40 ms·

Web3 is a stupid idea

189 points by gozmike 5y ago

twox2 5y ago
Some valid arguments, but in reality web3 is just the web where the backend is something on the blockchain. It makes sense to talk about how to make this experience more secure, but to say the whole thing is a stupid idea doesn't benefit anyone, because a lot of people want it and are going to use it. By the way, most web wallets have hardware support, so you can add an additional layer of security that way.
- devmunchies 5y ago
  > web3 is just the web where the backend is something on the blockchain even more broad, i think web3 is just where the database is decentralized. blockchain is one solution.
  - semicolon_storm 5y ago
    If it's just when the database is decentralized, why even call it web3? Why should web standards even care about implementation details of the database? We didn't move to "web3" when db sharding became a big thing, or when NoSQL caught on.
    - xur17 5y ago
      I don't think a sharded database is "decentralized".
    - divs1210 5y ago
      Because this is fundamentally different? No third party owns your data. Imagine a social network built like this.
      - smt88 5y ago
        Email and Mastodon are existing decentralized social networks. If you want to call something Web3, it's going to need to be more than just "decentralized".
        devmunchies 5y ago
        technically they are federated, not decentralized. Gmail is a centralized, federated node. Think like a federation of states where each state is its own centralized, independent unit. the newer definition of "decentralization" is more akin to anarchy. Collectivism vs individualism.
        smt88 5y ago
        Email is not "technically federated". It's de facto federated. You can run your own email server on your home computer. Anything less centralized than email isn't going to be "Web3" because it's not going to be a web at all. For the purposes of the internet, there is no functional difference between federated and decentralized. Two strangers must have a way of contacting each other -- something like an IP address at a minimum. That's a centralization point right there. In the case of the web, DNS is going to be the main way that things are centralized. Blockchain is similarly federated -- it just has a way to make sure that each node has a mutually agreed upon state. That doesn't make it decentralized, it just makes it redundant and distributed.
      - majormajor 5y ago
        Isn't that just the late 90s internet? Make your geocities page with your info, link to whoever else's pages you want, use email or chat to communicate with them. HTTP, SMTP, IRC...
      - rchaud 5y ago
        I am trying to imagine a social network like that. How would it be different? A social network is the place to gain clout, so high profile people would continue giving away their IP for free. The network itself could still display context-aware advertising.
  - michaelsbradley 5y ago
    Web3 involves decentralized: 1. consensus networks, 2. data storage networks, 3. messaging networks. (1) includes Ethereum and other blockchain and distributed ledger tech. (2) includes IPFS, FileCoin, GUN, etc. If you're storing data on the blockchain apart from the bits needed in relation to consensus ops, you're probably doing it wrong. (3) includes Waku (Status), Matrix ... depends a bit on whether you think this category should only include p2p networks or federated networks of servers qualify. There are many other projects that could be listed for those categories, those are just off the top of my head.
  - derefr 5y ago
    Sure; I would describe the technical requirement for something to be "web3" as: • data storage and/or backend computation taking place in/on a decentralized / distributed-locus-of-control system, • where these systems are exposed directly to browsers via regular-web HTTP gateways, • and where there are well-defined general APIs (these being the "web3" APIs) such that these gateways are interchangeable in the access they provide; • where a web app can choose to have a relationship (e.g. a paying customer relationship) with their own gateway provider, rather than having one forced upon them; • and where the user-agent can further enable the user to have their own relationship with different gateway provider, overriding the website's choice of gateway, in a way invisible to the web app. (Just like how UA stylesheets override site stylesheets, in ways invisible to the web app.) The gateways are a necessary part of the definition, because HTTP is fundamentally a protocol for talking to specific servers, so Web -three, then, is 90% about the particular way in which we hitch decentralized stuff up to that centralized model. The fact that the website and the user get choice in their gateway, is what makes this a decentralized system, rather than being something like X.509 that's nominally decentralized (anyone can be their own CA root authority for their own DAG-of-trust) but where in practice there's only one public DAG-of-trust forced on everyone by a consortium of browser and OS manufacturers.
    - jollybean 5y ago
      And this is the 'technical requirement' that solves what problem, that people actually need solved?
      - derefr 5y ago
        Before I answer: why are you asking this in response to the definition of a piece of technical jargon? What makes something "web3", and whether anyone should care about "web3", are separate questions. Nevertheless, the answer is: because web standards don't allow browsers and other only-speaks-HTTP clients, to interact with regular peer-to-peer protocols, preventing them from participating in [the existing networks serving] peer-to-peer use-cases. You can't write a blockchain node as Javascript that executes in a browser and have it talk to the same network peers that other native nodes for that chain interact with. Instead, if users want to participate in such use-cases (e.g. to download a torrent on a Chromebook), they must use technologies like WebTorrent, that stand up their own, incompatible p2p networks based on WebRTC and other web-specific carrier protocols. This creates isolated "web p2p" networks (e.g. the WebTorrent swarm) divorced from their regular-p2p equivalents (e.g. the BitTorrent swarm.) Web3 is one way of avoiding this network split: it is a [nascent] set of standard APIs, allowing browsers and other only-speaks-HTTP clients to interact with p2p protocols by holding relationships with "p2p protocol 'light client' over HTTP" gateways, that expose the p2p protocols in standard useful-over-HTTP manners to browsers. Another way of avoiding such a network split, instead of web3, would be creating lower-level gateways that allow browsers and other only-speaks-HTTP clients to directly tunnel p2p wire protocols over HTTP, where the gateway would terminate the HTTP tunnel and then route the p2p packets to peers as normal. However, most p2p protocols are a really bad fit for having all communications linearized into a TCP stream. Peers connected through such gateways would be really badly-behaved peers from the perspective of the network. Web3 "solves" this by not having the browser speak the p2p protocol itself, but instead having the gateway speak the p2p protocol and act as the finite-state-machine keeping the p2p state, while the browser just gets to interact with the state model that the gateway node builds up through its p2p interactions, via either RPC request-response flows, or event streaming flows, both of which are much better behaved over an HTTP carrier than p2p traffic generally is.
- gfodor 5y ago
  Sounds like you didn't read the article.
  - twox2 5y ago
    I did, but I'm responding to the title, which is the soundbite most folks will digest.
Tenoke 5y ago
1. The web3 'vision' came before the web3.js library they just named it after it but other blockchain interactions fall under it 2. There'll always be subpar devs, and those that make too many calls etc. There's freedom on the web, that's hardly a fault of the idea. In fact the whole article is complaints are about some of the current sites rather than anything more (and many of them aren't bad). The vision if you believe people with cryptopunk avatars is vaster than that already. 3. Some of the complaints like you not having MetaMask to interact with a MetaMask-based website are just odd. Do you complain that users without a phone can't be called? 4. Ethers.js is a lot simplified compared to web3.js. People are working on all those complaints. 5. There's non-extension wallets, too. Solflare doesn't make me install an extension to interact with sites. The extensions just have benefits - everything is fully local but easily integratable so they aren't a bad solution to my eyes.
michaellee8 5y ago
Lol the company I am working for is doing some kind of wallet that basically allow you to keep and use your private key without a (shitty) browser extension like metamask. You basically just get your key back by authenticating with your google account and pressing your finger at touchid. Basically allow people to have same web 2.0 experience when using web3 apps.
- fallat 5y ago
  I don't get the hate for Metamask. You can connect hardware wallets to it and its actual UX is good.
  - timdaub 5y ago
    We can't it be a browser-integrated feature? That we can store keys, have them sign messages and e.g. unlock the signature function through e.g. a hardware wallet or a master password?
    - Tenoke 5y ago
      .. Because major browsers will need to integrate it and they haven't. You can build things yourself more easily than you can convince say chrome to build something (which is the whole point of extensions, really). What you seem to be asking is just metamask to be integrated directly into chrome, which is a nice ask but not done to the right people (ask google/firefox) and its lack does not turn web3 into a 'Stupid Idea'. There's a lot of extension functionality I'd like straight in the browser itself but it's not the extension's fault that browser devs haven't included it.
  - verdverm 5y ago
    They were uploading significant details of failed transactions to Segment. If that ever happened to you, they have a connection of a wallet address to other personal details.
  - officialchicken 5y ago
    Good UX isn't security, MM and Infuria are owned by the same person (very centralized), you can't change your secret phrase, sentry.js doesn't secure a react app very well at all... etc. etc. etc. I'm not a hater (actually I'm a user), but I am pointing out a wide variety of issues that should be publicly discussed.
cam0 5y ago
I think it's poorly named. It's not a new major version of the web. Forget the fact that the vast majority of the web's users don't care about decentralization vs. centralization even a single bit. People will continue to mindlessly use WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Coinbase because decentralization is not a concern for _most_ users. Most users of these apps just want to socialize with friends and family, show off / humble brag / argue, and gamble.
- timdaub 5y ago
  Yeah, I also think it's poorly named. It's semantically speaking not a major upgrade. But additionally, I'd prefer web 2.1 over web 3.0 first...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- dreyfan 5y ago
  I’m so glad the entire decentralized community has rallied around the limitless power and innovation of NFTs.
  - officialchicken 5y ago
    Please make an NFT of your comment for sale on opensea... I suggest "Bored hackernews comment club"
    - rchaud 5y ago
      Christie's and Sotheby's will be on red alert when this drops.
