9 ms·

About the Urgency of Building Web3

49 points by timdaub 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
RadixDLT 5y ago
Scrypto
sysadm1n 5y ago
I'm just waiting for the hype of web3 and the NFT craze to die down so I can soberly look at it later on when all the early players of it are in Margaritaville on some beach somewhere enjoying their spoils. I plan on being around in the next 5 years, and I plan to dive into it properly then. Otherwise I would be acting out of FOMO or emotions. There is also the Joy of Missing Out (JOMO) too.
- timdaub 5y ago
  > There is also the Joy of Missing Out (JOMO) too. Ha! I love reversing negative framings into a positives too. Now that I think about it, I must have had JOMO too! Thanks for teaching me. And have fun riding your JOMO!
tfang17 5y ago
We're still in the first inning of Web3. Was at Coinbase in 2017 - am now waiting for more dev tooling to come out before jumping back in to the industry. The existing infrastructure is abysmal - equivalent of programming at the network layer. Google and Amazon were built 2 decades after the invention of the internet. No need to FOMO in when the first programmable blockchain (Ethereum) is only 6 years old.
- trutannus 5y ago
  Well put. In addition, Ethereum is also not the most ideal blockchain in the world. Given more time, I'm sure better options will become available. There's no reason to pile onto a flawed system like that just because it's the only option now. Realistically, we should be still developing out better chains rather than building everything onto Ethereum.
  - mcintyre1994 5y ago
    I did a Buildspace project building on the Solana blockchain a couple of weeks ago. It solves a bunch of problems with Ethereum - it processes thousands of transactions a second and has tiny fees. Had to learn some Rust to write it though, and it’s definitely very early still. But I think it or something like it is going to become a really good option eventually because so many apps can’t really work with Ethereum’s transaction speed and fees.
    - randomopining 5y ago
      But is Solana even decentralized enough? What's the point if it's not really that decentralized?
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - mcintyre1994 5y ago
        I'm not sure, I'm not super familiar with the theory of it to be honest. I'd like to learn more though! Do you mean in terms of being proof of stake instead of proof of work, or do you mean something specific to Solana itself?
        randomopining 5y ago
        Idk so much, but basically i've heard that Solana validation isn't easily available like ETH (run on any GPU). It needs like 16 core cpu with 256gb RAM and fast SSD. Then there's only 1000 validators right now, and 130 of them are losing money. So it seems like their validation is very oligarchal. Which kinda defeats the purpose right? Venmo or Visa can have superfast and supercheap transactions... but who cares.
        mcintyre1994 5y ago
        Yep looks like you’re right, those are some pretty beefy requirements. I suppose that if they’re paid in Sol then they could become profitable/more profitable over time and then more might come in, but that’s definitely a really high floor.
theamk 5y ago
The author is almost there! The next question should be: "And is there a need for Web3 to be blockchain based? Do those DeFi startups have any value once FOMO ends?"
- timdaub 5y ago
  Hi, author here, you might also enjoy reading: - https://timdaub.github.io/2021/10/31/tokens-considered-harmful/ https://timdaub.github.io/2021/10/31/tokens-considered-harmf... - https://timdaub.github.io/2021/10/21/on-chain-the-emperor-wears-no-clothes/ https://timdaub.github.io/2021/10/21/on-chain-the-emperor-we... as I think this topic deserves its own discussion and controversy.
- NathanKP 5y ago
  I personally think that IPFS is the actual web3. All the noise about blockchain powered NFT's is obscuring the really interesting tech underneath: the distributed, versioned filesystem that can be used to actually host those corny images that people are buying and selling for obscene amounts. The other thing that is interesting is ENS, which provides a distributed blockchain version of DNS so that you can give your IPFS hosted things a proper human readable name instead of just using long hashes. IPFS and ENS together feels like it could be an actual web3. But that real tech often gets overlooked amid the buzz and speculation of people buying and selling NFT's and pumping and dumping shit coins to make huge profits. Some people are doing the actual tech work, but the rest are gambling in a flashy casino, making a lot of noise, and calling it web3.
  - VHRanger 5y ago
    Serious question: why would anyone use IPFS for storage compared to available options? Everything I see points to it being ludicrously more expensive, not having good systems for redundancy and availability, etc.
