24 ms·

Is Web3 Bullshit?

• togaen 5y ago
  Yes.
• lonk 5y ago
  Elon Musk might think web3 bs because even he's rich, but Web3(or blockchain) operating out of his control.
• codingdave 5y ago
  I reject the term 'web3'. Let start with the simple fact that blockchain is not web-based. Actually, lets end with that fact, too. This tech, whether or not you believe it is going anywhere, is quite simply not the web.
• hashtones 5y ago
  In case anyone missed this point too, blockchain technology enables the notion of robotic singularity. Not saying that's what it is, but when your robot (or car) is connected to an immutable ledger, it has access to everything every other robot (or car) senses, so for instance robots connected to a blockchain can synchronize their orchestration (so, for instance, making it more possible to produce self driving cars).
• _se0c 5y ago
  Reading through the linked article on "real world uses for Web3", most of them seem to consist of things that public key cryptography has been able to solve for decades (persistent identity, multiple persistent identities) or things you could do anyway ("right now, people can only go to facebook or Google. With Web3, everyone can have their own space!!") because the writer has apparently never heard of a web server. Another HNer made a good point recently: Compute power is nearing post scarcity. Web3 is people trying to make it scarce again.
  • gjulianm 5y ago
    > because the writer has apparently never heard of a web server. This is a constant issue I have with crypto advocates. Most of the use cases can be done with crypto, but also with other techs (sometimes it's as simple as "we need a database for this"). But there's never a serious analysis of why those use cases have not been covered with previous tech, and when you point out that there might be issues other than the tech then you get labeled as a "crypto hater". And I wouldn't care too much if random people called you a hater, but when all crypto people label dissent as "haters" it makes me think it's like a cult where all you need to do is believe.
    • wisty 5y ago
      I love pointing out that if it becomes a serious currency banks would offer bitcoin-denominated loans (causing an increase in money supply); and if there's then a credit crunch the Fed could offer bitcoin-denominated (but unbacked) bonds. It would be like the gold standard all over again.
      • kevinak 5y ago
        I'm curious why you think this is the case. It's close to impossible (good luck convincing people to devalue their money) to increase the Bitcoin supply other than through minig.
        • anchpop 5y ago
          Loans create “virtual money” in a way, which does contribute to inflation (in fact, controlling lending is a primary way the federal reserve controls inflation)
          • kevinak 5y ago
            Yes, in the current fiat system that is the case, but there is no way for someone (a bank or government) to inflate the supply in world where Bitcoin is the currency everyone uses.
  • mypastself 5y ago
    I often feel like I’m missing a key piece of technological or intellectual insight when I read bullish articles like the linked one. I cannot see a single use-case in there that would definitively be improved by the use of blockchain, and in most cases, I’d expect the opposite to happen.
    • Gigachad 5y ago
      The key insight you are missing is that someone makes a lot of money trying to convince you that this stuff is the future of the internet.
    • NicoJuicy 5y ago
      You aren't, no worries.
    • ianm98 5y ago
      What do you think about cryptocurrency enabled sports betting and prediction markets? There's a pretty clear technical path to these replacing traditional sports betting market makers and I personally cannot wait. Current market makers like DraftKings still put out betting lines with insane spreads, because in the US atleast, their markets are protected by regulatory capture. This [1] is one of the projects I have my eye on in this space but there is many that are starting to get to work now that a lot of the technical issues around Oracles are being sorted out. 1. https://www.betdex.com/ https://www.betdex.com/ * No affiliation
      • mypastself 5y ago
        Since the use of an oracle introduces a source of information external to the blockchain, we’re left with centralization issues again. I feel like this removes the unique advantage of using the technology in the first place. I suppose there are ways to gamble exclusively using the blockchain, but I don’t think sports betting is among them.
