well, he definitely "coined" it as in "transform it into coins". Crypto-coins, to be exact, mostly of his own currency, which has seen a quite exorbitant rise in valuation, not in the smallest part based on exuberant hyping of this "Web 3.0", of which everyone really needed to be a part (by buying Ether) or they would miss out on the next big thing.
- coldtea 8y ago
  Relevant video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He7TnoCM7fo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He7TnoCM7fo
- droidist2 8y ago
  I just coined the term Web 4.0, you heard it here first.
  - Midnightas 8y ago
    36 minutes too late, better quickly coin Web 5.0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17918120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17918120
    - droidist2 8y ago
      Oh damn! I'm coining Web 6.0 just to be safe.
sonusario 8y ago
> Ethereum—the platform I helped found—would allow people to interact in mutually beneficial ways without anyone needing to trust each other. Asking from ignorance here. Is everyone who uses ethereum subject to the ethereum developers when updates are made?
vslira 8y ago
If we get fully cryptographic computation (I don’t know if I’m using the term correctly, but basically no one knows what you’re doing with their cycles), why would we need decentralization? Couldn’t Isis run their irc server on AWS if it was impossible to know who is doing what? This is an honest question btw
- icebraining 8y ago
  Computation is just a small part of the system. Payment is a big one - your account can still be flagged and taken down if they ban your credit card or equivalent. Another is public services: if you're serving a publicly accessible site, for example, at some point the data must be encrypted to be shown to the user. If they can trace that back to the AWS machine, the account can still be taken down.
r3bl 8y ago
Not that I give any of these two any chance of succeeding, but the fediverse seems to me like it has much higher chances of short term success than Web 3.0. Small (and a pretty ignorant) comparison: Fediverse: Fair amount of clients, some users, utilizes existing technologies and creates decentralized versions of already existing paradigms based on the W3C recommendations. Web 3.0: Uses blockchain, can't access it from your browser, has barely any users but apparently a lot of clients, inherits probably the worst aspect of .onion services (inability to just type in the URL). However, looking purely at the financial level, Web 3.0 seems to be winning. It's where money is funneled through, because there's a small chance that it will offer something grandiose in return. Meanwhile, fediverse operates on pennies donated by the users to approachable sysadmins with some spare resources. One of them can afford a summit in San Francisco (sponsored by a few foundations), and the second one will probably never have a summit anywhere.
- phiresky 8y ago
  > (inability to just type in the URL) You could still put all domains of an alternate domain system behind a X.web3.org that loads the whole system client side, and then connects to peers via WebRTC to load the domain X via webtorrents or ipfs or zeronet or whatever. That way it's (mostly) backwards compatible to normal websites and you can remove the "root domain" trust point later.
- xj9 8y ago
  i can neither confirm or deny the existence of clandestine fediverse summits.
- herbst 8y ago
  Ether is in fact perfectly well integrated in the browser though metamask. It's a strange but interesting piece of technology.
pjmlp 8y ago
Web 3.0 will be the browser as universal VM, with everyone directly targeting WebAssembly, re-inventing the UI stack via WebGL or WebGPU.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
platz 8y ago
I guess web 3.0 is blockchain, eh > “the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot.” - brought to you by a humble impartial observer who maintains the blockchain protocols
jancsika 8y ago
Proof of work doesn't provide a sufficient number of transactions per second to support ideas of this magnitude.
mdarens 8y ago
I'm old enough to remember when Web 3.0 was another name for The Semantic Web[1]. I'm sure Gavin Wood is a clever person but the opening of this article made him come off as a dotcom boom era huckster. [1] https://archive.fo/jUSh#selection-627.0-627.56 https://archive.fo/jUSh#selection-627.0-627.56
coldtea 8y ago
>It was over four years ago that I coined the term “Web 3.0.” Back then, it was clear to me: Ethereum—the platform I helped found—would allow people to interact in mutually beneficial ways without anyone needing to trust each other. Well, I'd rather we have a web of people trusting each other...
jmull 8y ago
Maybe I'm looking at this blockchain thing all wrong. Perhaps it's a lesser evil, whereby the foolish money is vacuumed up and held in a relatively innocuous form before it is dispersed all around where it would cause greater mischief and misery. What can I say, I'm an optimist.
Midnightas 8y ago
I'd rather keep using non-corporate internet such as IRC, forums, and whatnot, it's sad to see what's happening with this.
mrlala 8y ago
What could possibly go wrong with having every browser in the world directly tied to your wallet? At least I think that's what he's saying. Fuck off dude! I enjoy having my money in the bank where I don't have to worry about it and I can browse online- worst case I get some virus or shit that breaks my computer for a day.. no big deal. It's not going to unilaterally steal everything I've worked for with basically zero recourse. Also I don't want to have to click a big "PAY 0.003897483 ETH TO ACCESS THIS SITE" everywhere I go...
egypturnash 8y ago
I kept on waiting for the part where he actually tells me what “web 3.0” involves. I guess it’s “something something blockchain”.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
blocked_again 8y ago
I always thought web 3.0 was the decentralised web and not necessarily blockchain.

