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Not going to lie, I thought and still think that the whole Web 2.0 thing was clever marketing and window dressing on top of fairly pedestrian but useful technol

Not going to lie, I thought and still think that the whole Web 2.0 thing was clever marketing and window dressing on top of fairly pedestrian but useful technologies. It was actually less of seismic shock than mobile first which despite being a bigger shift didn't actually get a number. As far as I'm concerned, Web3 is beyond this. It's what happen when you let Ponzi schemers write the marketing material. I can't for the life of me discern what's of actual value from what is a fabrication in the pile of technologies put forward. It doesn't help that I personally have yet to see a use for a blockchain which isn't replicating an existing financial instrument while trying to avoid the eyes of the state. I’m sure there is some good things in the middle of it all but I respect the authors of this article for having the courage to delve into the whole steaming pile. I certainly do not have it.

DantesKite 5y ago
Riding off a wave of addicts and their enthusiasm for gambling. Meanwhile, Cash App, Apple Pay, and Stripe have done more for fintech in the past month than all other cryptocurrency technologies combined in the last decade.
- echelon 5y ago
  Bingo. They can't even get their numbering scheme right. This would be "web4" Disregarding the semantic web throws out the history of the tech that sought to build p2p knowledge graphs before the social giants pushed it aside. They care little for these concepts given their blatant disregard.
  - tata71 5y ago
    Nah, jamming shitty responsive sites into phone screens was Web 2.5. Convergence, meaning plug your phone or tablet into fullsize keyboard and display, will be the new normal. Crossplatform web app EVERYTHING, PWA if you please, with web3 hooks where relevant, is Web 3.0.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    Honestly i think its perfect. Both are big ideas that sound very impressive to an outsider but problematic once you get into the details.
    - echelon 5y ago
      In a world without the concentration of development to venture capital-backed tech firms, semantic models of data create a web of rich APIs and data that are interlinked and that can grow and evolve. You have schemas for representing people that you can download as contacts. Schemas for representing articles that can be linked to people. Schemas for comments and upvotes... Fully distributed Facebook / Reddit / Twitter that anyone could extend. Venture-backed startups grew faster than the Semantic Web. That's the reason it didn't materialize.
- Vetch 5y ago
  Where I live none of those services are available but cryptocurrency tech is. Connecting to services like patreon or getting small amounts for games on itch.io are headache inducing high friction activities involving several extra third party services that are barely worth the effort. The attached risk is hard to state as better given all the fly by night operations in the local finance industry. Even if very few people use crypto, it's orders of magnitude less stress to put up a link to a wallet for donations on say a page with a visual demo on how linear acceleration and light bending motivate gravity. It's instrumental in financing sci-hub, which is also vital here. You probably live in a country where central institutions are trusted. Probably without overwhelming levels of corruption actively antagonistic to citizens, or double digit inflation, or very high unemployment rates and a general lack of opportunity. I don't think cryptocurrencies are some magical cure and can't say they will be part of a solution concept. Neither do I care for gambling and scummy activity on it. For some of us it isn't about inflation hedging (although it has a useful role if you can anticipate impending economic collapse) or anti-fiat or overthrowing governments. It's about imagining a network of transactions where anyone can participate regardless of their country of birth, without a central synchronizing consensus mechanism and a strongly tamper resistant storage useful in coordinating economic activity. Blockchain free decentralized tech are preferable where possible but there are some things only blockchain structures (or even worse scaling massive communication overhead systems) can do.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    Your poetic invocation of the theoretical glorious potential of crypto aside, what country do you live in?
    - askonomm 5y ago
      Not sure about OP, but I live in Argentina, and there is no Apple Pay, Stripe, or Cash App here either. Not in most of the Latin American countries, actually. I had to make a U.S Wyoming company in order to be able to use Stripe. And Latin America is a pretty big chunk of land, with a ton of people. And with the ever-increasing inflation of 40% YoY and government restrictions on the ability to convert foreign currency to local currency, crypto P2P is a saving grace here. I do think most crypto stuff is probably still a scam, but the ability to buy stable coins and sell them to someone local here for peso's by getting 2x more than I would with the official central bank rate is a godsend.
bko 5y ago