    - anchpop 5y ago
      It's not meaningful to talk about IPFS being expensive, it's like saying bittorrent is expensive. Both are just ways for people to seed a file, and other people to retrieve that file from its hash. There's only as much redundancy as there are people who want to seed it. IPFS is in wide usage because of libgen haha. Currently the resolver can take 30ish seconds, and there's a new, fancier resolver that supposedly takes <5 seconds, which is still pretty high compared to what people are used to but it's a work in progress. There's also IPNS which allows for the controller of a keypair to update the content associated with an identifier. Filecoin is an incentive layer for IPFS that I'm much less bullish on. It's probably what you were thinking of, it's a way to pay money to have someone host or serve something for you on IPFS. It seems pretty underbaked to me but I think it's in the same order of magnitude, cost wise, as AWS.
encoderer 5y ago
Personally, I always use Netscape 5 to browse Web3
- geronimo1274 5y ago
  Odd choice naming a new technology after an existing technology. It's like calling something HTML.
- theandrewbailey 5y ago
  I was going to add a joke about internet 2, but I remembered that it was real.
dreyfan 5y ago
Cryptocurrency and related speculative technology does not define “web3” as much as that community would like to pretend it does.
geronimo1274 5y ago
I won't miss out again. It's clearly too late to get into existing crypto, so I'll soon be launching the first pretenseless cryptocurrency: GMMECoin. Mining works by giving me your money, or, you can buy coins by giving me your money. If you want to sell, our decentralized crypto helicopter nodes will be down and you should probably give me money. The uses for blockchain are endless. Buying illegal substances, providing the earth with free heating, embezzling money. We'll also be launching a new way to patronize your favorite artists by buying their receipts from recent trips to CVS! That's right, you can have buy all the receipts you want! Juuuust give me your money.
mattlondon 5y ago
Can someone explain it like I am 5, why "web 3" (i.e. decentralisation from the likes of IPFS and Dat) is getting conflated with crypto? IPFS et al seem to be working fine right now without shoe-horning in blockchain.... or am I missing something?
- devmor 5y ago
  Because crypto scammers are spending on PR to conflate them, so that they can reap the benefits of being associated with legitimate projects.
  - wrinkl3 5y ago
    Which legitimate projects are you referring to?
- timdaub 5y ago
  Hi, author here, given my provenance notes, I believe the brand/vision of the term web3 originates from web3.js and those people around it. But the term is quite general, as really it's anyone's authority to bump the web's major version number. But I'm conflating web3 with crypto as I've been witnessing "web3"'s rise through my own eyes and it has always been conflated with crypto IMO. I accept if others have a different perspective. I think nowadays there are so may web3 efforts that I've lost track. > IPFS et al seem to be working fine right now without shoe-horning in blockchain Btw. I think the original creator of IPFS Juan Benet would disagree with you here. I know for a fact that the original IPFS and Filecoin whitepapers (the old Filecon paper! [1]) were kind of written in parallel (around 2015 or earlier), so I'd infer that it always had been their vision to also create a ledger or crypto component. - 1: https://filecoin.io/filecoin-jul-2014.pdf https://filecoin.io/filecoin-jul-2014.pdf
- carlosdp 5y ago
  web3 isn't being conflated with crypto, web3 IS the decentralized web powered via crypto.
  - deleted 5y ago
VHRanger 5y ago
There's nothing that says we have to build it either. Like crypto up to now, the Web3 idea is a solution in search for a problem.
difosfor 5y ago
Web3? Right; a decentralized web. Cool idea, kind of reminds me of the semantic web. Not getting anywhere anytime soon due to the inertia of the existing web. I'm kind of waiting for the revolution where people demand to own their information, as it makes more sense and could protect against all sorts of abuse, but I'm not holding my breath.
- eivarv 5y ago
  could protect against all sorts of abuse... Could it, though? What's to stop someone that gains access to user data (by legitimate means) to make a copy?
  - difosfor 5y ago
    Laws and law enforcement. We should demand our governments to make laws that make unauthorized (by the people themselves through a decentralized system) use of our data illegal. At least the more flagrant/large scale forms of abuse could be prevented that way.
    - eivarv 5y ago