41 points by bpierre 8y ago

Here's hoping Web 3.0 goes back to minimalism. Unless you're building a fully interactive web application, let's get back to server side rendering, optimized images, and minimal web requests. Now that everyone is getting faster and faster internet speeds, the web has turned into the old sloppy coding practices, where CPU speeds were doubling year after year. Just give me the information we need without all of the magical fluff around it.

highesttide 8y ago
I honestly don't think I would want to keep working with webdev if I had to go back to relying on server side rendering for everything, the workflow is just _so_ much worse (to me).
- pjc50 8y ago
  Why is that, do you think?
- overcast 8y ago
  Your priority as a developer, shouldn't be what is best for you, it should be what is best for your end user.
- rpdillon 8y ago
  I'd like to hear more about your experience. I was in a technical presentation yesterday in which a web developer working on a Rails codebase that has been transitioning from backbone to React over the past couple of years talked about her experience trying to add a single page to the app. In the end, it required 14 steps, and I couldn't help but wonder whether all the scaffolding, code generation, and wiring to enable both dynamic and static rendering to work correctly (static for search engines) really provides a better experience for anyone. I get why companies like Google and Facebook developed these frameworks, but for a site of moderate size (say, a million monthly uniques), is it really a win? I look at sites like https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/ and feel like they really hit the sweet spot on utility, user experience, performance, and development workflow. But most of my experience is on the backend. What am I missing?
TeMPOraL 8y ago
Fully agree with you, I want the same things. Sadly, TFA is not about this. TFA is about even more bloated Internet, backed by one the most ridiculous way of wasting energy ever invented.

realPubkey 8y ago

What precisely is wrong with the web today? In short, it’s a big baby. It has grown old without growing up. That's exactly what I think about most of the cryptocurrenciy ecosystem today.

blocked_again 8y ago
Ethereum is only 3 years old.
- MrEfficiency 8y ago
  It had the lessons of Bitcoin and hundreds of dead alt coins. Every time ETH gets used for an app, it takes down/log jams the network. I dont think it will be possible to use blockchain to power the web. Slow, unreliable, and expensive.
  - blocked_again 8y ago
    There were hardly a dozen alt-coins before Ethereum. I mentioned specifically Ethereum because it was Ethereum that introduced a Turing complete virtual machine that allowed people to execute code in Blockchain. Before Ethereum came into the picture people used Blockchain only for storing value. So Ethereum was a game changer and it is only 3 years old. Ethereum developers are currently working hard on making Ethereum more scalable. It cant definitely power the web anytime soon but its getting better and better. Read about Sharding, Plasma, Raiden etc if you are interested.
    - MrEfficiency 8y ago
      There were hundreds of alt coins before ETH, they were bitcoin copypastes and no one cared. When you start talking about offchain ETH solutions or using multiple ETH systems to scale, you are removing the only thing that provides value from Blockchain - Trust. When an ETH sidechain can get 51% attacked or the entire system is verified through a few centralized locations, you remove the only reason you should use blockchain. I used to drink the ETH koolaid, I now realize blockchain shouldnt be used for apps.

octosphere 8y ago

I experimented with Beaker Browser[1] and explored some dat:// pages. It reminded me when I first used the Tor Browser. Most of the pages looked like they were Geocities pages, and the same goes for dat:// pages - they are like something from the late nineties web. So much for the term 'Web 3.0' [1] https://beakerbrowser.com/ https://beakerbrowser.com/

tyingq 8y ago
"dat:// websites work just like any other webpage. They’re a collection of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files that come together to form a webpage" So there's nothing technical driving that dated look and feel...
- solarkraft 8y ago
  It might be the user base.
- octosphere 8y ago
  Yeah but I think it's the type of users creating the webpages. They sloppily throw together some HTML & CSS and it leads to this dated Geocities look and feel. (No jQuery powered single page application which hogs memory and heats up your CPU)
staticvar 8y ago
I love the geocities feel :-). I'm not expecting Web 3.0 to look any different from the Web we know today. Instead it will be a Web that respects user's privacy and at the same time a Web that is more cost efficient for large companies who want cut their hosting costs and stop forking over heaps of cash to their competitors (Amazon, Google).

chooseaname 8y ago

If "Web 2.0" was already coined, can you really coin something so derivative as "Web 3.0"?

