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Blockchain isn't even central in Web3, but it surely helps. Web3 = decentralized identity, full data and connection graph ownership by user, reputation transfe

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)
strogonoff 5y ago
Lack of human support in the old Web 2.0 is bad, but going full zero-trust in response seems more like throwing a fit instead of improving things (e.g., banning the exploitative ‘free’ ad-supported business models). A world in which you lose some magic alphanumeric combination (or a thief pinches your hardware key, etc.) and you are literally locked out of your identity (together with access to your eternal blockchain-backed social rating or whatever is the logical next move) seems simultaneously horrifying and ridiculous.
- paul_f 5y ago
  It does not even require hacker, a thief could show up at your house and demand your keys.
  - DanHulton 5y ago
    Ah, the ol' "rubber hose cryptanalysis". I was literally just talking about this an hour ago.
  - mannanj 5y ago
    How would this be any different from a thief breaking in anyways and taking your valuables at gunpoint?
    - strogonoff 5y ago
      Because your money are in a bank (which is generally a bit more difficult to break into), and if the thief takes some of the shiny toys you are still left with your identity at least.
- practice9 5y ago
  It's just that by relying so much on centralized corporations we give them powers of a country/dictatorship: - issue an ID - create a policy - ban if you break the ambiguous rules or trip some fraud algorithm - not ban some people or orgs even if they break the rules, because they bring too much value to platform (= almost a bribe in some sense) - and you can't really emigrate and take your belongings with you. Can you export your social graph from FB? Not sure if that's possible, at least not in a straightforward way, you need to recreate it on another platform again. - Google and Apple become a little better with this last few years, there is data export (in a .zip, lol) I agree with your second point. For non-technical users, taking care of their private key will be a huge issue. There are some models like multisig, or social recovery (you add a guardian or a set of trusted persons that can vouch for you). AFAIK even FB has been trying out social recovery features. This is a good post about social recovery wallets: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html
necubi 5y ago
And that's an improvement how? At least with Google there's a chance you'll be able to get your account back. If it's "decentralized" (which in crypto land is apparently synonymous with "run by a cabal of miners in China") and you lose your private key, you're completely out of luck.
- xmly 5y ago
  When will Trump get his chance?
- drdeca 5y ago
  If it isn't relying on a blockchain thing, and it's based on you setting up a private key, there's no "run by a cabal of miners in China" issue. And how is "google accidentally bans your account" and "you lose your private key" comparable anyway? In the first case, it isn't under your control, but under the control of some large organization, and in the second case it is because you messed up. In addition, there are mechanisms being worked on (often in the context of on-blockchain stuff, but I don't see this as fundamentally necessary to it) for facilitating like, "I trust these people to authenticate whether someone is me, in the case that I lose my private key", in order to establish that a new key still corresponds to the same person. Like, I'm less enthusiastic about this kind of thing than I have been in the past (and I've never spent money on it), but your criticism doesn't seem to be engaging in the ideas really.
- aaronax 5y ago
  If you lose some cash you are also out of luck, yet cash is still useful and even had some valuable properties.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    You may have a different experience, but most people tend to only keep small amounts of cash that they're able to accept the loss of around. They put the rest of their assets in banks and securities because then they're protected from loss by several mechanisms like bank security, legal security, and insurance. The way people handle money is literally the opposite of keeping your identity on a blockchain.
nyanpasu64 5y ago
It's a noble goal. And I don't think that's what NFTs and blockchains and their promoters are setting out to do.
KallDrexx 5y ago
Can you explain how web3 solves any of your bullets? If you are trying to say that web3 will prevent platform holders from banning you from their platform, then good luck with that. Any platform can and will ban you and have complete control over their platform. Thinking web3 is going to prevent that is naive for many many reasons. If Facebook bans me then web3 isn't going to allow me to post on Facebook still. Same with Twitter and Linked In. If you are saying that web3 solves these by making it so that these platforms aren't in charge of my identity, well they aren't today so I'm not sure what the deal is. If gmail bans my account it's not a huge issue because I use a custom domain for my email, so I can route it to another provider or host my own. If Facebook bans me then I lose contact with family on there but I don't lost my identity because FB isn't in charge of my identity. same with twitter or linked in or whatever. All these problems you list are solvable today with the decentralized web we've had for decades. There's a reason centralization has happened on these platforms, and it seems like all the web3 talk I see is naive to that. Edit: Also Keybase is a great example using cryptography to solve the identity problem without a blockchain and with some level of decentralization (keybase's servers are centralized but the actual identity is all based on PGP and GPG that's been around for a long time).
- wpietri 5y ago
  This is always my issue with things in this space. There's a list of bad things to be fixed or good things to achieve. And then there's a technology like [jazz hands] blockchain. But when you ask how they relate, it gets very handwavey. When I was at Code for America in 2015, somebody dropped by one of our events to buttonhole me about [jazz hands] blockchain for governments. I listened politely for a while and then asked, "Why would something that is definitionally a central authority need a trustless, distributed system?" They blathered and huffed for a while, but could never answer the question. They walked away thinking I was clearly not bright enough to see how it was all going to change. A couple years later a friend asked me to set down with somebody who wanted to launch a startup. Their customers were companies who wanted employees to be able to safely report sexual harassment and other misbehavior. They had a few existing competitors, so I asked what made this new company different. The would-be founder explained that they would use [jazz hands] blockchain. I asked further, and it turned out that they would use [jazz hands] blockchain internally. So basically a database with extra steps. I pointed out that assault reporters wouldn't be able to see any difference; from the user perspective, all the companies in the market were just saying, "trust us, we definitely won't tell the people paying us anything". The entrepreneur was convinced that it really was different, but if so they couldn't make it clear to me. So now we've had, what, 6 or 7 years where [jazz hands] blockchain was going to revolutionize things and it hasn't made a practical dent in any real industry. Originally I too was willing to call that naive, but it seems an awfully long time to accidentally maintain such perfect innocence.
mamma_luvs_rust 5y ago
Even if you're logging in with the 'blockchain' they can still ban your account, all of the good usages of 'Web3' I've seen look like WebAuthn but with most possibilities for scams
- swiftcoder 5y ago
  Indeed. Blockchain identities have the unfortunate property of being immutable and easily traceable. No longer can you just create a new email account to evade a service ban...
richardw 5y ago
People can self publish and now we have a total shitshow of misinformation. It’s not guaranteed that decentralised finance and web solves world peace. There is always a tradeoff. Maybe it’s awesome. Maybe it’s the web version of string theory. Can someone tell us why it’s more of the former than the latter?