> which isn't replicating an existing financial instrument [available to the developed world] while trying to avoid the eyes of the [benevolent] state Not everyone has access to Venmo or free checking accounts. And not every behavior the state is trying to restrict is nefarious.
- afavour 5y ago
  Sure, and if “web3” was sold as “banking for those who cannot use normal banking” and “worthy transactions you want to hide from the state” then I think a lot fewer people would have a negative perception of it. But it isn’t.
  - MarkPNeyer 5y ago
    Who is doing the selling? Since nobody is in charge you should expect most sellers to be full of nonsense and misinformed. That’s the nature of any decentralized movement - especially one as directly antagonistic to the status quo.
- zepto 5y ago
  Even fewer people have access to cryptocurrency wallets and exchanges than have access to Venmo and it’s international equivalents.
practice9 5y ago
Blockchain isn't even central in Web3, but it surely helps. Web3 = decentralized identity, full data and connection graph ownership by user, reputation transfer, verification via zero knowledge proofs, support for VR/AR and 3D objects. All of this stuff is either in prototype or draft phase, but it's ok. These things need to be built to stop horror stories on HN about "algorithm justice" and "data kingdoms”: - Google accidentaly bans your 10+ year old Gmail account that is a huge part of your online identity, oops. You can't access your important data or reach support if you can't make this situation a huge deal on HN, Reddit or Twitter - Facebook or Twitter locks your account because you added a new sentence to your About you section - LinkedIn reads your messages and makes sure you can't automate responses to recruiters, locks your account if you reply in a generic way
- chrisfrantz 5y ago
  Sure, but that’s replaced with user’s being in control of their identity (permanently). Lose your keys, you’re out of luck and locked out of who knows how many applications permanently. It might be fine for us, but just think of the less technically inclined folks in your life. Are they going to remember a 32 word phrase or use a password manager for a key? And what happens if they’re hacked? If google detects your account is hacked, you may be able to salvage it. If someone nabs your wallet, they get access to however many apps you have set up along with whatever funds you have in there.
  - kaetemi 5y ago
    Then they can still use a middleman. The idea is that any data ownership can be transferred. No middleman monopoly or lock-in.
    - chrisfrantz 5y ago
      If people need a middleman, there will be a few winners and the monopoly or duopoly will continue.
  - robbiep 5y ago
    I think the idea of fully decentralising all the things as per web3 or the move to crypto is really interesting. But if the last couple years has told us anything it’s that it’s being immediately met with a wave of recentralisation where some ungodly percentage of crypto wallets are all sitting with centralised providers and services, which still require email/password entry. I fail to see how a non-tecnhical user is going to migrate from where we are now to keeping all their keys by themselves (Sorry I recognise you’re agreeing with these points as well basically but started replying here so might as well finish)
koboll 5y ago
>It doesn't help that I personally have yet to see a use for a blockchain which isn't replicating an existing financial instrument while trying to avoid the eyes of the state. I mean, there's a domain name system. There are various games. There was recently a high-profile crowdfunded attempt to buy an artifact at auction. Feel free to be skeptical of all of these, but what's the point of posting that you "haven't seen" anything legitimate if you're unwilling to exert a bare minimum level of effort to research other use cases?
- doopy1 5y ago
  BuT tHis is AlL PosSiBLe wIth eXisTInG TechNoloGY!!
- afavour 5y ago
  The crowdfunding to bust the constitution is surely a replication of an existing financial instrument? Crowdfunding is not new. That particular episode also laid bare the problems no web3 proponent seems to want to address: a whole load of people are going to lose all the money they gave to the fund because transaction fees will swallow their investment whole if they ever try for a refund.
  - stefan_ 5y ago
    Not to mention that all the transaction fees meant their final fund was just barely too small to actually buy the item they had crowdfunded for. Cryptocurrency: it just ain't good for anything.
- zepto 5y ago
  How is that crowdfunding thing anything other than a failed publicity stunt? There is nothing new that was demonstrated.
- luhn 5y ago
  > I mean, there's a domain name system. You mean ENS, the .eth domain registrar incorporated in the Cayman Islands? It doesn't matter what the blockchain says, my .eth domain is only good as long as the registrar agrees to honor it. Sounds like GoDaddy with more steps. > There are various games. What's the point of a distribute ledger that can only be used within a game controlled by a centralized company? > There was recently a high-profile crowdfunded attempt to buy an artifact at auction. You mean ConstitutionDOA, which imploded quite spectacularly? People are still wondering if that was a scam or just sheer incompetence. Honestly it's hilarious that you would bring that up as a flagship example. > you're unwilling to exert a bare minimum level of effort to research other use cases I have exerted that effort and more, and still come up short.