anvandare 8y ago

>[...] We see wealth, power and influence placed in the hands of the greedy, the megalomaniacs, or the plain malicious. [...] the same old dynamics. Insanity is running the same program over and over again and expecting different results. You can tweak the configs a bit and change the running environment; but until we start editing the sourcecode (our DNA) you may expect the crooked wood of humankind to always act like humans always have.

pjc50 8y ago

Ah, Ethereum. Web 1.0's idealism was focused on liberal, unilateral sharing of information. People just put things up without any real commercialisation, until the dotcom era of the very late 90s. Not all the internet was the web: there was a decentralised censorship-resistant messageboard system known as USENET, and people tended to access email with local clients. Web 2.0 was the commercialisation and polishing of the above; everything became a web app. The downside of this was everything being infested by advertising. Web 3.0 likes to claim it's a return to 1.0 ideals of information-sharing, but if it's built on cryptocurrency it will inherit its flaws: appalling waste of energy, fundamental capacity limitations, and a tendency to collapse in fraud.

MrEfficiency 8y ago
Using blockchain for a web database is a gigantic waste of bandwidth and money. Ethereum flopped as it couldnt scale, and outside casino games, people dont care about decentralized verification. My programming circle likes bitcoin but is totally against using blockchain for everything else.
jsutton 8y ago
There are flaws in every evolution of the web, but none that can't be mitigated and presumably the good that each evolution brings to the world far outweighs the bad.
platz 8y ago
> a return to 1.0 ideals of information-sharing Jaron Lanier often makes the point that the goals of free information didn't turn out quite the way they intended > The internet was built on a socialist model that everything should be free and accessible to all. But it also celebrated visionary tech entrepreneurs who made it big with their world-changing ideas. “How do you celebrate entrepreneurship when everything is free?” he mused. Tech companies looked to advertising to fund their operations, and that’s where all the corruption began. Ads powered by algorithms that perform behavior-modification on it's subjects is the only model left when all that "information" is free. > A monetized information economy will create a strong middle class out of information sharing—and a strong middle class must be able to outspend the elite tip of an economy for democracy to endure,” https://qz.com/1249955/jaron-lanier-at-ted-2018-to-fix-the-internet-we-have-to-start-paying-for-google-and-facebook/ https://qz.com/1249955/jaron-lanier-at-ted-2018-to-fix-the-i... https://qz.com/87795/free-information-as-great-as-it-sounds-will-enslave-us-all/ https://qz.com/87795/free-information-as-great-as-it-sounds-...

Numberwang 8y ago

"It was over four years ago that I coined the term “Web 3.0.”" Pay heed, as today I the great Numberwang coin the term "Web 4.0"

pupppet 8y ago
I couldn’t get past that first sentence.

losvedir 8y ago

I used to be much more positive about decentralization. I even wrote this little decentralized side project[0] that did well on HN a few years ago. But lately, I've become more cynical about it. I fear it just doesn't map that well to the real world. From an abstract/logical architecture it makes a ton of sense, and would be beyond amazing to have a decentralized, unstoppable, computing platform that anyone can hop on, like Ethereum promises. But there's real computation happening in physical machines somewhere, real fiber connections between servers, real electricity costs, real national borders, real laws, etc. These days I'm much more enthused, I think, by federation, as that seems to map more cleanly onto the real world, putting the ownership and costs and responsibilities on those who control the hardware. I was extremely excited, for example, by sandstorm.io, but it seems like it's winding down lately. I haven't really seen an equivalent that's caught my eye, but maybe I'm missing some. I really do support the "Web 3.0" vision as defined here, and best of luck to them. If they can get that "killer app" that makes everyone want to join, and provide a little defense against detractors trying to use physical means to shut down the logical decentralization, then it would be a revolution for sure. But it looks hard to get there from here, to me. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9531265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9531265

lylecubed 8y ago
> [federation] seems to map more cleanly onto the real world, putting the ownership and costs and responsibilities on those who control the hardware. This is both the biggest strength of federation and its biggest weakness. How do those who control the hardware profit from federating open and free services? Federation will be a contender when (if?) somebody figures that out.

blunte 8y ago

He begins by claiming to have coined the term "Web 3.0". Reminds me of when some other guy recently claimed to have coined the phrase, "priming the pump". When I see a statement like this, one which seems clearly absurd, I have a hard time taking whatever follows seriously.

nradov 8y ago
Tim Berners-Lee labeled the semantic web as "Web 3.0" in 2006. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web#Web_3.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web#Web_3.0
Slartie 8y ago
Well, he definitely "coined" it as in "transform it into coins". Crypto-coins, to be exact, mostly of his own currency, which has seen a quite exorbitant rise in valuation, not in the smallest part based on exuberant hyping of this "Web 3.0", of which everyone really needed to be a part (by buying Ether) or they would miss out on the next big thing.
coldtea 8y ago
Relevant video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He7TnoCM7fo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He7TnoCM7fo
droidist2 8y ago
I just coined the term Web 4.0, you heard it here first.
- Midnightas 8y ago
  36 minutes too late, better quickly coin Web 5.0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17918120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17918120
  - droidist2 8y ago
    Oh damn! I'm coining Web 6.0 just to be safe.

