29 ms·

Notes on Web3

• PaulHoule 5y ago
  The Media Lab would know the Semantic Web was supposed to be "Web 3.0". Somehow the blockheads didn't notice.
  • hnbad 5y ago
    FWIW the idea of the Semantic Web pre-dates Web 2.0 by quite a bit, so even the idea of it being Web 3.0 was a bit of an attempt to bandwagon on the success of Web 2.0.
    • pmlnr 5y ago
      It does. Even XHTML 1.0 is ~2000.
• simmanian 5y ago
  Does anyone know where I can see the latest developments on web 3.0 without most of the tulip mania? It takes so much effort to filter out blog articles and youtube videos on why <insert name> is going to be the next big thing when I just want to see the current state of things.
  • ghostwreck 5y ago
    Consider diving into tulip land (without any major investments of course). Mint an NFT, write a coin contract, it's actually a very fun and easy way to learn the basics of web3.
    • faeyanpiraat 5y ago
      Fun way to waste your time.
      • kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
        Well we ARE programmers. We build invisible castles in the sky.
      • dvt 5y ago
        What a weirdly aggressive and unnecessary comment. Web3 has some pretty cool parts and there's definitely a new programming paradigm at work. Even out of curiosity, you should give it a try. Distributed computing is pretty interesting, and even more-so when there's a code complexity resource you need to optimize for (gas).
        • frazbin 5y ago
          idk it's not untrue. So far my time investment in distributed ledgers hasn't done a damn thing for anybody, but it has been fun (in a 'playing with your food' way, as someone said downthread). I suspect many here have had a similar experience.
        • preseinger 5y ago
          Distributed computing is an entire field of study unrelated to blockchains.
          • dvt 5y ago
            > Distributed computing is an entire field of study unrelated to blockchains. I'm not sure if you're just being purposefully obtuse, but this is most definitely not true[1]. Consensus protocols (which are very salient in blockchains) have been studied in distributed computing since like the 70s; the EVM is basically a distributed Turing machine; etc. [1] https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2019/2/234355-blockchains-from-a-distributed-computing-perspective/fulltext https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2019/2/234355-blockchains-fro...
            • preseinger 5y ago
              What? Your comments support my point, they don't refute it. Blockchains are a (naive) application of distributed computing principles, not the foundation of them...
  • ssss11 5y ago
    I just came across CoinSutra in which the article I read about Lido seemed very level headed and refreshing. Otherwise I generally read CoinTelegraph but it can get very bullish at times.
  • JarekS 5y ago
    Try Bankless https://banklesshq.com/ https://banklesshq.com/
    • outside1234 5y ago
      ... but go in knowing it is going to be a breathless hype-fest
      • adamw2k 5y ago
        just signed up here and already unsubscribed. way too kool-aid.
    • Tenoke 5y ago
      Bankless is almost exclusively just about ads to pump their own bags with little objectivity, though I guess they occasionally will have more knowledgeable guests who themselves might provide useful information. Either way, last place to go if you want to avoid the hype.
    • Igelau 5y ago
      > without most of the tulip mania
    • capableweb 5y ago
      One only have to look at that website to realize it's the opposite of what simmanian is asking for. > Each week you get... > A rundown of opportunities > A new crypto tactic to learn > A new strategy to consider > A recap with an action list Absolutely zero focus on technical details...
  • k__ 5y ago
    It's very vast field, and by the day there is new stuff happening. I'm in 2 months now and only scratched the surface. In the Developer DAO (which is in founding) we currently plan to make all these web3 learning resources more accessible. But right now, you can look here for resources: https://github.com/Developer-DAO/resources https://github.com/Developer-DAO/resources
    • leppr 5y ago
      You plan to make learning resources more accessible by gating them behind a limited supply NFT? Interesting.
      • k__ 5y ago
        While many of the members are just starting their journey, the NFTs are more of an incentivization for the creators of learning resources, I think. The resources themselves, when created, should reach as many people as possible.
        • leppr 5y ago
          Noble goal, but I really don't understand what advantage you gain from selecting contributors with NFTs. To be honest, I hope it fails. Developer communities are one of the very few places in crypto that aren't totally infested by Ponzi grifters and where you can find honest conversation, so I wasn't exactly thrilled when I saw this pop up. We don't need more wonky centrally-managed incentives. Incentives can be harmful. It most often reduces to a simple Ponzi.
          • k__ 5y ago
            To me it seemed that the incentives are used to make decentralization more secure in the future, but let's see how that goes. It feels like a refreshing alternative to the run of the mill VC/startup model.
            • leppr 5y ago
  • sali0 5y ago
    Twitter is very good for this, but you must follow the builders. Wholly agreed, there is too much trash if you just search for crypto. I'd recommend finding the founders and devs of a crypto organization or protocol you find interesting and follow along. Some high signal ones are @Bantg from Yearn Finance, @gakonst from Paradigm, @epolynya for Modular Blockchain info, @iamDCinvestor for macro view and NFTs. You can find a lot more good ones by seeing these individuals replies. And if you like, you can follow me as well @_nd_go, I try to keep my feed fairly high signal
    • notsureaboutpg 5y ago
      The very first "high signal" account you mentioned has one of the latest tweets shilling something called Hegic which seems to be a risky options trading platform + coin built by a grifter.
  • larsiusprime 5y ago
    My colleagues and I write about this now and then for Naavik: https://twitter.com/larsiusprime/status/1459191090100244483 https://twitter.com/larsiusprime/status/1459191090100244483 Sufficiently non-tulipy?
    • neilparikh 5y ago
      Great thread, particularly the part on "land" in games. I've always found it a little off putting that so many cryptocurrency projects essentially advertise themselves by promising that early adopters will become landed gentry. Also, I read the Transitional Gains Trap paper a few years ago and really liked it, but forgot the name and couldn't find it again, so you helped me find it again, thanks!
      • larsiusprime 5y ago
        Yeah I learned about it literally the day I posted that; it's a great little concept to pack in my mental toolbox.
  • clippablematt 5y ago
    If you want a programmer/documentation approach then GitHub and developer forums are where you will get the best shill free discussion, read the eips/ercs on github and the eth cat herders forum. https://eips.ethereum.org/ https://eips.ethereum.org/ https://ethereumcatherders.com/ https://ethereumcatherders.com/ Play with the tools like https://eth-brownie.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ https://eth-brownie.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ https://hardhat.org/ https://hardhat.org/ https://www.cairo-lang.org/docs/hello_starknet/index.html https://www.cairo-lang.org/docs/hello_starknet/index.html Note these are eth focused, but there is overlap with zcash/cosmos/polkadot and the many evm chains that now exist. I’d also recommend: https://gov.yearn.finance/ https://gov.yearn.finance/ and https://forum.makerdao.com/ https://forum.makerdao.com/ for insight into how protocols are managed.
    • davidmurdoch 5y ago
      Don't forget about the OG Ethereum framework: https://trufflesuite.com https://trufflesuite.com :-)
      • eoo 5y ago
        I heard that truffle is a little outdated unfortunately, and doesn't add much value nowadays over hardhat.
        • ArtWomb 5y ago
          Do any frameworks add essential components over bare web3js?
          • Tenoke 5y ago
            Truffle gives you a local Blockchain to develop on. Web3js gives you a way to interact with a Blockchain.
          • davidmurdoch 5y ago
            The two coolest things about truffle, IMO, is the debugger, which lets you debug/step through past transactions, even ones on mainnet, and the --dry-run feature, which lets you run your deployment against a local copy of a real network, without syncing the whole blockchain. Both those features lean heavily on the work I do on Ganache, an Ethereum simulator that has all sorts of nice development features that a public node doesn't.