  - poetaster 5y ago
    I'd buy an officialchicken fungible whatyamathingy!
- acdha 5y ago
ramon 5y ago
Bittorrent seems to be the pioneer in this open P2P space and I liked also the zeronet initiative about descentralized web. Web3 is trying to pickup on that same space, I think maybe unifying these efforts of Web3 with Bittorrent and all will make a big descentralized ground for what Web3 should probably become and yes I do not think wallets are a good approach either it is stupid, is what we have now but we need a better approach without any browser plugins, maybe facial recognition is the key here.
pphysch 5y ago
Even an ideal blockchain-ified P2P "Web 3.0" is a silly fantasy on par with NAT-less IPv4. First they reinvented gold & databases, now they are reinventing IP. Flat networks are a thing of the past, when you could keep the whole Internet in a paper directory on your desk. Blockchains may be used for settlement and accounting within small networks of international firms, but they will never service the latency and throughput needs of 8 billion netizens.
- gfodor 5y ago
  HN comments that use the word "never" should raise eyebrows. You're not wrong if you assume technology is fixed. But it ain't.
  - pphysch 5y ago
    Right, and we will eventually choose to forgo toilets and defecate in the streets again, because "never say never". Please address my argument instead of this unconstructive purity-testing nonsense.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      > Right, and we will eventually choose to forgo toilets and defecate in the streets again, because "never say never". It's happened in the past; why would you rule it out in the future?
    - Kiro 5y ago
      It's not about "never say never". It's about HN being notoriously bad at predicting trends.
    - gfodor 5y ago
      Your argument is refuted by the fact the technology to solve the problem you claim will never be solved literally already exists, one version of which has a market cap of almost $10B.[1] Claiming that a very obvious engineering problem incentivized to being solved is the same as imagining us being incentivized to regress in the way you mention is also weird. [1] https://www.avax.network/ https://www.avax.network/
agustif 5y ago
web2: client <-> server web3: client <-> client <-> client
- semicolon_storm 5y ago
  When's a client become a server? If you need to connect to a fullnode which is running in a datacenter somewhere whose sole purpose is to service these kinds of requests, surely it's just a server.
- pphysch 5y ago
  web1: client <-> client Web2 happened for a lot of very good reasons.
- Matthias247 5y ago
  From the blog post I understood this still talks from the browser client to some gateway server, which might then be part of a p2p network. Which would certainly be required if the library uses http for communication. Or did I got it wrong and a native browser plugin enables other means of communication?
sentinel 5y ago
It's a metaphor dude.
api 5y ago
My biggest issue with it is its complexity. It's impossible to tell what the fuck is happening behind things like Metamask, which makes me wonder if the whole thing isn't fake decentralization with hidden centralized services or authorities working behind the scenes. It also means that it's hard to create different implementations. I've seen fake decentralization in other areas in the very dodgy cryptocurrency ecosystem. A lot of times it's "we'll decentralize this eventually when we figure out some issues" but that never happens. After the ICO or coin offering or whatever nothing else happens in the repository and Tesla sells some more high-end cars. The web was simple and its core still mostly is. It has a ton of extensions and newer protocols but you don't need all that to use it for its original document store purpose.
- danielrhodes 5y ago
  This is what happens to most decentralized services. They are hard and wonky to use. People need help using them, corporations need reliability. And hence come centralized services to help sort it out. Examples: * Cash -> Bank Deposit Account * Email (host your own mail server) -> Gmail * Rack your own server -> AWS * Everybody is a DNS node -> Root Servers/ISPs/Cloudflare/OpenDNS, etc. * BitTorrent -> Pirate Bay * Git -> GitHub * Bitcoin -> Coinbase
zzok22 5y ago
It's much easier to criticize than to build an alternative. I don't think anyone at Metamask or in the space in general thinks to themselves that the ecosystem is in a state of full maturity or that there aren't major problems. Despite its shortcomings, MM and Web3 have given us capabilities that simply didn't exist five years ago. And those capabilities aren't just limited to a select number of shadowy super hackers. MM has millions of MAU and that number will only grow as more people see the potential of the tech.
- tmcw 5y ago
  People are building things like renewed web standards (Project Fugu, for example) and P2P networks (Beaker, Hypercore), and light clients (Mighty). These projects don't get any attention from the "Web3" crowd because they don't involve currency speculation.
  - max_ 5y ago
    You cannot separate economics incentives from networking protocols. You need an actual sepeculative market to price and offer these services. Most of open source fails because they don't acknowledge this reality.
    - soneca 5y ago
      > ” Most of open source fails because they don't acknowledge this reality.” That’s a bold statement. Most of projects that do acknowledge this reality also fail. Like all for-profit and even those web3 projects that are using cryptocurrency speculation. So I think there are tons of reasons that open source projects fail, not just because of this reason.
    - X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
      What about bittorrent?
      - max_ 5y ago
        Bittorrent is fantastic for 'altruistic' activity. But it is useless if you want to build a for profit Netflix. You may have to look at something like IPFS that accounts for economic incentives I the protocol.
sergiotapia 5y ago
Unfortunately, "web3" being placed next to words like "crypto" and "blockchain" stains it as bullshit full of grifters and leeches. Edit: forgot about the cherry on top "NFT" another layer of shit on what I thought would be pure and innovative. Grifters all the way down.
PostThisTooFast 5y ago
So is this headline.
dnpp123 5y ago
Sadly not sure the ecosystem is mature enough for any kind of standardization yet.
- tmcw 5y ago
  Ethereum is, what, 6 years old. Metamask has been in development for 5 years. Bitcoin is 12 years old. Bitcoin is older than React.js. Ethereum has been around for as long as TikTok. Uber was founded in the same year as Bitcoin and has essentially destroyed a worldwide industry. At some point these things aren't young or early, they're just stupid.
  - reidjs 5y ago
    What point are you making here? Just because they haven't destroyed a worldwide industry in 5 or 6 years they are stupid?
    - jollybean 5y ago
      They haven't 'found' a single practical use case other than for some speculators who think they have a 'store of value'. Reading this thread it's clear Web3 doesn't really have a use case either, it's more like a concept. These have many parallels in industry - there are tons of products that never got made because they didn't make a whole lot of sense even though they were cool. The difference being, people can chose to spend their own time on these things now if they so choose and a lot of people do. It's like a distributed technical artistic counter-cultural social movement except the artists believe they're doing something more practical than they probably are.
  - beambot 5y ago
    Technologies mature at different rates. ARPAnet was created in the 1960s. www was created in 1989. Yahoo & Netscape were started in 1994. Foundational infrastructure is rarely explosive in growth. It's also unclear how you're measuring success. By market cap, Bitcoin beats out all three of your examples (React, TikTok, & Uber). But it's also a bit weird to compare Bitcoin to two of the fastest growing consumer companies in recent memory. It's apples & oranges.
bob229 5y ago
Working at a blockchain company you would certainly be knowledgeable in stupid ideas
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
okdjnfweonfe 5y ago
Really wish progressive enhancement was chosen as the first thing, want to get rid of the backend db? ok, two APIs, store to extension-managed DB (e.g. flatfiles in the home directory, or shunted onto something managed with LDAP, or loaded onto some weird coin thing on a local light node, or etc), or in environments where extensions are fussy / overcomplicated, store to another website via a http api (la https://remotestorage.io/ https://remotestorage.io/, or if one wants to overcomplicate it again, a remotestorage-to-weird-blockchain-thing-shim) - - - For the article itself, deriding web3 as "Money websites" and then basically asking for "Lightweight money websites" is a bit pointless. Storing stuff on "Money" is a big overhead, If you were to decide to write your data onto a gold ingot, you'd probably not enjoy the process of going to the bank safe deposit box each time to make a change or read a change, likewise, money websites are going to be encumbered with risk, endless layers of crypto math un-understanding, and stress. Don't worry, someone might make a contract to provide that fine grained API you want, and that contract might not have bugs, and the tooling used might not be able to be tricked to use some other contract as an api since you know, decentralized, shouldn't be able to use only 1 implementation right Or, if you remove money from the equation, like, hell, replace it with text files or something, even if users need to exchange text files with each other to update each other's pages (ok a bit overkill, webrtc should suffice, still requires both people online at the same time though), it still removes a lot of emotional stress
- yunohn 5y ago
  > If you were to decide to write your data onto a gold ingot Why do crypto enthusiasts feel the need to use gold as a strawman? The vast majority of non-crypto people use digital money (in local currencies), and have never touched gold in their lives. Digital money works great, and doesn’t need a blockchain.
  - hackingforfun 5y ago
    > Why do crypto enthusiasts feel the need to use gold as a strawman? Well, at least the US, the government treats crypto as property, at least tax-wise (actually it's taxed just like real estate or gold). It's just that crypto is much more easily transferable than real estate or gold. > The vast majority of non-crypto people use digital money (in local currencies), and have never touched gold in their lives. Digital money works great, and doesn’t need a blockchain. I understand this argument. The traditional financial system is quite mature, and works pretty well. I do have a few concerns with it though: •Negative interest rates in some parts of the world •Ever increasing sovereign debt throughout the world, with no intent of ever paying it back •Lack of ability for 24/7 payments, or even instant payments (at least in the US, however, this fortunately seems to be changing with things like FedNow) •No APIs for banks which make things like screen scraping necessary for data aggregation, i.e. Mint, or verification tools, i.e. Plaid (and I know this opens a can of worms because banking data should be regulated and private, but still, I've seen this API complaint on HN before, and crypto is a more open system, that could also have layers of permission added to it) This leads me to another point, which is actually a question. How do people here beat inflation? Stocks? Sure, I have some stocks, too. But crypto yields are some of the highest right now, and it isn't all just some manipulation or leverage or something. Take a look at proof of stake coins, you can stake say, Polkadot, on Kraken, for 12% APR [1]. You can also stake Polkadot, directly, without using an exchange as an intermediary, it just requires more technical skill. The staking return on proof of stake coins is a reward for helping secure the proof of stake network. I've heard Charles Hoskinson, the creator of Cardano and co-founder of Ethereum, say in one of his videos that we need a new asset class in order to make up for this inflationary environment. And also, I would add, that we need that to accommodate for what I consider to be a war on cash. I'd be happy to keep fiat in a savings account, and I did for many years, until the rates on savings accounts went to basically zero. Now people are basically forced to hold riskier things like stocks, or if they have an even higher appetite for risk, crypto. In short, I don't think everything in digital fiat is going perfectly well. If it was, I don't think I'd find crypto as attractive. [1] https://www.kraken.com/en-us/features/staking-coins https://www.kraken.com/en-us/features/staking-coins
