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Web3 – A Vision for a Decentralized Web

178 points by jgrahamc 5y ago

gibsonf1 5y ago
https://solidproject.org/ https://solidproject.org/
- M2Ys4U 5y ago
  Solid is much more "Web 3.0" than "Web3" - it leverages decentralisation and HTTP rather than cryptocurrency nonsense. Although there is a bunch of overlap via DIDs and such.
gitfan86 5y ago
This is genius marketing. Decentralization is great, but what is even better is if you host all of your decentralized projects on one central platform.
- ignoramous 5y ago
  Cloudflare provides a HTTPS gateway to IPFS. It isn't the sole host for any IPFS content.
- beckman466 5y ago
  it's decentralization if it runs on two separate hard drives in the same AWS data center, right? right!?
  - Spivak 5y ago
    You try and define decentralization in a way that accounts for multiple independent hosts of content coincidentally using the same cloud service. If some people host content on GCP and others Amazon is it suddenly decentralized?
mwcampbell 5y ago
I'm disappointed to see Cloudflare chasing this hype train rather than focusing all of its resources on its own truly valuable innovations, particularly the Workers platform.
- jgrahamc 5y ago
  The nature of innovation is that you have to try things that might not pan out. Maybe web3 fizzles and dies, maybe it doesn't. But a small investment by our research arm means we can get experience with new technologies that might be years away from coming to fruition. And I often tell people that my goal is that if you hear about an Internet technology and Google it you should find that Cloudflare has already written about it and/or implemented it. That way people can trust us as a valuable source of information and to be on top of a changing world. Imagine a large customer of Cloudflare who's heard about web3. Lo and behold we've written about it, have a product offering, etc. Maybe they read all that and say "Nope, don't want web3". Doesn't matter, they still trust us to be their partner in whatever's next.
  - mwcampbell 5y ago
    Touché.
- fallat 5y ago
  Ethereum is not just hype. You better start educating yourself.
  - mikewhy 5y ago
    True, it's also accelerating the destruction of the environment, helped people make money off other people's artwork, and introduced a new generation of people to pump and dump schemes over receipts.
    - threecheese 5y ago
      Technically Ethereum is moving to proof of stake; no more miners, no more massive (well, less egregious) environmental impact. I would say that BTC is the big problem here, which is one reason why I personally don’t think it will have staying power long term. You have a point about proof of work in general though.
rvz 5y ago
Is that a sell signal?
- punkspider 5y ago
  Same thought crossed my mind.
- jancsika 5y ago
  I would like to know more. :) In what way does this alert you that some fundamental thing is wrong with the company?
  - rvz 5y ago
    Sure. I already gave the buy signal years ago on Cloudflare [0] since they released their S-1 in 2019. Now I am >500% up since buying on IPO day and sold some today. Overall bullish, but you make money by taking profits. Buy the rumour, sell the news. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20707306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20707306
taytus 5y ago
Every time I see someone talking about web3, I roll my eyes so hard I can see my brain.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
justshowpost 5y ago
I'd really like to see Cloudflare Pages offer an option to deploy to IPFS. Integrate that with Cloudflare registrar to setup DNS automatically such that it's proxied to the old Web through the Cloudflare IPFS gateway, and I can host my entire site on Cloudflare. The current one-click push to deploy integration is key, and I'd like to see that for IPFS as well. They could use the same edge servers as IPFS nodes, offering the same benefits of DDOS mitigation and such. Though as is the benefit of IPFS, they'd receive less traffic since other IPFS nodes might pin the content as well. It'd probably cost them less, since currently each page revision is hosted indefinitely at <rev>.<domain>.pages.dev which would be the same as keeping the old versions pinned on IPFS.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
uniclaude 5y ago
META: The hate for pretty much anything blockchain-related in the comments is real. I clicked on this link expecting the usual load of criticism, and I wasn’t disappointed. Now, to actually add to the discussion, it would be great to see clearer use cases that Cloudflare has to help publishers and users of web3, as the blog post describes what’s behind the name but goes only very briefly on what Cloudflare actually wants to bring to the table. A very fast, yet privacy-focused or anonymous, and affordable decentralized CDN would be interesting.
- soco 5y ago
  Just as real as the fascination... there are two sides to any idea, more often than not. To your point, indeed it's not very clear to me what does Cloudflare want to achieve in this area.
itsbits 5y ago
There are strong reasons why peer - peer network is not mainstream. Not a single internet giant using this in their infra. if Cloudfare is replacing CDN keyword with Web3, may be it's fine.
pornel 5y ago
I'm so disappointed that our* company is peddling this bullshit :( I'm going to raise it internally. (yes, I'm an employee)
- WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
  > our company Are you an employee? Or, speaking generally here to a company this community commonly roots for? I guess either way. What’s your beef with them experimenting to try new and wild ideas? Edit: > (yes, I'm an employee) If true, wow. If not, troll… Publicly trashing another co-workers work/team is in poor taste, immature, and creates a hostile work environment — if you agree or not with the tech or direction. I hope you get what’s coming to you. Classic Dev God ego and suggest maybe disconnecting online a bit and apologizing to them. I can’t imagine Cloudflare’s hiring team likes to see this type of hostile banter allowed.
  - floatboth 5y ago
    > new and wild ideas Only "wild" as in "stupid". Ethereum has been around for ages, and it still has nothing to do with "decentralizing the web". Its advanced functionality is only used for building things like automated Ponzi schemes.
- rchaud 5y ago
  I would suggest editing it to provide more detail on IPFS and existing methods of decentralization like torrents, which regular people can understand and use, and whose reputation is free of "get rich quick" snake oil.
- sneak 5y ago
  I don't see anything being peddled in TFA. Your comment seems like ideological bias.
- dgb23 5y ago
  Hey, I agree with you! Even though I think it's bad etiquette to write a comment like that, I was kind of relieved to read it. I have almost always been impressed with Cloudflare's blog posts (and documentation). Good and explicit marketing, clear language, interesting and smart products. Just really attractive stuff that demonstrates competency. This one feels like a mumbo-jumbo of cryptocurrency buzzwords that no one needs or even wants to hear. Just thinking about the term "Web3" pains me to the bones.