        • ianm98 5y ago
          Suppose they use a fully centralized oracles, isn't there still a huge benefit in having much lower fees and tighter spreads, even if it's not decentralized? For the end user, having settlement, custody, and market making decentralized while having centralized oracles is still a huge advantage. Then consider that people are tackling the issue of decentralized oracles. The most common platform for that is Chainlink [1]. In this space specifically, Augur [2] is among those who has attempted to make decentralized sports reporting Oracles. I'm not sure if their solution is fully fleshed out, but regardless it doesn't seem to be an insurmountable technical issue for something that is as easy to verify as outcome of a game. If your willing to accept that the Oracle problem will be solved, I'm not sure how you would say this doesn't create value for consumers. 1.https://chain.link/education/blockchain-oracles https://chain.link/education/blockchain-oracles 2. https://augur.net/ https://augur.net/
  • legutierr 5y ago
    > because the writer has apparently never heard of a web server. But blockchains do introduce a technical capability that never existed before: shared, “trustless” access to and control over data. Previously, you could run your own webserver, your own email server, etc, and you could trust your own data, but other people collaborating with you would need to trust you to manage that data, and trust that you hadn’t manipulated the data in some way. What if they don’t know you well enough to trust you? Sure, other people could keep their own copy of that same data, and sync with you somehow, but most pre-blockchain data services lack replication capability out of the box, and as far as I know there are no non-blockchain data services that can give you any assurances at all that data has not been tampered with. And on top of the issue of trust is the issue of network size. If you personally know who you want to collaborate with, you can share a single server, but what if you want open collaboration and discovery to be part of the application? Federated application services capable of competing with big tech have been a dream and an objective of open-source advocates for decades, but no one has been able to deliver. I would say the major reason is because trustless data syncing at scale is orders of magnitude harder than running a single standalone server, and all of the solutions until web3 attempted to perform data syncing at the application layer—which means a lot of duplicated effort, and almost zero opportunity for reuse between projects. Blockchain tech moves replication and tampering protection to the data layer, as a generalized service that is relatively trivial to set up. The promise of web3 is that shared-data applications can be built on top of that data layer in the same way that complex centralized applications can be built on well-defined centralized data layers like the file system and the relational database. A robust and abstracted data layer allows application developers to spend more time thinking about application logic and less time thinking about data.
    • neilalexander 5y ago
      > But blockchains do introduce a technical capability that never existed before: shared, “trustless” access to and control over data. I don’t think blockchains control access over data at all without the integration of other technologies (i.e. using public key authentication to prove to some third-party service that you hold a key that performed a blockchain transaction). They only control permissions to update things on-chain and everything on the chain is still publicly readable anyway. PKI is capable of doing the same thing and has existed for a very long time. > Sure, other people could keep their own copy of that same data, and sync with you somehow, but most pre-blockchain data services lack replication capability out of the box, and as far as I know there are no non-blockchain data services that can give you any assurances at all that data has not been tampered with. Look at the existing NFT mess. The problem here is that the blockchain _doesn’t_ replicate anything other than a bit of metadata for these types of applications — the content still has to be stored elsewhere, often on a classic web server which is centralised and can go down any time. If you want an example of something that replicates data and guarantees integrity then look at IPFS. > Federated application services capable of competing with big tech have been a dream and an objective of open-source advocates for decades, but no one has been able to deliver. I would say the major reason is because trustless data syncing at scale is orders of magnitude harder than running a single standalone server, and all of the solutions until web3 attempted to perform data syncing at the application layer—which means a lot of duplicated effort, and almost zero opportunity for reuse between projects. Blockchain’s answer to “federation is hard” is just to replicate the entire chain to all participants and have all participants repeat the exact same work to arrive at the same position. This is not exactly a glamouring success story of how to avoid “duplicated effort” — in fact, duplicated effort is a fundamental part of the blockchain architecture. > Blockchain tech moves replication and tampering protection to the data layer, as a generalized service that is relatively trivial to set up. The promise of web3 is that shared-data applications can be built on top of that data layer in the same way that complex centralized applications can be built on well-defined centralized data layers like the file system and the relational database. This isn’t really true though — it’s more like the blockchain provides a tamperproof metadata store. Putting actual quantities of information onto a typical blockchain is either prohibitively expensive computationally (it needs to be replicated everywhere) or prohibitively expensive financially (Ethereum gas costs as an example).