  • pmlnr 5y ago
    There isn't one - because they have been around, quietly, growing. Check sneakernet ideas, like Scuttlebutt ( https://scuttlebutt.nz/get-started/ https://scuttlebutt.nz/get-started/ ), p2p networks, like dat:// and ipfs://, retroshare, and so on. Whatever you'll find under the web3 banner is, unfortunately, complete garbage.
    • atweiden 5y ago
      See also: internet reclamation projects [1] [1]: https://drewdevault.com/2021/09/23/Nitter-and-other-internet-reclamation-projects.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/09/23/Nitter-and-other-internet...
  • prohobo 5y ago
    Vitalik Buterin's blog often talks about developments in tokenomics and governance, including the game theory behind it and new projects that are implementing it.
    • pcthrowaway 5y ago
      Vitalik is one of the best people to follow in the space because he generally ignores a lot of the hype and focuses on way decentralization can change (and improve) the world. While there is a lot of value in defi, by its nature it attracts users and builders to the space for the wrong reasons (and in some ways taints the general perception of what blockchain tech is capable of) If anyone is interested in the decentralized web without the ponzi-like elements (I say ponzi-like though I should reiterate again that I think defi has value), I'd recommend this talk by Vitalik, "Things that matter outside of defi": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLsb7clrXMQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLsb7clrXMQ
  • Throwaway197401 5y ago
    I can really recommend Bankless podcast. https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ really great non spammy content. They have a lot of different people on from all walks of life and really do in-depth interviews.
  • eterpstra 5y ago
    GitHub! It's all open source. EIPs are Ethereum Improvement Proposals. You can view them all here: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues Ethereum Foundation blog is a good read on technical detail with no price discussion: https://blog.ethereum.org/ https://blog.ethereum.org/
    • brabel 5y ago
      Why are they using GitHub, a closed-source, traditional, centralized code hosting platform? Can't they use something "web3" even for this basic task of hosting a git repository (remembering that git itself is completely de-centralized)?
      • capableweb 5y ago
        While transfers have been "solved" in the cryptocurrency world (see Bitcoin et al), and likewise "computation" has been "solved" (see Ethereum et al), file storage is still not solved and seems to be a bit harder as it's taking time for the various solutions to mature enough to be useful for day to day usage.
        • can16358p 5y ago
          I think it's kind-of-solved with IPFS and integrating IPFS hashes into the blockchain.
          • capableweb 5y ago
            No, if you think so I don't think you properly understand IPFS. IPFS suffers the same problem as HTTP, content disappears when people stop serving it. Yes, it's easier to make sure it's online as it's content-addressed, but content still disappears. Filecoin is supposed to solve that particular problem, but seems to have trouble maturing right now as it's not mainstream yet to use, or maybe it solves the wrong problem/solves the right problem with the wrong solution.
      • spky333 5y ago
  • baby 5y ago
    Any zero knowledge / zksnarks communities are usually noise-free I found.
  • dv35z 5y ago
    I posted a similar question to HN the other day and got some great info (thanks to everyone who contributed!). Check it out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29139813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29139813
  • LittleChimera 5y ago
    Internet computer [1] went online recently. There are a bunch of apps already developed by the community on its version of smart contracts [2]. Some examples: - dscvr.one - oc.app - distrikt.io Disclosure: I work at DFINITY. [1] https://internetcomputer.org/ https://internetcomputer.org/ [2] https://smartcontracts.org/ https://smartcontracts.org/
  • user-the-name 5y ago
    Doesn't exist. It's all tulip mania.
  • kranke155 5y ago
    Follow Lefteris on Twitter https://twitter.com/lefterisjp?s=21 https://twitter.com/lefterisjp?s=21 Then look for people with .ETH to their name. A lot of them are technical and Ethereum Foundation members.
• ChrisArchitect 5y ago
  Dupe. Submitted a bunch a week ago already. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29188948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29188948
  • dang 5y ago
    On HN, it only counts as a dupe if the story has had significant attention already (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). This one hadn't, so the repost is ok. The reason we allow this is to give good submissions multiple chances at getting attention. Otherwise it's far too random what gets traction off /newest.
    • ChrisArchitect 5y ago
      ok fine, thought multiple chances would come from the pool or reinvites, not new posters, but ok.
• xg15 5y ago
  > Therefore, a good diagnostic question to ask might be: would you still be curious about Web3 if those currencies were worthless, in dollar terms? For some people, the answer is “yes, absolutely”, because they find the foundational puzzles so compelling. For others, if they’re honest, the answer is “nnnot reallyyy”. Can we add group #3, people who are profoundly uninterested in this version of Web3 even despite all the money in it? I was a fan of decentralisation when it stood for federated software and the idea that the web should generally be the same for hobbyists and professionals. I really can't see a desirable vision of the future with a web based on artificial scarcity, intentional resource waste and anarchocapitalism.
  • FpUser 5y ago
    >"I really can't see a desirable vision of the future with a web based on artificial scarcity, intentional resource waste and anarchocapitalism." You've got my vote on that one.
  • deltarholamda 5y ago
    > despite all the money in it? I wonder about this, because an awful lot of post-2008ish technology simply seems to be "like before, but different enough that we think we can be the first movers of the Next Big Thing, and therefore make a killing." When you really get down to it, a lot of the popular technology isn't all that different from IRC, Usenet, etc., just app-ified and Web-ified (and emoji-ified, of course). I'm not sure moving to a "Web3" paradigm is going to be all that different, just with a new set of Very Important People driving it.
  • leppr 5y ago
    The problem with "traditional" federated networks is the lack of fungibility. The network effects around nodes is too great, which encourages centralization over time. Cryptocurrencies allow formalizing and automating the incentives involved in running decentralized networks, which can make them actually scalable. I have no doubt the future successful decentralized networks will use or evolve from cryptocurrencies, but not being inspired by the current crypto landscape is completely understandable. The Ponzis drown everything out these days, they cloud the judgment of too many, making the public discourse around this field unpalatable. In percentage terms, almost nobody in crypto today care about what they're actually building or what for. It's all about raising money, or pushing a Ponzi in which they are invested.
• austincheney 5y ago
  Lame. Web3 used to mean the semantic web. That died. Even before that died social media marketers were already using the term Web3.0 to refer to some advertising nonsense. Now it seems it is something vaguely related to blockchain. At the moment blockchain is directly tied to crypto currency, which to almost everybody looks like a giant Ponzi scheme. Until the concept of blockchain is completely divorced from crypto currencies they can name this nonsence whatever they want. It won't stick. Nobody cares except for the few people already making money off this.
  • xg15 5y ago
    I mean, at least they followed current marketing trends and rebranded the venerable Web 3.0 into the hipster web3.
  • chrisco255 5y ago
    The builders will win and naysayers will be long forgotten. I work full time in this space and it is evolving faster than I can keep up with. DAOs, NFTs, tokens, decentralized file storage, decentralized identity via public keys and smart contracts, tokens as authentication, on-chain reputation systems, oracles, fundraising with no third parties or gatekeepers, etc are all here to stay and will evolve further and faster than your bias will let you see. If you have an alternative to the monopolistic web and mobile dystopia we find ourselves in, wherein we can only speak within the narrow band of corporately acceptable speech and expression, and we can only transact with the blessings of PayPal's overlords, that doesn't involve crypto or blockchain, I suggest you quit your job to build it. Otherwise, I fear you might be too late at disrupting the establishment, as the builders are well under way, working on Web3 powered by crypto (in both senses of the word).