ahmedfromtunis 5y ago
I totally agree with you. The only Blockchain-first technology I got excited about was a system where people can put their free disk space for rent. They get paid in some coin, and that is how the coin gets generated. Sure, you can do it without the Blockchain, but the tech has some real added value. Alas, for whatever reason, it never got deployed.
- aspenmayer 5y ago
  It’s possible you’re thinking of Chia, IPFS, or FileCoin, all of which are “live” and “deployed” currently.
  - uncomputation 5y ago
    Filecoin is “live” only technically. There is no way for individuals to contribute, which seems to be intentional as the leadership is looking for corporate support first. It currently has no real use cases. I say this as someone who is also excited by the idea.
    - aspenmayer 5y ago
      Perhaps you can clarify the relations between IPFS and FileCoin? I was under the impression that they were related projects of Protocol Labs, with IPFS being a dependency of FileCoin.
    - shepardrtc 5y ago
      If you want something similar to Filecoin that is live and in use, check out http://siasky.net/ http://siasky.net/ Siacoin has been around for a while and approaches things differently. Plus its already being used by people.
  - phire 5y ago
    IPFS isn't blockchain. and Chia doesn't allow people to rent out storage space, it just lets them mine with HDDs instead of GPUs. The other one I'm aware of is Sia.
nemo44x 5y ago
Why wouldn’t this primitive thing we call the web have massive and frequent revolutions? You can’t discern the value but creators and their consumers will and will again. Web 2 is distinct from Web (AJAX, SaaS. Cloud, Mobile). I’m sort of shocked it’s even brought up as a fuzzy distinction.
shp0ngle 5y ago
web3 is whatever you want it to be They call it "web3" when it's not web, as in, world wide web... so it really means nothing. There is nothing there. It's all just random imagination an ponzi schemes. Good luck getting anything useful out of this.
pyuser583 5y ago
Web 2.0 was definitely a thing … the introduction of social media and targeted advertising as a revenue source changed things a lot. Not to mention cloud computing … but that’s really Web 2.5. Web 3.0 should probably have something to do with the increasing centralization of web services, and the increasingly common subscription fees everyone is paying. Instead it’s about blockchains … which are pretty much the only way the web is becoming less centralized.
cblconfederate 5y ago
> which isn't replicating an existing financial instrument while trying to avoid the eyes of the state. Similar to how software ate the world while the state wasn't looking?
babyshake 5y ago
Let's say you live in a country where the government carefully monitors all printing presses that publish newspapers and books. And once you see the world wide web, you might just see "trying to avoid the eyes of the state" but that's just a part of what makes it such an important revolution. In both cases, one person with an idea and a keyboard can create something new, or something new that interacts with other existing things. It's a paradigm shift.
- Tom4hawk 5y ago
  Just look at China and their access to WORLD wide web. If crypto gains any traction it will also be treated that way.
olalonde 5y ago
> It doesn't help that I personally have yet to see a use for a blockchain which isn't replicating an existing financial instrument while trying to avoid the eyes of the state. That's kind of the whole point. Money without a state and without permission. If you don't believe in that then of course you won't see the value in decentralized finance.
danjac 5y ago
When upward mobility has been stymied for generations (the US has the lowest upword mobility among Western nations, outdoing even the class-ridden Brits) and insane house prices, student loans and cost of living increases have cut all the bootstraps, people are looking for anything - anything - that offers the slimmest of opportunities, because education and hard work don't cut it any more. Hence the crypto nonsense among the younger generation and MLM cults for the older Facebook crowd.
- austincheney 5y ago
  So much wrong with that. Education and hard work drive labor. These aren’t qualities respected by any kind of wealth generators or management. If anything they are unrewarded implicit requirements except for labor where there aren’t other more substantial qualities to rate individual contributions. In most of the country house prices remained low and stable until very recently. Only a few coastal areas have seen decades of out of control pricing.
  - Xeronate 5y ago
    I agree with you, but I am interested in hearing what qualities you feel are respected by wealth generators and management.
    - austincheney 5y ago
      Initiative and accountability are two broadly rewarded qualities.
- vletal 5y ago
  I can clearly see a strong correlation between both education and hard work vs. social status and income. I come from Europe though. Is it really not the case in the US? Is it because of student loan barrier?
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    How hard did Boris Johnson work again? Or Priti Patel? Or Don Jr? Or Jair Bolsonaro? I'm Brazilian, but I live in Europe, and everyday I see that I was privileged to be able to focus on studying hard (and didn't, most of the time) and still managed to be quite successful when compared to the average European. In Brazil, my skin and eye color was a ticket to some very restricted spaces I simply wouldn't have access to with the wrong colors.