      Exactly – this is currently a regulatory problem, and blockchains, decentralized identity, etc. won't solve anything in this space. On the contrary, it will by definition enable identification in some types of data. This makes me conclude that these types of solutions are really more about portability and making some sort of political point (the only thing users realistically control is first party authorization – nothing else); They certainly don't have any security or privacy-related guarantees.
- carlosdp 5y ago
  The "existing web" and web3 aren't separate things. Web3 is the organic evolution forward of the web, and it has tons of traction already.
  - floatboth 5y ago
chuckSu 5y ago
Web3 the semantic web of the 2020s
adam_arthur 5y ago
Suddenly seeing metaverse and web3 all over the place, after FB announced their rebrand. Disney even talking about their metaverse ambitions. I'm sure the terms existed prior, but I never came across despite being an avid browser/news reader. I believe the concepts can bear fruit, but feels like a sort of euphoria/me too kind of buzzword without a lot of substance. By substance, I mean tangible utility benefit to society in the short to medium term. Is it just me?
- dagmx 5y ago
  I 100 agree with you. I just posted a comment saying the same. The hype machine for it just came out of nowhere and ramped up fast
- madeofpalk 5y ago
  Just like how in the "web 2.0" days there were a lot of "thought leaders" pushing their ideas, brands, and courses
anchpop 5y ago
I typed this up for another comment, but lost what comment I was replying to, so I'm posting it here. It's about the three most interesting blockchain-associated projects I know of. I'm trying to figure out what's being built that's actually useful, outside of DeFi stuff (which I don't understand the hype for). The first is a retroactive public goods funding system, sponsored and partially designed by Vitalik: https://medium.com/ethereum-optimism/retroactive-public-goods-funding-33c9b7d00f0c https://medium.com/ethereum-optimism/retroactive-public-good... . The idea is that, instead of trying to figure out which public goods will be worthwhile in advance and funding those, they collect money from transaction fees (or something) and pay it to public goods projects that in retrospect were beneficial to society. ("The core principle behind the concept of retroactive public goods funding is simple: it’s easier to agree on what was useful than what will be useful.") In theory, you could have a startup whose business plan is "raise money from investors, build a public good, then get a ton of money once the public goods funding oracle agrees our good is beneficial and repay our investors". That's not a change that requires a blockchain or a cryptocurrency or whatever, but it definitely meets the criteria of "some people interested in and working on blockchain and related technologies are pursuing ambitious goals that could reshape the economy and politics". Next up, Ethereum Name Service. The idea here is basically just DNS as an Ethereum smart contract. This, combined with the really ergonomic key-management tools that have popped up like Metamask, could enable an interesting future: one where everyone has a keypair that's associated with a human-meaningful name. You could imagine websites where your account is a public key, and you "log in" by solving challenge (decrypting something encrypted with your pubkey), and your "username" is just whatever ENS name is associated with that pubkey. Basically, it decentralizes the concept of an authentication/user accounts. (disclaimer, I got some ENS token for free when they did an airdrop that I haven't bothered to sell yet so I guess I have a stake in it) Third, filecoin/IPFS/IPNS. IPFS is a protocol for retrieval of a file corresponding to a hash (basically it's bittorrent, nothing really that new or exciting, although it performs quite a bit better). IPNS is a way of creating an identifier that's associated with a hash you can update, basically replicating the concept of static websites that the website maintainer can update, except it's decentralized so anyone can provide hosting for the site instead of just the original site owner. (Imagine if you could download every site in your bookmarks and seed it, so they would never go down for anyone in the world as long as your computer is online.) You can associate an IPNS identifier with an ENS name, which is the only way I know of to have a website with a human-meaningful name where the whole stack is fully decentralized. I think IPFS and IPNS feel delightfully "webby", there's no complicated blockchain or anything like that, it's essentially just a souped-up bittorrent. Filecoin is interesting because its goal is to act as an incentive layer for IPFS. On the traditional web, hosting a website costs money that the website owner has to