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Web3 architecture and how it compares to traditional web apps
- nivertech 5y agoThe most important component of Web3[1] is Infura[2] running on AWS;) -- 1. at least its Ethereum-based implementation, which is the vast majority of web3 stuff. 2. https://infura.io/ https://infura.io/
- suikadayo 5y agoEthereum Altair hard fork at the end of this month introduces light clients which will enable the browser to sync with the chain, making infura unnecessary.
- mattlondon 5y agoI love the idea of distributed web stuff - Dat and IPFS. I reject efforts to try to force Blockchain into it. Can someone explain like I am 5 what the benefit of Blockchain is for something like dat or IPFS? Seems like they work just fine without Blockchain ?
- fwip 5y agoThe main difference is that traditional web apps aren't inherently scams.
- kukabynd 5y agoWell, in 2021, they are not. The late 90s and early 00s reeked of scams too.
- pavlov 5y agoI hate how crypto proponents try to rewrite recent history to fit their narrative. “The early Internet was useless too!” “Everything on the web in the 1990s was a scam too!” It’s demeaning towards the online pioneers, and it’s depressing if young people actually start to believe this stuff just because some dweeb wants to sell them multi-level casino tokens.
- kukabynd 5y agoNot sure if you’re saying I’m a crypto proponent as I am not. To say that early Internet didn’t have its scams is a lie though. Crypto sucks too, don’t get me wrong. The digital scarcity is an archaic concept.
- mosdl 5y agoI really hated it when pet.com stole all my pet food I ordered..oh wait!
- ryoshu 5y agoIf you bought pets.com stock after their IPO they lost your investment.
- hammyhavoc 5y agoThere's still plenty of web apps that are scams.
- pcthrowaway 5y agoDapps aren't 'inherently scams' either. Some are, some aren't, and the same goes for traditional web apps.
- tyingq 5y agoI guess the first wave of trying to get ignorant CIOs to pay for blockchain stuff is dying down, and "Web3" is the attempt to revive it?
- easrng 5y ago"Web3" all too often is just the same old client-server model. The key difference is the API calls are formatted as Ethereum transactions and the server is Infura.
- necovek 5y agoI am seriously confused. Internet is already decentralized for the most part. I run my own web server and mail server from my home. There's my "piece of the Internet". Sure, DNS is centralized (even though it's heavily federated), and TLS certificates are centralized (less federated). So, what we are looking to replace is simply "who is there?" and "is it the real you?" services with something less... centralized. This can live on the blockchain, sure, but blockchain is a database you sync across in its entirety, right? I am sure you can only get parts of it for some applications, but this, by definition, does not scale to the size of the Internet. (Hum, this is probably a decent dapp proposal: domain name system with certs, but it'd still grow very large if it was to cover entire Internet) I don't get the connection with Google/Amazon/Facebook either: they are humongous services operating on the decentralized Internet today. Yes, people flock to them, but that's exactly the Internet you can avoid (a recent discussion on search.marginalia.nu gives a pointer as to how).
- necovek 5y ago> domain name system And it's already there it seems: https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/ I wonder how does one integrate ENS into an existing DNS-based system — is there a DNS-compatible resolver that will look up names on ENS (and an IPv4/IPv6 proxy perhaps)? It's also a missed opportunity to provide hierarchical certificates at the same time, signed by the registry, though in a sense, a smart contract is exactly that, but I am more interested in simple name-resolution and TLS communication for traditional web applications like HTTP and mail (name-to-IP).
- throwing_away 5y agoWe've done lots of federations over the years, and the internet was absolutely built with some degree of decentralization/federation in mind. The radical change here is that now anyone with some pocket change in crypto can deploy a decentralized application. We don't know how that's going to be used yet, it's still so early, but it's certainly exciting. Web3 is a terrible name (as everyone else has already pointed out), but the magic that shouldn't get lost here is that a new decentralized internet is being born.
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- rsynnott 5y agoWait, wasn't Web 3 the whole semantic web thing? This blockchain-y thing should be Web 4, or at least Web 3.1. I expect it'll be just as successful as Web 3 was.