mrfinn 5y ago
Blockchain wasn't at first about avoiding eyes of the state, but tyranic control of the state, or any other authority. Then projects allowing secrecy appeared. Coins like Ethereum pushed way forward, via smart contracts, the possibilities available in cryptocurrencies. Then others like Chainlink added again a whole new level of possibilities connecting the smart contracts to trusted real world data. That goes way beyond the scope of financial instruments, a whole world of automated business can be built on top of that. BTW blockchain is outdated technology, is doesn't scale enough for being able to handle a massive use of cryptocurrencies.
philwelch 5y ago
> It doesn't help that I personally have yet to see a use for a blockchain which isn't replicating an existing financial instrument while trying to avoid the eyes of the state. Is that not enough for you? Just because you think you live in a time and place where the eyes of the state are kind and benevolent?
thefounder 5y ago
Getting rid of the banks and paypal/visa like services should be enough .
djohnston 5y ago
Go to a web3 site and use your wallet as your identity without any signin flow, don't click on any asinine cookie prompts, and you'll see it's already bringing improvements. Or you can just write comments like this.
- Uehreka 5y ago
  OK, NOW WE’RE TALKIN. In years of talking to blockchain people about this stuff, no one has ever given me a use case description that succinct and concrete. A decentralized SSO is the kind of thing that would seem useful on it’s own, even without the other stuff. So let’s say I want to try this out this weekend. Do I just download MetaMask and make a wallet? Do I have to go somewhere or pay someone to inscribe my username in the blockchain or does this basically work immediately? And what are some sites that support this?
  - fastball 5y ago
    Decentralized SSO is a great use case for blockchain tech and there are so many ways you can do it. There has been a lot of hype around NFTs due to the crazy prices we've been seeing for "digital artwork NFTs", but you can also use them for auth and it's actually pretty slick. Here is a project[1] that a friend of mine is building that does exactly that. It's basically a collection of TailwindCSS components that he originally built in the "web 2.0" way, as in: buy a subscription (via Stripe) and now you have access to his collection of pre-built components. But then he realized this is actually a great use-case for web3. So instead of signing up for an account with an email + password then using your credit card to buy a lifetime deal, you can connect your MetaMask wallet to his website and "mint" a pass for 0.08 ETH (approx ~$350 atm) which is just an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain. Then as long as that NFT is owned by your wallet you can use it to login to his website. The benefits are: it's actually faster for the user (your wallet is your identity and you access pass is attached directly to that wallet on the blockchain) and also pretty simple for him to integrate on his end. The other benefit is you can trade these passes at will without his oversight – so if he adds more and more Tailwind components to the collection the value of this lifetime access to them hypothetically goes up. But let's say you no longer are interested in building anything with Tailwind components – well you can just sell the NFT that gives you access to someone else via any of the 3rd party decentralized marketplaces. Anyway there are a lot of cool ideas and use-cases that aren't just decentralized lending (which I'm still pretty skeptical of) or generic gambling (still most of crypto). The main problem right now is that a lot of the coolest stuff has been built on Ethereum (due to the flexibility of its smart contracts) but the transaction fees and throughput are pretty terrible at the moment. Finally, it gets a lot of hate here on HN, but Brave Browser actually has a MetaMask-equivalent (I think it might actually just be a fork of MetaMask) that is built right into the browser, alongside best-in-class ad-blocking so I'd consider using that too. Though installing MetaMask is super easy as well. [1] https://rareblocks.xyz/ https://rareblocks.xyz/
matheusmoreira 5y ago
> trying to avoid the eyes of the state Nothing wrong with that. Everyone agrees cryptography is a good thing, worldwide warrantless surveillance is bad, privacy is good. So why is it acceptable for the government to pry into people's finances? Total surveillance is already the norm there. If a blockchain is what it takes to defeat that, then so be it.
- FridgeSeal 5y ago
  It’d be a lot cooler (ha) if we didn’t have to burn the energy of a small country for questionable-to-zero actual gains in privacy though.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    I partially agree. Bitcoin is a failure and it's pretty sad that so much energy is being spent mining it. I wouldn't mind that same amount of energy being spent on Monero though. It would also be nice if we could use the heat generated by computers for something instead of dissipating it all into the air. That way the energy wouldn't actually be wasted.

