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Web3 is not Decentralisation – it’s a Ploy to put Crypto Bros in Charge

eternityforest 5y ago
I hope I never actually have to use crypto as a real currency. I don't want to use a coin without fraud protection. I don't want to completely restructure how I handle security because now a stolen phone means my life savings gone. And I especially don't want to see the entire tech world stagnate because there are basically no new P2P projects not ruined by a blockchain(That's not P2P, it's P2MiningFarm)
okareaman 5y ago
I'm having trouble understanding what problem Web3 is attempting to solve
- ehutch79 5y ago
  It's trying to solve the problem of crypto bros not being rich enough?
  - loceng 5y ago
    A solution looking for a problem to solve, so they can try to realize their artificially inflated paper profits - so they're not left holding the bag.
- winddude 5y ago
  A bit like usenet of old, information could be recreated on everyone running a full node. Making it much harder to censor. Now this makes sense for a number of industries, particularly financial, where the data is small, and the rewards are large. Storing petabites of porn on a distributed blockchain, probably not efficient.
  - okareaman 5y ago
    So extrapolating here, web3 is a new kind of anti-censorship system with blockchain that ensures the original information isn't corrupted and replaced with misinformation? It's an interesting topic, but it seems in relation to finances, we're talking about a system that enables financial crime. Telex (anti-censorship system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex_(anti-censorship_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex_(anti-censorship_system) Internet censorship circumvention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_circumvention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_circumvent...
- okareaman 5y ago
  Right after I posted this I logged onto Twitter to read this by Kimbal Musk tweeted 20 hours ago: "Web3 reminds me of 1995 Internet days. So many older people (younger than I am now) just could not get it. It was clear as a bell to 22yr old me. Now I understand those older people better and I'm working as fast as possible to be a better old person" https://twitter.com/kimbal/status/1465425295393976321 https://twitter.com/kimbal/status/1465425295393976321
  - angryasian 5y ago
    I read about how people are making the claim of how this will bring back the web of the early days. The web was always introduced as walled gardens and people love walled gardens. From the beginning if was Yahoo telling you what links to click or aol portals. Today its Apple's curated ecosystem and Facebook. I don't see how decentralizing anything helps.
    - mosdl 5y ago
      Indeed, most people talking about how different "web1.0" don't seem to have ever used it.
  - GDC7 5y ago
    > It was clear as a bell to 22yr old me For sure! Pumping and dumping overvalued equity to bigger fools together with his cousin.
    - okareaman 5y ago
      I hope this isn't an indication of how easy it is to manipulate young people
    - drsnow 5y ago
      People are legitimately making a living trading crypto, you know. It's actually putting food on people's tables. It's a tradable asset like any other, and its value is dictated by supply and demand, like any other. How is someone a fool for profiting from trading it?
- beepbooptheory 5y ago
  One theory I have is that the gravity of capital is pushing things towards a world where users pay for more and more web infrastructure costs. Decentralization, it appears, does not lead to democracy, but it does lead to less monolithic servers, and more shared mesh/edge computation. Just good business sense to offload computation on regular users, if the tech is there.
  - seeking_future 5y ago
    as usual smartest comment in HN thread has no replies
- wan23 5y ago
  There are a few things that people find exciting, but for me the idea of being able to pay for content frictionlessly is pretty neat. I'd love, for example, if when you get one of those ad blocker blocker popups if there was an option to pay .005 cents to bypass it.
- landemva 5y ago
  Double spend and censorship resistance are a couple big ones. Privileged westerners have courts and banking which are good enough, so not much reason for them to be interested. Probably nothing.
- fumplethumb 5y ago
  I often find it useful to relate the Web3 movement to the introduction of the internet. What problem was did that attempt to solve? The internet solved problems that were only apparent in hindsight. The same could be true of Web3. It could also be nonsense, but I don’t think so. The absence of a particular problem to solve doesn’t necessarily render it useless.
- tim333 5y ago
  I'm not sure it's trying to solve a specific problem. It's basically the web plus cryptocurrency and related technology which you can use to make a variety of stuff for better or worse. IPFS is cool in principle - being able to store stuff indefinitely on the web without needing ongoing payments to some hoster.
aero-glide2 5y ago
I think the title is a bit sexist. In my friend circle, a lot of women are interested in crypto currencies (more than traditional stock markets).
- green01 5y ago
  just an unsubstantiated slur against men same as tech bro or bro culture
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- Butterhugger 5y ago
  Your thinking is wrong and you should probably log off. Because we live under patriarchy sexism against men just sounds like cuckolded incels complaining. It doesn't exist. Edit: this incel man child flagged me to the mods in under 15 seconds lmfao
etchalon 5y ago
The fact it's impossible to disconnect the profit motive from the technology stack should be incredibly concerning, and the article makes a good point as to why. My primary concern, right now, is that Web3 is inaccessible to the majority of people, because its very architecture makes a "free" version of it impossible.