  • paradite 5y ago
    > because the writer has apparently never heard of a web server. This gives me the initial dropbox dismissal comment (you can do it trivially with ftp) vibe... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
    • anaisbetts 5y ago
      Sure but the difference was that Dropbox was an order of magnitude more accessible and convenient in its experience. web3 has yet to make anything tangibly better than the thing it wants to replace - only more convoluted, risky, and expensive. It turns operations that were free and instant into operations that cost significant money and take minutes/hours
    • Gigachad 5y ago
      It's been years, over a decade since bitcoin came out, and still nothing useful came out of it. Dropbox was well understood to be useful shortly after it came out and the initial reactions were over.
  • arnvald 5y ago
    One more point from that article I noticed: in a section talking about taking on multiple projects, the author writes "This is how much of Hollywood works." How can you not think: well, if this is how much of Hollywood works now, isn't that proof that you don't need a blockchain for it?!
    • JohnFen 5y ago
      Not to mention that "how Hollywood works" is seriously problematic as it is. I'm not sure it should be replicated.
      • ozim 5y ago
        Add to that - it really is talking "how Hollywood works" - on the movie set. It disregards all that happen before and after and outside of movie set. It also disregards that loads of projects/works are not "how Hollywood works".
  • goodpoint 5y ago
    > Compute power is nearing post scarcity Nearing? 99.9% of the Internet content I care about is pure text. In quantities could be served and stored on SBC or a phone from 10 years ago. Think of text messaging, IM rooms, forums like HN or mailing lists, activitypub. Do the math around how much text a person can consume in a day and how much data can a SBC handle in a day.
    • foxfluff 5y ago
      > Do the math around how much text a person can consume in a day and how much data can a SBC handle in a day. A $0.80 microcontroller would get you pretty far.
  • malermeister 5y ago
    The way I see it this scarcity thing is exactly the point, and I'll go a bit deeper. Capitalism can only work with scarcity to monetize. With scarcity nearing an end, there's now two camps: * those that are excited for the post-scarcity future where we can freely share data and culture * those who are deeply bought into capitalist ideology and who are terrified of capitalism ending with scarcity. The first group hates all the crypto stuff because it's a technological attempt to put the genie back in the bottle and undo the progress we've made in eliminating scarcity. The second group hails crypto as their savior and thinks it will revolutionize everything by reintroducing scarcity everywhere, giving capitalism a life line. I think that's the core disconnect.
    • brightstep 5y ago
      I don't think capitalism is going anywhere. "Web3" might succeed but, absent a political fight, only if it can be assimilated into existing capital and power structures.
      • malermeister 5y ago
        I'm not sure you fully got the point I was trying to make. Despite all the claims from crypto advocates about crypto freeing us from existing power structures, I think the truth is actually the opposite. Crypto entrenches existing power structures, where capital = power. You can see that formalized in various decentralized organizations where votes are allocated by token count, or in other words, more capital means more power. Crypto is an effort to preserve the status quo, not to change it. If the "web3" were to succeed, moneyed interests would still be controlling everything, with the only change being that some early crypto adopters would also rise to their level. Crypto advocacy comes down to an attempt to rise to the ruling class by serving it, not to topple it.
        • brightstep 5y ago
          Yes! That's what I've been saying. If crypto succeeds, it will be because it serves capital (what crypto believers refer to as "centralixed authority") not in spite of it.
  • stjohnswarts 5y ago
    With the added benefit every transaction you do with a "persona" isn't on a blockchain that almost everyone has access to into perpetuity.
• matesz 5y ago
  Web3 is not bullshit, nobody actually defined it properly, just like nobody defined properly what is Web0, Web1 and Web2. Web versioning methodology is bs, not the general concept of pinpointing what makes a big leap. Does anybody here have a link to proper methodology for versioning the Web? ps. Web is simply referring to a web of connected “pages” through links. Pretty much anybody who claims to work on Web3 says nothing about links.