DantesKite 5y ago

Riding off a wave of addicts and their enthusiasm for gambling. Meanwhile, Cash App, Apple Pay, and Stripe have done more for fintech in the past month than all other cryptocurrency technologies combined in the last decade.

echelon 5y ago
Bingo. They can't even get their numbering scheme right. This would be "web4" Disregarding the semantic web throws out the history of the tech that sought to build p2p knowledge graphs before the social giants pushed it aside. They care little for these concepts given their blatant disregard.
- tata71 5y ago
  Nah, jamming shitty responsive sites into phone screens was Web 2.5. Convergence, meaning plug your phone or tablet into fullsize keyboard and display, will be the new normal. Crossplatform web app EVERYTHING, PWA if you please, with web3 hooks where relevant, is Web 3.0.
- bawolff 5y ago
  Honestly i think its perfect. Both are big ideas that sound very impressive to an outsider but problematic once you get into the details.
  - echelon 5y ago
    In a world without the concentration of development to venture capital-backed tech firms, semantic models of data create a web of rich APIs and data that are interlinked and that can grow and evolve. You have schemas for representing people that you can download as contacts. Schemas for representing articles that can be linked to people. Schemas for comments and upvotes... Fully distributed Facebook / Reddit / Twitter that anyone could extend. Venture-backed startups grew faster than the Semantic Web. That's the reason it didn't materialize.
Vetch 5y ago
Where I live none of those services are available but cryptocurrency tech is. Connecting to services like patreon or getting small amounts for games on itch.io are headache inducing high friction activities involving several extra third party services that are barely worth the effort. The attached risk is hard to state as better given all the fly by night operations in the local finance industry. Even if very few people use crypto, it's orders of magnitude less stress to put up a link to a wallet for donations on say a page with a visual demo on how linear acceleration and light bending motivate gravity. It's instrumental in financing sci-hub, which is also vital here. You probably live in a country where central institutions are trusted. Probably without overwhelming levels of corruption actively antagonistic to citizens, or double digit inflation, or very high unemployment rates and a general lack of opportunity. I don't think cryptocurrencies are some magical cure and can't say they will be part of a solution concept. Neither do I care for gambling and scummy activity on it. For some of us it isn't about inflation hedging (although it has a useful role if you can anticipate impending economic collapse) or anti-fiat or overthrowing governments. It's about imagining a network of transactions where anyone can participate regardless of their country of birth, without a central synchronizing consensus mechanism and a strongly tamper resistant storage useful in coordinating economic activity. Blockchain free decentralized tech are preferable where possible but there are some things only blockchain structures (or even worse scaling massive communication overhead systems) can do.
- wpietri 5y ago
  Your poetic invocation of the theoretical glorious potential of crypto aside, what country do you live in?
  - askonomm 5y ago
    Not sure about OP, but I live in Argentina, and there is no Apple Pay, Stripe, or Cash App here either. Not in most of the Latin American countries, actually. I had to make a U.S Wyoming company in order to be able to use Stripe. And Latin America is a pretty big chunk of land, with a ton of people. And with the ever-increasing inflation of 40% YoY and government restrictions on the ability to convert foreign currency to local currency, crypto P2P is a saving grace here. I do think most crypto stuff is probably still a scam, but the ability to buy stable coins and sell them to someone local here for peso's by getting 2x more than I would with the official central bank rate is a godsend.

bko 5y ago

> which isn't replicating an existing financial instrument [available to the developed world] while trying to avoid the eyes of the [benevolent] state Not everyone has access to Venmo or free checking accounts. And not every behavior the state is trying to restrict is nefarious.

afavour 5y ago
Sure, and if “web3” was sold as “banking for those who cannot use normal banking” and “worthy transactions you want to hide from the state” then I think a lot fewer people would have a negative perception of it. But it isn’t.
- MarkPNeyer 5y ago
  Who is doing the selling? Since nobody is in charge you should expect most sellers to be full of nonsense and misinformed. That’s the nature of any decentralized movement - especially one as directly antagonistic to the status quo.
zepto 5y ago
Even fewer people have access to cryptocurrency wallets and exchanges than have access to Venmo and it’s international equivalents.