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)

strogonoff 5y ago

Lack of human support in the old Web 2.0 is bad, but going full zero-trust in response seems more like throwing a fit instead of improving things (e.g., banning the exploitative ‘free’ ad-supported business models). A world in which you lose some magic alphanumeric combination (or a thief pinches your hardware key, etc.) and you are literally locked out of your identity (together with access to your eternal blockchain-backed social rating or whatever is the logical next move) seems simultaneously horrifying and ridiculous.

paul_f 5y ago
It does not even require hacker, a thief could show up at your house and demand your keys.
- DanHulton 5y ago
  Ah, the ol' "rubber hose cryptanalysis". I was literally just talking about this an hour ago.
- mannanj 5y ago
  How would this be any different from a thief breaking in anyways and taking your valuables at gunpoint?
  - strogonoff 5y ago
    Because your money are in a bank (which is generally a bit more difficult to break into), and if the thief takes some of the shiny toys you are still left with your identity at least.
practice9 5y ago
It's just that by relying so much on centralized corporations we give them powers of a country/dictatorship: - issue an ID - create a policy - ban if you break the ambiguous rules or trip some fraud algorithm - not ban some people or orgs even if they break the rules, because they bring too much value to platform (= almost a bribe in some sense) - and you can't really emigrate and take your belongings with you. Can you export your social graph from FB? Not sure if that's possible, at least not in a straightforward way, you need to recreate it on another platform again. - Google and Apple become a little better with this last few years, there is data export (in a .zip, lol) I agree with your second point. For non-technical users, taking care of their private key will be a huge issue. There are some models like multisig, or social recovery (you add a guardian or a set of trusted persons that can vouch for you). AFAIK even FB has been trying out social recovery features. This is a good post about social recovery wallets: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html

necubi 5y ago

And that's an improvement how? At least with Google there's a chance you'll be able to get your account back. If it's "decentralized" (which in crypto land is apparently synonymous with "run by a cabal of miners in China") and you lose your private key, you're completely out of luck.