    • sllewe 5y ago
      I advise/consult/build technology for a wide range of industries. (From AEC Firms to Major league sports teams) From my perch, the meaningful proliferation of blockchain in those industries has been...zero. And that's not to say it hasn't been on the tip of many of their CTO's tongues. Your giant list of of terminology isn't making much of an impact on me. In fact many of those sounds terrible. So giving your post the benefit of the doubt, when can I expect to be disrupted out of a job by even a single item on your list?
• binarynate 5y ago
  I'm totally fine with people exploring and getting excited about uses for crypto and Ethereum, but I don't like the term "Web3"because it suggests that it's the next evolution of the web, when really it's a completely different technology. Hopefully this Web3 term is just a phase and will get replaced with something better.
  • binarynate 5y ago
    On a side note, in Ben Thompson's Stratechery interview with the CEO of Unity this week, the Unity CEO used the term "Web 3" multiple times, but he was referring to a 3D/XR-enabled web rather than developments related to crypto. And I'm sure there will be many more takes to come on what the next version of the web will be. https://stratechery.com/2021/unity-buys-weta-digital-an-interview-with-unity-ceo-john-riccitiello/ https://stratechery.com/2021/unity-buys-weta-digital-an-inte...
    • k__ 5y ago
      I heard people claiming web3 since web2 was coined. Semantic web, 3D web, and whatnot.
    • nkellenicki 5y ago
      I find it similar to the two currently in-vogue uses of the world "Metaverse" - you've got the crypto/web3 people using it to describe a world where NFT's are usable and recognised across software (ie. Armor you buy in Call of Duty is useable in Battlefield), and Facebook/Meta, trying to build a social VR environment not entirely unlike the vision of Ready Player One. It's entirely probably they'll merge at some point if they haven't already.
      • babyshake 5y ago
        Where better to utilize NFTs (digital art, mainly) than virtual and augmented reality?
      • simonw 5y ago
        This idea, "Armor you buy in Call of Duty is useable in Battlefield", to me illustrates so much that is frothy and unrealistic about this space. Think about what it would actually take to implement such a thing: - Call of Duty and Battlefield - rival games from rival companies - would need to agree to an integration at a VERY deep level - They would have to share the same asset formats, such that an asset designed for one game could be used in another - Issues of balance would have to be resolved: just sharing 3D models wouldn't be enough, they would need to agree on a system for modelling damage, armour piercing capabilities, visual effects... - Then they would have to add blockchain integration deep enough that weapons a player obtains in the game are represented in a way that the other games can see. - ... not to mention figure out some kind of exchange rate / add some kind of additional economy to their games, which would need to be shared across different games such that e.g. a pistol in Battlefield wasn't worth the same as a machine gun in Call of Duty That's just off the top of my head. And... they're supposed to be games! Game design is about balance - creating a set of rules that players enjoy. Allowing some cryptocurrency-billionaire to jump into any game they like with the best possible guns and armour doesn't sound any fun at all. Pretty much every idea I see coming out of this space has the same problem: it sounds plausible in a high-level hand-wavy, but collapses the moment you start to dig into the details of how it would work. (My absolute favourite bad idea is still real estate on the blockchain, where presumably if I forget my password I can no longer sell my house)
• leashless 5y ago
  So I've built a market for physical assets using the Ethereum/IPFS. The point is that the data about the assets should outlast the interest of the current owner. It should outlast the physical assets themselves. Hard to get another architecture which can manage data beyond the lifetime of any given market actor.
  • frazbin 5y ago
    so 'hard' in fact, that ipfs/ethereum can't do it. Try for instance to discover the replication status of your data on the ipfs 'network'-- or to determine how you're partitioned relative to other actors. Ya can't do it. But hey as long as the cloudflare gateway works, right?
    • leashless 5y ago
      IPFS is one of several storage layers.
  • leashless 5y ago
    (and I should mention we use semantic web tools to describe the physical assets: parametric search)
  • link_108 5y ago
    How do you ensure the ownership of the physical item is kept in line with the ownership of the NFT? Eg if the physical owner sold or gifted the item or it was stolen? It seems like the NFT is likely to have incorrect information over time.
    • isodev 5y ago
      I agree, you have to pretend NFT really implies ownership. I’d put it in the terms of service :).
      • leashless 5y ago
        The legals took several years to get right. This is, indeed, the hard part.
• ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  I like the idea of Web3, but the problem is immediately apparent when I want to go play with some Web3 technologies: Everything requires money up front, and it's often a non-trivial amount. NFT based games are selling items for hundreds or thousands of dollars and I just want to screw around in the game for fun. A big part of the problem here is that the high cost of crypto transactions and NFT minting means many Web3 things literally can't afford to let people get started for free.
  • robot_no_419 5y ago
    The solution is layer 2 protocols like Loopring and Polygon that will sit on top of the Ethereum stack and offer much faster/cheaper ways to interact with the Blockchain.
    • ocdtrekkie 5y ago
      Speaking of layers of protocols... that just feels like adding NAT to IPv4: A patch job solution for something that was deeply flawed to begin with.
    • pcthrowaway 5y ago
      For additional clarity, Polygon is its own blockchain. Loopring is, to my understanding, specialized for trading, and perhaps expensive to get started with. And there are also other blockchains for which transactions indeed cost pennies, and which are faster than Ethereum. I love Ethereum for what it's provided to the ecosystem, but at the same time, I've never used it.
  • zenlikethat 5y ago
    Whether it's new, high-performance chains like Solana or Avalanche, or better Ethereum scaling, things will definitely get cheaper eventually. You can also buy tons of NFTs for cheap thanks to the gold rush, not that you'd want to.
• tshaddox 5y ago
  That’s weird, was this article edited after being on the HN front page a few days ago? I distinctly remember the article mentioning social networks being built in SF in South Park, but now that section says “ I have vivid memories of the ferment of the late 2000s, a new social network flaring up every week! I lived in San Francisco; they were building them in offices around a narrow, scraggly park” which strikes me as odd phrasing.
  • tshaddox 5y ago
    The old version that mentions South Park is archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111052337/https://society.robinsloan.com/archive/notes-on-web3/ https://web.archive.org/web/20211111052337/https://society.r...
  • tbolt 5y ago
    I submitted this thinking it would show me the discussion so I wouldn’t be surprised if it was posted before.
• bserge 5y ago
  Web3 for me is going Back to the Future. Ownership over rent, sharing info without replying/participating in social diarrhea, local storage first, no regional restrictions (hi, Google fucks), small and slow before big and instant (shove your Prime up yours), less is more and all that shit. I've realized I'm not overcoming thousands or millions of years of evolution in a lifetime, so no need to stress over the "progress" people made in recent years. Keep your modern hyperconnectedness, it works great as a buttplug.
• outside1234 5y ago
  We need to get specific. There is no web3. People aren't going to just take everything from the crypto ecosystem and instead we need to talk about what is good and what is terrible. Crypto currencies are terrible - or at least I have heard of no reason why people need them outside of ponzi scheming, ransomwaring, or your drug deal - especially since they are NOT cheaper to do transactions in and are NOT anonymous and are definitely NOT (yet) even close to green. That said, things like distributed file storage (IPFS) and distributed identity are really interesting. We really do need solutions around how we prevent China, Russia, and other governments from basically brainwashing folks through turning off any part of the internet they don't like. I'm all-in on that part.
  • leppr 5y ago
    Filecoin is a cryptocurrency that is used to incentivize IPFS pinning in a decentralized way. There, you have a reason.
    • holoduke 5y ago
      Buy why is called coin? Why not distributed Blockchain file container or something.
      • detaro 5y ago
        Because it's a currency to pay for storage?