- jude- 5y ago
  Yeah, how dare people try to make money without resorting to surveillance capitalism. What's the world coming to.
- diveanon 5y ago
  Using web3 for auth costs nothing, and users here have often stated an interest in an ad free pay-per-use web. Here it is, people are just confused because there is a strong incentive on this forum to trash anything cryptocurrency related. Web3 is by far the easiest way to provide auth to a web app right now, if you haven’t experimented with it I highly recommend giving it a try. The react library is a decent place to start.
  - whymarrh 5y ago
    > Web3 is by far the easiest way to provide auth to a web app right now Easiest by what measure? As I understand it, few browsers (read: only one or two) have built in wallets and outside of that the UX for this auth isn’t great. It’s hard to see how this is better/easier to use than existing OIDC/"Sign In With X" solutions.
    - RileyJames 5y ago
      Click “Connect” and sign into MetaMask wallet. Agreed, it’s much the same as OIDC. Tho personally, beyond GitHub for dev related sites, I won’t use them. If anything it enables “websites” to be simpler, smaller. A UI atop a single function. Without the bloat. Without the “we must do enough to show value to get users to sign up”. I just auth, use it, and move on with my life. Sometimes there’s a fee per use. Sometimes that value is exchanged somewhere else in the transaction. But either way, I got what I needed and I’m done.
diveanon 5y ago
This is an extremely inaccurate take by someone who also decided it was a good idea to bring sexism into the conversation. Why does this kind of trash get upvoted here?
- exdsq 5y ago
  Because anything related to crypto is immediately judged the same way among HN users - all crypto/web3 projects are inherently bad
  - emerged 5y ago
    I find HN also immediately judges things like pickpocketing, littering, punching babies, and keying strangers cars. They just don’t get it!
    - exdsq 5y ago
      Yes, working on cryptographic and consensus protocols is very similar to punching babies https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
lucasmullens 5y ago
I'm not sure I agree with this article. It's like saying the web is centralized because everyone has to use the same web technologies. Decentralization is about how many people have control, not about how many choices in technology there are. If something like a social network on top of Bitcoin takes off, the Crypto Bros will have far, far less control than Mark Zuckerberg does over Facebook.
- skulk 5y ago
  TFA addresses your claim. > The idea of the Decentralised Autonomous Organisation that runs itself by consensus, where nobody is really in charge, is illusory. Some individuals will always find a way to be more influential, whether that’s through money, connections or rhetoric. A DAO doesn’t change this simple fact of life; it simply hides it with a new layer of obfuscation.
  - im3w1l 5y ago
    That's like saying that dictatorship is better than democracy, because someone will always be more influential and democracy just hides it.
    - ryan_lane 5y ago
      It's more like saying "Just because you call yourself the democratic nation of x doesn't mean your country is a democracy."
      - jjk166 5y ago
        No, parent comment's analogy is much closer.
        ryan_lane 5y ago
        If the DAO has a number of members, but a single individual in the DAO has wrangled control from the other members (through any number of means), then it's not a democracy, it's a dictatorship. DAOs don't solve socio-political issues, because technology can't do so.
coyotespike 5y ago
Most of the piece is mood affiliation, accusing anyone supporting crypto aims of bad faith. Under the fluff, there are two substantive points: - If Web3 advocates move essential internet services on-chain, that would centralize into a single-database-like source of truth - not decentralize. - Web3 will not eliminate hierarchies of influence. The second is unambiguously true. For the first, in my view, there's a sort Schrodinger's cat thing with crypto. DAOs seem much more open than corporations - and they're also creating mini-economies which can lock out non-token holders, privileging the financialized. So it's also kind of true, but the matter is complex. Any odds, there are a lot of sincere and smart people in crypto, and dismissing them all as basically evil is silly.
evergrande 5y ago
Silly title and claim. Web3 is inclusive in the fullest sense of the term. It does not care if you are a bro. It doesn't even know if you are a bro. It doesn't care where you live, what your name is, what your opinions are, what your hair or skin color is, what your credit score is. Nothing. Anyone and everyone on planet Earth can use it. This is not true of traditional banking and other web2 services. Where people get locked out or denied entry every day by central actors. Furthermore, all activity is transparent. Everyone can see the database. History can't be altered and the rules can't suddenly be changed. We have no real transparency into the stock market, banks, twitter.com. They can and do selectively edit their databases and change the rules at will. The public can't audit what they are doing. They public can audit the blockchain. The more our institutions become corrupt, the more important transparency and full inclusivity is.
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  Out of curiosity I checked your account, and you have only posted in favour of web3 since the beginning (3 months ago). It's a bit strange IMO when someone shows absolutely no doubt on a topic that is so divisive and controversial. anyway: anyone on planet Earth can use the web too, proof is everybody already does.