- echelon 5y agoWeb 3.0 was indeed the semantic web [1], which Google, Facebook, and Digg/Reddit killed, though perhaps not entirely consciously. The tooling around FOAF and similar semantic web microformats wasn't very good, and Atom/RSS wasn't needed or widely supported when the web became increasingly siloed. Web 3.0 died when personal websites and blogs stopped being the most common publishing medium. "New web 3.0" is web + NFTs. The analogy I see thrown around is this : Web 1.0 : read-only Web 2.0 : read + write Web 3.0 : read + write + ownership Which is stupid, because we already have ownership. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
- tannhaeuser 5y agoActually, Fb is/was one of the largest users of RDF, in the form of OpenGraph meta-tags. And the tooling for RDF/SPARQL isn't bad at all, if stagnant since first introduced in 2002 or so. It's just that there was no business case for it when ads are the primary or only means for monetization. And Atom only served to cannibalize RSS.
- leephillips 5y agoYou and other commenters have mentioned Google, Facebook, and other silos, and I think your point is well taken. But nobody talks about another giant villain responsible for a pernicious centralization of information and partly responsible for the withering of the decentralized web of individual sites, and the individual responsibility that went with them: Wikipedia.
- ryan_lane 5y agoYou mean the website that's run by a non-profit, uses an open content license, provides full history dumps, and is maintained by hundreds of thousands of volunteers? Wikipedia is hosted centrally, because running infrastructure in a decentralized way is worse in every technical sense. The actual content and maintenance is as decentralized as you can possibly have. I'm sure you haven't really put much effort into actually looking into this, but you can volunteer to work on the underlying software, and infrastructure as well. The wiki and infra code are open, the infra is documented openly, and the test/dev/staging environments allow volunteers to directly participate. You can have your code end up in production after review.
- wombatmobile 5y agoIf Web3 is the solution, what is the problem?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- beders 5y agoIn most discussions around the decentralized apps of the future I fail to get any good answers who is actually paying for the compute power and who is maintaining it. In short: who is paying for the Ramen? Let's take a multi-user chatting app. The compute power necessary to serve 1000 users is X. Running this costs us $Y. Now we distribute this app, having the same features, I now need to spend X plus the overhead of storing data on-chain plus - likely - extra network hops since my users form a peer2peer network of sorts amounting to $Z. So now the cost is $Y + $Z: Who is paying for that?
- giantrobot 5y agoDon't you see? The blockchain crypto will disrupt the centralized gatekeepers! Then the crypto tokens will fund early adopters. Clearly new AI paradigms will foster the synergy needed for peer to peer decentralized finance. Combined with augmented VR it'll create a self perpetuating network effect. It's really almost too simple.
- qaq 5y agoyou did not mention metaverse (_)
- suction 5y agoThe idea that there are organised "gatekeepers" holding down humanity is nothing but a thinly veiled layer over "the zionists who control everything". This is just the tech-version of this evil old conspiracy theory that'll end up, without fail, blaming a race / religious group for all that's allegedly wrong with the world.
- CuriousCosmic 5y agoI'm pretty sure that's the point. It's a very tongue in cheek/sarcastic "blockchain will liberate us and save all our problems" comment parroting what you hear a lot of less informed & overly zealous individuals claim.
- mattdesl 5y ago
- shiohime 5y agoI've been playing around with creating a few dapps here and there and I do have to say I really enjoy being able to use wallets as a proof of identity rather than hooking in a dedicated authentication server. I haven't created anything to scale yet but I think simply using wallets instead of relying on oauth for simple applications is really lowering the amount of time I have to put up front into creating proof of concept applications. Also, I really do think that NFT ownership serving as an access token into a service is a very neat feature that we'll start to see more of as people start getting more creative with NFTs instead of simply being an art asset. There's a lot there and we're barely scratching the surface imo.
- albertgoeswoof 5y agoThe auth thing is great! But from the end user and the developer perspective there’s no difference between an oauth provider and a wallet. You still have to set it up on the machine and “login”, same for the app developer
- shiohime 5y agoYeah, they are comparable, but there is definitely a difference, from both an end user, and developer. The flow is similar - you have to have a wallet, and you have to authenticate it. But really, that's about it. From an end user perspective, all I need to do is press a button to connect my wallet, and I'm in. The site doesn't even need to reload or hit a callback uri. It's a much simpler flow than any of the oauth authentication flows. Also, as anyone can create a wallet and it is not tied to any other identifying information, it's a breath of fresh air to have some vague sense of anonymity than hooking everything into a centralized email account. From a developer standpoint, all I need to do is use an API with a callback function that on success takes whatever data I need and update my application state appropriately. It really is smooth, and I don't need to do things like maintain session or handle access token expiration and request refresh tokens. I can sign messages on the frontend & verify signatures on the backend to ensure the user is who they claim to be. It's so simple compared to the stuff I had to implement in the corporate world for OAuth (granted, the projects I've been working on in the space are much less complex). If you want to try it out yourself as an end user, just download a wallet extension and check out an nft marketplace such as solanart or opensea. You simply have to connect, and that's it. I find it fascinating personally and it's one of the pieces of web3 that I'm most excited for. I believe we're going to continue to see a lot of innovation in the space.