    • acdha 5y ago
      Okay, what advantages does being a coin give it over a Stripe button? At some point you need to buy real hardware so anything useful involves at least a couple of blockchain transaction fees on top of whatever the actual cost is.
      • leppr 5y ago
        Uncensorability, mostly. Stripe is an American company. Why should Iranians be bared from participating in the decentralized web?
• rburhum 5y ago
  I keep hearing this (healthy) skepticism, but it does lose sight of what is happening in many countries. For a lot of folks (me included) Web3 is about using decentralized blockchains in a web context to reduce problems that arise with control from centralized systems. It makes sense for specific use cases, so let me give you 2. 1) Finance (DeFi). Even for valid (non-criminal) uses cases, there are numerous laws and regulations that translate into crazy fees to do proper crossboder money transfer. I transfer money every month from the US to different countries in LATAM to pay employees, and historically you get screwed with various fees depending on how you structure the transfer (e.g. to the employee directly vs. to an entity in the receiving country that disburses the money to different local employees). During the past few years I have encountered everything: - unexpected fees beyond the local transfer fee at the receiving end (that change some times) (hello folks at Interbank!) - low-fee provider that canceled our account because the TOS said that the service was meant to be used to send money to family and not to employees (hello folks at Xoom!) - holding of money transferred for a week because of some threshold passed that triggered some AML check (hello folks at BCP!) - provider that canceled transfer to a particular country for political instability (hello folks at Transferwise!) - etc etc All that goes away when you use p2p networks (like the ones from Binance https://p2p.binance.com/en?fiat=CNY&payment=ALL https://p2p.binance.com/en?fiat=CNY&payment=ALL) and stablecoins to transfer money. The fees are low (or sometimes non-existent) and the transfer happens in seconds (vs the hours/days in a traditional system). Literally millions of cross-border dollars get transferred this way every day. Additionally, I hear of other folks who have escaped authoritarian regimes but still have family in those countries where there are strict restrictions to send/receive money. Guess what they are using? 2) Digital Property/Rights: Whether you want to accept it or not, there is an entire market where all kinds of property is being transferred through smart contracts. Sometimes the traditional digital item (say an NFT) has an associated real-world contract attached to it that extends some sort of right/ownership of a physical item in the real world. The rights to these items is being transferred from person to person every day. That market keeps growing, and it is not just "exchanging jpegs" anymore. For both of these use cases, there are real world scenarios where a central authority has been by-passed for a legitimate transaction. And it happens every day today. The use cases for web3 is not running a "distributed Wordpress instance", but other useful real-world use-cases like these that we are starting to discover.
• rvz 5y ago
  > Ethereum should inspire anyone interested in the future(s) of the internet, because it demonstrates, powerfully, that new protocols are still possible. Yes it should. Hence the reasons why there are alternative blockchains that not only aim to supersede Ethereum but they are specifically designed to scale and handle more applications and use-cases with cheaper transaction fees and are also EVM compatible. The only reason that they have decided on something unscalable and expensive as Ethereum is because they missed out on Bitcoin. So the Web3 crowd decides to hype it everywhere. I still cannot use Ethereum to buy my groceries. Therefore it is completely useless for that case.
  • outside1234 5y ago
    But you can use it for your next ransomware project!
• tarkin2 5y ago
  So the crypto-hype train is now claiming it's the new web. The article is wishy-washy language that leaves you excited and unclear. I wonder how much of a dollar boost this will give crypto currencies before the next thing shifts attention and garners excitement.
  • airstrike 5y ago
    Reminds me of Pied Piper... "If we could do it, we could build a completely decentralized version of our current internet," Hendricks says. "With no firewalls, no tolls, no government regulation, no spying. Information would be totally free in every sense of the word."
• pmlnr 5y ago
  I was there through web2.0, and my dear deities, the buzz and the frenzy. This is worse.
  • dehrmann 5y ago
    Crypto.com getting naming rights to Staples Center feels like a Pets.com moment. Web 2.0 never got this frothy.
  • geitir 5y ago
    To me it seems like people who were late to the game on crypto are trying to hype this concept of web3 to make a quick buck
• barnabee 5y ago
  There may be no single thing that is "web3" but there is something I will fight hard for that I think justifies the term: ways to use the internet for the movement and coordination of information and value that nobody can control or censor and anyone can participate in. That's it. That's all that needs to happen to keep me on side. The more our online lives and worlds fulfil the above statement, the better.
  • davidw 5y ago
    Ironically, one of the good things about HN is that dang et al do a lot of work moderating it.
    • barnabee 5y ago
      Absolutely, communities need moderation! However, the internet is infrastructure and right now both governments and service providers like Facebook, Twitter, Google effectively force moderation on communities becasue they increasingly control the infrastructure and methods of access that communitites need to use that infrastructure. The goal of "web3" or decentralisation in general should be to remove those layers and give communities complete freedom and control over how and if they moderate content.
      • bendavis381 5y ago
        What’s stopping you (or anyone) from building these communities now with existing tech?
        • Karunamon 5y ago
          What isn't? Every single stepping stone on that path uses someone else's infrastructure, who are able and willing to shut you down for any or no reason. To activate your free speech rights, first buy a computer and build your own datacenter. Next, start your own ISP. Finally, tell others about your site, without piggybacking on any existing sites. In this way, all citizens can express their views without fear of censorship… and without fear of anyone ever noticing. https://sealedabstract.com/rants/re-xkcd-1357-free-speech/index.html https://sealedabstract.com/rants/re-xkcd-1357-free-speech/in...
• pezzana 5y ago
  > It’s possible you have, in recent months, seen people writing with excitement (or curiosity, or consternation) about “Web3”. The term imagines the transition of many internet services to a model built around cryptographic tokens, such that ownership and/or control of those services might be divided between their token-holders, a group that might include their users. The tokens would also have exchange value, so, as a user, you could always: cash out. Except in 99% of cases there is no technical reason for those tokens to exist. Everything they claim to do can be done with Bitcoin by itself. Look, there's nothing wrong with harvesting money from digital rubes. But let's not fool ourselves into believing what's going on has anything to do with turning the world into a digital Chuck E Cheese.
  • IIAOPSW 5y ago
    I mostly agree with one caveat. The bitcoin signature "dumb contract" is intentionally a form of automata just shy of Turing completeness. Therefore there's no way to hack in any arbitrary feature (like NFTs) without having a fork. Granted NFTs don't do anything computationally complex, so all it would take is modifying bitcoins stack machine with a single additional op code for minting Chuck E Cheese tokens (I propose 0xCEC). Now we just need to get all the miners to agree to a hard fork adding this one mundane feature that honestly shouldn't upset anyone and you can just ignore if you don't like it. In other words, it will never happen.
    • pezzana 5y ago
      I'm not sure if you've seen Script before, but you might be surprised at what it can do. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script As for NFTs they are little more than OP_RETURN, which has been part of Bitcoin since 2014. There's this persistent and incredibly ignorant view out there that Ethereum's contracts are "smart" and Bitcoin, well, it doesn't do smart contracts. Even a cursory glance at the link shows this is not true.
      • PKop 5y ago
        Proof is in the pudding. There's this persistent effort to list the technicality that BTC can do "something" in terms of smart contracts, but the disparity in the real world usage of smart contracts between ETH, ETH compatible VMs and BTC would imply something is missing. Does not the Taproot update aim to solve this non trivial disparity in capabilities? >incredibly ignorant I don't think it's ignorant at all. Over-emphasizing BTC smart contracts in my opinion is pedantic. Where is BTC Defi? That is a multi hundred billion-$ industry in terms of value locked in contracts. If BTC doesn't have the equivalent, then its "smart contract" capabilities are not equivalent. Simple as that.