  - evergrande 5y ago
    I have expressed doubt: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29371613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29371613 But even if that wasn't the case, so what? HN is overrepresented by people convinced web3 has no merit. That doesn't seem to be a problem (and IMO it isn't), but presenting arguments in favor is a problem?
- Kbelicius 5y ago
  > Web3 is inclusive in the fullest sense of the term. Only to those that hold the tokens. Web1 and Web2 seem to be more inclusive. > Nothing. Anyone and everyone on planet Earth can use it. This is not true of traditional banking and other web2 services. How is web2 more inaccessible than web3? Also banking is accessible to more people than the internet. The vast majority of unbanked aren't unbanked because they don't have access to banks but because they are so poor that they have no need for banks. How will crypto/web3 help those people? > Furthermore, all activity is transparent. Fuck no!
jeroenhd 5y ago
I still don't know what web3 is supposed to be. It sounds like IPFS and bittorrent but with more cryptocoins involved somehow. I've only heard the term from people pushing their investment in crypto so maybe I'm biased against it. The whole "decentralised" part of it is already here in the form of peer to peer networking and regular old web servers anyone can run. The fediverse is also great at replicating information across networks. Is that what's meant by web3? People and companies choose to centralise the internet because it's easy and because it's cheap. Graph theory is hard to get right in software, after all.
cracker_jacks 5y ago
This is the thing I do not fully understand about crypto and more specifically Bitcoin. If Bitcoin is successful, it will inevitably create a tiny group of super-wealthy early adopters amongst everyone else and we are back to the same rigged system evangelists were arguing crypto solves. Even worse, there is no method of confiscation/redistribution/taxation to prevent monopolies.
- plorkyeran 5y ago
  What about that do you not get? That's exactly what the people pushing it are hoping for.
- landemva 5y ago
  Do you have any btc, or still waiting in case it doesn't catch on?
  - cracker_jacks 5y ago
    Can you explain how permanent monopolies won't become a problem?
    - jjk166 5y ago
      How would they become a problem? No matter how much bitcoin one entity holds, it in no way limits the ability of others to exchange bitcoin.
      - cracker_jacks 5y ago
        Because the ability to accumulate wealth becomes easier as you have more of it.
g42gregory 5y ago
Anything better than the Social Media Bros?
butz 5y ago
Writing anything to blockchain costs money ("gas" on ETH) and energy. And deleting written data is practically impossible. Why not skip it altogether and build Web3 as peer-to-peer based, really decentralized system?
- carlosdp 5y ago
  Great idea! How are we going to get people to run their own persistent servers at scale so this peer-to-peer network stays online 24/7 though? Oh I know, why don't we build some kind of economic incentive that pays whoever wants to run one of these servers some small amount of money for doing so, and we all pay a little to these servers when we want to do things with the network?
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    Under that model nodes would contain search indexes. Content would be self hosted or blockchain hosted for a fee or sponsor hosted through ads. It could work..
  - floatboth 5y ago
    How do BitTorrent trackers successfully encourage seeding? Information wants to be free, fuck economic incentives. Stop financializing everything.
  - butz 5y ago
    Most people already have persistent servers - smartphones. Considering how much tracking data and ads are already sent up and down the network by apps, installing a tiny web server to share a simple blog or image gallery shouldn't make a huge difference. And 24/7 uptime is not strictly necessary; considering digital wellbeing, that might be an unintended feature.
motohagiography 5y ago
> Imagine if someone were to suggest that all web infrastructure should share the same database. That would rightly be seen as an absurd idea — but that’s what Web3 advocates are essentially suggesting. I think BGP routing tables, ARIN, ICANN, whois records, and DNS root servers are equally as centralized as a blockchain would be - in that they form top level federations, sort of how "the internet" is centralized when you call it one thing. Cloudflare, Akamai, AWS etc are more centralized as single companies. Blockchains are essentially nested application/data layer federation protocols. It's hard to respond with more charity than he ventured, so I'd ask if there is a smarter form of his argument I should consider. It may be worth hearing what the concern is rooted in.
- maccolgan 5y ago
  >Blockchains are essentially nested application/data layer federation protocols. They are trustless, that's the biggest advantage.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
LouisSayers 5y ago
All anyone talks about in crypto is how to make money from crypto - this is the number one use case for it. Sure, it's used on the dark Web, but when was the last time you heard someone talk about how great it was to buy something with crypto? I can't get over the fact that crypto seems kinda useless - in the sense that it doesn't actually get used for anything other than on crypto exchanges. Talk of Web3 is also equally confusing to me. It seems to me that people want to spend less time with tech these days, not more. If anything it seems that web3 is going to be more about interaction with the real world, especially after pandemic lockdowns. People talking about social networks paying its users and smart contracts etc... I also just don't understand - these things are already possible but have not been done with existing tech, so why would anything change just because we have NFTs or whatever? It all smells of greed and feels like people peddling some new MLM system. You can talk about gov and how the man has us all entrapped in the system or whatever, but we don't typically store lumps of gold in our homes, so why would you do the same with crypto (which is arguably easier to steal)?