tomcooks 5y ago
Cloudflare's vision, especially about decentralization, smells a lot.
floatboth 5y ago
Cloudflare is a major force in centralizing the actual internet on itself (the one free CDN/anti-DDoS for everyone who's not a giant themselves, huh, what could possibly go wrong). Are they attaching themselves to this coin crap in order to "decentralization-wash" their public image? They have to know that people know how fraudulent and awful the whole cryptocurrency space is, right?
- WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
  > coin crap in order to "decentralization-wash" their public image I’d guess it has nothing to do with that and way less dramatic. They are a company that benefits and profits from having a large network. It makes sense to try and be part of alternate networks. A lot of people, including myself, see their growth as also having made small businesses/sites/apps more competitive on an increasingly centralized web from way more evil players in the game. The Crypto noise aside, I also think a decentralized Internet is exciting. At the very least, I’m glad they are throwing money at and will see where this goes research helps things go.
  - RNCTX 5y ago
    I'd guess it's less dramatic than your hypothetical still: They need new faces and the most obvious source of them en masse is people who aren't welcome on other cloud platforms. That means cryptocurrency people, who have been effectively outcast from the rest of the internet's premium tier hosting providers, because when they were allowed on the rest of the internet's premium tier hosting providers they tried to steal shit while they were in there.
    - WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
      What?
- rchaud 5y ago
  I believe you can create a Cloudflare mirror for your web3 site so people can access it using a regular browser.
threecheese 5y ago
Is this Cloudflare looking to become the trusted off-chain provider? With decentralization, there’s no entrenched behemoths pulling revenue from the system by virtue of size, but someone sure can hang off to the side and solve all the problems of linking decentralized systems to the rest of the world, and becoming the gateway to and from web3. Heck, one possible outcome is blockchains become free databases for the entrenched providers, paid for with customer bandwidth and power. Honestly I think something like this is what will happen; we saw the original decentralized web1.0 as democratizing access to information, but in reality economies of scale have created Facebook and Google - the complete opposite. No reason to suspect this isn’t just the way of things.
sandofsky 5y ago
This is where Web3 comes in. The last two decades have proven that building a scalable system that decentralizes content is a challenge. While the technology to build such systems exists, no content platform achieves decentralization at scale. There is one notable exception: Bitcoin. I don't consider myself well versed in crypto, but there's a whole wikipedia page on its scalability problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem The transaction processing capacity maximum estimated using an average or median transaction size is between 3.3 and 7 transactions per second. And that page doesn't touch on the energy consumption: According to the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance (CCAF), Bitcoin currently consumes around 110 Terawatt Hours per year — 0.55% of global electricity production, or roughly equivalent to the annual energy draw of small countries like Malaysia or Sweden. https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actually-consume https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall... I'm guessing that these problems get brought up a lot, but as it relates to this article, I wouldn't build my argument on Bitcoin being a pillar of scaling. Perhaps virality, but I'd argue that has more to do with financial speculation than solving end-user problems.
- floatboth 5y ago
  It's an unprecedented global scale for a Ponzi scheme as measured in dollars, that's for sure.
- jzm2k 5y ago
  While Bitcoin certainly has scalability issues, I think the point they are trying to make is that is there any other decentralized system that has been able to reach the scale of Bitcoin.
  - rchaud 5y ago
    What about torrents? Those have been around forever, and I just downloaded Gimp over one instead of using their server's bandwidth. Maybe they're talking purely about dollar value, but I'd say more useful information has been passed back and forth with torrents.
rchaud 5y ago
The web as it's understood by most people is about sharing messages, images, games, audio and video. Wasting time, having fun. So why does all talk of Web3 always shoehorn in blockchain and smart contracts? Who cares about that besides crypto buyers, who are mostly conducting their business via clearweb exchanges anyway? The best part of Web 1.0 era was that you didn't have to pay to access information beyond what your ISP charged. Ethereum and its dApps are pay-to-play. I'd be interested to know how many of the cited 7000 dApps offer free information, and not just overpriced digital trinkets.
- BrianOnHN 5y ago
  > how many of the cited 7000 dApps offer free information, and not just overpriced digital trinkets My guess is that number is zero. It would make no sense otherwise. No reasonable person would open a classic book store on Rodeo Drive. What's the difference?
- kvark 5y ago
  Computers 40 years ago, as understood by most people, would be giant calculators. Who cares about sound, graphics, portability, aside from a few nerds? It turns out, people will care, once they discover the new ways.
  - verdverm 5y ago
    Those are small technical things and while blockchain has technology, it is more of a social change, which is harder and different. Blockchain is getting the heat social networks should have up front. There are sufficient bad actors that blockchain will be dangerous for most people's financial well being, like social networks are for most peoples mental well being.
  - continuational 5y ago
    That's a great argument - it works for any upcoming technology!
  - rchaud 5y ago
    But the web today already has graphics, sound, portability, etc. Web3 isn't offering anything beyond our current capabilities.
habibur 5y ago
I was with it until it came down to NFT. ssh like crypto works. If you want to bring in blockchain, do it later as an added layer.
thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
"Imagine an Internet where you can hop into an app and have access to all of your favorite digital goods available for you to use regardless of where you purchased them." I have one of these. It's called my computer's local files. It runs locally and I can even access my files when the Internet is down. If all your stuff is DRM-locked on someone else's computer, it is not your stuff. If your stuff is on someone else's computer, it is also not your stuff.