gibsonf1 5y ago
https://solidproject.org/ https://solidproject.org/
- Vinnl 5y ago
  > We should stop building key-management plugins and start thinking about a standardizable web API. We must stop training our users to install shitty browser plugins! Interestingly Solid also used to have an authentication system based on in-browser certificates (WebID-TLS), then switched to an OIDC-based system (Solid-OIDC).
overgard 5y ago
So I've never heard of this term until now, but actually, I can think of a use case for this I kind of like. So, pretty much daily I get linked to an article on a paywalled site that wants me to subscribe or get a free trial. And I always click away, I'm not going through the hassle of email verification or putting in my credit card for a 2 minute read. But if this supported something like "pay 25 cents to read this article", I'd probably do it. Microtransactions seems like it could be a viable use for this kind of thing?
- fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
  Blendle also solves this problem, but it’s a bit higher friction.
- pavlov 5y ago
  This dream of penny transactions is as old as the web — even HTTP status code 402 was reserved for this purpose [1], but a unified solution never happened. Many startups have tried building add-ons and other solutions for this, but it doesn't seem to be a very attractive proposition to a larger user base. People seem to prefer subscriptions rather than nickel-and-diming each piece of content. (Consider how Spotify and Netflix triumphed over the iTunes Store model of 99-cent transactions.) The blockchain backing of so-called "Web3" is not a great fit for micro-transactions because fees are very high and the networks are congested. You'd be paying several dollars in transaction fees for that 25-cent purchase, and waiting several minutes for it to go through. Of course this can be mitigated by a centralized solution that can handle higher volumes. But then it's no different from all the micro-transaction startups that already failed. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402
  - overgard 5y ago
    Everyone I've talked to (and my personal feeling) is that people are kind of sick of the number of subscriptions they have and have to maintain. I think the microtransaction thing never took off not because it's a bad idea, but because it never was built-in and legit feeling and widespread. If I just had a general crypto wallet where I could add some spending money every once in a while, and I could use that to unpaywall things by clicking a button, I would totally use that.
patwolf 5y ago
I was around for web 2.0, and it felt like a substantial change over how the web worked previously. It was the first glimpse that the web was capable of replacing the desktop apps we were accustomed to, while simultaneously adding new capabilities that didn't exist in desktop apps. There was a lot more to it, but to the casual user that was the most obvious difference. This was the first thing I've read about web 3, so I didn't need to grep my brain to find and remove any existing notions about it. As someone coming in late to the party, I agree that installing a browser extension seems like a deal breaker. Web 2.0 was about getting rid of browser extensions. It also sounds like web3 is missing a killer app. For web 2.0, Gmail and Google Maps and YouTube were all immediately useful to all web users. Web 3 doesn't sound all that compelling to a lay person.
- aty268 5y ago
  This is the problem here. What kind of lay people care about this at all? I'm having a hard time being convinced myself, and I could not imagine trying to get 90% of the population remotely excited about this. There's nothing new for them, like you said, no killer app.
- jlokier 5y ago
  That's because "Web 3" is more of a marketing term, whereas "Web 2.0" was a descriptive term coined for something that had already emerged in the preceding years from countless independent implementations, evolving together. When "Web 2.0" was named, most of the techniques had been used for over a decade, and social networking side of it was well established too. Even "AJAX" was coined years after some sites were already using that technique, without that name. Web 3 is an attempt to portray p2p, cryptocurrency, IPFS and similar types of networks as on an equal footing to the evolutionary changes that vaguely made up Web 2.0. In particular, the name implies it's "the" (singular) next version of the Web after 2.0. But it's too early to be sure of that. Most people aren't using it, most sites aren't using it either and don't plan to. The real successor to Web 2.0 that things evolve to en masse might be quite different than Web 3 proponents are describing at the moment.
- casi18 5y ago
  metamask has 10MM monthly active users, opensea at half the volume of ebay last month... anecdotally, people seem to be moving to wallet connect smartphone wallets (eg rainbow) recently as they are nicer than browser extensions + you can use mobile websites/apps with them. Metamask is a bit of a mess tbh. I've been in the space for a few years now so i find it really hard imagining a non-cryptocurrency/web3 internet at this point. It's such a big part of my use of the internet at this point. Hanging out in various dao chats in discord from chess clubs to running gallery spaces, voting in snapshot is a daily activity. Its basically like being in wow guilds, but with a completely open-ended design space to play in. Im not sure what people will be satisfied with as a killer app? what is the measure of success? it feels like its already here and successful to me. After a dull period of the internet feeling like it was disappearing under FAANG it feels alive and chaotic and fun again.
X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
It was only this year that I actually got excited about Ethereum specifically because of what "web3" enables. Yes it's a dumb name, and this article certainly doesn't cover all of the issues, shit just look at the confirmation page for metamask, it literally just asks you if you want to spend X to submit a byte array. No link to the contract, the method you are calling, any avaliable adudits etc. But if you as a reader have any passing interest I'd really encourage you to check out what's happening in the space, the thing that got me excited was the permissionlessness and composability. Going to uniswap, locking up some funds in an AMM and then depositing that elsewhere to liquidity farm shows off the composability, then the fact that you can see it all tracked on a dashboard like zapper.fi or debank.com really drives the point home. Word of warning, Ethereum it's self is now so clogged up with NFTs and people constantly arbitraging or performing liqudiations that it's far too expensive to play around with. There is plenty of cheaper EVM based chains though, like Fantom or Polygon
- binarymax 5y ago
  Your last phrase is really what gets me. Why should any web delivery platform get "clogged up" by content? If this becomes popular, then it just gets slower and more painful to use in ways that aren't fixed by adding more infrastructure? Also, what is the value add that can be explained to someone who just wants to use the web and leaving the jargon like permisionlessness and composability aside? What reason would anyone have to start using this as a consumer?
  - X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
    Long term ethereum is looking at adding more 'infrastructure' but it's early stages, the current paradigm is to move transactions to "roll-ups" that inherent their security from the mainchain. Rollups are expected to increase throughput ~100-1000x (so optimistically getting back to ~1 cent per tx) All of this is early enough that it's all currently exposed to the user. The fact of the matter is that cryptocurrency is still quite technical and under heavy development (well bitcoin isn't, but you can only do one thing with it). Hopefully as these technical solutions are rolled out wallet software will start abstracting across them so the user doesn't need to worry about whether they are transacting on a roll-up. The current state is really not ready for general adoption. It's easy to lose all of your funds to some sort of hack or rug-pull, if you lose your keys you've lost your funds, it's hard to determine what is trust worthy, tax day is a nightmare etc. I participate because I find it fascinating and can stomach the technical complexity and risks
rvz 5y ago
Did the author just forget about the attempted corporate take over of .org? [0]. Blockchains like Ethereum are part of the solution which help prevent something like that from happening. They're not at the stage to be usable yet but it seems that is where we are going. It just takes more de-platformings, bans, hostile takeovers, suspensions etc to accelerate the need for this. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22122458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22122458
- tialaramex 5y ago
  > Blockchains like Ethereum are part of the solution which help prevent something like that from happening. How so? The problem is that many humans are greedy. How do "Blockchains like Ethereum" fix that? The existence of a technology that's completely orthogonal to the problem isn't "part of the solution" although marketing it as a solution certainly does help move worthless tokens.
  - rvz 5y ago
    > How so? The problem is that many humans are greedy. How do "Blockchains like Ethereum" fix that? You do realise Ethereum is a blockchain ecosystem and not just a coin? So ENS isn't part of the solution then? Perhaps you yourself have your own better solution then?
    - tialaramex 5y ago
      I asked "How so?" and, rather than offer any answer at all, you've replied by jabbering about the blockchain again. The closest to an answer is perhaps "So ENS isn't part of the solution then?" which I suppose hints that you believe somehow if everybody pays hundreds of dollars to some third party (sorry, for the "gas" to power an otherwise "free" transaction like a "free" gift that asks for $25 postage and packing...) this will somehow cure an unrelated problem. But who knows, since you didn't explain it.
      - rvz 5y ago