- onion2k 5y agoVery few people will ever choose to invest the time necessary to understand how to use cryptocurrencies safely. This means no matter how good or how useful a "Web 3.0" product is it will either remain too niche to make a serious profit in the long term or it will end up as a way to scam people who don't understand how to use crypto safely and eventually sink under a wave of PR disasters. Web 3.0 is doomed.
- qaq 5y agoBefore we go to web3 can we get a decently working reasonably priced "serverless" SQL RDBMS?
- aliswe 5y agoI think that azure serverless SQL database is extremely cheap ... what is your goal spend and throughput?
- suction 5y agoAzure SQL-Server is extremely expensive. It might be cheap unless you actually want to use it for something heavy. Azure is really good at making itself look cheap by assuming that no one ever really needs to use its pricier performance options. It's cheap for CRUD, but once you want to crunch some numbers, like process financial statements for one month, you either wait a week to finish or pay a fortune. We looked into replacing one (1)local SQL-Server that is able to crunch our monthly statements in a few hours. It would have cost us around USD $15,000 on Azure per pop. The local machine cost $30,000 to buy + about $1000 in service plans / month, and will be used 2-5 years. And it would run other stuff for the rest of the month, at no extra cost.
- qaq 5y agohow is pricing by vcores make it serverless? you just took a legacy RDBMS and made a different pricing model
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- danfritz 5y agoThis will never get any traction except for startup hype. The economics just don't work and the end user sees nothing changed since frontend stays the same? How complicated and expensive can you get. Engineering is about solving problems with the right tools and with the least amount of maintenance. This is inventing a whole lot of stack for what? Your pipedream of "decentralised" internet. They fork Ethereum chain continueslly for their own gain, aka it's managed centrally! /endrand
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dmak 5y agoYou say it will never get any traction, but cryptocurrency’s global market cap is $2.28T right now and growing. This has a lot of vibes similar to when dropbox was first announced. Even if you don’t find it valuable or believe in it, surely you can see why a group of people might.
- ctvo 5y agoIt’s not similar to Dropbox. For the initial Dropbox idea it was doubt that user convenience mattered (just use rsync!) not that there wasn’t a worthwhile problem. What is the problem and solution here? If you say illegal activities, gambling, and evading state regulations, I can see it. Great product. Citing market cap isn’t that convincing. China has a property market with similar value that’s being threatened as we speak. What does a very large number prove except there’s been investment? It certainly doesn’t prove it’s a sound investment or that it has a future beyond a vehicle for the uses I mentioned.
- ryan_lane 5y agoThe thing driving that market cap is wash trading. The legitimate trade volume is actually quite low. Very few people use cryptocurrencies, and the vast majority that do are gambling. I can see that people enjoy gambling, but that doesn't mean the actual tech is good.
- capybara_2020 5y agoCan someone explain the hype around crypto? Startups and even large consulting companies hyped blockchain. But they never could find an actual use for it. So even places like IBM silently closed their departments. It is like crypto is a solution looking for a problem. It feels like the whole blockchain hype all over again. More noise than actual substance. Anyone know of an example for a lay user where crpto has a huge benefit compared to other tech in the space?
- weq 5y agoHere is something your programmer brain can get its nureons around. https://github.com/git-token https://github.com/git-token
- Tom4hawk 5y agoI have this thing called salary that I get for contributing code (it's even better - I also get it for doing other things!).
- HamburgerEmoji 5y agoWell, on Ethereum, it's possible to do things that I never anticipated would be possible, despite programming nonstop for 20-whatever years: it is now possible to deploy a smart contract that does something useful and then lock yourself and everyone else out of it, forever. If there are no bugs, then it can be expected to do its job indefinitely without it being possible for anyone to change their mind and use their privileged access to change how the program works. This is called trustlessness, and it's the basis for a new kind of confidence.
- heromal 5y agoThis is a lot of words that say absolutely nothing.
- HamburgerEmoji 5y agoIf you think so, I don't think you understand what has been achieved. Sorry I couldn't help you with that.
- rafaele 5y agoHaven't heard the term dapps before. Maybe we can start calling web apps, wapps now?