- beckman466 5y ago
  yep, the name of the game here is misdefining: intentionally distorting words, terms and definitions away from their original meaning
- alfiedotwtf 5y ago
  Their thinking: but if your stuff is on your computer and not mine, how can I charge you?
- joewadcan 5y ago
  there's a difference between "having" and "owning" something. You may have it on your local file (aka access) but ownership implies a super set of capabilities that they're talking about.
  - thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
    Do you really think someone else's "ownership" of a digital asset impacts my use of my local files? DRM only works if you run the code that implements DRM. My copy of the bits are not impacted by someone's claim of ownership nor can their ownership token stop me from accessing my copy of the bits. Artificial scarcity is artificial.
    - joewadcan 5y ago
      > Do you really think someone else's "ownership" of a digital asset impacts my use of my local files? No I don't think so at all, but that's only a sliver of what is being discussed. > My copy of the bits are not impacted by someone's claim of ownership nor can their ownership token stop me from accessing my copy of the bits. > My copy of the bits are not impacted by someone's claim of ownership nor can their ownership token stop me from accessing my copy of the bits. > DRM only works if you run the code that implements DRM. Agreed. ----- Here's an example: You bought a digital item, say a sword used in video games. Yes you can keep that image file of the sword and do whatever you want with it. That's only a tiny piece of "owning" that item. Imagine you could take the sword and bring it into lots of video games. The properties of that sword having value in those games can only exist with digital scarcity. Now say you want to sell merch, t-shirts with your sword printed on them. You can own the copyright to your item, so it's legal and protected. Again, "ownership" means more than access. If you don't like this or care about it... that's fine. But it's unlocking a massive amount of capability that's never existed before. As a personal who likes tech because it's an enabler... it's exciting
BrianOnHN 5y ago
Blockchains are finite, the future of the web is fuzzy. Do we really need bulletproof consensus on Wikipedia edits? Let alone your blog... Idk what "Web3" will be, but the future of the internet is a tolerant(fuzzy) mesh network.
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steve76 5y ago
In favor of centralization, two really big computers processing reliable data like solar panels switching on or satellite positions can garbage collect everything. The 4.5 petabytes of astronomy data from the event horizon global telescope array becomes two numbers for a memory address. Decentralization is not serverless or device to device communication. Peer discovery isn't decentralized. Browsers don't do it because of privacy and tracking. Users will need to go to an app store for your implementation. The big national infrastructure that makes the devices will do it better and won't drain the battery. So you really should get rid of the populism. It's more of a liability transfer. All risk is offloaded and assigned to the consumers now. Amazon never saw your credit card number.
throw_m239339 5y ago
The web is already decentralized (minus the DNS), the web isn't really distributed. But it's a bit funny for cloudfare to talk about decentralization when everybody with a website hides behind their proxy servers. Should the web be distributed? I'd like to see a good distributed search engine for instance. I know there are a few peer to peer ones already, although the content isn't high quality and there is a need for a way to deal with the high volume of spam.
orthecreedence 5y ago
> At Cloudflare, we are embracing this distributed future. Cloudflare is, like, one of the most centralized parts of the web. How many sites/apps route all of their traffic through Cloudflare? How many TLS terminations do they do? How many DNS zones do they control? How many crosswalks do I have to find over and over because of them? They seem to be going quite long on centralization.
- xtracto 5y ago
  Exactly, this reminded me of that time Cloudflare went down, and half of the internet went down with it [1]. Their marketing department is lying through their teeth. [1] https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/cloudflare-outage-takes-down-internet-for-second-time-in-a-week-heres-how-companys-ceo-responded.html https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/cloudflare-outage-takes-down-...
k__ 5y ago
What most people don't seem to understand is the baked-in payment solution. Classical stack: User pays company via a third-party payment provider. Then the company pays their infrastructur provider via another payment provider. Web3 stack: User pays infrastructure provider via the infrastructure's own payment system. User pays company via infrastructure's own payment system. I worked with Stripe, PayPal, and whatnot. Some are simpler or harder to integrate, but none were really a joy to work with. Solidity and in turn the Ethereum platform makes this really nice, since the infrastructure costs are always paid implicitly, because every transaction costs money.
- donmcronald 5y ago
  > because every transaction costs money. Based on my observations (ETH gas) every transaction costs a ton of money and in a lot of jurisdictions you have to track capital gains / losses based on fair market values whenever you participate in a transaction. I’m sure it’s easy for Cloudflare and other big companies to play around with crypto protocols because they can send the complicated financial end of it to their accounting department. For normal people like me it’s insanely difficult to deal with.
  - k__ 5y ago
    I read a few pieces on tax advise and they all said crypto currencies aren't considered money in the sense of taxes. Which is kinda strange, but seems to be the downside of a government not allowing crypto to be legal tender.
saurik 5y ago
Cloudflare's Ethereum gateway is sadly super unstable :(. The biggest issue it has is that often requests will be returned back with errors saying that the node doesn't have any blocks synced, as they seem to keep bringing in new nodes that sync from scratch but they aren't excluded from their backend set until they are ready, and so you'll do requests and get back failures constantly (but there are also other "silly" issues such as some kind of JSON parsing front-end that is using a "falsey" check on the id field, which is causing it to disallow spec-valid values such as 0). FWIW, I'd love to be using them in production constantly for our product, but they just have never worked even for small periods of time really... I'd love to have some good way to send feedback on these issues to Cloudflare and have them get fixed, so if anyone from Cloudflare reads this and would be excited about that, I'm saurik@saurik.com?