        > I asked "How so?" and, rather than offer any answer at all, you've replied by jabbering about the blockchain again. No need to admit that you detest anything 'blockchain'. I'm assuming that you have your own working clever idea to this then? Very easy to sit there and criticise than to actually build anything...
vmoore 5y ago
Web3 is hardly stupid (it's actually very clever). The name if off-putting more than anything. When I think of Web 3.0, I think of augmented reality, every physical thing having its own QR code which you can look up easily with a smartphone. And if the thing is too small, it could have a chip in it that communicates with NFC and you could learn more about your environment. We're still sort of there, but the dream of QR & NFC codes for everything hasn't been fleshed out yet. Web 3.0 could also be simply an assortment of apps? I think we need more app stores, not the two monopolies we have currently (Play and Apple Store). The dream of having everything happen in the browser could die if it wanted. No more trying to makes sites have an 'appy' feel which has been the main agenda for well over the last decade and a half now.
- warkdarrior 5y ago
  I think you and the author have completely different definitions of "web 3".
- rchaud 5y ago
  QR codes are about the easiest possible attack vector for malware. Is there a decentralized malware scanner that I can pass the QR code through first?
  - vmoore 5y ago
    > QR codes are about the easiest possible attack vector for malware It's up to Android and iOS (and others) to make sure QR codes are not an 'easy' attack vector. Why should it be the case that sending an SMS with a (malware-loaded) bit.ly link takes over your phone? If the phone OS does `principle of least privilege` and sandboxing, and other mitigations then the user should be fine.
platz 5y ago
> you're able to pool thousands of dollars What does it mean 'to pool' ether? I'm not familiar with using it as a verb. Or rather, if its just a transaction, what is the mraning of the choice of the word pool for such an event.
- rattlesnakedave 5y ago
  if a group of people or organizations "pool" their money, knowledge, or equipment, they share it or put it together so that it can be used for a particular purpose for instance, you can "pool" money to provide liquidity for trades on the ethereum blockchain via uniswap.
  - platz 5y ago
    Would it be accurate to say that if I buy a stock that I am pooling my funds?
- timdaub 5y ago
  I suggest you do research in Ethereum on: - staking - automated market makers - p2p lending/borrowing E.g. the compound.finance whitepaper explains some technical details well. One incomplete definition could be that you submit your money temporarily to the control of a mart contract.
klaudioz 5y ago
This is a good answer for that: https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1434530149119135753 https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1434530149119135753
- moogly 5y ago
  That's a lot of words to, essentially, say "OK, Boomer".
neilk 5y ago
I'm generally a blockchain skeptic but I would count this article as evidence _for_ web3 being important. Everything that matters goes through a phase of the idea being great and inspiring and powerful, but the tooling being utter garbage. The latter is fixable.
xook 5y ago
Post's date has 2020, but it also says Sept. 8th, therefore I ask: Is this exactly one year old, or a date error?
- timdaub 5y ago
  No this article is one year old. But it's true that it's a rather weird coincidenct that it popped on HN exactly a year later.
betwixthewires 5y ago
My main concern with it is that a lot of these temporary ecosystem workarounds become de facto standard and it lessens the original purpose of doing all this. An example in the article is Infura. It is a system designed to allow easy use of the network in the interim before a truly decentralized peer to peer network is mature, but habits form and interests entrench and tools get built on infrastructure and you get legacy systems and technical debt and nobody wants to change how things work after a while. I think this is basically the gripe of the article, we have not delivered on the sales pitch yet, are still relying on stopgaps, and as time goes on it becomes increasingly difficult to move past them and they become the norm.
- bastawhiz 5y ago
  Metamask and others are seemingly the Google Gears of 2021.
- timdaub 5y ago
  100% agree with your post. This line of thinking was a big motivator to write the article!
rattlesnakedave 5y ago
This whole post reads like someone who is frustrated with a new technology they don't understand. >We should stop building key-management plugins and start thinking about a standardizable web API. We must stop training our users to install shitty browser plugins! "standardizable web API" is a total pipe dream. The space moves too quickly for standards. Why is installing a browser plugin bad? Is metamask shitty? The millions of MAU must not have noticed. >We need to make light clients work as soon as possible and become independent from third-party services like thegraph and Infura. What does this mean? You can use metmask and web3/ethers.js with your own node. When $$$ is on the line (as with Uniswap, et. al.), it makes sense to farm out your infra to someone else. Should we also be moving away from AWS and its reliability / productivity gains to appease the author? >We need to improve our client libraries (ethers.js and web3.js) by dramatically simplifying them and making them bug-free (god damn it!)! Yes, first good point of the article. People are working on this. Could be said about ANY technology. Web3 is still VERY early. >We need to take advantage of some of the blockchain's fundamental properties. Most data is immutable so let's start caching things. Not sure what this means either. What are we caching? Where? Why? Are you aware we already (kinda) do this with the strata of different ETH nodes via say syncmode in geth? Or are you talking about front ends, many of which are already distributed via IPFS?
steve76 5y ago
Best way I can explain crypto is it's a way computers can pay one another without a bank or money in between. You have a solar panel that trades power for crypto. It wirelessly messages a drone to clean it. You build both and let them work without a human's bank account. Remember pass codes for video games? Crypto is a lot like that, the video game entering the real world. They won't up end replacing money. They require peer discovery. Just take those out if no one wants it. There are ways around it but it will stop widespread adoption. It's easier to get the leadership positions yourself by doing the work or winning the argument instead of fighting against things people don't want.
rewtraw 5y ago
A large chunk of my internet experience lately has been on web3, and the experience is _wonderful_ despite it's immaturity. It's incredible to be able to go to different websites (Zapper, Zerion, OpenSea, etc.) and simply have all my data already exist -- without needing to create an account, export/import. web3 makes me believe in a new era of the internet that isn't full of ads, cookie consent forms, dozens of sign-in services, tracking, etc. An anonymous version of myself and my data exists everywhere. It's really a hackers dream.
- TacoToni 5y ago
  Yes - completely agree. it is refreshing to go to a website, hit connect, and boom there is all my data! I think we are only brushing the surface of what is possible with web3. Cant wait for login support to sign up for social media sites.
  - rewtraw 5y ago
    I do hope existing websites eventually support web3 login, but eventually there will be a web3-native/decentralized social network that actually succeeds. there have been a few attempts over the years but nothing has gained much traction. https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/16/22627435/twitter-bluesky-lead-jay-graber-decentralized-social-web https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/16/22627435/twitter-bluesky-...
- wtvanhest 5y ago
  Yeah. I started really digging in earlier this year and what I realized was that web3 offers true ownership over the important parts of your online identity. For the average user, it’s not exceptionally helpful yet, but for power users like celebrities, politicians and executives, it is extremely valuable. Where they go everyone else will go. Web3 has a massive future
  - Nraphael 5y ago
    Why would these types of people want all their data available on a public chain?
simmanian 5y ago
To me, web3 isn't about building everything on some blockchain. Firstly, it's about building networks and systems that serve us instead of what we have today: big, monolithic networks that profit off our rage and addiction. Secondly, it's about building a model of democracy that is fundamentally more scalable than what we have today: people with differing opinions and values being forced into a single echo chamber and fighting in a zero-sum game to take control of the chamber. Decentralization won't solve all our problems, but I believe it's a more natural and scalable way to organize on the web.
vmception 5y ago
eh, dude, web 2.0 was never defined either. it was cringy for a long time as well. and yes, web 3.0 is absolutely a play on words from web 2.0. this blogger is thinking way too hard about it after some slight disillusionment after a lot of excitement about it, and accurate assessment of its current and future capabilities. its totally okay to criticize how much people rely on Infura. that has nothing to do with an inflammatory title just to get the attention of some Gen-X blockchain skeptics that are just looking for a venue to write their unrelated blockchain skeptic comment.
a94d5dc743 5y ago
What decentralized web can there possibly be when the overwhelming majority of users is on ipv4 behind symmetric NAT? An no, tunneling traffic through a handful of relays is not decentralization either. And neither is storing the full copy of a blockchain elsewhere but on an end user device.
SamPatt 5y ago
Building p2p networks with their own light clients is incredibly difficult. We built OpenBazaar (decentralized marketplace using cryptocurrency) as a p2p network on top on IPFS with it's own client. It eventually failed and everyone asked for a web version and a mobile app (which we built but wasn't truly decentralized thus negating the entire point). I agree that the current web3 approach is often more decentralized in name than in practice, but it seems to be a tradeoff most people are happy with.
danlugo92 5y ago
https://gun.eco/ https://gun.eco/
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
I was pretty disappointed when I realized how much of this was just funnelling through one company, Infura to actually function at all. Always assumed Metamask and web3.js was interfacing with the network directly in a decentralized way until I dug in and started coding with it myself. Still think the promise of an identity you can truly own and authenticate with that has finance built in is important in taking the web back from the megacorps.
deleted 5y ago
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kerng 5y ago
The premise and conclusion of the post is strange because it seems to say Web3 is extremely awesome, and therefore should become default in browers, rather then having to deal with extension!?!? Or did I get this wrong? Brave already integrates these things by the way.
- timdaub 5y ago
  You're righty it's exactly the premise of the article. Seey I've been building in the crypto space since a long time and this post was also a way to express my impatience. I'd like some things to have progressed further by now. Particularly all the web standardization points...