pay, and then website users enjoy the site for free. That's nice, but it means that without ads or some other form of monetization the website can be a financial burden on the owner. (it's fine for text sites, but imagine a video-hosting site or something, the bandwidth alone can be extremely expensive.) Filecoin rebalances the incentives by allowing the users to pay a small fee to the host (and it's decentralized, so anyone can be the host if they choose), that way as long as there's some interest in the site someone is at least being compensated a little for storage and hosting. I don't know how much progress they're actually making towards any of these goals though, it doesn't seem usable in its current state in the way IPFS or ENS are.
dagmx 5y ago
I'm very curious where the current hype for a Web 3.0 originated from. One thing I notice among the crypto circle is how lock step all the hype building and talking points are. Within the last few weeks, all the people I personally know who are crytpo fans are suddenly talking about web 3.0 when they've had no interest in web technologies prior. Is there a prominent set of influencers who recently published some content regarding it? The hype seems to have come out of seemingly nowhere, though largely on the tails of Meta's recent presentation. It just seems really odd that so many people are saying the same things so suddenly without any concrete technology advancement backing it up.
- timdaub 5y ago
  Interesting observation. I can second your sentiment. For my project, we've recently had a huge push through Google [1]. And I can't remember making substantial changes that would explain this phenomenon. I don't know why this happened, but I've also heard it from other projects too. But generally, I tend to think that it's always difficult to make out a causation for e.g. hype. Definitely FB renaming to Meta gave lots of mainstream credibility to an otherwise kinda-fringe space. But I don't know. - 1: https://plausible.io/rugpullindex.com?period=6mo&source=Google https://plausible.io/rugpullindex.com?period=6mo&source=Goog...
- YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
  It's mostly a term for "people in the space" if you look at twitter discussions about crypto and web3 you get a lot of answers like "You don't understand it because you are not in the space. It's for web3 people." It's an easy way out of a discussion as it was with web2.0 in the beginning further ramping up the FOMO for "normies". Some weeks ago a lot of Twitch streamers got sponsorships for nft-marketplaces like https://eternal.gg/ https://eternal.gg/ the biggest talking points they gave creators to handle backlash was "the future of the web, web3" and that "it's for people in the space". Have a look at /r/livestreamfail on reddit and search for nfts or crypto and you will find a lot of videos of creators defending their decision to offer nfts with "web3".
  - gilmore606 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
idreyn 5y ago
I'd like to see more discussion about the nuts-and-bolts infrastructure of web3: the servers, file hosting and streaming, the caching layers. All of these slick websites are probably running on the same old cloud platforms and using the blockchain as an (admittedly powerful) identity or transactions layer. I know it's early days, but the rhetoric about freedom from FAANG is outpacing the reality. I worry about a new generation of services that lure in and capture users with a thin veneer of decentralization ("oh, your identity is on ENS, but uh we actually host your videos") or those services suddenly finding they have huge cloud infrastructure bills to pay, leading to governance catastrophes, broken promises, and rug pulls/shutdowns. A potential small step in the right direction: it would be super cool to see a blogging platform like mirror.xyz host its user-uploaded image assets on IPFS. It would be super super cool to see a DAO engineered to put money in trust to keep these assets pinned past the lifetime of the service itself, with as little human intervention as possible.
- timdaub 5y ago
  > All of these slick websites are probably running on the same old cloud platforms and using the blockchain as an (admittedly powerful) identity or transactions layer. I'd like to second your sentiment. I've written about this topic too [1]. I think we should accept "web3" as a demonstration of what's possible and move into systems engineering now. - 1: https://timdaub.github.io/2020/09/08/web3/ https://timdaub.github.io/2020/09/08/web3/
m00dy 5y ago
I must admit that the hype around web3. But, I also realised how powerful the DEFI is. I think banks are waiting for DEFI to be disrupted. Disclaimer: I'm one of the founding members of LongShort Finance. It is a decentralised, permissionless, crypto derivative exchange.