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Getting and spend coin in the early days was the draw. Too much money poured in making everyone afraid to spend because everything is worth so much. I remember people dropping coin in reddit to anyone with a positive comment.
  - PikachuEXE 5y ago
    Yup Every "currency" (even the legal ones like USD) are in the end "assets" If people predict that the value (not price) will rise, they hold. If people predict that the value will drop, they sell (i.e. swap it with something else).
    - 8note 5y ago
      Currencies however, are expected to drop in value slowly
      - 5y ago
GDC7 5y ago
In charge? In charge of what? The most relevant thought leaders in the crypto world are people who have no intention of "owning it", meaning being at the helm of an organization. They are the so called hodlers and traders, like Microstrategy CEO. People like Vitalik Buterin would deserve to be in charge because they seem genuinely interested in providing soltions, but he seems very ineffective because he's in search of a problem.
thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
Web3 requires retrofitting the web to use blockchain technologies to do what the web can mostly do already. In "Blockchains Are a Bad Idea", James Mickens gives several arguments against blockchain-based systems like Bitcoin: See his presentation here: https://youtu.be/15RTC22Z2xI https://youtu.be/15RTC22Z2xI 1. People have out-of-band trust relationships in real life which reduce the likelihood of malice. Bitcoin-style anonymous identities undermine trust relationships and are not needed for legitimate (not illegal) transactions. 2. Real life legal systems encourage good behaviors. If you have a dispute with someone, you can sue them. Bitcoin and related systems lack these protections. 3. Existing tools such as public-key cryptography and digital signatures can provide most of the functionality that applications need without the problems that blockchain-based systems have.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
  1. The assumption that anonymous or pseudonymous identities undermine trust is very… naive and doesn’t consider the fact that many things are considered illegal but shouldn’t be and even if you think they should be, there will always be people that think otherwise. Like participating economically with a relative in an embargoed country for example. 2. Real life legal systems can still be used. Stolen coins can and have be blacklisted by court of law and chainanalysis companies meaning they are frozen immediately at fiat off ramps. Just like would happen with a fungible physical asset like gold. 3. This is 100% true. The thing is one of the problems that is fixed by blockchain based systems is trust. Trust that the source code won’t be changed because of the very pecuniary incentives people keep hating on.
mk2k21 5y ago
Blockchain is the Ponzi pyramid that wants to eat the world.
- neophyt3 5y ago
  it should not be blockchain but cryptocurrency and crypto exchanges
  - mk2k21 5y ago
    Without crypto currency and exchanges, there is no incentive to run nodes, thus the blockchain is a ponzi scheme
rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
Nah, this article is way off base. Web3 is at best a public key signing protocol that authenticates a web client (primarily metamask). You can use this for any authentication with an ethereum-like address, eg: 0x06012c8cf97bead5deae237070f9587f8e7a266d Spending coins is not actually the point. Its to authenticate with a public key, the same way SSH public key authentication works. Most of the time, one should not be spending coins on random websites anyway. This complaint is like saying public key authentication is a plot to put big-PKI in charge. Nonsensical.
scotuswroteus 5y ago
We need an abbreviation for "Ploy To Put Crypto Bros in Charge"
endisneigh 5y ago
How do you delete data in Web3? Game over. And no, encrypting data is not deleting it. If you even remotely value your privacy you won’t support blockchain backed web3
- landemva 5y ago
  Destroy the contract. https://solidity-by-example.org/hacks/self-destruct https://solidity-by-example.org/hacks/self-destruct If you had mailed CDs of pictures and all your data to everyone in town, you mostly gave up your privacy already. And then you want a magic delete-all-CDs button?
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    Your link doesn’t explain how deletion is possible
    - landemva 5y ago
      Call the contract self destruct function. The contract and stored info (state) are removed. You may want to explain how mailing CDs to everyone in town allows an expectation they will destroy the CDs when you press the magic delete-all-CDs button. If you want to publish your info on a public ledger, and you want privacy, you would be studying zk proofs rather than learning about selfdestruct().
      - endisneigh 5y ago
        Your mailing cd example isn’t relevant nor did I mention it so I’m not sure why you are. Again, your link doesn’t explain how something is deleted for everyone. Your link doesn’t say that it’s deleted, simply sent to another address.
m9731526 5y ago
The fundamental problem with Web3 IMO is that in a perfect web3 world, if your address/hash/id is compromised, you lost everything. Most people are not ready for this kind of responsibility--living without social contract. (Maybe I am using wrong words)