- prdonahue 5y ago
  Drop me a note and I'll connect you with the right PM: pat at cloudflare.com.
Pils 5y ago
An abridged history of decentralized storage: * DHTs are "invented" at Berkeley/MIT. Online storage is too expensive for most end users, so the target market is helping large companies index data in their filesystems. * A bunch of content distribution protocols get built on top of the concept, the most popular being Bittorrent. Torrent protocols run into issues with the free rider problem, resulting in slow downloads. Meanwhile, storage on the web is becoming cheaper and cheaper. * To solve the free rider problem, IPFS was created. A brilliant incentive structure was created so that asset hosting no longer relied on the benevolence torrent seeders. Meanwhile, companies like Cloudflare, Mega, Google and Amazon make online storage essentially free. * Cloudflare starts hosting IPFS assets for free. Decentralized storage still exists, but is still slow in comparison and, in IPFS's case, is more expensive than free, so people only use IPFS addresses to download assets from large, centralized services. * IPFS is mostly used as a distributed network of hashed addresses that can be used to look up data in a large company's filesystem.
- floatboth 5y ago
  BitTorrent was published in the same year as the original DHT protocols, and they kinda had nothing to do with each other until four years later (according to Wikipedia the Mainline DHT was added to the mainline client in November 2005).
skybrian 5y ago
I was surprised there wasn’t a “to be sure” paragraph where they talk about some of the current limitations of decentralization and cryptocurrency. (In particular, there is no mainstream way to keep an important private key safe enough to use as your primary identity. Cellphones break, and even Yubikeys are a niche.) There’s also no real announcement to this blog post, or enough meat to it for “Web3” to catch on. What’s the real purpose? Is it just about hiring?
deleted 5y ago
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eightysixfour 5y ago
I can't being express my disappointment that we have somehow attached the idea and possible success of a decentralized web to the creation of artificial scarcity in the one environment we have that has basically infinite abundance.
nikolay 5y ago
The hijacking of the successor to Web 2.0 by craptocurrency enthusiasts is sickening. No, I'm not interested in their perverted vision of the next web!
angryasian 5y ago
wouldn't opensea.io be considered a closed platform. Didn't one of their employees get in trouble for buying and hyping up NFT's to profit. I find the whole Web3 really deplorable.
ladyattis 5y ago
I think the fetishization of blockchain technology demonstrates that most of its proponents don't understand the Internet. The Internet isn't powered by mere ownership claims but by the ability to distribute content with little effort by its users. To augment enclosure of the "digital commons" is going to make the Internet worse off than it ever has been. The more they try to monetize and commodify computing technology the more they just reinvent what already existed and diminish both the established forms and the new ones.
DisjointedHunt 5y ago
This is much bigger than anyone realises. As a demo of the power of something like this, you’d have to look at the bootleg market for live sport and AceStream in particular[1] Streams at a quality I haven’t seen from any broadcaster over the internet, comparable to 4K 60fps cable AND IT GETS BETTER, THE MORE PEOPLE THAT JOIN! A truly decentralised social network for content is the stuff of lore. There are so many things to be said about use cases that arise from infrastructure such as this, it’s impossible to fathom the potential. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_Stream https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_Stream
dmantis 5y ago
People are so offensive to decentralized stuff in comments. Many do really think that the whole thing is about printing money (which is a fun process, lol), but I'd like to explain a bit from the other side of perspective. Today's web have an obvious problem - it is run by oligopolies. CF/AWS and Google don't like you (like with Parler case or recent youtube shields on discussing elections on several countries) and you have a problem. Torrent-like static distributions (IPFS) with distributed backends like Ethereum basically broke this oligopoly - even US gov wouldn't be able to shut down truly "web3" service, which is pretty cool, like in the old days when you could setup a server in third-world country. These days are different - there are state backed DDOS gangs in town with an INSANE amount of resources. You are banned from several CDNs, Google and AWS - and you are done if they want you to be shut down. For example, just a week ago Russian "elections" have happened, opposition sites were under complete ddos the whole time and Google+Apple just deleted opposition apps from the appstore after the small talk with gov guys, so there is no trust in big tech - they are not interested in anything but moneymaking. Yes, crypto has a lot of scammers and bastards but those bastards would setup ANY website for you for one another coin. Any torrent, any porn payment processing (hello Christian fanatics and blocked card payments on pornhub), any content distribution (hello Apple in China and blocked Hong Kong flags !). Maybe that market-based approach is better if those "scammers" broke censorship and white-suite Silicon Valley boys prefer to deploy censorship mechanisms because that will make them another investment round without a scandal. Maybe censorship-free global distributed backends for critical apps are more important than a few bucks stolen. Freedom comes with a price.
necovek 5y ago
Ok, while I fully respect Cloudflare's contribution to some aspects of privacy and open internet, there's a few things where they are actively working on centralising the web. Or what to take of: - captchas so things like recently discussed marginalia.nu can't easily index sites behind CF? - per-country restrictions for visiting their customer web sites (stopping legitimate users from visiting parts of the web depending on their current location, but also reducing the value of VPNs)? Basically, coming from Serbia, I've been stopped from visiting US-based web sites by CF increasingly commonly in the last few years: they make this all too easy for their misled customers (companies thinking that their US-based-businesses might not get significant business outside US). And sure, each individual company could block visitors based on GeoIP data itself, but if this was not a few clicks, they would probably not bother. A large player like Cloudflare thus provides a net negative for the decentralisation of the web.
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178 points by jgrahamc 5y ago