practice9 5y ago

Blockchain isn't even central in Web3, but it surely helps. Web3 = decentralized identity, full data and connection graph ownership by user, reputation transfer, verification via zero knowledge proofs, support for VR/AR and 3D objects. All of this stuff is either in prototype or draft phase, but it's ok. These things need to be built to stop horror stories on HN about "algorithm justice" and "data kingdoms”: - Google accidentaly bans your 10+ year old Gmail account that is a huge part of your online identity, oops. You can't access your important data or reach support if you can't make this situation a huge deal on HN, Reddit or Twitter - Facebook or Twitter locks your account because you added a new sentence to your About you section - LinkedIn reads your messages and makes sure you can't automate responses to recruiters, locks your account if you reply in a generic way

chrisfrantz 5y ago
Sure, but that’s replaced with user’s being in control of their identity (permanently). Lose your keys, you’re out of luck and locked out of who knows how many applications permanently. It might be fine for us, but just think of the less technically inclined folks in your life. Are they going to remember a 32 word phrase or use a password manager for a key? And what happens if they’re hacked? If google detects your account is hacked, you may be able to salvage it. If someone nabs your wallet, they get access to however many apps you have set up along with whatever funds you have in there.
- kaetemi 5y ago
  Then they can still use a middleman. The idea is that any data ownership can be transferred. No middleman monopoly or lock-in.
  - chrisfrantz 5y ago
    If people need a middleman, there will be a few winners and the monopoly or duopoly will continue.
- robbiep 5y ago
  I think the idea of fully decentralising all the things as per web3 or the move to crypto is really interesting. But if the last couple years has told us anything it’s that it’s being immediately met with a wave of recentralisation where some ungodly percentage of crypto wallets are all sitting with centralised providers and services, which still require email/password entry. I fail to see how a non-tecnhical user is going to migrate from where we are now to keeping all their keys by themselves (Sorry I recognise you’re agreeing with these points as well basically but started replying here so might as well finish)

koboll 5y ago

>It doesn't help that I personally have yet to see a use for a blockchain which isn't replicating an existing financial instrument while trying to avoid the eyes of the state. I mean, there's a domain name system. There are various games. There was recently a high-profile crowdfunded attempt to buy an artifact at auction. Feel free to be skeptical of all of these, but what's the point of posting that you "haven't seen" anything legitimate if you're unwilling to exert a bare minimum level of effort to research other use cases?

doopy1 5y ago
BuT tHis is AlL PosSiBLe wIth eXisTInG TechNoloGY!!
afavour 5y ago
The crowdfunding to bust the constitution is surely a replication of an existing financial instrument? Crowdfunding is not new. That particular episode also laid bare the problems no web3 proponent seems to want to address: a whole load of people are going to lose all the money they gave to the fund because transaction fees will swallow their investment whole if they ever try for a refund.
- stefan_ 5y ago
  Not to mention that all the transaction fees meant their final fund was just barely too small to actually buy the item they had crowdfunded for. Cryptocurrency: it just ain't good for anything.
zepto 5y ago
How is that crowdfunding thing anything other than a failed publicity stunt? There is nothing new that was demonstrated.
luhn 5y ago
> I mean, there's a domain name system. You mean ENS, the .eth domain registrar incorporated in the Cayman Islands? It doesn't matter what the blockchain says, my .eth domain is only good as long as the registrar agrees to honor it. Sounds like GoDaddy with more steps. > There are various games. What's the point of a distribute ledger that can only be used within a game controlled by a centralized company? > There was recently a high-profile crowdfunded attempt to buy an artifact at auction. You mean ConstitutionDOA, which imploded quite spectacularly? People are still wondering if that was a scam or just sheer incompetence. Honestly it's hilarious that you would bring that up as a flagship example. > you're unwilling to exert a bare minimum level of effort to research other use cases I have exerted that effort and more, and still come up short.

ahmedfromtunis 5y ago

I totally agree with you. The only Blockchain-first technology I got excited about was a system where people can put their free disk space for rent. They get paid in some coin, and that is how the coin gets generated. Sure, you can do it without the Blockchain, but the tech has some real added value. Alas, for whatever reason, it never got deployed.