I hope I never actually have to use crypto as a real currency. I don't want to use a coin without fraud protection. I don't want to completely restructure how I handle security because now a stolen phone means my life savings gone. And I especially don't want to see the entire tech world stagnate because there are basically no new P2P projects not ruined by a blockchain(That's not P2P, it's P2MiningFarm)

okareaman 5y ago

I'm having trouble understanding what problem Web3 is attempting to solve

ehutch79 5y ago
It's trying to solve the problem of crypto bros not being rich enough?
- loceng 5y ago
  A solution looking for a problem to solve, so they can try to realize their artificially inflated paper profits - so they're not left holding the bag.
winddude 5y ago
A bit like usenet of old, information could be recreated on everyone running a full node. Making it much harder to censor. Now this makes sense for a number of industries, particularly financial, where the data is small, and the rewards are large. Storing petabites of porn on a distributed blockchain, probably not efficient.
- okareaman 5y ago
  So extrapolating here, web3 is a new kind of anti-censorship system with blockchain that ensures the original information isn't corrupted and replaced with misinformation? It's an interesting topic, but it seems in relation to finances, we're talking about a system that enables financial crime. Telex (anti-censorship system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex_(anti-censorship_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex_(anti-censorship_system) Internet censorship circumvention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_circumvention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_circumvent...
okareaman 5y ago
Right after I posted this I logged onto Twitter to read this by Kimbal Musk tweeted 20 hours ago: "Web3 reminds me of 1995 Internet days. So many older people (younger than I am now) just could not get it. It was clear as a bell to 22yr old me. Now I understand those older people better and I'm working as fast as possible to be a better old person" https://twitter.com/kimbal/status/1465425295393976321 https://twitter.com/kimbal/status/1465425295393976321
- angryasian 5y ago
  I read about how people are making the claim of how this will bring back the web of the early days. The web was always introduced as walled gardens and people love walled gardens. From the beginning if was Yahoo telling you what links to click or aol portals. Today its Apple's curated ecosystem and Facebook. I don't see how decentralizing anything helps.
  - mosdl 5y ago
    Indeed, most people talking about how different "web1.0" don't seem to have ever used it.
- GDC7 5y ago
  > It was clear as a bell to 22yr old me For sure! Pumping and dumping overvalued equity to bigger fools together with his cousin.
  - okareaman 5y ago
    I hope this isn't an indication of how easy it is to manipulate young people
  - drsnow 5y ago
    People are legitimately making a living trading crypto, you know. It's actually putting food on people's tables. It's a tradable asset like any other, and its value is dictated by supply and demand, like any other. How is someone a fool for profiting from trading it?
beepbooptheory 5y ago
One theory I have is that the gravity of capital is pushing things towards a world where users pay for more and more web infrastructure costs. Decentralization, it appears, does not lead to democracy, but it does lead to less monolithic servers, and more shared mesh/edge computation. Just good business sense to offload computation on regular users, if the tech is there.
- seeking_future 5y ago
  as usual smartest comment in HN thread has no replies
wan23 5y ago
There are a few things that people find exciting, but for me the idea of being able to pay for content frictionlessly is pretty neat. I'd love, for example, if when you get one of those ad blocker blocker popups if there was an option to pay .005 cents to bypass it.
landemva 5y ago
Double spend and censorship resistance are a couple big ones. Privileged westerners have courts and banking which are good enough, so not much reason for them to be interested. Probably nothing.
fumplethumb 5y ago
I often find it useful to relate the Web3 movement to the introduction of the internet. What problem was did that attempt to solve? The internet solved problems that were only apparent in hindsight. The same could be true of Web3. It could also be nonsense, but I don’t think so. The absence of a particular problem to solve doesn’t necessarily render it useless.
tim333 5y ago
I'm not sure it's trying to solve a specific problem. It's basically the web plus cryptocurrency and related technology which you can use to make a variety of stuff for better or worse. IPFS is cool in principle - being able to store stuff indefinitely on the web without needing ongoing payments to some hoster.

aero-glide2 5y ago

I think the title is a bit sexist. In my friend circle, a lot of women are interested in crypto currencies (more than traditional stock markets).

green01 5y ago
just an unsubstantiated slur against men same as tech bro or bro culture
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Butterhugger 5y ago
Your thinking is wrong and you should probably log off. Because we live under patriarchy sexism against men just sounds like cuckolded incels complaining. It doesn't exist. Edit: this incel man child flagged me to the mods in under 15 seconds lmfao

etchalon 5y ago

The fact it's impossible to disconnect the profit motive from the technology stack should be incredibly concerning, and the article makes a good point as to why. My primary concern, right now, is that Web3 is inaccessible to the majority of people, because its very architecture makes a "free" version of it impossible.