49 points by timdaub 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

RadixDLT 5y ago

Scrypto

sysadm1n 5y ago

I'm just waiting for the hype of web3 and the NFT craze to die down so I can soberly look at it later on when all the early players of it are in Margaritaville on some beach somewhere enjoying their spoils. I plan on being around in the next 5 years, and I plan to dive into it properly then. Otherwise I would be acting out of FOMO or emotions. There is also the Joy of Missing Out (JOMO) too.

timdaub 5y ago
> There is also the Joy of Missing Out (JOMO) too. Ha! I love reversing negative framings into a positives too. Now that I think about it, I must have had JOMO too! Thanks for teaching me. And have fun riding your JOMO!

tfang17 5y ago

We're still in the first inning of Web3. Was at Coinbase in 2017 - am now waiting for more dev tooling to come out before jumping back in to the industry. The existing infrastructure is abysmal - equivalent of programming at the network layer. Google and Amazon were built 2 decades after the invention of the internet. No need to FOMO in when the first programmable blockchain (Ethereum) is only 6 years old.

trutannus 5y ago
Well put. In addition, Ethereum is also not the most ideal blockchain in the world. Given more time, I'm sure better options will become available. There's no reason to pile onto a flawed system like that just because it's the only option now. Realistically, we should be still developing out better chains rather than building everything onto Ethereum.
- mcintyre1994 5y ago
  I did a Buildspace project building on the Solana blockchain a couple of weeks ago. It solves a bunch of problems with Ethereum - it processes thousands of transactions a second and has tiny fees. Had to learn some Rust to write it though, and it’s definitely very early still. But I think it or something like it is going to become a really good option eventually because so many apps can’t really work with Ethereum’s transaction speed and fees.
  - randomopining 5y ago
    But is Solana even decentralized enough? What's the point if it's not really that decentralized?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - mcintyre1994 5y ago
      I'm not sure, I'm not super familiar with the theory of it to be honest. I'd like to learn more though! Do you mean in terms of being proof of stake instead of proof of work, or do you mean something specific to Solana itself?
      - randomopining 5y ago
        Idk so much, but basically i've heard that Solana validation isn't easily available like ETH (run on any GPU). It needs like 16 core cpu with 256gb RAM and fast SSD. Then there's only 1000 validators right now, and 130 of them are losing money. So it seems like their validation is very oligarchal. Which kinda defeats the purpose right? Venmo or Visa can have superfast and supercheap transactions... but who cares.
        mcintyre1994 5y ago
        Yep looks like you’re right, those are some pretty beefy requirements. I suppose that if they’re paid in Sol then they could become profitable/more profitable over time and then more might come in, but that’s definitely a really high floor.

theamk 5y ago

The author is almost there! The next question should be: "And is there a need for Web3 to be blockchain based? Do those DeFi startups have any value once FOMO ends?"

timdaub 5y ago
Hi, author here, you might also enjoy reading: - https://timdaub.github.io/2021/10/31/tokens-considered-harmful/ https://timdaub.github.io/2021/10/31/tokens-considered-harmf... - https://timdaub.github.io/2021/10/21/on-chain-the-emperor-wears-no-clothes/ https://timdaub.github.io/2021/10/21/on-chain-the-emperor-we... as I think this topic deserves its own discussion and controversy.
NathanKP 5y ago
I personally think that IPFS is the actual web3. All the noise about blockchain powered NFT's is obscuring the really interesting tech underneath: the distributed, versioned filesystem that can be used to actually host those corny images that people are buying and selling for obscene amounts. The other thing that is interesting is ENS, which provides a distributed blockchain version of DNS so that you can give your IPFS hosted things a proper human readable name instead of just using long hashes. IPFS and ENS together feels like it could be an actual web3. But that real tech often gets overlooked amid the buzz and speculation of people buying and selling NFT's and pumping and dumping shit coins to make huge profits. Some people are doing the actual tech work, but the rest are gambling in a flashy casino, making a lot of noise, and calling it web3.
- VHRanger 5y ago
  Serious question: why would anyone use IPFS for storage compared to available options? Everything I see points to it being ludicrously more expensive, not having good systems for redundancy and availability, etc.
  - anchpop 5y ago
    It's not meaningful to talk about IPFS being expensive, it's like saying bittorrent is expensive. Both are just ways for people to seed a file, and other people to retrieve that file from its hash. There's only as much redundancy as there are people who want to seed it. IPFS is in wide usage because of libgen haha. Currently the resolver can take 30ish seconds, and there's a new, fancier resolver that supposedly takes <5 seconds, which is still pretty high compared to what people are used to but it's a work in progress. There's also IPNS which allows for the controller of a keypair to update the content associated with an identifier. Filecoin is an incentive layer for IPFS that I'm much less bullish on. It's probably what you were thinking of, it's a way to pay money to have someone host or serve something for you on IPFS. It seems pretty underbaked to me but I think it's in the same order of magnitude, cost wise, as AWS.