- adminscoffee 5y agobring back compuServe or prodigy before they connected to the internet, then we can talk shop
- ahmedfromtunis 5y agoLet's say Facebook or someone else builds a popular social network on web3. How is this new incarnation better than the one we have today?
- ThePhysicist 5y agoWeb3 seems like the attempt to hype a solution to a largely non-existent problem in order to "keep the music playing". There are many actors with large financial stakes in the crypto ecosystem that will do anything to keep the masses to put money into the system. We've seen that with NFTs earlier this year, where a concerted effort was made to create hype e.g. by auctioning NFTs via Sothesby's for 8-figure amounts (one does wonder why you'd need Sotheby's in the world of decentralized finance), which seems to have worked as people now pay thousands of dollars for worthless GIFs. But in order to keep the price rally going you need to make people pour more and more money into the system every year. Hyping decentralized apps just seems like the next logical step here. I found it quite hilarious though to see the diagram in the article that explains how a decentralized Web3 app is supposed to replace a traditional centralized system, which ended up being plastered with the logos of companies whose proprietary commercial solutions you need to operate a dApp.
- libertine 5y agoI'm not into crypto, but I think you're missing the picture here: the fact is that a lot of people are into crypto, and new people are coming in (even if they come in waves that crash and exit, some do still stick around), and Web3 seems to be here to serve this people. You can even call it a niche. If you can capture part of the value of this market by creating value for those users... what's wrong with that? How is this a non-existent problem? NFTs are a good example of what you're dealing with. There are so many people with - arguably - apparent "poor taste" exchanging large sums of funny-money because that's part of their vision of an end game, and maybe that "poor taste" it's just because there's nothing else to do with the funny-money. The problem here is that they want to spend it, exchange it, do things with it, and dApps are here to serve them. From my understanding of this: the Web3 is not about/for you, or me, it's more for them. If they are hyping it to be the future, let them be, it's their thing and we "don't get it" - that's ok. We've seen this over and over again, some stuff stuck around, others faded away. But it's ok to not understand some social movements and not be part of them. You're probably experiencing what some folks experienced when Rock Music came about, it's confusion and it's an odd feeling. I'm not saying crypto will have the same popularity of rock music... I could say another example like EBM music... the point is that we don't understand a lot of things.
- pennaMan 5y agoEvery time crypto is mentioned on HN it's like the Dropbox Show HN thread over and over again. Decentralisation, open collaborartion, opportunity for entirely new paradigms of entrepreneurship free from the constraints set by the rulling professional managerial class. Weren't those core hacker values? The Nakamoto consensus algorithm is the single biggest contribution to CS so far in the 21st century. Choosing ignorance of novel technology is really sad to see on a forum intitled "hacker news"
- LindyTalker 5y agoIt’s really amazing and sad. I think the majority of users here are now 40+ and are too set in their ways to see anything different.
- acdha 5y ago> Decentralisation, open collaborartion, opportunity for entirely new paradigms of entrepreneurship free from the constraints set by the rulling professional managerial class. Weren't those core hacker values? So the solution is centralizing a currently decentralized network onto a blockchain controlled by a few major players? Remember: honesty is also a core hacker value. Before saying that “open collaboration” hasn’t been happening for decades, you might want to consider how credible that unsupported claim sounds when your audience knows that you will personally profit every time someone buys into the system you’re pushing. Hacker culture has traditionally found that kind of sales pitch disdainful.
- pennaMan 5y agoI think we are talking about wildly different things here. >centralizing a currently decentralized network onto a blockchain controlled by a few major players No, the basic idea is simply decentralization of trust. I do not know what specific blockchain you are refering to. >someone buys into the system you’re pushing I'm pushing that we come together to develop novel systems that fundamentally change how governments and human collaboration in general work. Speculative markets do not interest me.
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- bob1029 5y agoYou can tell this is a social movement and not a technology movement by the way it increases the complexity of everything by orders of magnitude without delivering any meaningful improvements to the end user/customer experience.
- daniel-thompson 5y ago> Dixon, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), is a big believer that “the next wave of computing innovation will be driven by crypto.” His definition of “Web 3” (a term more commonly styled as “Web3”) revolves around blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies — a market that a16z is heavily invested in. In other words, a guy heavily invested in speculative technology X, is pushing X.
- panarky 5y agoIn other words, a guy thinks X will be extremely successful in the future, so he invests in X early.
- DangitBobby 5y agoI kind of thought web3 was supposed to be made of apps that worked without ever taking my personal data off my disk. I'm really bummed that it's somehow instead about cryptocurrencies.