• harel 5y ago
  I don't usually think about this but one of the points did hit some nerve - I cannot begin to understand what it's like for a 20 year old to have been born in a world where Google is already established, Social networks are mainstream, and Amazon is our all encompassing commerce overlords. To me it was just yesterday that the idea of that curated list of web links called Yahoo seemed neat, ebay is some social experiment from across the bay, and then this ugly looking Google kid comes in and blows everyone away with actual relevant search results. Or those SMS messages from that SMS service Twitter or finding old friends on friendster... I can't recall any recent high impact "new thing" except maybe crypto.
  • smt88 5y ago
    > I can't recall any recent high impact "new thing" except maybe crypto. Uber is literally life-changing. Remember needing to call people and ask them for a ride when something unexpected happened? > I cannot begin to understand what it's like for a 20 year old to have been born in a world where Google is already established, Social networks are mainstream, and Amazon is our all encompassing commerce overlords. 20-year-olds have had life-changing technology adopted around them multiple times. It's just not on your radar because you weren't 10 years old in 2011. Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite are examples. As people are saying: the metaverse already exists to some extent, and young people have been living in it daily since they were small children.
    • evanextreme 5y ago
      > Uber is literally life-changing I might be only 26 years old, but even I have memories of my parents easily flagging down taxis in Manhattan. More convenient? Absolutely. "Literally life changing" seems a bit much, though.
      • contrahax 5y ago
        Outside of Manhattan, certain streets in San Francisco, and some parts of Chicago it is life changing.
      • 5y ago
• okareaman 5y ago
  I keep thinking about the beauty of the BitTorrent protocol and wonder why there is no longer any excitement about it and no one is building anything on top of it. Isn't it already a inter planetary file system?
  • leppr 5y ago
    IPFS takes a lot from BitTorrent and is more adapted to the file system usecase. As for Bram himself he's now building a Bitcoin alternative.
    • okareaman 5y ago
      Bram Cohen's Twitter bio says "Created BitTorrent, but no longer affiliated (nothing to do with BTT)" so not even he is no longer interested in it.
      • capableweb 5y ago
        leppr is talking about Chia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chia_(cryptocurrency) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chia_(cryptocurrency)) which Bram Cohen founded, not BTT.
        • pcthrowaway 5y ago
          Unfortunately, Chia happens to be the most efficient way to turn perfectly good hard drives in to landfill fodder.
          • capableweb 5y ago
            Not sure what that has to do with BitTorrent. But anyways, are we gonna judge people based on what they use their hard drives for? How do you feel about people filling their drives with just porn or worse, just movies and video games?
            • 5y ago
• 015a 5y ago
  > Does a “Web3” that depends on Twitter for its marketing and coordination channel really deserve the name? You might say, “Oh, just wait; Web3 will make a Twitter of its own.” No, it won’t. Such a platform would be useless to Web3, because there would be no one there to recruit Web 2.0, while nebulous, is reasonably defined as "the web as an application platform". Web 1.0 is for documents; static. Web 2.0 couldn't exist without 1.0; it took HTML, CSS, added JavaScript (well, argue the term "added", its nebulous, we're speaking in broad terms), and "evolved" it (or "devolved" depending on who you ask) to support much deeper user interaction and productivity. Moreover; Web 1.0 is still right here. It didn't go anywhere. Its as easy as its always been to publish a static site with just HTML. Anyone on the Web3 side who argues "P2P or Nothing" is, frankly, just as pointless as someone on the other side who says "haha, all your marketing is on Web2 Twitter, you people can't even build a social network!". Its not a zero sum game, despite what the semver naming scheme asserts (and let's be fair: Web2 started it! Web3 just adopted their inaccuracy). Really love a lot of the other points made here, though. Lots of things to ponder over. > The money thing confounds evaluation; it’s like trying to look at a star next to the sun [...] would you still be curious about Web3 if those currencies were worthless, in dollar terms? [...] The Ethereum Virtual Machine, humming heart of Web3, is a computer that charges you many dollars to execute a very small program very slowly. [...] They were about other things — science and coffee pots, links and camera lenses — while Web3 is, to a first approximation, about Web3. I think a lot about sort-of the thrust of all these points. Web3/ETH/etc are super interesting from a technical angle, but what "real" work are they accomplishing? First thing people point to: DeFi. But that's self-referential, as he says, and moreover, finance sucks; its important, but its fake. Where's the real productivity in Web3? Well, the Second thing; ETH VM, which is a joke. NFTs feel like a "third" large use-case of Web3, and could be the first interesting one, as a way to create digital scarcity. I'm not sure if its good or bad, but it is, at least, Natural, and Interesting. But its still self-referential and rooted in finance. Point being, I think I would be far, far more interested in Web3 if it actually wasn't so mired in finance. I love his wording: its like trying to look at a [planet] next to the sun. But I'm also convinced that it wouldn't exist without its roots in finance; that's how you get people interested.
  • ph0rque 5y ago
    > Moreover; Web 1.0 is still right here. It didn't go anywhere. Its as easy as its always been to publish a static site with just HTML. That's a really, really good point. Web1 has become commoditized and thus invisible. Web2 might follow a similar path.
• m3kw9 5y ago
  Web 3 is cool, but I’m not liking how it is usually promoted for crypto blockchain only.
• m3kw9 5y ago
  A lot of new crypto developments are basically solutions for a problem that is already solved. But when you add crypto, you get funding. $$$
• ThomPete 5y ago
  While always interesting to hear peoples thoughts on Web3, it doesn't really matter. It's here to stay, NFT opened the floodgates and in 10 after the usual crashes and bull market runs, everyone will be integrated onto the blockchain one way or another.
• SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago
  > Web3 is best understood as a game, or a game of games. I don’t intend that as a dig: it’s a really good game! Vast and open-ended, deeply social, with lots of scores to tally … AND you can win real money?? I mean, that’s terrific. That is the best explanation of Web3, it is like one of those Reddit April's folks events, just a social game.
  • textbookrental 5y ago
    I think it is best understood as a bunch of crypto millionaires sucking each other's dicks.
    • diveanon 5y ago
      Exactly the kind of ignorant comment I’ve come to expect from this forum whenever crypto is even tangentially related to the topic. It’s been almost 15 years, you’re getting left behind.
      • dang 5y ago
        Please keep tedious flamewar off HN. You've been posting a lot like this, and we ban that sort of account. It's not what this site is for, regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • dang 5y ago
      Flamebait like this will get you banned here. No more of this, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • mmahemoff 5y ago
    You might like Packy M's "The Great Online Game: How to Win the Internet." https://www.notboring.co/p/the-great-online-game https://www.notboring.co/p/the-great-online-game I think it captures a lot of the current culture with crypto and NFTs. A lot of it reminds me of when reality TV began. Suddenly we had a new class of celebrities who weren't singers or actors. Reality TV stars, famous people whose claim to fame was being famous. Circular logic. Positive fedback loops. You should "invest" in this NFT collection because look at how many other people are buying this NFT collection. Web3 is more than speculative NFTs and I expect we'll see some important things come out of it, just with a lot of surprises and broken expectations along the way.