encoderer 5y ago

Personally, I always use Netscape 5 to browse Web3

geronimo1274 5y ago
Odd choice naming a new technology after an existing technology. It's like calling something HTML.
theandrewbailey 5y ago
I was going to add a joke about internet 2, but I remembered that it was real.

dreyfan 5y ago

Cryptocurrency and related speculative technology does not define “web3” as much as that community would like to pretend it does.

geronimo1274 5y ago

I won't miss out again. It's clearly too late to get into existing crypto, so I'll soon be launching the first pretenseless cryptocurrency: GMMECoin. Mining works by giving me your money, or, you can buy coins by giving me your money. If you want to sell, our decentralized crypto helicopter nodes will be down and you should probably give me money. The uses for blockchain are endless. Buying illegal substances, providing the earth with free heating, embezzling money. We'll also be launching a new way to patronize your favorite artists by buying their receipts from recent trips to CVS! That's right, you can have buy all the receipts you want! Juuuust give me your money.

mattlondon 5y ago

Can someone explain it like I am 5, why "web 3" (i.e. decentralisation from the likes of IPFS and Dat) is getting conflated with crypto? IPFS et al seem to be working fine right now without shoe-horning in blockchain.... or am I missing something?

devmor 5y ago
Because crypto scammers are spending on PR to conflate them, so that they can reap the benefits of being associated with legitimate projects.
- wrinkl3 5y ago
  Which legitimate projects are you referring to?
timdaub 5y ago
Hi, author here, given my provenance notes, I believe the brand/vision of the term web3 originates from web3.js and those people around it. But the term is quite general, as really it's anyone's authority to bump the web's major version number. But I'm conflating web3 with crypto as I've been witnessing "web3"'s rise through my own eyes and it has always been conflated with crypto IMO. I accept if others have a different perspective. I think nowadays there are so may web3 efforts that I've lost track. > IPFS et al seem to be working fine right now without shoe-horning in blockchain Btw. I think the original creator of IPFS Juan Benet would disagree with you here. I know for a fact that the original IPFS and Filecoin whitepapers (the old Filecon paper! [1]) were kind of written in parallel (around 2015 or earlier), so I'd infer that it always had been their vision to also create a ledger or crypto component. - 1: https://filecoin.io/filecoin-jul-2014.pdf https://filecoin.io/filecoin-jul-2014.pdf
carlosdp 5y ago
web3 isn't being conflated with crypto, web3 IS the decentralized web powered via crypto.
- deleted 5y ago

VHRanger 5y ago

There's nothing that says we have to build it either. Like crypto up to now, the Web3 idea is a solution in search for a problem.

difosfor 5y ago

Web3? Right; a decentralized web. Cool idea, kind of reminds me of the semantic web. Not getting anywhere anytime soon due to the inertia of the existing web. I'm kind of waiting for the revolution where people demand to own their information, as it makes more sense and could protect against all sorts of abuse, but I'm not holding my breath.