189 points by gozmike 5y ago

Some valid arguments, but in reality web3 is just the web where the backend is something on the blockchain. It makes sense to talk about how to make this experience more secure, but to say the whole thing is a stupid idea doesn't benefit anyone, because a lot of people want it and are going to use it. By the way, most web wallets have hardware support, so you can add an additional layer of security that way.

devmunchies 5y ago
> web3 is just the web where the backend is something on the blockchain even more broad, i think web3 is just where the database is decentralized. blockchain is one solution.
- semicolon_storm 5y ago
  If it's just when the database is decentralized, why even call it web3? Why should web standards even care about implementation details of the database? We didn't move to "web3" when db sharding became a big thing, or when NoSQL caught on.
  - xur17 5y ago
    I don't think a sharded database is "decentralized".
  - divs1210 5y ago
    Because this is fundamentally different? No third party owns your data. Imagine a social network built like this.
    - smt88 5y ago
      Email and Mastodon are existing decentralized social networks. If you want to call something Web3, it's going to need to be more than just "decentralized".
      - devmunchies 5y ago
        technically they are federated, not decentralized. Gmail is a centralized, federated node. Think like a federation of states where each state is its own centralized, independent unit. the newer definition of "decentralization" is more akin to anarchy. Collectivism vs individualism.
        smt88 5y ago
        Email is not "technically federated". It's de facto federated. You can run your own email server on your home computer. Anything less centralized than email isn't going to be "Web3" because it's not going to be a web at all. For the purposes of the internet, there is no functional difference between federated and decentralized. Two strangers must have a way of contacting each other -- something like an IP address at a minimum. That's a centralization point right there. In the case of the web, DNS is going to be the main way that things are centralized. Blockchain is similarly federated -- it just has a way to make sure that each node has a mutually agreed upon state. That doesn't make it decentralized, it just makes it redundant and distributed.
    - majormajor 5y ago
      Isn't that just the late 90s internet? Make your geocities page with your info, link to whoever else's pages you want, use email or chat to communicate with them. HTTP, SMTP, IRC...
    - rchaud 5y ago
      I am trying to imagine a social network like that. How would it be different? A social network is the place to gain clout, so high profile people would continue giving away their IP for free. The network itself could still display context-aware advertising.
- michaelsbradley 5y ago
  Web3 involves decentralized: 1. consensus networks, 2. data storage networks, 3. messaging networks. (1) includes Ethereum and other blockchain and distributed ledger tech. (2) includes IPFS, FileCoin, GUN, etc. If you're storing data on the blockchain apart from the bits needed in relation to consensus ops, you're probably doing it wrong. (3) includes Waku (Status), Matrix ... depends a bit on whether you think this category should only include p2p networks or federated networks of servers qualify. There are many other projects that could be listed for those categories, those are just off the top of my head.
- derefr 5y ago
  Sure; I would describe the technical requirement for something to be "web3" as: • data storage and/or backend computation taking place in/on a decentralized / distributed-locus-of-control system, • where these systems are exposed directly to browsers via regular-web HTTP gateways, • and where there are well-defined general APIs (these being the "web3" APIs) such that these gateways are interchangeable in the access they provide; • where a web app can choose to have a relationship (e.g. a paying customer relationship) with their own gateway provider, rather than having one forced upon them; • and where the user-agent can further enable the user to have their own relationship with different gateway provider, overriding the website's choice of gateway, in a way invisible to the web app. (Just like how UA stylesheets override site stylesheets, in ways invisible to the web app.) The gateways are a necessary part of the definition, because HTTP is fundamentally a protocol for talking to specific servers, so Web -three, then, is 90% about the particular way in which we hitch decentralized stuff up to that centralized model. The fact that the website and the user get choice in their gateway, is what makes this a decentralized system, rather than being something like X.509 that's nominally decentralized (anyone can be their own CA root authority for their own DAG-of-trust) but where in practice there's only one public DAG-of-trust forced on everyone by a consortium of browser and OS manufacturers.
  - jollybean 5y ago
    And this is the 'technical requirement' that solves what problem, that people actually need solved?
    - derefr 5y ago
      Before I answer: why are you asking this in response to the definition of a piece of technical jargon? What makes something "web3", and whether anyone should care about "web3", are separate questions. Nevertheless, the answer is: because web standards don't allow browsers and other only-speaks-HTTP clients, to interact with regular peer-to-peer protocols, preventing them from participating in [the existing networks serving] peer-to-peer use-cases. You can't write a blockchain node as Javascript that executes in a browser and have it talk to the same network peers that other native nodes for that chain interact with. Instead, if users want to participate in such use-cases (e.g. to download a torrent on a Chromebook), they must use technologies like WebTorrent, that stand up their own, incompatible p2p networks based on WebRTC and other web-specific carrier protocols. This creates isolated "web p2p" networks (e.g. the WebTorrent swarm) divorced from their regular-p2p equivalents (e.g. the BitTorrent swarm.) Web3 is one way of avoiding this network split: it is a [nascent] set of standard APIs, allowing browsers and other only-speaks-HTTP clients to interact with p2p protocols by holding relationships with "p2p protocol 'light client' over HTTP" gateways, that expose the p2p protocols in standard useful-over-HTTP manners to browsers. Another way of avoiding such a network split, instead of web3, would be creating lower-level gateways that allow browsers and other only-speaks-HTTP clients to directly tunnel p2p wire protocols over HTTP, where the gateway would terminate the HTTP tunnel and then route the p2p packets to peers as normal. However, most p2p protocols are a really bad fit for having all communications linearized into a TCP stream. Peers connected through such gateways would be really badly-behaved peers from the perspective of the network. Web3 "solves" this by not having the browser speak the p2p protocol itself, but instead having the gateway speak the p2p protocol and act as the finite-state-machine keeping the p2p state, while the browser just gets to interact with the state model that the gateway node builds up through its p2p interactions, via either RPC request-response flows, or event streaming flows, both of which are much better behaved over an HTTP carrier than p2p traffic generally is.
gfodor 5y ago
Sounds like you didn't read the article.
- twox2 5y ago
  I did, but I'm responding to the title, which is the soundbite most folks will digest.

Tenoke 5y ago

1. The web3 'vision' came before the web3.js library they just named it after it but other blockchain interactions fall under it 2. There'll always be subpar devs, and those that make too many calls etc. There's freedom on the web, that's hardly a fault of the idea. In fact the whole article is complaints are about some of the current sites rather than anything more (and many of them aren't bad). The vision if you believe people with cryptopunk avatars is vaster than that already. 3. Some of the complaints like you not having MetaMask to interact with a MetaMask-based website are just odd. Do you complain that users without a phone can't be called? 4. Ethers.js is a lot simplified compared to web3.js. People are working on all those complaints. 5. There's non-extension wallets, too. Solflare doesn't make me install an extension to interact with sites. The extensions just have benefits - everything is fully local but easily integratable so they aren't a bad solution to my eyes.

michaellee8 5y ago

Lol the company I am working for is doing some kind of wallet that basically allow you to keep and use your private key without a (shitty) browser extension like metamask. You basically just get your key back by authenticating with your google account and pressing your finger at touchid. Basically allow people to have same web 2.0 experience when using web3 apps.

fallat 5y ago
I don't get the hate for Metamask. You can connect hardware wallets to it and its actual UX is good.
- timdaub 5y ago
  We can't it be a browser-integrated feature? That we can store keys, have them sign messages and e.g. unlock the signature function through e.g. a hardware wallet or a master password?
  - Tenoke 5y ago
    .. Because major browsers will need to integrate it and they haven't. You can build things yourself more easily than you can convince say chrome to build something (which is the whole point of extensions, really). What you seem to be asking is just metamask to be integrated directly into chrome, which is a nice ask but not done to the right people (ask google/firefox) and its lack does not turn web3 into a 'Stupid Idea'. There's a lot of extension functionality I'd like straight in the browser itself but it's not the extension's fault that browser devs haven't included it.
- verdverm 5y ago
  They were uploading significant details of failed transactions to Segment. If that ever happened to you, they have a connection of a wallet address to other personal details.
- officialchicken 5y ago
  Good UX isn't security, MM and Infuria are owned by the same person (very centralized), you can't change your secret phrase, sentry.js doesn't secure a react app very well at all... etc. etc. etc. I'm not a hater (actually I'm a user), but I am pointing out a wide variety of issues that should be publicly discussed.

cam0 5y ago

I think it's poorly named. It's not a new major version of the web. Forget the fact that the vast majority of the web's users don't care about decentralization vs. centralization even a single bit. People will continue to mindlessly use WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Coinbase because decentralization is not a concern for _most_ users. Most users of these apps just want to socialize with friends and family, show off / humble brag / argue, and gamble.