- i_like_apis 5y agoPartner at Anderson Horowitz or not, this reads like a non-engineer offering architecture kool-aid. That diagram makes little sense. Unless I'm missing something.
- rahimnathwani 5y agoA lot of folks here seem to believe the web is currently decentralized. But consider: - if Google were to stop functioning tomorrow, would you still be able to identify yourself to the web sites you use? - if dang decided to censor your HN comments, could you or I easily spin up an instance of HN that ignored that censorship? - if someone were to come up with a better algorithm for generating your Twitter feed, could they implement it and attract users to their site? The way the web works today, we don't have equal access to the data that powers the applications we use. I'm not saying which is better, but the type of decentralization envisaged by web3 proponents goes further than what we have today.
- vvpan 5y agoThe comments here are terribly negative. I'll just paste a post I wrote from /r/ethfinance to explain why I think people who think that blockchain are a fad or just a money grab are wrong. I think blockchain to me personally in very practical sense offers better experience than my bank. And I elaborated this in a thread about a prominent social-recovery wallet (wallet where you rely on your social connections for reinstating you as owner in case of loss) adopting a much needed scaling solution: Using a social recovery wallet (Argent specifically) has been my top Keanu Reeves "WHOA!" moment in crypto. Years ago when I started coming to these forums and everybody was talking about how this or that chain's TPS is the highest my argument was always that none of it matters to end-user if the UX is not there. I would repeat this ad-nauseum and get downvoted. Feeling like wallets are the key I started a website and twitter account that analyses and compares the UX of different contract wallets. When Argent came around I stopped what I was doing because everything else was pointless. The UX comparing to other wallets was incredible. But even more importantly the user experience was better than my bank. You see, I fly a lot. And when I fly to different countries my credit cards (no matter how "international" they are) constantly get rejected and locked. When I try to transfer cash from my bank in country X while in country Y I get prompted for PIN numbers which I do not have, because I do not have my phone number. I walk around clutching my credit cards, got forbid they are stolen. And still every couple of years I have to cancel cards cause my credentials are stolen, so its not like the security is so awesome. When I started using argent (especially when they had daily-limits, which I feel will make a comeback with lower gas fees) I realised that it has none of the problems I had with banks. And also, I can get yields on my assets and stake straight from the wallet. Send money to charity? Easy! Send some ETH to friend so that they can play with it, or cause I owe them? Easy! No seed phrase to worry about! Wallet gets stolen? No problem! In every way that I can think of I would prefer a social recovery wallet. I barely even have any funds on my Trezor (hardware wallets are awful UX. telling people to use them is a sure way to dissuade them getting into crypto. Even I, a power-user, take out the hardware wallet once every few months cause it sucks. And then there's the seedphrase, gah!). But the obvious elephant in the room is - gas fees. Argent even changed their transact/recover logistics cause a wallet that could be perfect for payment was never used that way, it was only used for long-term safe storage. Back to Liberosist's write-up and zkSync. There is probably a long way to go in terms of speed and adoption of crypto payments. But if transactions get cheaper I do no see any use from my bank any longer - zero! I am even willing to pay money for L1 recovery. This would be the true unbanking of the banked.
- xrd 5y agoAll the comments here about not needing the decentralized part of web3 or not needing the payment systems of web3 are missing the forest for the trees. Yes, both of these things exist in web2. But, the exciting thing about web3 isn't decentralized payment. It is that you can participate in decentralized markets. For example, if you go to any website and get an ERC20 token, you can use that token without permission from the site where you got it. Those tokens can be traded on that site, or another marketplace, or another dapp can use them. The original site can't control that. If you go to uniswap you can see the prices of all those tokens. It's useful for speculators now but if those tokens have true utility value, it starts getting very interesting and very valuable. Marketplaces are where things are traded freely. Web3 doesn't make payments any more free. It just makes things more freely tradable.
- ryan_lane 5y agoI can do this with USD right now, and the number of middlemen I need to pay is considerably lower.
- hammyhavoc 5y agoTransaction fees are lower too. Also less volatile. Lol?
- ctvo 5y agoI have a lot of trouble with Web3. Generally there's mass adoption when we solve some need for users, usually around two areas: - Price - Convenience The problems so far we've solved with crypto seem to be around bypassing nation state regulations and as financial asset to gamble with. In those areas crypto has solved for convenience. It's plausible that some time in the future users will need / want decentralized platforms with different ownership models for content. Is that time now? I'm not convinced. Being too early isn't great even if you're right eventually.