eivarv 5y ago
could protect against all sorts of abuse... Could it, though? What's to stop someone that gains access to user data (by legitimate means) to make a copy?
- difosfor 5y ago
  Laws and law enforcement. We should demand our governments to make laws that make unauthorized (by the people themselves through a decentralized system) use of our data illegal. At least the more flagrant/large scale forms of abuse could be prevented that way.
  - eivarv 5y ago
    Exactly – this is currently a regulatory problem, and blockchains, decentralized identity, etc. won't solve anything in this space. On the contrary, it will by definition enable identification in some types of data. This makes me conclude that these types of solutions are really more about portability and making some sort of political point (the only thing users realistically control is first party authorization – nothing else); They certainly don't have any security or privacy-related guarantees.
carlosdp 5y ago
The "existing web" and web3 aren't separate things. Web3 is the organic evolution forward of the web, and it has tons of traction already.
- floatboth 5y ago

chuckSu 5y ago

Web3 the semantic web of the 2020s

adam_arthur 5y ago

Suddenly seeing metaverse and web3 all over the place, after FB announced their rebrand. Disney even talking about their metaverse ambitions. I'm sure the terms existed prior, but I never came across despite being an avid browser/news reader. I believe the concepts can bear fruit, but feels like a sort of euphoria/me too kind of buzzword without a lot of substance. By substance, I mean tangible utility benefit to society in the short to medium term. Is it just me?

dagmx 5y ago
I 100 agree with you. I just posted a comment saying the same. The hype machine for it just came out of nowhere and ramped up fast
madeofpalk 5y ago
Just like how in the "web 2.0" days there were a lot of "thought leaders" pushing their ideas, brands, and courses

anchpop 5y ago

I typed this up for another comment, but lost what comment I was replying to, so I'm posting it here. It's about the three most interesting blockchain-associated projects I know of. I'm trying to figure out what's being built that's actually useful, outside of DeFi stuff (which I don't understand the hype for). The first is a retroactive public goods funding system, sponsored and partially designed by Vitalik: https://medium.com/ethereum-optimism/retroactive-public-goods-funding-33c9b7d00f0c https://medium.com/ethereum-optimism/retroactive-public-good... . The idea is that, instead of trying to figure out which public goods will be worthwhile in advance and funding those, they collect money from transaction fees (or something) and pay it to public goods projects that in retrospect were beneficial to society. ("The core principle behind the concept of retroactive public goods funding is simple: it’s easier to agree on what was useful than what will be useful.") In theory, you could have a startup whose business plan is "raise money from investors, build a public good, then get a ton of money once the public goods funding oracle agrees our good is beneficial and repay our investors". That's not a change that requires a blockchain or a cryptocurrency or whatever, but it definitely meets the criteria of "some people interested in and working on blockchain and related technologies are pursuing ambitious goals that could reshape the economy and politics". Next up, Ethereum Name Service. The idea here is basically just DNS as an Ethereum smart contract. This, combined with the really ergonomic key-management tools that have popped up like Metamask, could enable an interesting future: one where everyone has a keypair that's associated with a human-meaningful name. You could imagine websites where your account is a public key, and you "log in" by solving challenge (decrypting something encrypted with your pubkey), and your "username" is just whatever ENS name is associated with that pubkey. Basically, it decentralizes the concept of an authentication/user accounts. (disclaimer, I got some ENS token for free when they did an airdrop that I haven't bothered to sell yet so I guess I have a stake in it) Third, filecoin/IPFS/IPNS. IPFS is a protocol for retrieval of a file corresponding to a hash (basically it's bittorrent, nothing really that new or exciting, although it performs quite a bit better). IPNS is a way of creating an identifier that's associated with a hash you can update, basically replicating the concept of static websites that the website maintainer can update, except it's decentralized so anyone can provide hosting for the site instead of just the original site owner. (Imagine if you could download every site in your bookmarks and seed it, so they would never go down for anyone in the world as long as your computer is online.) You can associate an IPNS identifier with an ENS name, which is the only way I know of to have a website with a human-meaningful name where the whole stack is fully decentralized. I think IPFS and IPNS feel delightfully "webby", there's no complicated blockchain or anything like that, it's essentially just a souped-up bittorrent. Filecoin is interesting because its goal is to act as an incentive layer for IPFS. On the traditional web, hosting a website costs money that the website owner has to pay, and then website users enjoy the site for free. That's nice, but it means that without ads or some other form of monetization the website can be a financial burden on the owner. (it's fine for text sites, but imagine a video-hosting site or something, the bandwidth alone can be extremely expensive.) Filecoin rebalances the incentives by allowing the users to pay a small fee to the host (and it's decentralized, so anyone can be the host if they choose), that way as long as there's some interest in the site someone is at least being compensated a little for storage and hosting. I don't know how much progress they're actually making towards any of these goals though, it doesn't seem usable in its current state in the way IPFS or ENS are.