gibsonf1 5y ago

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

M2Ys4U 5y ago
Solid is much more "Web 3.0" than "Web3" - it leverages decentralisation and HTTP rather than cryptocurrency nonsense. Although there is a bunch of overlap via DIDs and such.

gitfan86 5y ago

This is genius marketing. Decentralization is great, but what is even better is if you host all of your decentralized projects on one central platform.

ignoramous 5y ago
Cloudflare provides a HTTPS gateway to IPFS. It isn't the sole host for any IPFS content.
beckman466 5y ago
it's decentralization if it runs on two separate hard drives in the same AWS data center, right? right!?
- Spivak 5y ago
  You try and define decentralization in a way that accounts for multiple independent hosts of content coincidentally using the same cloud service. If some people host content on GCP and others Amazon is it suddenly decentralized?

mwcampbell 5y ago

I'm disappointed to see Cloudflare chasing this hype train rather than focusing all of its resources on its own truly valuable innovations, particularly the Workers platform.

jgrahamc 5y ago
The nature of innovation is that you have to try things that might not pan out. Maybe web3 fizzles and dies, maybe it doesn't. But a small investment by our research arm means we can get experience with new technologies that might be years away from coming to fruition. And I often tell people that my goal is that if you hear about an Internet technology and Google it you should find that Cloudflare has already written about it and/or implemented it. That way people can trust us as a valuable source of information and to be on top of a changing world. Imagine a large customer of Cloudflare who's heard about web3. Lo and behold we've written about it, have a product offering, etc. Maybe they read all that and say "Nope, don't want web3". Doesn't matter, they still trust us to be their partner in whatever's next.
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  Touché.
fallat 5y ago
Ethereum is not just hype. You better start educating yourself.
- mikewhy 5y ago
  True, it's also accelerating the destruction of the environment, helped people make money off other people's artwork, and introduced a new generation of people to pump and dump schemes over receipts.
  - threecheese 5y ago
    Technically Ethereum is moving to proof of stake; no more miners, no more massive (well, less egregious) environmental impact. I would say that BTC is the big problem here, which is one reason why I personally don’t think it will have staying power long term. You have a point about proof of work in general though.

rvz 5y ago

Is that a sell signal?

punkspider 5y ago
Same thought crossed my mind.
jancsika 5y ago
I would like to know more. :) In what way does this alert you that some fundamental thing is wrong with the company?
- rvz 5y ago
  Sure. I already gave the buy signal years ago on Cloudflare [0] since they released their S-1 in 2019. Now I am >500% up since buying on IPO day and sold some today. Overall bullish, but you make money by taking profits. Buy the rumour, sell the news. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20707306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20707306

taytus 5y ago

Every time I see someone talking about web3, I roll my eyes so hard I can see my brain.

deleted 5y ago
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justshowpost 5y ago

I'd really like to see Cloudflare Pages offer an option to deploy to IPFS. Integrate that with Cloudflare registrar to setup DNS automatically such that it's proxied to the old Web through the Cloudflare IPFS gateway, and I can host my entire site on Cloudflare. The current one-click push to deploy integration is key, and I'd like to see that for IPFS as well. They could use the same edge servers as IPFS nodes, offering the same benefits of DDOS mitigation and such. Though as is the benefit of IPFS, they'd receive less traffic since other IPFS nodes might pin the content as well. It'd probably cost them less, since currently each page revision is hosted indefinitely at <rev>.<domain>.pages.dev which would be the same as keeping the old versions pinned on IPFS.

deleted 5y ago
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uniclaude 5y ago

META: The hate for pretty much anything blockchain-related in the comments is real. I clicked on this link expecting the usual load of criticism, and I wasn’t disappointed. Now, to actually add to the discussion, it would be great to see clearer use cases that Cloudflare has to help publishers and users of web3, as the blog post describes what’s behind the name but goes only very briefly on what Cloudflare actually wants to bring to the table. A very fast, yet privacy-focused or anonymous, and affordable decentralized CDN would be interesting.

soco 5y ago
Just as real as the fascination... there are two sides to any idea, more often than not. To your point, indeed it's not very clear to me what does Cloudflare want to achieve in this area.

itsbits 5y ago

There are strong reasons why peer - peer network is not mainstream. Not a single internet giant using this in their infra. if Cloudfare is replacing CDN keyword with Web3, may be it's fine.

pornel 5y ago

I'm so disappointed that our* company is peddling this bullshit :( I'm going to raise it internally. (yes, I'm an employee)

WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
> our company Are you an employee? Or, speaking generally here to a company this community commonly roots for? I guess either way. What’s your beef with them experimenting to try new and wild ideas? Edit: > (yes, I'm an employee) If true, wow. If not, troll… Publicly trashing another co-workers work/team is in poor taste, immature, and creates a hostile work environment — if you agree or not with the tech or direction. I hope you get what’s coming to you. Classic Dev God ego and suggest maybe disconnecting online a bit and apologizing to them. I can’t imagine Cloudflare’s hiring team likes to see this type of hostile banter allowed.
- floatboth 5y ago
  > new and wild ideas Only "wild" as in "stupid". Ethereum has been around for ages, and it still has nothing to do with "decentralizing the web". Its advanced functionality is only used for building things like automated Ponzi schemes.
rchaud 5y ago
I would suggest editing it to provide more detail on IPFS and existing methods of decentralization like torrents, which regular people can understand and use, and whose reputation is free of "get rich quick" snake oil.
sneak 5y ago
I don't see anything being peddled in TFA. Your comment seems like ideological bias.
dgb23 5y ago
Hey, I agree with you! Even though I think it's bad etiquette to write a comment like that, I was kind of relieved to read it. I have almost always been impressed with Cloudflare's blog posts (and documentation). Good and explicit marketing, clear language, interesting and smart products. Just really attractive stuff that demonstrates competency. This one feels like a mumbo-jumbo of cryptocurrency buzzwords that no one needs or even wants to hear. Just thinking about the term "Web3" pains me to the bones.