aspenmayer 5y ago
It’s possible you’re thinking of Chia, IPFS, or FileCoin, all of which are “live” and “deployed” currently.
- uncomputation 5y ago
  Filecoin is “live” only technically. There is no way for individuals to contribute, which seems to be intentional as the leadership is looking for corporate support first. It currently has no real use cases. I say this as someone who is also excited by the idea.
  - aspenmayer 5y ago
    Perhaps you can clarify the relations between IPFS and FileCoin? I was under the impression that they were related projects of Protocol Labs, with IPFS being a dependency of FileCoin.
  - shepardrtc 5y ago
    If you want something similar to Filecoin that is live and in use, check out http://siasky.net/ http://siasky.net/ Siacoin has been around for a while and approaches things differently. Plus its already being used by people.
- phire 5y ago
  IPFS isn't blockchain. and Chia doesn't allow people to rent out storage space, it just lets them mine with HDDs instead of GPUs. The other one I'm aware of is Sia.

nemo44x 5y ago

Why wouldn’t this primitive thing we call the web have massive and frequent revolutions? You can’t discern the value but creators and their consumers will and will again. Web 2 is distinct from Web (AJAX, SaaS. Cloud, Mobile). I’m sort of shocked it’s even brought up as a fuzzy distinction.

shp0ngle 5y ago

web3 is whatever you want it to be They call it "web3" when it's not web, as in, world wide web... so it really means nothing. There is nothing there. It's all just random imagination an ponzi schemes. Good luck getting anything useful out of this.

pyuser583 5y ago

Web 2.0 was definitely a thing … the introduction of social media and targeted advertising as a revenue source changed things a lot. Not to mention cloud computing … but that’s really Web 2.5. Web 3.0 should probably have something to do with the increasing centralization of web services, and the increasingly common subscription fees everyone is paying. Instead it’s about blockchains … which are pretty much the only way the web is becoming less centralized.

cblconfederate 5y ago

> which isn't replicating an existing financial instrument while trying to avoid the eyes of the state. Similar to how software ate the world while the state wasn't looking?

babyshake 5y ago

Let's say you live in a country where the government carefully monitors all printing presses that publish newspapers and books. And once you see the world wide web, you might just see "trying to avoid the eyes of the state" but that's just a part of what makes it such an important revolution. In both cases, one person with an idea and a keyboard can create something new, or something new that interacts with other existing things. It's a paradigm shift.

Tom4hawk 5y ago
Just look at China and their access to WORLD wide web. If crypto gains any traction it will also be treated that way.

olalonde 5y ago

> It doesn't help that I personally have yet to see a use for a blockchain which isn't replicating an existing financial instrument while trying to avoid the eyes of the state. That's kind of the whole point. Money without a state and without permission. If you don't believe in that then of course you won't see the value in decentralized finance.

danjac 5y ago

When upward mobility has been stymied for generations (the US has the lowest upword mobility among Western nations, outdoing even the class-ridden Brits) and insane house prices, student loans and cost of living increases have cut all the bootstraps, people are looking for anything - anything - that offers the slimmest of opportunities, because education and hard work don't cut it any more. Hence the crypto nonsense among the younger generation and MLM cults for the older Facebook crowd.

austincheney 5y ago
So much wrong with that. Education and hard work drive labor. These aren’t qualities respected by any kind of wealth generators or management. If anything they are unrewarded implicit requirements except for labor where there aren’t other more substantial qualities to rate individual contributions. In most of the country house prices remained low and stable until very recently. Only a few coastal areas have seen decades of out of control pricing.
- Xeronate 5y ago
  I agree with you, but I am interested in hearing what qualities you feel are respected by wealth generators and management.
  - austincheney 5y ago
    Initiative and accountability are two broadly rewarded qualities.
vletal 5y ago
I can clearly see a strong correlation between both education and hard work vs. social status and income. I come from Europe though. Is it really not the case in the US? Is it because of student loan barrier?
- rbanffy 5y ago
  How hard did Boris Johnson work again? Or Priti Patel? Or Don Jr? Or Jair Bolsonaro? I'm Brazilian, but I live in Europe, and everyday I see that I was privileged to be able to focus on studying hard (and didn't, most of the time) and still managed to be quite successful when compared to the average European. In Brazil, my skin and eye color was a ticket to some very restricted spaces I simply wouldn't have access to with the wrong colors.