• aunty_helen 5y ago
  I'm quite bullish on web3 after having a chat with a mate who's developing on the terra protocol. As disclosure, I don't own more than 500usd in crypto (which I mined at a much lower price), don't have a trading account anywhere and have never speculated on it. However, the reason web3 excites me is this. Imagine the web, but there's a value exchange mechanism built in (a payment system if that helps your imagination). I see a lot of frontier tech wild west stuff going on and that's fine. Let's not look at the trees here. There have a been a lot of web 1 and 2 approaches that are no longer. But things like braves attention token to relpace the advertisement model and micro transactions for supporting pages directly. On chain tools which do away with backends, payment processors, account management etc NFTs as true assets. Currently the closest thing to a digital asset that we have is an email account that we don't want to have blocked or lose. Now you have people with 5000$ NFTs that they have a level of attachment to and can use as collateral. They seem silly now, but it meets the definition of a digital asset. And that will help grow a network of tools that use them. One example, you put your NFT up as collateral for a DeFi loan, you don't pay it back by the time given, a smart contract repos your NFT. Obviously this is a lot of speculation and opinion, how it all plays out is not going to be and already hasn't been a smooth ride. However, it's bringing a lot of innovation very rapidly. And one last thing for the sceptics, try to remember that crypto doesn't solve technical problems, it solves problems at a societal level.
  • outside1234 5y ago
    > try to remember that crypto doesn't solve technical problems, it solves problems at a societal level. Let's test that with ransomware - how does it solve that societal problem?
    • ThomPete 5y ago
      Ransomware is going to be much more expensive to do. Right now there is little cost to doing bad things on the internet. But the point is a little different. Crypto solves among others the problem of technology moving faster than legislation in ways that can't be tampered with. That's the big innovation of bitcoin. Someone created a store of value system and threw away the keys to the engine room which means it can't be tampered with by rough actors.
• zenlikethat 5y ago
  The best argument here I think is the self-referential nature of Web3. Many of the other ones are basically saying "It reminds me of the dotcom bubble", but ... in the end, the Internet won big. At any rate, I miss the old web sometimes, where people threw up bizarre websites ranting about the occult, or their academic passion or what have you. Crypto definitely does have a "playing with our food" feel a lot of the time, but I also think there's a privileged American perspective in turning your nose up at DeFi. In America we can generally count on a well regulated financial system, a stable currency, and a good climate to transact and do business. Many, MANY other places do not have this. If inflation is 10-20% like Turkey or Brazil, or your bank might bail in your assets to socialize losses like in Greece or Cyprus, or the only way to invest is through shady brokerages who might rip you off, DeFi is a fantastic alternative. Not to mention some coins helping with the right to transact anonymously. The writing is on the wall for cash, and how many of you are thrilled about a world in which your every purchase and transaction is easily available to governments and corporations? It gets lost in all the hubbub, but Monero is one of the best privacy enhancing tools to come along in years. While it can be used for horrible things, it can also be invaluable to dissidents and other benign actors, just like cryptography in general can. Fred Wilson's post on "the opening" re: the potential of NFTs I think is also worth a read -- https://avc.com/2021/08/the-opening/ https://avc.com/2021/08/the-opening/ It's hard to understand the memetic disease NFT participants catch until you're actually in the middle of it. Whether everyone will catch it or it will peter out is still up for debate.
  • preseinger 5y ago
    The writing is emphatically not on the wall for cash. Currencies are substantially more than just a mechanism for value exchange, they're deeply interwoven with the power and sovereignty of government.
    • jurassic 5y ago
      This. Until I can pay my taxes in crypto, the United States dollar isn't going anywhere.
      • 5y ago
• vmception 5y ago
  Most of the criticisms of web3, tokens, crypto, blockchain etc miss one important thing: how founders make money! The mindshare goes this direction because the project lifecycle is faster. That’s it. Overhead costs are lower, institutional validation requirements are nonexistent, the infrastructure requirements are minimal (frontend only, and even thats a maybe) - sure you could have used a database but now you dont even need one and your users pay to write to the database (blockchain) you do use! - the monetization paths are more lucrative, more liquid and instant, and your pedigree, geographic location or network doesnt matter to do any of this. thats why this is going to keep happening. tech sector is fast, this tech sector is faster. there’s no competition as far as fields go right now. just continuing working for your exploitative ad conglomerate while imagining you are doing something more important and dont worry about everyone else. thats where we are at right now.
  • _alex_ 5y ago
    30% premine of a token and then hyping the hell out of it is a great way to make a lot of money really fast
    • vmception 5y ago
      one of many, one of many there are many projects out there earning large revenues without issuing a token. ironically many people don’t know about them because there isn’t a token doing all of the advertising from speculators. the one thing that a broader audience would respect, overlooked because there isnt a token they can criticize.
• alfl 5y ago
  Don't forget distributed storage like IPFS and content management graphs like kubelt (my company). web3 isn't all tokens and NFTs. There's a huge distributed computing piece. The increased investment is being used to build important infra.
  • frazbin 5y ago
    Ipfs is kinda junkware though, given its age and lack of basic features. I had a lot more patience with the unpolishedness 5 years ago, but at this point a greenfield implementation with none of the same people might be the best way forward. Unfortunately the foul smell seems to be coming from the direction of ethereum.. like the devs have an incentive to keep e.g. discoverability crippled so that ethereum is less useless. shrug
  • giantrobot 5y ago
    > Don't forget distributed storage like IPFS I want to like IPFS but it has a lot of serious problems. It's got the same inherent problem as BitTorrent in that availability of content follows a power law distribution of popularity. Popular content is readily available but best of luck accessing anything that's not popular. It's link rot taken to the extreme. It also has the very real limitation of the wildly asymmetric nature of consumer Internet connections. Not only do most connections have a fraction of their downstream bandwidth as upstream bandwidth but ISPs also regularly block ports and event packet types. On mobile the situation is even worse as CGNAT largely prevents devices from hosting content without reflecting off some third party. These issues just makes the availability problems of distributed storage worse. They're also on top of other practical things like actual host availability (being powered on), how much storage is reliably available on the network, and actually recouping real costs for running nodes.
    • shepardrtc 5y ago
      > I want to like IPFS but it has a lot of serious problems. It most certainly does. But there are other options if you want decentralized storage, like SkyNet: https://siasky.net https://siasky.net
• armchairhacker 5y ago
  I really hope that the hype around web3 from techies and developers translates into it becoming a reincarnation of the "old web". AKA I don't see the general public moving away from centralized web2, but I do think it would be nice if developers created a decentralized alternative to Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, etc. which being made by individuals and mostly comprised of other developers, is very similar to old-school message boards. I don't think this decentralized platform will necessarily involve blockchain, just peer-to-peer interactions. The "web3 movement" could simply be getting more people to join a decentralized network like the Fediverse, and improving said network, so it becomes a common peer-to-peer developer version of Twitter, Youtube, etc. Blockchain makes it easy to pay people for being part of the network, but you could do the exact same thing with stablecoins or Stripe payments. Right now most techies and developers use YouTube and Reddit and Twitter even though they publicly loath and complain about these platforms (ironically on the platforms themselves). Because it's impossible for a small group to create anything remotely competing with a large centralized platform. But a decentralized platform, just maybe, could attract enough people and produce enough content to not be obscure. Ultimately, I think most of the interest in web3 comes from nostalgia. Old-school developers look at the rise of "Web 1.0" (the original Internet) and "Web 2.0" (Google, Facebook, YouTube). They remember everything being so new and exciting, and recognize how much opportunity they missed. Well, in the past few years the internet hasn't "really" changed much, supposedly it's been much more boring. People want more novelty and excitement and opportunity, and they think and hope it's going to happen again in something they will call "web3".
  • whywhywhywhy 5y ago
    >AKA I don't see the general public moving away from centralized web2 I do, once the next major social network launches with crypto at it's core and the early adopters get an airdrop it's pretty much over for web2 social media. A whole generation will consider it antiquated to "do work for free" posting on the old networks when the next generation rewards them.
    • diveanon 5y ago
      Reddit and FB are racing for this, and I know a half dozen other well funded startups working towards it too. Anyone who isn’t looking in this direction is going to get left behind over the next few years.