tomcooks 5y ago

Cloudflare's vision, especially about decentralization, smells a lot.

floatboth 5y ago

Cloudflare is a major force in centralizing the actual internet on itself (the one free CDN/anti-DDoS for everyone who's not a giant themselves, huh, what could possibly go wrong). Are they attaching themselves to this coin crap in order to "decentralization-wash" their public image? They have to know that people know how fraudulent and awful the whole cryptocurrency space is, right?

WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
> coin crap in order to "decentralization-wash" their public image I’d guess it has nothing to do with that and way less dramatic. They are a company that benefits and profits from having a large network. It makes sense to try and be part of alternate networks. A lot of people, including myself, see their growth as also having made small businesses/sites/apps more competitive on an increasingly centralized web from way more evil players in the game. The Crypto noise aside, I also think a decentralized Internet is exciting. At the very least, I’m glad they are throwing money at and will see where this goes research helps things go.
- RNCTX 5y ago
  I'd guess it's less dramatic than your hypothetical still: They need new faces and the most obvious source of them en masse is people who aren't welcome on other cloud platforms. That means cryptocurrency people, who have been effectively outcast from the rest of the internet's premium tier hosting providers, because when they were allowed on the rest of the internet's premium tier hosting providers they tried to steal shit while they were in there.
  - WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
    What?
rchaud 5y ago
I believe you can create a Cloudflare mirror for your web3 site so people can access it using a regular browser.

threecheese 5y ago

Is this Cloudflare looking to become the trusted off-chain provider? With decentralization, there’s no entrenched behemoths pulling revenue from the system by virtue of size, but someone sure can hang off to the side and solve all the problems of linking decentralized systems to the rest of the world, and becoming the gateway to and from web3. Heck, one possible outcome is blockchains become free databases for the entrenched providers, paid for with customer bandwidth and power. Honestly I think something like this is what will happen; we saw the original decentralized web1.0 as democratizing access to information, but in reality economies of scale have created Facebook and Google - the complete opposite. No reason to suspect this isn’t just the way of things.

sandofsky 5y ago

This is where Web3 comes in. The last two decades have proven that building a scalable system that decentralizes content is a challenge. While the technology to build such systems exists, no content platform achieves decentralization at scale. There is one notable exception: Bitcoin. I don't consider myself well versed in crypto, but there's a whole wikipedia page on its scalability problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem The transaction processing capacity maximum estimated using an average or median transaction size is between 3.3 and 7 transactions per second. And that page doesn't touch on the energy consumption: According to the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance (CCAF), Bitcoin currently consumes around 110 Terawatt Hours per year — 0.55% of global electricity production, or roughly equivalent to the annual energy draw of small countries like Malaysia or Sweden. https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actually-consume https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall... I'm guessing that these problems get brought up a lot, but as it relates to this article, I wouldn't build my argument on Bitcoin being a pillar of scaling. Perhaps virality, but I'd argue that has more to do with financial speculation than solving end-user problems.

floatboth 5y ago
It's an unprecedented global scale for a Ponzi scheme as measured in dollars, that's for sure.
jzm2k 5y ago
While Bitcoin certainly has scalability issues, I think the point they are trying to make is that is there any other decentralized system that has been able to reach the scale of Bitcoin.
- rchaud 5y ago
  What about torrents? Those have been around forever, and I just downloaded Gimp over one instead of using their server's bandwidth. Maybe they're talking purely about dollar value, but I'd say more useful information has been passed back and forth with torrents.

rchaud 5y ago

The web as it's understood by most people is about sharing messages, images, games, audio and video. Wasting time, having fun. So why does all talk of Web3 always shoehorn in blockchain and smart contracts? Who cares about that besides crypto buyers, who are mostly conducting their business via clearweb exchanges anyway? The best part of Web 1.0 era was that you didn't have to pay to access information beyond what your ISP charged. Ethereum and its dApps are pay-to-play. I'd be interested to know how many of the cited 7000 dApps offer free information, and not just overpriced digital trinkets.

BrianOnHN 5y ago
> how many of the cited 7000 dApps offer free information, and not just overpriced digital trinkets My guess is that number is zero. It would make no sense otherwise. No reasonable person would open a classic book store on Rodeo Drive. What's the difference?
kvark 5y ago
Computers 40 years ago, as understood by most people, would be giant calculators. Who cares about sound, graphics, portability, aside from a few nerds? It turns out, people will care, once they discover the new ways.
- verdverm 5y ago
  Those are small technical things and while blockchain has technology, it is more of a social change, which is harder and different. Blockchain is getting the heat social networks should have up front. There are sufficient bad actors that blockchain will be dangerous for most people's financial well being, like social networks are for most peoples mental well being.
- continuational 5y ago
  That's a great argument - it works for any upcoming technology!
- rchaud 5y ago
  But the web today already has graphics, sound, portability, etc. Web3 isn't offering anything beyond our current capabilities.

habibur 5y ago

I was with it until it came down to NFT. ssh like crypto works. If you want to bring in blockchain, do it later as an added layer.