timdaub 5y ago
Yeah, I also think it's poorly named. It's semantically speaking not a major upgrade. But additionally, I'd prefer web 2.1 over web 3.0 first...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
dreyfan 5y ago
I’m so glad the entire decentralized community has rallied around the limitless power and innovation of NFTs.
- officialchicken 5y ago
  Please make an NFT of your comment for sale on opensea... I suggest "Bored hackernews comment club"
  - rchaud 5y ago
    Christie's and Sotheby's will be on red alert when this drops.
- poetaster 5y ago
  I'd buy an officialchicken fungible whatyamathingy!
acdha 5y ago

ramon 5y ago

Bittorrent seems to be the pioneer in this open P2P space and I liked also the zeronet initiative about descentralized web. Web3 is trying to pickup on that same space, I think maybe unifying these efforts of Web3 with Bittorrent and all will make a big descentralized ground for what Web3 should probably become and yes I do not think wallets are a good approach either it is stupid, is what we have now but we need a better approach without any browser plugins, maybe facial recognition is the key here.

pphysch 5y ago

Even an ideal blockchain-ified P2P "Web 3.0" is a silly fantasy on par with NAT-less IPv4. First they reinvented gold & databases, now they are reinventing IP. Flat networks are a thing of the past, when you could keep the whole Internet in a paper directory on your desk. Blockchains may be used for settlement and accounting within small networks of international firms, but they will never service the latency and throughput needs of 8 billion netizens.

gfodor 5y ago
HN comments that use the word "never" should raise eyebrows. You're not wrong if you assume technology is fixed. But it ain't.
- pphysch 5y ago
  Right, and we will eventually choose to forgo toilets and defecate in the streets again, because "never say never". Please address my argument instead of this unconstructive purity-testing nonsense.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    > Right, and we will eventually choose to forgo toilets and defecate in the streets again, because "never say never". It's happened in the past; why would you rule it out in the future?
  - Kiro 5y ago
    It's not about "never say never". It's about HN being notoriously bad at predicting trends.
  - gfodor 5y ago
    Your argument is refuted by the fact the technology to solve the problem you claim will never be solved literally already exists, one version of which has a market cap of almost $10B.[1] Claiming that a very obvious engineering problem incentivized to being solved is the same as imagining us being incentivized to regress in the way you mention is also weird. [1] https://www.avax.network/ https://www.avax.network/

agustif 5y ago

web2: client <-> server web3: client <-> client <-> client

semicolon_storm 5y ago
When's a client become a server? If you need to connect to a fullnode which is running in a datacenter somewhere whose sole purpose is to service these kinds of requests, surely it's just a server.
pphysch 5y ago
web1: client <-> client Web2 happened for a lot of very good reasons.
Matthias247 5y ago
From the blog post I understood this still talks from the browser client to some gateway server, which might then be part of a p2p network. Which would certainly be required if the library uses http for communication. Or did I got it wrong and a native browser plugin enables other means of communication?

sentinel 5y ago

It's a metaphor dude.

api 5y ago

My biggest issue with it is its complexity. It's impossible to tell what the fuck is happening behind things like Metamask, which makes me wonder if the whole thing isn't fake decentralization with hidden centralized services or authorities working behind the scenes. It also means that it's hard to create different implementations. I've seen fake decentralization in other areas in the very dodgy cryptocurrency ecosystem. A lot of times it's "we'll decentralize this eventually when we figure out some issues" but that never happens. After the ICO or coin offering or whatever nothing else happens in the repository and Tesla sells some more high-end cars. The web was simple and its core still mostly is. It has a ton of extensions and newer protocols but you don't need all that to use it for its original document store purpose.

danielrhodes 5y ago
This is what happens to most decentralized services. They are hard and wonky to use. People need help using them, corporations need reliability. And hence come centralized services to help sort it out. Examples: * Cash -> Bank Deposit Account * Email (host your own mail server) -> Gmail * Rack your own server -> AWS * Everybody is a DNS node -> Root Servers/ISPs/Cloudflare/OpenDNS, etc. * BitTorrent -> Pirate Bay * Git -> GitHub * Bitcoin -> Coinbase

zzok22 5y ago

It's much easier to criticize than to build an alternative. I don't think anyone at Metamask or in the space in general thinks to themselves that the ecosystem is in a state of full maturity or that there aren't major problems. Despite its shortcomings, MM and Web3 have given us capabilities that simply didn't exist five years ago. And those capabilities aren't just limited to a select number of shadowy super hackers. MM has millions of MAU and that number will only grow as more people see the potential of the tech.

tmcw 5y ago
People are building things like renewed web standards (Project Fugu, for example) and P2P networks (Beaker, Hypercore), and light clients (Mighty). These projects don't get any attention from the "Web3" crowd because they don't involve currency speculation.
- max_ 5y ago
  You cannot separate economics incentives from networking protocols. You need an actual sepeculative market to price and offer these services. Most of open source fails because they don't acknowledge this reality.
  - soneca 5y ago
    > ” Most of open source fails because they don't acknowledge this reality.” That’s a bold statement. Most of projects that do acknowledge this reality also fail. Like all for-profit and even those web3 projects that are using cryptocurrency speculation. So I think there are tons of reasons that open source projects fail, not just because of this reason.
  - X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
    What about bittorrent?
    - max_ 5y ago
      Bittorrent is fantastic for 'altruistic' activity. But it is useless if you want to build a for profit Netflix. You may have to look at something like IPFS that accounts for economic incentives I the protocol.

sergiotapia 5y ago

Unfortunately, "web3" being placed next to words like "crypto" and "blockchain" stains it as bullshit full of grifters and leeches. Edit: forgot about the cherry on top "NFT" another layer of shit on what I thought would be pure and innovative. Grifters all the way down.

PostThisTooFast 5y ago

So is this headline.

dnpp123 5y ago

Sadly not sure the ecosystem is mature enough for any kind of standardization yet.

tmcw 5y ago
Ethereum is, what, 6 years old. Metamask has been in development for 5 years. Bitcoin is 12 years old. Bitcoin is older than React.js. Ethereum has been around for as long as TikTok. Uber was founded in the same year as Bitcoin and has essentially destroyed a worldwide industry. At some point these things aren't young or early, they're just stupid.
- reidjs 5y ago
  What point are you making here? Just because they haven't destroyed a worldwide industry in 5 or 6 years they are stupid?
  - jollybean 5y ago
    They haven't 'found' a single practical use case other than for some speculators who think they have a 'store of value'. Reading this thread it's clear Web3 doesn't really have a use case either, it's more like a concept. These have many parallels in industry - there are tons of products that never got made because they didn't make a whole lot of sense even though they were cool. The difference being, people can chose to spend their own time on these things now if they so choose and a lot of people do. It's like a distributed technical artistic counter-cultural social movement except the artists believe they're doing something more practical than they probably are.
- beambot 5y ago
  Technologies mature at different rates. ARPAnet was created in the 1960s. www was created in 1989. Yahoo & Netscape were started in 1994. Foundational infrastructure is rarely explosive in growth. It's also unclear how you're measuring success. By market cap, Bitcoin beats out all three of your examples (React, TikTok, & Uber). But it's also a bit weird to compare Bitcoin to two of the fastest growing consumer companies in recent memory. It's apples & oranges.

bob229 5y ago

Working at a blockchain company you would certainly be knowledgeable in stupid ideas

deleted 5y ago

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okdjnfweonfe 5y ago

Really wish progressive enhancement was chosen as the first thing, want to get rid of the backend db? ok, two APIs, store to extension-managed DB (e.g. flatfiles in the home directory, or shunted onto something managed with LDAP, or loaded onto some weird coin thing on a local light node, or etc), or in environments where extensions are fussy / overcomplicated, store to another website via a http api (la https://remotestorage.io/ https://remotestorage.io/, or if one wants to overcomplicate it again, a remotestorage-to-weird-blockchain-thing-shim) - - - For the article itself, deriding web3 as "Money websites" and then basically asking for "Lightweight money websites" is a bit pointless. Storing stuff on "Money" is a big overhead, If you were to decide to write your data onto a gold ingot, you'd probably not enjoy the process of going to the bank safe deposit box each time to make a change or read a change, likewise, money websites are going to be encumbered with risk, endless layers of crypto math un-understanding, and stress. Don't worry, someone might make a contract to provide that fine grained API you want, and that contract might not have bugs, and the tooling used might not be able to be tricked to use some other contract as an api since you know, decentralized, shouldn't be able to use only 1 implementation right Or, if you remove money from the equation, like, hell, replace it with text files or something, even if users need to exchange text files with each other to update each other's pages (ok a bit overkill, webrtc should suffice, still requires both people online at the same time though), it still removes a lot of emotional stress