• isodev 5y ago
  > “ The assumed audience is subscribers who know roughly what Web3 is supposed to be” In other words, the prerequisite is that you already believe web3 is a real technology and not just bs. Really, why are developers wasting their time? Plenty of real “decentralised web” technologies and opportunities are begging for your acquaintance!
  • pcthrowaway 5y ago
    Did you read the article? It seems that the author leans more towards thinking it's "bs", even though they know a fair bit about what web3 is.
• imgabe 5y ago
  > the Ethereum Virtual Machine, humming heart of Web3, is a computer that charges you many dollars to execute a very small program very slowly. So did physical computers, in the beginning.
  • _alex_ 5y ago
    onchain smart contract execution is a fundamentally broken concept. Everyone acknowledges this in the move to rollups and other "second layers" that execute offchain and then publish zero-knowledge proofs to the chain.
    • isodev 5y ago
      Which defeats the purpose of the entire effort to involve the blockchain in the first place…
      • capableweb 5y ago
        Why? The core value proposition is still there, be able to do transactions between parties that don't trust each other and prove that double-spending didn't happen.
• ChicagoDave 5y ago
  I mostly agree with the OP. web3 "feels" like trendy possible next gen plumbing that something (don't know what yet) will be built on much later. So all these kids are busy building things in it and experimenting and I think that's awesome. All of this is mildly interesting...but... Web2 isn't going anywhere. It's not about some ephemeral future of web3, but more about stuff most people care about works in web2. Which is mainly, stream a flick, buy a pair of pants, watch football, order food. Web3 really doesn't influence any of those basic needs. And social networks? web3+Facebook would be EVEN WORSE. Hard pass. Tokenizing humanity is _not_ the way to go.
  • dehrmann 5y ago
    > Which is mainly, stream a flick, buy a pair of pants, watch football, order food You could do all those things in the 80's, too. Cable, mail-order catalogs, pizza delivery. It's just gotten a lot better. Web3 will have to make things a lot better, and the only big openings I'm seeing are around management of personal data, but I don't think blockchains really help with that compared to even public cloud providers.
    • waffl 5y ago
      One of the more interesting things I've felt about web3 is the idea of portable identities not being locked to centralized account management systems/walled gardens. This applies to tokens as well - eg, an asset that is no longer locked in to a particular game and could be used anywhere on chain. I'm thinking of MMORPGs having their servers shut down. It's interesting to imagine these things existing beyond the games themselves. I'm not a gamer (nor a collector of anything really), but I could imagine how interesting it would be to hold on to one's relics from these games, bringing them into new virtual worlds, even passing them down like family heirlooms. It seems like something that was often dismissed until the NFT boom lent some credence to the notion that digital artifacts need not be entirely disposable. Be it better or worse for the world, ultimately it really is a bizarre but fascinating experiment/exploration into our ideas of value and provenance.
      • 5y ago
• _gf4m 5y ago
  I think that one of the most exciting facets of web3 stuff is around how easy it makes authentication and authorization scenarios. I've been working on a project that is an interactive NFT art project, where the interactive capabilities of the art are only possible for the owners of the piece. Providing authorization to the service is as simple as verifying ownership of the token. It's been pretty fun, I used an open source game engine as both the art generative tool as well as the interactive HTML5 app that allows for users to interact with their art. That, and utilizing wallets as proof of identity, is so mindnumbingly simple compared to OAuth+OIDC for authentication and varying strategies for authorization. Granted the project is a small scale project, but with web3 architectural changes, it is empowering me to create a 2 person project (I am the only engineer too), that would be much more daunting of a project in traditional web architecture. It's very exciting stuff, and I hope that people are able to see the tech for the possibilities it provides, especially when it comes to the NFT space. An NFT is just simply a single issue token, it can do whatever the developer wants, despite the common misperception being it is solely a link to a static image file on arweave / IPFS. Unfortunately the market is completely saturated with low-effort projects so it is very, very difficult to get eyes on innovative projects, but I hope that can change, and hope that I can create a project that allows even a small amount of people to see that there is so much more to the technology than what people have considered in 2021.
  • Eflores 5y ago
    Maybe a curated marketplace would be a good place for those projects?
    • shiohime 5y ago
      Yeah, there are some marketplaces that are trying to only curate high quality projects, and others that are more open to accepting any project. It's actually pretty crazy right now, there's so many ongoing independent projects that some of these exchanges and launchpads have huge queues. I'm hoping that my project will be able to be featured on one of these marketplaces, but it's been rough out there. I think once I finish up and polish our roadmap and goals for the project, in addition to the already existing website and short video preview, we'll be able to get in on one of those. Fingers crossed, at least :)
• gfodor 5y ago
  Good critique, but misplaced. Web3 is fundamentally about economic and speech freedom. Simple really. It’s a thesis though, we will see if it proves itself out.
• benreesman 5y ago
  I’ve historically been a huge blockchain skeptic, partially because of the ambient scammy tulip mania, but mostly because the technology demonstrably doesn’t scale (I spent 200 bucks buying 5 bucks of something the other day because I slipped a zero doing the gas math in a hurry, I am not alone). With that said the crypto folks have had some legitimate heavy hitters quietly building another generation of the technology and it’s just now starting to go live. Take a look at the Haskell / distributed systems bench at IO-HK: Standard Chartered would love to employ that group of people. And while it’s still a little early, Substrate is powering Kusama-bonded chains on delegated PoS + finality gadget in the wild, today. The Parity people are also not screwing around. It will be at a minimum interesting to see how mature technology alters the fundamental “crypto” equation. P.S. If you want to point web3.is at a modern chain, Moonriver seems like your best bet right now, but it’s early days.
  • wmf 5y ago
    The problem is that advanced technology (you forgot Avalanche) isn't more profitable during a bubble. It's probably less profitable because the development is slower and more expensive.
  • hanniabu 5y ago
    > the technology demonstrably doesn’t scale Yes it does, look at rollups.
  • shiohime 5y ago
    Check out other chains than Ethereum, this is really only an Ethereum scalability problem. Transactions on Solana for example cost a fraction of a cent and execute much quicker than ETH transactions.
    • evv 5y ago
      Solana is a "Proof of Stake" network, a trust model where nodes can only be run by currency holders. There is a predetermined list of trusted identities- aka, centralization. And to your point, centralized services do have better performance. I'm not trying to be a downer- I think centralization can be incredibly valuable for building trusted systems. But they are not to be confused with trustless networks like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Chia.