jude- 5y ago
Yeah, how dare people try to make money without resorting to surveillance capitalism. What's the world coming to.
diveanon 5y ago
Using web3 for auth costs nothing, and users here have often stated an interest in an ad free pay-per-use web. Here it is, people are just confused because there is a strong incentive on this forum to trash anything cryptocurrency related. Web3 is by far the easiest way to provide auth to a web app right now, if you haven’t experimented with it I highly recommend giving it a try. The react library is a decent place to start.
- whymarrh 5y ago
  > Web3 is by far the easiest way to provide auth to a web app right now Easiest by what measure? As I understand it, few browsers (read: only one or two) have built in wallets and outside of that the UX for this auth isn’t great. It’s hard to see how this is better/easier to use than existing OIDC/"Sign In With X" solutions.
  - RileyJames 5y ago
    Click “Connect” and sign into MetaMask wallet. Agreed, it’s much the same as OIDC. Tho personally, beyond GitHub for dev related sites, I won’t use them. If anything it enables “websites” to be simpler, smaller. A UI atop a single function. Without the bloat. Without the “we must do enough to show value to get users to sign up”. I just auth, use it, and move on with my life. Sometimes there’s a fee per use. Sometimes that value is exchanged somewhere else in the transaction. But either way, I got what I needed and I’m done.

diveanon 5y ago

This is an extremely inaccurate take by someone who also decided it was a good idea to bring sexism into the conversation. Why does this kind of trash get upvoted here?

exdsq 5y ago
Because anything related to crypto is immediately judged the same way among HN users - all crypto/web3 projects are inherently bad
- emerged 5y ago
  I find HN also immediately judges things like pickpocketing, littering, punching babies, and keying strangers cars. They just don’t get it!
  - exdsq 5y ago
    Yes, working on cryptographic and consensus protocols is very similar to punching babies https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

lucasmullens 5y ago

I'm not sure I agree with this article. It's like saying the web is centralized because everyone has to use the same web technologies. Decentralization is about how many people have control, not about how many choices in technology there are. If something like a social network on top of Bitcoin takes off, the Crypto Bros will have far, far less control than Mark Zuckerberg does over Facebook.

skulk 5y ago
TFA addresses your claim. > The idea of the Decentralised Autonomous Organisation that runs itself by consensus, where nobody is really in charge, is illusory. Some individuals will always find a way to be more influential, whether that’s through money, connections or rhetoric. A DAO doesn’t change this simple fact of life; it simply hides it with a new layer of obfuscation.
- im3w1l 5y ago
  That's like saying that dictatorship is better than democracy, because someone will always be more influential and democracy just hides it.
  - ryan_lane 5y ago
    It's more like saying "Just because you call yourself the democratic nation of x doesn't mean your country is a democracy."
    - jjk166 5y ago
      No, parent comment's analogy is much closer.
      - ryan_lane 5y ago
        If the DAO has a number of members, but a single individual in the DAO has wrangled control from the other members (through any number of means), then it's not a democracy, it's a dictatorship. DAOs don't solve socio-political issues, because technology can't do so.

coyotespike 5y ago

Most of the piece is mood affiliation, accusing anyone supporting crypto aims of bad faith. Under the fluff, there are two substantive points: - If Web3 advocates move essential internet services on-chain, that would centralize into a single-database-like source of truth - not decentralize. - Web3 will not eliminate hierarchies of influence. The second is unambiguously true. For the first, in my view, there's a sort Schrodinger's cat thing with crypto. DAOs seem much more open than corporations - and they're also creating mini-economies which can lock out non-token holders, privileging the financialized. So it's also kind of true, but the matter is complex. Any odds, there are a lot of sincere and smart people in crypto, and dismissing them all as basically evil is silly.

evergrande 5y ago

Silly title and claim. Web3 is inclusive in the fullest sense of the term. It does not care if you are a bro. It doesn't even know if you are a bro. It doesn't care where you live, what your name is, what your opinions are, what your hair or skin color is, what your credit score is. Nothing. Anyone and everyone on planet Earth can use it. This is not true of traditional banking and other web2 services. Where people get locked out or denied entry every day by central actors. Furthermore, all activity is transparent. Everyone can see the database. History can't be altered and the rules can't suddenly be changed. We have no real transparency into the stock market, banks, twitter.com. They can and do selectively edit their databases and change the rules at will. The public can't audit what they are doing. They public can audit the blockchain. The more our institutions become corrupt, the more important transparency and full inclusivity is.