yunohn 5y ago
> If you were to decide to write your data onto a gold ingot Why do crypto enthusiasts feel the need to use gold as a strawman? The vast majority of non-crypto people use digital money (in local currencies), and have never touched gold in their lives. Digital money works great, and doesn’t need a blockchain.
- hackingforfun 5y ago
  > Why do crypto enthusiasts feel the need to use gold as a strawman? Well, at least the US, the government treats crypto as property, at least tax-wise (actually it's taxed just like real estate or gold). It's just that crypto is much more easily transferable than real estate or gold. > The vast majority of non-crypto people use digital money (in local currencies), and have never touched gold in their lives. Digital money works great, and doesn’t need a blockchain. I understand this argument. The traditional financial system is quite mature, and works pretty well. I do have a few concerns with it though: •Negative interest rates in some parts of the world •Ever increasing sovereign debt throughout the world, with no intent of ever paying it back •Lack of ability for 24/7 payments, or even instant payments (at least in the US, however, this fortunately seems to be changing with things like FedNow) •No APIs for banks which make things like screen scraping necessary for data aggregation, i.e. Mint, or verification tools, i.e. Plaid (and I know this opens a can of worms because banking data should be regulated and private, but still, I've seen this API complaint on HN before, and crypto is a more open system, that could also have layers of permission added to it) This leads me to another point, which is actually a question. How do people here beat inflation? Stocks? Sure, I have some stocks, too. But crypto yields are some of the highest right now, and it isn't all just some manipulation or leverage or something. Take a look at proof of stake coins, you can stake say, Polkadot, on Kraken, for 12% APR [1]. You can also stake Polkadot, directly, without using an exchange as an intermediary, it just requires more technical skill. The staking return on proof of stake coins is a reward for helping secure the proof of stake network. I've heard Charles Hoskinson, the creator of Cardano and co-founder of Ethereum, say in one of his videos that we need a new asset class in order to make up for this inflationary environment. And also, I would add, that we need that to accommodate for what I consider to be a war on cash. I'd be happy to keep fiat in a savings account, and I did for many years, until the rates on savings accounts went to basically zero. Now people are basically forced to hold riskier things like stocks, or if they have an even higher appetite for risk, crypto. In short, I don't think everything in digital fiat is going perfectly well. If it was, I don't think I'd find crypto as attractive. [1] https://www.kraken.com/en-us/features/staking-coins https://www.kraken.com/en-us/features/staking-coins

gibsonf1 5y ago

https://solidproject.org/ https://solidproject.org/

Vinnl 5y ago
> We should stop building key-management plugins and start thinking about a standardizable web API. We must stop training our users to install shitty browser plugins! Interestingly Solid also used to have an authentication system based on in-browser certificates (WebID-TLS), then switched to an OIDC-based system (Solid-OIDC).

overgard 5y ago

So I've never heard of this term until now, but actually, I can think of a use case for this I kind of like. So, pretty much daily I get linked to an article on a paywalled site that wants me to subscribe or get a free trial. And I always click away, I'm not going through the hassle of email verification or putting in my credit card for a 2 minute read. But if this supported something like "pay 25 cents to read this article", I'd probably do it. Microtransactions seems like it could be a viable use for this kind of thing?

fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
Blendle also solves this problem, but it’s a bit higher friction.
pavlov 5y ago
This dream of penny transactions is as old as the web — even HTTP status code 402 was reserved for this purpose [1], but a unified solution never happened. Many startups have tried building add-ons and other solutions for this, but it doesn't seem to be a very attractive proposition to a larger user base. People seem to prefer subscriptions rather than nickel-and-diming each piece of content. (Consider how Spotify and Netflix triumphed over the iTunes Store model of 99-cent transactions.) The blockchain backing of so-called "Web3" is not a great fit for micro-transactions because fees are very high and the networks are congested. You'd be paying several dollars in transaction fees for that 25-cent purchase, and waiting several minutes for it to go through. Of course this can be mitigated by a centralized solution that can handle higher volumes. But then it's no different from all the micro-transaction startups that already failed. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402
- overgard 5y ago
  Everyone I've talked to (and my personal feeling) is that people are kind of sick of the number of subscriptions they have and have to maintain. I think the microtransaction thing never took off not because it's a bad idea, but because it never was built-in and legit feeling and widespread. If I just had a general crypto wallet where I could add some spending money every once in a while, and I could use that to unpaywall things by clicking a button, I would totally use that.

patwolf 5y ago

I was around for web 2.0, and it felt like a substantial change over how the web worked previously. It was the first glimpse that the web was capable of replacing the desktop apps we were accustomed to, while simultaneously adding new capabilities that didn't exist in desktop apps. There was a lot more to it, but to the casual user that was the most obvious difference. This was the first thing I've read about web 3, so I didn't need to grep my brain to find and remove any existing notions about it. As someone coming in late to the party, I agree that installing a browser extension seems like a deal breaker. Web 2.0 was about getting rid of browser extensions. It also sounds like web3 is missing a killer app. For web 2.0, Gmail and Google Maps and YouTube were all immediately useful to all web users. Web 3 doesn't sound all that compelling to a lay person.

aty268 5y ago
This is the problem here. What kind of lay people care about this at all? I'm having a hard time being convinced myself, and I could not imagine trying to get 90% of the population remotely excited about this. There's nothing new for them, like you said, no killer app.
jlokier 5y ago
That's because "Web 3" is more of a marketing term, whereas "Web 2.0" was a descriptive term coined for something that had already emerged in the preceding years from countless independent implementations, evolving together. When "Web 2.0" was named, most of the techniques had been used for over a decade, and social networking side of it was well established too. Even "AJAX" was coined years after some sites were already using that technique, without that name. Web 3 is an attempt to portray p2p, cryptocurrency, IPFS and similar types of networks as on an equal footing to the evolutionary changes that vaguely made up Web 2.0. In particular, the name implies it's "the" (singular) next version of the Web after 2.0. But it's too early to be sure of that. Most people aren't using it, most sites aren't using it either and don't plan to. The real successor to Web 2.0 that things evolve to en masse might be quite different than Web 3 proponents are describing at the moment.
casi18 5y ago
metamask has 10MM monthly active users, opensea at half the volume of ebay last month... anecdotally, people seem to be moving to wallet connect smartphone wallets (eg rainbow) recently as they are nicer than browser extensions + you can use mobile websites/apps with them. Metamask is a bit of a mess tbh. I've been in the space for a few years now so i find it really hard imagining a non-cryptocurrency/web3 internet at this point. It's such a big part of my use of the internet at this point. Hanging out in various dao chats in discord from chess clubs to running gallery spaces, voting in snapshot is a daily activity. Its basically like being in wow guilds, but with a completely open-ended design space to play in. Im not sure what people will be satisfied with as a killer app? what is the measure of success? it feels like its already here and successful to me. After a dull period of the internet feeling like it was disappearing under FAANG it feels alive and chaotic and fun again.

X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago

It was only this year that I actually got excited about Ethereum specifically because of what "web3" enables. Yes it's a dumb name, and this article certainly doesn't cover all of the issues, shit just look at the confirmation page for metamask, it literally just asks you if you want to spend X to submit a byte array. No link to the contract, the method you are calling, any avaliable adudits etc. But if you as a reader have any passing interest I'd really encourage you to check out what's happening in the space, the thing that got me excited was the permissionlessness and composability. Going to uniswap, locking up some funds in an AMM and then depositing that elsewhere to liquidity farm shows off the composability, then the fact that you can see it all tracked on a dashboard like zapper.fi or debank.com really drives the point home. Word of warning, Ethereum it's self is now so clogged up with NFTs and people constantly arbitraging or performing liqudiations that it's far too expensive to play around with. There is plenty of cheaper EVM based chains though, like Fantom or Polygon

binarymax 5y ago
Your last phrase is really what gets me. Why should any web delivery platform get "clogged up" by content? If this becomes popular, then it just gets slower and more painful to use in ways that aren't fixed by adding more infrastructure? Also, what is the value add that can be explained to someone who just wants to use the web and leaving the jargon like permisionlessness and composability aside? What reason would anyone have to start using this as a consumer?
- X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
  Long term ethereum is looking at adding more 'infrastructure' but it's early stages, the current paradigm is to move transactions to "roll-ups" that inherent their security from the mainchain. Rollups are expected to increase throughput ~100-1000x (so optimistically getting back to ~1 cent per tx) All of this is early enough that it's all currently exposed to the user. The fact of the matter is that cryptocurrency is still quite technical and under heavy development (well bitcoin isn't, but you can only do one thing with it). Hopefully as these technical solutions are rolled out wallet software will start abstracting across them so the user doesn't need to worry about whether they are transacting on a roll-up. The current state is really not ready for general adoption. It's easy to lose all of your funds to some sort of hack or rug-pull, if you lose your keys you've lost your funds, it's hard to determine what is trust worthy, tax day is a nightmare etc. I participate because I find it fascinating and can stomach the technical complexity and risks

rvz 5y ago

Did the author just forget about the attempted corporate take over of .org? [0]. Blockchains like Ethereum are part of the solution which help prevent something like that from happening. They're not at the stage to be usable yet but it seems that is where we are going. It just takes more de-platformings, bans, hostile takeovers, suspensions etc to accelerate the need for this. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22122458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22122458

tialaramex 5y ago
> Blockchains like Ethereum are part of the solution which help prevent something like that from happening. How so? The problem is that many humans are greedy. How do "Blockchains like Ethereum" fix that? The existence of a technology that's completely orthogonal to the problem isn't "part of the solution" although marketing it as a solution certainly does help move worthless tokens.
- rvz 5y ago
  > How so? The problem is that many humans are greedy. How do "Blockchains like Ethereum" fix that? You do realise Ethereum is a blockchain ecosystem and not just a coin? So ENS isn't part of the solution then? Perhaps you yourself have your own better solution then?
  - tialaramex 5y ago
    I asked "How so?" and, rather than offer any answer at all, you've replied by jabbering about the blockchain again. The closest to an answer is perhaps "So ENS isn't part of the solution then?" which I suppose hints that you believe somehow if everybody pays hundreds of dollars to some third party (sorry, for the "gas" to power an otherwise "free" transaction like a "free" gift that asks for $25 postage and packing...) this will somehow cure an unrelated problem. But who knows, since you didn't explain it.
    - rvz 5y ago
      > I asked "How so?" and, rather than offer any answer at all, you've replied by jabbering about the blockchain again. No need to admit that you detest anything 'blockchain'. I'm assuming that you have your own working clever idea to this then? Very easy to sit there and criticise than to actually build anything...