• ketanip 5y ago
  I thought I was the only one who thought this but thank god others think the same. ### Main uses ? Most people talk about censorship and decentralization but what percentage of consumers care about it negligible. If you want to fight against censorship then just create a website on dark web ( like NYT has ), you can also use tools like Onion Share ( I haven't tested it yet ) if you have no idea how to do complicated stetting up of a dark web site. ### Decentralization WEB 3.0 people talk about decentralization and spread their word on Twitter and discord ( Centralized means of communication ) but will never host a node of mastodon or Matrix Chat, which is a real way forward if you want to fight these platforms but no as if they will do then people will know, Oh Shit Decentralized web already exists and this will drop the value of token will drop as people will know there it no future in wasting hardware capabilities for nothing. Even a silly dog shit coin ( DOGE ) can has so much value what the hell is going on, its not even limited. When people talk about IPFS they can only say it is decentralized and stuff but can it ever compete with the speed and cost efficiency of AWS S3, GCP Storage or Azure's offering, or even a self hosted 3 replica set on MinIO, never. And we have go guarantee of availability on IPFS so that's a big no at least for me. Also it is so slow that Cloudflare is caching content on IPFS they told in their recent blog post, so where is the decentralized bit am I missing something. Also some decentralized blockchains have invite only miners program, so where is decentralization, am I missing some thing ? ### Is it forever ? NO. Believe Me. Who the hell is going to use mining resources used now when all coins are mined out and sold. No one with a right mind, as there will be a very less incentive to do so. And who will stop the spread of misinformation without censorship, well we can't ( theoretically ). ### Environmental Impact Now let's talk about environmental impact that no one is going to talk about, why "We don't do that here.". It is one of the worst in a news article I read recently it said that it takes energy that would be required by 2 households in a day to process one transaction on Bitcoin. Global Warming WTF is that ask crypto coins. ### How do coin and protocol developers make money ? While doing research about WEB 3.0, I was wondering how the hell are companies developing products will make their money to remain in business and thus maintaining the projects and you how they will keep around about 15-20% or more of initial coins for them. Or if it is a company like Brave ( makers of brave browser who blocks others ads and show people their ads and makers of token BAT ) pre mint all the coins and wallah here comes the centralization in the coin. Web 3.0 can never obtain or create new innovative technologies like FANG as they can hire best engineers who really enjoy their work and their salary do not depend on value a silly token so they try to promote it everywhere they go. Now companies like twitter and discord and facing backlash as they unveil their plans to use tokens, so that's actually good I think. ### Any Solution: Yes, if you are on the immutability train let me introduce you to ImmuDB https://github.com/codenotary/immudb https://github.com/codenotary/immudb it is a super fast, so fast that blockchains can never accomplish these speeds "SQL SQL SQL" database which is so much more feature rich then the dumb blockchain. If you are on public ledger thing then just create a read-only node of database and let it open to public so everyone can use it, there are 1000s if not millions of people who know SQL that only few who the blockchain protocols. ### How can a blockchain be destroyed ? Simple Method Govt. can just block transaction from banks and exchanges and you are done no one accepts silly coins in real world. Hard Method ( Permanent / Long Lasting ) As far as my knowledge blockchains are venerable to 51% attack which people say is impossible, but let's say I'm XYZ country and I want to ruin a blockchain I will just force all the cloud providers in my country ( big and small ) to lend their computers for few minutes for free or paid and then just do 51% attack and ruin it and then when other good people will do the 51% attack to reset it to original form we know that it is not immutable and people will lose trust and wallah you just shot yourself in the foot and value of your tokens and all other tokens is below the ground. ### How to can content on IPFS be blocked ? Govt. can just tell ISP to block url to IPFS on web ( like cloudflare thing ) and check it against banned IPFS content signature and you have successfully blocked IPFS content. As govt. keeps a list of porn sites they can keep one for IPFS over http and update them regularly. So torrent it let's say 100 times if not 1000 times better that it. ### How censor people on Web 3.0 ? This is the biggest argument I hear so I decided to tell people a simple way to do it. Enjoy :). Just do it in frontend as social media today do, that's it. Then the Web 3.0 people say we will just use another frontend and well that's what we do today. For example: If some content is not available in your country let's say on reddit then you can just use another reddit client or if you are a pro then just read JSON response from the public API, or just use a VPN or TOR. ## Why ? I was frustrated will all this Web 3.0 coins and speculation everywhere so I wrote it and it is more that what I expected that I would write, also if you find any grammatical, spelling or any other errors just let me know I will fox it.
• habosa 5y ago
  If what bothers you about the web today is the centralized dominance of capitalist giants, web3 will be so much worse. The crypto community is maybe the most concentrated incarnation of pure capitalist energy ever. It’s all people inventing new ways to get rich without doing anything at all. Making small numbers into big numbers. Web3 is going to be the most greed and profit-driven tech the internet has ever seen.
  • geitir 5y ago
    Agreed, it's marketed pseudo innovation because people want to get rich
• sgt101 5y ago
  Tulips and Nazi's?
  • sgt101 5y ago
    oh my
• nathias 5y ago
  - web 1.0 was protocols - web 2.0 are platforms - web 3.0 will maybe be protocols agains The next iteration of web doesn't make away with the previous, it includes it, so thee is no fear of losing deletion but as anyone that can code can imagine: there is a real benefit to immutability, it gives you a foundation you can build on and in this case a decentralized foundation. Stop being fixated on kids swaping cards and try to see the good this tech can do, becuse if not only its bad side will be explored and we will just get platforms with more insidious dark patterns.
• dgudkov 5y ago
  The fundamental power of the internet is its interoperability. It was born out of the ability of different networks to talk to each other using common protocols. The interoperability is what we've lost in the Web 2.0 era. Even such quintessential thing as a web API has no well defined standard or protocol, just a very vague concept of REST or RPC. I want Web 3.0 to get interoperability back. We badly need commonly accepted standards and decentralized protocols: for web APIs, for identity management, for message queuing, for web callbacks (webhooks), for online transactions, for semantic web and ontology, etc. Take, for instance, web APIs. It's barely usable nowadays. Imagine if you had to write a special browser every time you need to connect to a new website. But this is what already happens with APIs. Accessing programmatically any web-service requires custom coding an API. Insane!
  • krainboltgreene 5y ago
    > The interoperability is what we've lost in the Web 2.0 era This is a huge claim that doesn't match reality. We still use browsers, HTTP clients still respect mediatypes, and websites still return HTML. We have even more standards now than we did at the beginning of Web 2.0, with things like microdata, opengraph, etc. Even non-HTML HTTP APIs are even more standard with things like grpc, json-api.org, and graphql. Maybe since my job is to literally do this I have a different take.
    • throaway6942 5y ago
      I think there is some weight to the claim. This is especially true for public user generated content. Any public content should be accessible without limits, but that is not the case with web2(twitter, public Instagram, forums etc). ofcourse, there are some server costs but the primary reason the walled-gardens do this is more business related than to reduce costs.
      • krainboltgreene 5y ago
        There is zero weight to the claim. Not only does it ignore an massive amount of improvements since the early 90's, it seems to completely ignore what Web 2.0 was about. > Any public content should be accessible without limits, This is not related to the discussion, even if I did agree with it. > but that is not the case with web2(twitter, public Instagram, forums etc). Twitter and "forums" are all completely accessible via a browser, which is literally what the original claim suggests we've "lost". You don't need to read twitter with a special twitter client, you read it with the any HATEOAS client. I urge developers to actually read some history.
• nyanpasu64 5y ago
  I find the "dark forest" of Ethereum (https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest/ https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest/) fascinating rather than terrifying, though I might be scared if I put in a good chunk of money and risked losing it (which is why I don't plan to invest myself). There's an intellectual beauty in creating a world people can choose to join, where "code is law", developers construct castles out of air and pure logic, trying to write "correct-by-design" code, and others look for creative ways to exploit the letter of the contracts. It reminds me of the beauty of formally verifiable algorithms (sorting algorithm bugs, probing hashmaps, distributed systems), various models and tradeoffs for undefined behavior in C++ and LLVM and Rust, atomic memory orderings and using Loom to find bugs, or binary exploitation and vulnerability development. Though I haven't actually worked on any blockchain tech and don't plan to start. However I don't want a Web3 built around "pay-to-play" which rejects the idea that anyone can read, write, and publish without paying for the privilege. The web I want is closer to Gemini (a simple transfer protocol and a hypertext format built around user-chosen presentation), instead of HTML's complex element hierarchies often unreadable without CSS's author-dictated formatting, JS's drive-by code execution by design, or Ethereum's rejection of permissionless access.
  • kranke155 5y ago
    Look into Polkadot and Internet Computer (ICP). They are both aiming for fee less blockchain usage for the end user.