peoplefromibiza 5y ago
Out of curiosity I checked your account, and you have only posted in favour of web3 since the beginning (3 months ago). It's a bit strange IMO when someone shows absolutely no doubt on a topic that is so divisive and controversial. anyway: anyone on planet Earth can use the web too, proof is everybody already does.
- evergrande 5y ago
  I have expressed doubt: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29371613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29371613 But even if that wasn't the case, so what? HN is overrepresented by people convinced web3 has no merit. That doesn't seem to be a problem (and IMO it isn't), but presenting arguments in favor is a problem?
Kbelicius 5y ago
> Web3 is inclusive in the fullest sense of the term. Only to those that hold the tokens. Web1 and Web2 seem to be more inclusive. > Nothing. Anyone and everyone on planet Earth can use it. This is not true of traditional banking and other web2 services. How is web2 more inaccessible than web3? Also banking is accessible to more people than the internet. The vast majority of unbanked aren't unbanked because they don't have access to banks but because they are so poor that they have no need for banks. How will crypto/web3 help those people? > Furthermore, all activity is transparent. Fuck no!

jeroenhd 5y ago

I still don't know what web3 is supposed to be. It sounds like IPFS and bittorrent but with more cryptocoins involved somehow. I've only heard the term from people pushing their investment in crypto so maybe I'm biased against it. The whole "decentralised" part of it is already here in the form of peer to peer networking and regular old web servers anyone can run. The fediverse is also great at replicating information across networks. Is that what's meant by web3? People and companies choose to centralise the internet because it's easy and because it's cheap. Graph theory is hard to get right in software, after all.

cracker_jacks 5y ago

This is the thing I do not fully understand about crypto and more specifically Bitcoin. If Bitcoin is successful, it will inevitably create a tiny group of super-wealthy early adopters amongst everyone else and we are back to the same rigged system evangelists were arguing crypto solves. Even worse, there is no method of confiscation/redistribution/taxation to prevent monopolies.

plorkyeran 5y ago
What about that do you not get? That's exactly what the people pushing it are hoping for.
landemva 5y ago
Do you have any btc, or still waiting in case it doesn't catch on?
- cracker_jacks 5y ago
  Can you explain how permanent monopolies won't become a problem?
  - jjk166 5y ago
    How would they become a problem? No matter how much bitcoin one entity holds, it in no way limits the ability of others to exchange bitcoin.
    - cracker_jacks 5y ago
      Because the ability to accumulate wealth becomes easier as you have more of it.

g42gregory 5y ago

Anything better than the Social Media Bros?

butz 5y ago

Writing anything to blockchain costs money ("gas" on ETH) and energy. And deleting written data is practically impossible. Why not skip it altogether and build Web3 as peer-to-peer based, really decentralized system?

carlosdp 5y ago
Great idea! How are we going to get people to run their own persistent servers at scale so this peer-to-peer network stays online 24/7 though? Oh I know, why don't we build some kind of economic incentive that pays whoever wants to run one of these servers some small amount of money for doing so, and we all pay a little to these servers when we want to do things with the network?
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Under that model nodes would contain search indexes. Content would be self hosted or blockchain hosted for a fee or sponsor hosted through ads. It could work..
- floatboth 5y ago
  How do BitTorrent trackers successfully encourage seeding? Information wants to be free, fuck economic incentives. Stop financializing everything.
- butz 5y ago
  Most people already have persistent servers - smartphones. Considering how much tracking data and ads are already sent up and down the network by apps, installing a tiny web server to share a simple blog or image gallery shouldn't make a huge difference. And 24/7 uptime is not strictly necessary; considering digital wellbeing, that might be an unintended feature.

motohagiography 5y ago

> Imagine if someone were to suggest that all web infrastructure should share the same database. That would rightly be seen as an absurd idea — but that’s what Web3 advocates are essentially suggesting. I think BGP routing tables, ARIN, ICANN, whois records, and DNS root servers are equally as centralized as a blockchain would be - in that they form top level federations, sort of how "the internet" is centralized when you call it one thing. Cloudflare, Akamai, AWS etc are more centralized as single companies. Blockchains are essentially nested application/data layer federation protocols. It's hard to respond with more charity than he ventured, so I'd ask if there is a smarter form of his argument I should consider. It may be worth hearing what the concern is rooted in.

maccolgan 5y ago
>Blockchains are essentially nested application/data layer federation protocols. They are trustless, that's the biggest advantage.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

LouisSayers 5y ago

All anyone talks about in crypto is how to make money from crypto - this is the number one use case for it. Sure, it's used on the dark Web, but when was the last time you heard someone talk about how great it was to buy something with crypto? I can't get over the fact that crypto seems kinda useless - in the sense that it doesn't actually get used for anything other than on crypto exchanges. Talk of Web3 is also equally confusing to me. It seems to me that people want to spend less time with tech these days, not more. If anything it seems that web3 is going to be more about interaction with the real world, especially after pandemic lockdowns. People talking about social networks paying its users and smart contracts etc... I also just don't understand - these things are already possible but have not been done with existing tech, so why would anything change just because we have NFTs or whatever? It all smells of greed and feels like people peddling some new MLM system. You can talk about gov and how the man has us all entrapped in the system or whatever, but we don't typically store lumps of gold in our homes, so why would you do the same with crypto (which is arguably easier to steal)?