vmoore 5y ago

Web3 is hardly stupid (it's actually very clever). The name if off-putting more than anything. When I think of Web 3.0, I think of augmented reality, every physical thing having its own QR code which you can look up easily with a smartphone. And if the thing is too small, it could have a chip in it that communicates with NFC and you could learn more about your environment. We're still sort of there, but the dream of QR & NFC codes for everything hasn't been fleshed out yet. Web 3.0 could also be simply an assortment of apps? I think we need more app stores, not the two monopolies we have currently (Play and Apple Store). The dream of having everything happen in the browser could die if it wanted. No more trying to makes sites have an 'appy' feel which has been the main agenda for well over the last decade and a half now.

warkdarrior 5y ago
I think you and the author have completely different definitions of "web 3".
rchaud 5y ago
QR codes are about the easiest possible attack vector for malware. Is there a decentralized malware scanner that I can pass the QR code through first?
- vmoore 5y ago
  > QR codes are about the easiest possible attack vector for malware It's up to Android and iOS (and others) to make sure QR codes are not an 'easy' attack vector. Why should it be the case that sending an SMS with a (malware-loaded) bit.ly link takes over your phone? If the phone OS does `principle of least privilege` and sandboxing, and other mitigations then the user should be fine.

platz 5y ago

> you're able to pool thousands of dollars What does it mean 'to pool' ether? I'm not familiar with using it as a verb. Or rather, if its just a transaction, what is the mraning of the choice of the word pool for such an event.

rattlesnakedave 5y ago
if a group of people or organizations "pool" their money, knowledge, or equipment, they share it or put it together so that it can be used for a particular purpose for instance, you can "pool" money to provide liquidity for trades on the ethereum blockchain via uniswap.
- platz 5y ago
  Would it be accurate to say that if I buy a stock that I am pooling my funds?
timdaub 5y ago
I suggest you do research in Ethereum on: - staking - automated market makers - p2p lending/borrowing E.g. the compound.finance whitepaper explains some technical details well. One incomplete definition could be that you submit your money temporarily to the control of a mart contract.

klaudioz 5y ago

This is a good answer for that: https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1434530149119135753 https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1434530149119135753

moogly 5y ago
That's a lot of words to, essentially, say "OK, Boomer".

neilk 5y ago

I'm generally a blockchain skeptic but I would count this article as evidence _for_ web3 being important. Everything that matters goes through a phase of the idea being great and inspiring and powerful, but the tooling being utter garbage. The latter is fixable.

xook 5y ago

Post's date has 2020, but it also says Sept. 8th, therefore I ask: Is this exactly one year old, or a date error?

timdaub 5y ago
No this article is one year old. But it's true that it's a rather weird coincidenct that it popped on HN exactly a year later.

betwixthewires 5y ago

My main concern with it is that a lot of these temporary ecosystem workarounds become de facto standard and it lessens the original purpose of doing all this. An example in the article is Infura. It is a system designed to allow easy use of the network in the interim before a truly decentralized peer to peer network is mature, but habits form and interests entrench and tools get built on infrastructure and you get legacy systems and technical debt and nobody wants to change how things work after a while. I think this is basically the gripe of the article, we have not delivered on the sales pitch yet, are still relying on stopgaps, and as time goes on it becomes increasingly difficult to move past them and they become the norm.

bastawhiz 5y ago
Metamask and others are seemingly the Google Gears of 2021.
timdaub 5y ago
100% agree with your post. This line of thinking was a big motivator to write the article!

rattlesnakedave 5y ago

This whole post reads like someone who is frustrated with a new technology they don't understand. >We should stop building key-management plugins and start thinking about a standardizable web API. We must stop training our users to install shitty browser plugins! "standardizable web API" is a total pipe dream. The space moves too quickly for standards. Why is installing a browser plugin bad? Is metamask shitty? The millions of MAU must not have noticed. >We need to make light clients work as soon as possible and become independent from third-party services like thegraph and Infura. What does this mean? You can use metmask and web3/ethers.js with your own node. When $$$ is on the line (as with Uniswap, et. al.), it makes sense to farm out your infra to someone else. Should we also be moving away from AWS and its reliability / productivity gains to appease the author? >We need to improve our client libraries (ethers.js and web3.js) by dramatically simplifying them and making them bug-free (god damn it!)! Yes, first good point of the article. People are working on this. Could be said about ANY technology. Web3 is still VERY early. >We need to take advantage of some of the blockchain's fundamental properties. Most data is immutable so let's start caching things. Not sure what this means either. What are we caching? Where? Why? Are you aware we already (kinda) do this with the strata of different ETH nodes via say syncmode in geth? Or are you talking about front ends, many of which are already distributed via IPFS?

steve76 5y ago

Best way I can explain crypto is it's a way computers can pay one another without a bank or money in between. You have a solar panel that trades power for crypto. It wirelessly messages a drone to clean it. You build both and let them work without a human's bank account. Remember pass codes for video games? Crypto is a lot like that, the video game entering the real world. They won't up end replacing money. They require peer discovery. Just take those out if no one wants it. There are ways around it but it will stop widespread adoption. It's easier to get the leadership positions yourself by doing the work or winning the argument instead of fighting against things people don't want.

rewtraw 5y ago

A large chunk of my internet experience lately has been on web3, and the experience is _wonderful_ despite it's immaturity. It's incredible to be able to go to different websites (Zapper, Zerion, OpenSea, etc.) and simply have all my data already exist -- without needing to create an account, export/import. web3 makes me believe in a new era of the internet that isn't full of ads, cookie consent forms, dozens of sign-in services, tracking, etc. An anonymous version of myself and my data exists everywhere. It's really a hackers dream.

TacoToni 5y ago
Yes - completely agree. it is refreshing to go to a website, hit connect, and boom there is all my data! I think we are only brushing the surface of what is possible with web3. Cant wait for login support to sign up for social media sites.
- rewtraw 5y ago
  I do hope existing websites eventually support web3 login, but eventually there will be a web3-native/decentralized social network that actually succeeds. there have been a few attempts over the years but nothing has gained much traction. https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/16/22627435/twitter-bluesky-lead-jay-graber-decentralized-social-web https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/16/22627435/twitter-bluesky-...
wtvanhest 5y ago
Yeah. I started really digging in earlier this year and what I realized was that web3 offers true ownership over the important parts of your online identity. For the average user, it’s not exceptionally helpful yet, but for power users like celebrities, politicians and executives, it is extremely valuable. Where they go everyone else will go. Web3 has a massive future
- Nraphael 5y ago
  Why would these types of people want all their data available on a public chain?

simmanian 5y ago

To me, web3 isn't about building everything on some blockchain. Firstly, it's about building networks and systems that serve us instead of what we have today: big, monolithic networks that profit off our rage and addiction. Secondly, it's about building a model of democracy that is fundamentally more scalable than what we have today: people with differing opinions and values being forced into a single echo chamber and fighting in a zero-sum game to take control of the chamber. Decentralization won't solve all our problems, but I believe it's a more natural and scalable way to organize on the web.

vmception 5y ago

eh, dude, web 2.0 was never defined either. it was cringy for a long time as well. and yes, web 3.0 is absolutely a play on words from web 2.0. this blogger is thinking way too hard about it after some slight disillusionment after a lot of excitement about it, and accurate assessment of its current and future capabilities. its totally okay to criticize how much people rely on Infura. that has nothing to do with an inflammatory title just to get the attention of some Gen-X blockchain skeptics that are just looking for a venue to write their unrelated blockchain skeptic comment.

a94d5dc743 5y ago

What decentralized web can there possibly be when the overwhelming majority of users is on ipv4 behind symmetric NAT? An no, tunneling traffic through a handful of relays is not decentralization either. And neither is storing the full copy of a blockchain elsewhere but on an end user device.

SamPatt 5y ago

Building p2p networks with their own light clients is incredibly difficult. We built OpenBazaar (decentralized marketplace using cryptocurrency) as a p2p network on top on IPFS with it's own client. It eventually failed and everyone asked for a web version and a mobile app (which we built but wasn't truly decentralized thus negating the entire point). I agree that the current web3 approach is often more decentralized in name than in practice, but it seems to be a tradeoff most people are happy with.

danlugo92 5y ago

https://gun.eco/ https://gun.eco/

whywhywhywhy 5y ago

I was pretty disappointed when I realized how much of this was just funnelling through one company, Infura to actually function at all. Always assumed Metamask and web3.js was interfacing with the network directly in a decentralized way until I dug in and started coding with it myself. Still think the promise of an identity you can truly own and authenticate with that has finance built in is important in taking the web back from the megacorps.

deleted 5y ago

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kerng 5y ago

The premise and conclusion of the post is strange because it seems to say Web3 is extremely awesome, and therefore should become default in browers, rather then having to deal with extension!?!? Or did I get this wrong? Brave already integrates these things by the way.

timdaub 5y ago
You're righty it's exactly the premise of the article. Seey I've been building in the crypto space since a long time and this post was also a way to express my impatience. I'd like some things to have progressed further by now. Particularly all the web standardization points...