mrfinn 5y ago

Blockchain wasn't at first about avoiding eyes of the state, but tyranic control of the state, or any other authority. Then projects allowing secrecy appeared. Coins like Ethereum pushed way forward, via smart contracts, the possibilities available in cryptocurrencies. Then others like Chainlink added again a whole new level of possibilities connecting the smart contracts to trusted real world data. That goes way beyond the scope of financial instruments, a whole world of automated business can be built on top of that. BTW blockchain is outdated technology, is doesn't scale enough for being able to handle a massive use of cryptocurrencies.

philwelch 5y ago

> It doesn't help that I personally have yet to see a use for a blockchain which isn't replicating an existing financial instrument while trying to avoid the eyes of the state. Is that not enough for you? Just because you think you live in a time and place where the eyes of the state are kind and benevolent?

thefounder 5y ago

Getting rid of the banks and paypal/visa like services should be enough .

djohnston 5y ago

Go to a web3 site and use your wallet as your identity without any signin flow, don't click on any asinine cookie prompts, and you'll see it's already bringing improvements. Or you can just write comments like this.

Uehreka 5y ago
OK, NOW WE’RE TALKIN. In years of talking to blockchain people about this stuff, no one has ever given me a use case description that succinct and concrete. A decentralized SSO is the kind of thing that would seem useful on it’s own, even without the other stuff. So let’s say I want to try this out this weekend. Do I just download MetaMask and make a wallet? Do I have to go somewhere or pay someone to inscribe my username in the blockchain or does this basically work immediately? And what are some sites that support this?
- fastball 5y ago
  Decentralized SSO is a great use case for blockchain tech and there are so many ways you can do it. There has been a lot of hype around NFTs due to the crazy prices we've been seeing for "digital artwork NFTs", but you can also use them for auth and it's actually pretty slick. Here is a project[1] that a friend of mine is building that does exactly that. It's basically a collection of TailwindCSS components that he originally built in the "web 2.0" way, as in: buy a subscription (via Stripe) and now you have access to his collection of pre-built components. But then he realized this is actually a great use-case for web3. So instead of signing up for an account with an email + password then using your credit card to buy a lifetime deal, you can connect your MetaMask wallet to his website and "mint" a pass for 0.08 ETH (approx ~$350 atm) which is just an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain. Then as long as that NFT is owned by your wallet you can use it to login to his website. The benefits are: it's actually faster for the user (your wallet is your identity and you access pass is attached directly to that wallet on the blockchain) and also pretty simple for him to integrate on his end. The other benefit is you can trade these passes at will without his oversight – so if he adds more and more Tailwind components to the collection the value of this lifetime access to them hypothetically goes up. But let's say you no longer are interested in building anything with Tailwind components – well you can just sell the NFT that gives you access to someone else via any of the 3rd party decentralized marketplaces. Anyway there are a lot of cool ideas and use-cases that aren't just decentralized lending (which I'm still pretty skeptical of) or generic gambling (still most of crypto). The main problem right now is that a lot of the coolest stuff has been built on Ethereum (due to the flexibility of its smart contracts) but the transaction fees and throughput are pretty terrible at the moment. Finally, it gets a lot of hate here on HN, but Brave Browser actually has a MetaMask-equivalent (I think it might actually just be a fork of MetaMask) that is built right into the browser, alongside best-in-class ad-blocking so I'd consider using that too. Though installing MetaMask is super easy as well. [1] https://rareblocks.xyz/ https://rareblocks.xyz/

matheusmoreira 5y ago

> trying to avoid the eyes of the state Nothing wrong with that. Everyone agrees cryptography is a good thing, worldwide warrantless surveillance is bad, privacy is good. So why is it acceptable for the government to pry into people's finances? Total surveillance is already the norm there. If a blockchain is what it takes to defeat that, then so be it.

FridgeSeal 5y ago
It’d be a lot cooler (ha) if we didn’t have to burn the energy of a small country for questionable-to-zero actual gains in privacy though.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  I partially agree. Bitcoin is a failure and it's pretty sad that so much energy is being spent mining it. I wouldn't mind that same amount of energy being spent on Monero though. It would also be nice if we could use the heat generated by computers for something instead of dissipating it all into the air. That way the energy wouldn't actually be wasted.