thesuperbigfrog 5y ago

"Imagine an Internet where you can hop into an app and have access to all of your favorite digital goods available for you to use regardless of where you purchased them." I have one of these. It's called my computer's local files. It runs locally and I can even access my files when the Internet is down. If all your stuff is DRM-locked on someone else's computer, it is not your stuff. If your stuff is on someone else's computer, it is also not your stuff.

beckman466 5y ago
yep, the name of the game here is misdefining: intentionally distorting words, terms and definitions away from their original meaning
alfiedotwtf 5y ago
Their thinking: but if your stuff is on your computer and not mine, how can I charge you?
joewadcan 5y ago
there's a difference between "having" and "owning" something. You may have it on your local file (aka access) but ownership implies a super set of capabilities that they're talking about.
- thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
  Do you really think someone else's "ownership" of a digital asset impacts my use of my local files? DRM only works if you run the code that implements DRM. My copy of the bits are not impacted by someone's claim of ownership nor can their ownership token stop me from accessing my copy of the bits. Artificial scarcity is artificial.
  - joewadcan 5y ago
    > Do you really think someone else's "ownership" of a digital asset impacts my use of my local files? No I don't think so at all, but that's only a sliver of what is being discussed. > My copy of the bits are not impacted by someone's claim of ownership nor can their ownership token stop me from accessing my copy of the bits. > My copy of the bits are not impacted by someone's claim of ownership nor can their ownership token stop me from accessing my copy of the bits. > DRM only works if you run the code that implements DRM. Agreed. ----- Here's an example: You bought a digital item, say a sword used in video games. Yes you can keep that image file of the sword and do whatever you want with it. That's only a tiny piece of "owning" that item. Imagine you could take the sword and bring it into lots of video games. The properties of that sword having value in those games can only exist with digital scarcity. Now say you want to sell merch, t-shirts with your sword printed on them. You can own the copyright to your item, so it's legal and protected. Again, "ownership" means more than access. If you don't like this or care about it... that's fine. But it's unlocking a massive amount of capability that's never existed before. As a personal who likes tech because it's an enabler... it's exciting

BrianOnHN 5y ago

Blockchains are finite, the future of the web is fuzzy. Do we really need bulletproof consensus on Wikipedia edits? Let alone your blog... Idk what "Web3" will be, but the future of the internet is a tolerant(fuzzy) mesh network.

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steve76 5y ago

In favor of centralization, two really big computers processing reliable data like solar panels switching on or satellite positions can garbage collect everything. The 4.5 petabytes of astronomy data from the event horizon global telescope array becomes two numbers for a memory address. Decentralization is not serverless or device to device communication. Peer discovery isn't decentralized. Browsers don't do it because of privacy and tracking. Users will need to go to an app store for your implementation. The big national infrastructure that makes the devices will do it better and won't drain the battery. So you really should get rid of the populism. It's more of a liability transfer. All risk is offloaded and assigned to the consumers now. Amazon never saw your credit card number.

throw_m239339 5y ago

The web is already decentralized (minus the DNS), the web isn't really distributed. But it's a bit funny for cloudfare to talk about decentralization when everybody with a website hides behind their proxy servers. Should the web be distributed? I'd like to see a good distributed search engine for instance. I know there are a few peer to peer ones already, although the content isn't high quality and there is a need for a way to deal with the high volume of spam.

orthecreedence 5y ago

> At Cloudflare, we are embracing this distributed future. Cloudflare is, like, one of the most centralized parts of the web. How many sites/apps route all of their traffic through Cloudflare? How many TLS terminations do they do? How many DNS zones do they control? How many crosswalks do I have to find over and over because of them? They seem to be going quite long on centralization.

xtracto 5y ago
Exactly, this reminded me of that time Cloudflare went down, and half of the internet went down with it [1]. Their marketing department is lying through their teeth. [1] https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/cloudflare-outage-takes-down-internet-for-second-time-in-a-week-heres-how-companys-ceo-responded.html https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/cloudflare-outage-takes-down-...

k__ 5y ago

What most people don't seem to understand is the baked-in payment solution. Classical stack: User pays company via a third-party payment provider. Then the company pays their infrastructur provider via another payment provider. Web3 stack: User pays infrastructure provider via the infrastructure's own payment system. User pays company via infrastructure's own payment system. I worked with Stripe, PayPal, and whatnot. Some are simpler or harder to integrate, but none were really a joy to work with. Solidity and in turn the Ethereum platform makes this really nice, since the infrastructure costs are always paid implicitly, because every transaction costs money.

donmcronald 5y ago
> because every transaction costs money. Based on my observations (ETH gas) every transaction costs a ton of money and in a lot of jurisdictions you have to track capital gains / losses based on fair market values whenever you participate in a transaction. I’m sure it’s easy for Cloudflare and other big companies to play around with crypto protocols because they can send the complicated financial end of it to their accounting department. For normal people like me it’s insanely difficult to deal with.
- k__ 5y ago
  I read a few pieces on tax advise and they all said crypto currencies aren't considered money in the sense of taxes. Which is kinda strange, but seems to be the downside of a government not allowing crypto to be legal tender.

saurik 5y ago

Cloudflare's Ethereum gateway is sadly super unstable :(. The biggest issue it has is that often requests will be returned back with errors saying that the node doesn't have any blocks synced, as they seem to keep bringing in new nodes that sync from scratch but they aren't excluded from their backend set until they are ready, and so you'll do requests and get back failures constantly (but there are also other "silly" issues such as some kind of JSON parsing front-end that is using a "falsey" check on the id field, which is causing it to disallow spec-valid values such as 0). FWIW, I'd love to be using them in production constantly for our product, but they just have never worked even for small periods of time really... I'd love to have some good way to send feedback on these issues to Cloudflare and have them get fixed, so if anyone from Cloudflare reads this and would be excited about that, I'm saurik@saurik.com?

prdonahue 5y ago
Drop me a note and I'll connect you with the right PM: pat at cloudflare.com.