sonusario 8y ago

> Ethereum—the platform I helped found—would allow people to interact in mutually beneficial ways without anyone needing to trust each other. Asking from ignorance here. Is everyone who uses ethereum subject to the ethereum developers when updates are made?

vslira 8y ago

If we get fully cryptographic computation (I don’t know if I’m using the term correctly, but basically no one knows what you’re doing with their cycles), why would we need decentralization? Couldn’t Isis run their irc server on AWS if it was impossible to know who is doing what? This is an honest question btw

icebraining 8y ago
Computation is just a small part of the system. Payment is a big one - your account can still be flagged and taken down if they ban your credit card or equivalent. Another is public services: if you're serving a publicly accessible site, for example, at some point the data must be encrypted to be shown to the user. If they can trace that back to the AWS machine, the account can still be taken down.

r3bl 8y ago

Not that I give any of these two any chance of succeeding, but the fediverse seems to me like it has much higher chances of short term success than Web 3.0. Small (and a pretty ignorant) comparison: Fediverse: Fair amount of clients, some users, utilizes existing technologies and creates decentralized versions of already existing paradigms based on the W3C recommendations. Web 3.0: Uses blockchain, can't access it from your browser, has barely any users but apparently a lot of clients, inherits probably the worst aspect of .onion services (inability to just type in the URL). However, looking purely at the financial level, Web 3.0 seems to be winning. It's where money is funneled through, because there's a small chance that it will offer something grandiose in return. Meanwhile, fediverse operates on pennies donated by the users to approachable sysadmins with some spare resources. One of them can afford a summit in San Francisco (sponsored by a few foundations), and the second one will probably never have a summit anywhere.

phiresky 8y ago
> (inability to just type in the URL) You could still put all domains of an alternate domain system behind a X.web3.org that loads the whole system client side, and then connects to peers via WebRTC to load the domain X via webtorrents or ipfs or zeronet or whatever. That way it's (mostly) backwards compatible to normal websites and you can remove the "root domain" trust point later.
xj9 8y ago
i can neither confirm or deny the existence of clandestine fediverse summits.
herbst 8y ago
Ether is in fact perfectly well integrated in the browser though metamask. It's a strange but interesting piece of technology.

pjmlp 8y ago

Web 3.0 will be the browser as universal VM, with everyone directly targeting WebAssembly, re-inventing the UI stack via WebGL or WebGPU.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

platz 8y ago

I guess web 3.0 is blockchain, eh > “the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot.” - brought to you by a humble impartial observer who maintains the blockchain protocols

jancsika 8y ago

Proof of work doesn't provide a sufficient number of transactions per second to support ideas of this magnitude.

mdarens 8y ago

I'm old enough to remember when Web 3.0 was another name for The Semantic Web[1]. I'm sure Gavin Wood is a clever person but the opening of this article made him come off as a dotcom boom era huckster. [1] https://archive.fo/jUSh#selection-627.0-627.56 https://archive.fo/jUSh#selection-627.0-627.56

coldtea 8y ago

>It was over four years ago that I coined the term “Web 3.0.” Back then, it was clear to me: Ethereum—the platform I helped found—would allow people to interact in mutually beneficial ways without anyone needing to trust each other. Well, I'd rather we have a web of people trusting each other...

jmull 8y ago

Maybe I'm looking at this blockchain thing all wrong. Perhaps it's a lesser evil, whereby the foolish money is vacuumed up and held in a relatively innocuous form before it is dispersed all around where it would cause greater mischief and misery. What can I say, I'm an optimist.

Midnightas 8y ago

I'd rather keep using non-corporate internet such as IRC, forums, and whatnot, it's sad to see what's happening with this.

mrlala 8y ago

What could possibly go wrong with having every browser in the world directly tied to your wallet? At least I think that's what he's saying. Fuck off dude! I enjoy having my money in the bank where I don't have to worry about it and I can browse online- worst case I get some virus or shit that breaks my computer for a day.. no big deal. It's not going to unilaterally steal everything I've worked for with basically zero recourse. Also I don't want to have to click a big "PAY 0.003897483 ETH TO ACCESS THIS SITE" everywhere I go...

egypturnash 8y ago

I kept on waiting for the part where he actually tells me what “web 3.0” involves. I guess it’s “something something blockchain”.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

blocked_again 8y ago

I always thought web 3.0 was the decentralised web and not necessarily blockchain.