xmly 5y ago
When will Trump get his chance?
drdeca 5y ago
If it isn't relying on a blockchain thing, and it's based on you setting up a private key, there's no "run by a cabal of miners in China" issue. And how is "google accidentally bans your account" and "you lose your private key" comparable anyway? In the first case, it isn't under your control, but under the control of some large organization, and in the second case it is because you messed up. In addition, there are mechanisms being worked on (often in the context of on-blockchain stuff, but I don't see this as fundamentally necessary to it) for facilitating like, "I trust these people to authenticate whether someone is me, in the case that I lose my private key", in order to establish that a new key still corresponds to the same person. Like, I'm less enthusiastic about this kind of thing than I have been in the past (and I've never spent money on it), but your criticism doesn't seem to be engaging in the ideas really.
aaronax 5y ago
If you lose some cash you are also out of luck, yet cash is still useful and even had some valuable properties.
- onion2k 5y ago
  You may have a different experience, but most people tend to only keep small amounts of cash that they're able to accept the loss of around. They put the rest of their assets in banks and securities because then they're protected from loss by several mechanisms like bank security, legal security, and insurance. The way people handle money is literally the opposite of keeping your identity on a blockchain.

nyanpasu64 5y ago

It's a noble goal. And I don't think that's what NFTs and blockchains and their promoters are setting out to do.

KallDrexx 5y ago

Can you explain how web3 solves any of your bullets? If you are trying to say that web3 will prevent platform holders from banning you from their platform, then good luck with that. Any platform can and will ban you and have complete control over their platform. Thinking web3 is going to prevent that is naive for many many reasons. If Facebook bans me then web3 isn't going to allow me to post on Facebook still. Same with Twitter and Linked In. If you are saying that web3 solves these by making it so that these platforms aren't in charge of my identity, well they aren't today so I'm not sure what the deal is. If gmail bans my account it's not a huge issue because I use a custom domain for my email, so I can route it to another provider or host my own. If Facebook bans me then I lose contact with family on there but I don't lost my identity because FB isn't in charge of my identity. same with twitter or linked in or whatever. All these problems you list are solvable today with the decentralized web we've had for decades. There's a reason centralization has happened on these platforms, and it seems like all the web3 talk I see is naive to that. Edit: Also Keybase is a great example using cryptography to solve the identity problem without a blockchain and with some level of decentralization (keybase's servers are centralized but the actual identity is all based on PGP and GPG that's been around for a long time).

wpietri 5y ago
This is always my issue with things in this space. There's a list of bad things to be fixed or good things to achieve. And then there's a technology like [jazz hands] blockchain. But when you ask how they relate, it gets very handwavey. When I was at Code for America in 2015, somebody dropped by one of our events to buttonhole me about [jazz hands] blockchain for governments. I listened politely for a while and then asked, "Why would something that is definitionally a central authority need a trustless, distributed system?" They blathered and huffed for a while, but could never answer the question. They walked away thinking I was clearly not bright enough to see how it was all going to change. A couple years later a friend asked me to set down with somebody who wanted to launch a startup. Their customers were companies who wanted employees to be able to safely report sexual harassment and other misbehavior. They had a few existing competitors, so I asked what made this new company different. The would-be founder explained that they would use [jazz hands] blockchain. I asked further, and it turned out that they would use [jazz hands] blockchain internally. So basically a database with extra steps. I pointed out that assault reporters wouldn't be able to see any difference; from the user perspective, all the companies in the market were just saying, "trust us, we definitely won't tell the people paying us anything". The entrepreneur was convinced that it really was different, but if so they couldn't make it clear to me. So now we've had, what, 6 or 7 years where [jazz hands] blockchain was going to revolutionize things and it hasn't made a practical dent in any real industry. Originally I too was willing to call that naive, but it seems an awfully long time to accidentally maintain such perfect innocence.

mamma_luvs_rust 5y ago

Even if you're logging in with the 'blockchain' they can still ban your account, all of the good usages of 'Web3' I've seen look like WebAuthn but with most possibilities for scams

swiftcoder 5y ago
Indeed. Blockchain identities have the unfortunate property of being immutable and easily traceable. No longer can you just create a new email account to evade a service ban...

richardw 5y ago

People can self publish and now we have a total shitshow of misinformation. It’s not guaranteed that decentralised finance and web solves world peace. There is always a tradeoff. Maybe it’s awesome. Maybe it’s the web version of string theory. Can someone tell us why it’s more of the former than the latter?