Pils 5y ago

An abridged history of decentralized storage: * DHTs are "invented" at Berkeley/MIT. Online storage is too expensive for most end users, so the target market is helping large companies index data in their filesystems. * A bunch of content distribution protocols get built on top of the concept, the most popular being Bittorrent. Torrent protocols run into issues with the free rider problem, resulting in slow downloads. Meanwhile, storage on the web is becoming cheaper and cheaper. * To solve the free rider problem, IPFS was created. A brilliant incentive structure was created so that asset hosting no longer relied on the benevolence torrent seeders. Meanwhile, companies like Cloudflare, Mega, Google and Amazon make online storage essentially free. * Cloudflare starts hosting IPFS assets for free. Decentralized storage still exists, but is still slow in comparison and, in IPFS's case, is more expensive than free, so people only use IPFS addresses to download assets from large, centralized services. * IPFS is mostly used as a distributed network of hashed addresses that can be used to look up data in a large company's filesystem.

floatboth 5y ago
BitTorrent was published in the same year as the original DHT protocols, and they kinda had nothing to do with each other until four years later (according to Wikipedia the Mainline DHT was added to the mainline client in November 2005).

skybrian 5y ago

I was surprised there wasn’t a “to be sure” paragraph where they talk about some of the current limitations of decentralization and cryptocurrency. (In particular, there is no mainstream way to keep an important private key safe enough to use as your primary identity. Cellphones break, and even Yubikeys are a niche.) There’s also no real announcement to this blog post, or enough meat to it for “Web3” to catch on. What’s the real purpose? Is it just about hiring?

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eightysixfour 5y ago

I can't being express my disappointment that we have somehow attached the idea and possible success of a decentralized web to the creation of artificial scarcity in the one environment we have that has basically infinite abundance.

nikolay 5y ago

The hijacking of the successor to Web 2.0 by craptocurrency enthusiasts is sickening. No, I'm not interested in their perverted vision of the next web!

angryasian 5y ago

wouldn't opensea.io be considered a closed platform. Didn't one of their employees get in trouble for buying and hyping up NFT's to profit. I find the whole Web3 really deplorable.

ladyattis 5y ago

I think the fetishization of blockchain technology demonstrates that most of its proponents don't understand the Internet. The Internet isn't powered by mere ownership claims but by the ability to distribute content with little effort by its users. To augment enclosure of the "digital commons" is going to make the Internet worse off than it ever has been. The more they try to monetize and commodify computing technology the more they just reinvent what already existed and diminish both the established forms and the new ones.

DisjointedHunt 5y ago

This is much bigger than anyone realises. As a demo of the power of something like this, you’d have to look at the bootleg market for live sport and AceStream in particular[1] Streams at a quality I haven’t seen from any broadcaster over the internet, comparable to 4K 60fps cable AND IT GETS BETTER, THE MORE PEOPLE THAT JOIN! A truly decentralised social network for content is the stuff of lore. There are so many things to be said about use cases that arise from infrastructure such as this, it’s impossible to fathom the potential. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_Stream https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_Stream

dmantis 5y ago

People are so offensive to decentralized stuff in comments. Many do really think that the whole thing is about printing money (which is a fun process, lol), but I'd like to explain a bit from the other side of perspective. Today's web have an obvious problem - it is run by oligopolies. CF/AWS and Google don't like you (like with Parler case or recent youtube shields on discussing elections on several countries) and you have a problem. Torrent-like static distributions (IPFS) with distributed backends like Ethereum basically broke this oligopoly - even US gov wouldn't be able to shut down truly "web3" service, which is pretty cool, like in the old days when you could setup a server in third-world country. These days are different - there are state backed DDOS gangs in town with an INSANE amount of resources. You are banned from several CDNs, Google and AWS - and you are done if they want you to be shut down. For example, just a week ago Russian "elections" have happened, opposition sites were under complete ddos the whole time and Google+Apple just deleted opposition apps from the appstore after the small talk with gov guys, so there is no trust in big tech - they are not interested in anything but moneymaking. Yes, crypto has a lot of scammers and bastards but those bastards would setup ANY website for you for one another coin. Any torrent, any porn payment processing (hello Christian fanatics and blocked card payments on pornhub), any content distribution (hello Apple in China and blocked Hong Kong flags !). Maybe that market-based approach is better if those "scammers" broke censorship and white-suite Silicon Valley boys prefer to deploy censorship mechanisms because that will make them another investment round without a scandal. Maybe censorship-free global distributed backends for critical apps are more important than a few bucks stolen. Freedom comes with a price.

necovek 5y ago

Ok, while I fully respect Cloudflare's contribution to some aspects of privacy and open internet, there's a few things where they are actively working on centralising the web. Or what to take of: - captchas so things like recently discussed marginalia.nu can't easily index sites behind CF? - per-country restrictions for visiting their customer web sites (stopping legitimate users from visiting parts of the web depending on their current location, but also reducing the value of VPNs)? Basically, coming from Serbia, I've been stopped from visiting US-based web sites by CF increasingly commonly in the last few years: they make this all too easy for their misled customers (companies thinking that their US-based-businesses might not get significant business outside US). And sure, each individual company could block visitors based on GeoIP data itself, but if this was not a few clicks, they would probably not bother. A large player like Cloudflare thus provides a net negative for the decentralisation of the web.

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