ipaddr 5y ago
Getting and spend coin in the early days was the draw. Too much money poured in making everyone afraid to spend because everything is worth so much. I remember people dropping coin in reddit to anyone with a positive comment.
- PikachuEXE 5y ago
  Yup Every "currency" (even the legal ones like USD) are in the end "assets" If people predict that the value (not price) will rise, they hold. If people predict that the value will drop, they sell (i.e. swap it with something else).
  - 8note 5y ago
    Currencies however, are expected to drop in value slowly
    - 5y ago

GDC7 5y ago

In charge? In charge of what? The most relevant thought leaders in the crypto world are people who have no intention of "owning it", meaning being at the helm of an organization. They are the so called hodlers and traders, like Microstrategy CEO. People like Vitalik Buterin would deserve to be in charge because they seem genuinely interested in providing soltions, but he seems very ineffective because he's in search of a problem.

thesuperbigfrog 5y ago

Web3 requires retrofitting the web to use blockchain technologies to do what the web can mostly do already. In "Blockchains Are a Bad Idea", James Mickens gives several arguments against blockchain-based systems like Bitcoin: See his presentation here: https://youtu.be/15RTC22Z2xI https://youtu.be/15RTC22Z2xI 1. People have out-of-band trust relationships in real life which reduce the likelihood of malice. Bitcoin-style anonymous identities undermine trust relationships and are not needed for legitimate (not illegal) transactions. 2. Real life legal systems encourage good behaviors. If you have a dispute with someone, you can sue them. Bitcoin and related systems lack these protections. 3. Existing tools such as public-key cryptography and digital signatures can provide most of the functionality that applications need without the problems that blockchain-based systems have.

bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
1. The assumption that anonymous or pseudonymous identities undermine trust is very… naive and doesn’t consider the fact that many things are considered illegal but shouldn’t be and even if you think they should be, there will always be people that think otherwise. Like participating economically with a relative in an embargoed country for example. 2. Real life legal systems can still be used. Stolen coins can and have be blacklisted by court of law and chainanalysis companies meaning they are frozen immediately at fiat off ramps. Just like would happen with a fungible physical asset like gold. 3. This is 100% true. The thing is one of the problems that is fixed by blockchain based systems is trust. Trust that the source code won’t be changed because of the very pecuniary incentives people keep hating on.

mk2k21 5y ago

Blockchain is the Ponzi pyramid that wants to eat the world.

neophyt3 5y ago
it should not be blockchain but cryptocurrency and crypto exchanges
- mk2k21 5y ago
  Without crypto currency and exchanges, there is no incentive to run nodes, thus the blockchain is a ponzi scheme

rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago

Nah, this article is way off base. Web3 is at best a public key signing protocol that authenticates a web client (primarily metamask). You can use this for any authentication with an ethereum-like address, eg: 0x06012c8cf97bead5deae237070f9587f8e7a266d Spending coins is not actually the point. Its to authenticate with a public key, the same way SSH public key authentication works. Most of the time, one should not be spending coins on random websites anyway. This complaint is like saying public key authentication is a plot to put big-PKI in charge. Nonsensical.

scotuswroteus 5y ago

We need an abbreviation for "Ploy To Put Crypto Bros in Charge"

endisneigh 5y ago

How do you delete data in Web3? Game over. And no, encrypting data is not deleting it. If you even remotely value your privacy you won’t support blockchain backed web3

landemva 5y ago
Destroy the contract. https://solidity-by-example.org/hacks/self-destruct https://solidity-by-example.org/hacks/self-destruct If you had mailed CDs of pictures and all your data to everyone in town, you mostly gave up your privacy already. And then you want a magic delete-all-CDs button?
- endisneigh 5y ago
  Your link doesn’t explain how deletion is possible
  - landemva 5y ago
    Call the contract self destruct function. The contract and stored info (state) are removed. You may want to explain how mailing CDs to everyone in town allows an expectation they will destroy the CDs when you press the magic delete-all-CDs button. If you want to publish your info on a public ledger, and you want privacy, you would be studying zk proofs rather than learning about selfdestruct().
    - endisneigh 5y ago
      Your mailing cd example isn’t relevant nor did I mention it so I’m not sure why you are. Again, your link doesn’t explain how something is deleted for everyone. Your link doesn’t say that it’s deleted, simply sent to another address.

m9731526 5y ago

The fundamental problem with Web3 IMO is that in a perfect web3 world, if your address/hash/id is compromised, you lost everything. Most people are not ready for this kind of responsibility--living without social contract. (Maybe I am using wrong words)