dagmx 5y ago

I'm very curious where the current hype for a Web 3.0 originated from. One thing I notice among the crypto circle is how lock step all the hype building and talking points are. Within the last few weeks, all the people I personally know who are crytpo fans are suddenly talking about web 3.0 when they've had no interest in web technologies prior. Is there a prominent set of influencers who recently published some content regarding it? The hype seems to have come out of seemingly nowhere, though largely on the tails of Meta's recent presentation. It just seems really odd that so many people are saying the same things so suddenly without any concrete technology advancement backing it up.

timdaub 5y ago
Interesting observation. I can second your sentiment. For my project, we've recently had a huge push through Google [1]. And I can't remember making substantial changes that would explain this phenomenon. I don't know why this happened, but I've also heard it from other projects too. But generally, I tend to think that it's always difficult to make out a causation for e.g. hype. Definitely FB renaming to Meta gave lots of mainstream credibility to an otherwise kinda-fringe space. But I don't know. - 1: https://plausible.io/rugpullindex.com?period=6mo&source=Google https://plausible.io/rugpullindex.com?period=6mo&source=Goog...
YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
It's mostly a term for "people in the space" if you look at twitter discussions about crypto and web3 you get a lot of answers like "You don't understand it because you are not in the space. It's for web3 people." It's an easy way out of a discussion as it was with web2.0 in the beginning further ramping up the FOMO for "normies". Some weeks ago a lot of Twitch streamers got sponsorships for nft-marketplaces like https://eternal.gg/ https://eternal.gg/ the biggest talking points they gave creators to handle backlash was "the future of the web, web3" and that "it's for people in the space". Have a look at /r/livestreamfail on reddit and search for nfts or crypto and you will find a lot of videos of creators defending their decision to offer nfts with "web3".
- gilmore606 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

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idreyn 5y ago

I'd like to see more discussion about the nuts-and-bolts infrastructure of web3: the servers, file hosting and streaming, the caching layers. All of these slick websites are probably running on the same old cloud platforms and using the blockchain as an (admittedly powerful) identity or transactions layer. I know it's early days, but the rhetoric about freedom from FAANG is outpacing the reality. I worry about a new generation of services that lure in and capture users with a thin veneer of decentralization ("oh, your identity is on ENS, but uh we actually host your videos") or those services suddenly finding they have huge cloud infrastructure bills to pay, leading to governance catastrophes, broken promises, and rug pulls/shutdowns. A potential small step in the right direction: it would be super cool to see a blogging platform like mirror.xyz host its user-uploaded image assets on IPFS. It would be super super cool to see a DAO engineered to put money in trust to keep these assets pinned past the lifetime of the service itself, with as little human intervention as possible.

timdaub 5y ago
> All of these slick websites are probably running on the same old cloud platforms and using the blockchain as an (admittedly powerful) identity or transactions layer. I'd like to second your sentiment. I've written about this topic too [1]. I think we should accept "web3" as a demonstration of what's possible and move into systems engineering now. - 1: https://timdaub.github.io/2020/09/08/web3/ https://timdaub.github.io/2020/09/08/web3/

m00dy 5y ago

I must admit that the hype around web3. But, I also realised how powerful the DEFI is. I think banks are waiting for DEFI to be disrupted. Disclaimer: I'm one of the founding members of LongShort Finance. It is a decentralised, permissionless, crypto derivative exchange.