  • flohofwoe 5y ago
    So far, all "WebX" names turned out to be bullshit (or at best, pointless). Besides, the cryptobros seem to have a somewhat short memory: "Web3" was going to be the "Semantic Web" (which of course turned out to be bullshit too), so if anything, we're now at "Web4" for the next pointless hype cycle.
    • Canotdohng 5y ago
      For context, the definition of web 3.0 from Tim Berners-Lee gives a good idea an the level of hazyness of this concept: > People keep asking what Web 3.0 is. I think maybe when you've got an overlay of scalable vector graphics — everything rippling and folding and looking misty — on Web 2.0 and access to a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data, you'll have access to an unbelievable data resource.
    • matesz 5y ago
      I think the problem is that we are lacking distinction between Web and the and IT tech in general. Web is just making all this accessible - links. Blockchain adds big benefit to the general usefulness of the Internet - for instance possibility of doing anonymous transactions, with all of its downsides of course. Not enough for a major version bump though. It’s just a small blip on entire spectrum of IT tech.
  • dvh 5y ago
    So like "agile development", everybody will define it by themselves.
  • monkeydust 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• mattlondon 5y ago
  It saddens me that they chose "web3" for the latest crypto pyramid scheme. Call it what you want, but please don't sully the web with your plat du jour crypto antics. Also for what it is worth, the web has been decentralised from the very start, I don't see what the fuss is about apart from just everyone getting rich selling the next hot coin/token/whatever.
  • cblconfederate 5y ago
    social networking 'web2' had little lot to do with web also
    • mattlondon 5y ago
      I'd disagree with that. Web 2 was the idea of site content being dynamic and user generated, and not curated by journalists/editors/whoever working a 9-5 or whatever. For many things like reddit, digg, youtube etc there was only a web interface to these things. They were of and for the web
      • onion2k 5y ago
        web1 was reading other people's content, web2 was about creating content and handing it to someone else to publish online, and web3 should be about retaining ownership of your own work. In theory, a web3 website could aggregate content produced by users while the users would be free to revoke the site's access, or they could move their content to a different site if they want, or they could delete it entirely. In a web3 world it should be the case that Reddit's access to content is by looking it up on a blockchain to publish, rather than claiming joint ownership of it. This, obviously, assumes that you believe users retaining ownership of the content they make is a real and necessary benefit. I'm not sure about that yet. I don't really see why people need to. Unfortunately however, regardless of whether web3 content ownership is a good thing or not, the current cohort of web3 businesses and evangelists seem more interested in shilling their own coins and many-thousands-of-dollars coding courses instead.
        • 5y ago
• gigatexal 5y ago
  Yes. Now let’s move on to more worthwhile endeavors
  • cblconfederate 5y ago
    i'm listening
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• say_it_as_it_is 5y ago
  Web3 seems like a response to every facet of Facebook. Facebook offers valuable services for free in exchange for data about its users. Web3 pays users for data they own and control with money grown on trees. There are limitless forests where money grows on trees if you just close your eyes and dream hard enough. Advertisers will pay users for their data, cutting out the middleman who creates any sort of meaning about them. Who needs valuable services, after all? Just send the money directly from advertiser to user.
  • cblconfederate 5y ago
    the user can then use the money he earned to buy the valuable service , or another service, isn't that better?
  • altdataseller 5y ago
    Advertisers don’t pay for data. When I advertise on FB, I get no data on who I am advertising to. I am paying for actual clicks and purchases and brand Awareness
• daenney 5y ago
  The question the title asks can be answered with a single word: yes.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• StephenJGL 5y ago
  It feels marketing driven. Like trying to make a thing. I haven't seen an actual change in consumer interaction with the web, which was a defining aspect of web1 -> web2.
  • davidgerard 5y ago
    specifically, a16z is hyping the hell out of it
• postcynical 5y ago
  web1: information web2: information, people web3: information, people, value (value as in money and other valuable assets)
  • libertine 5y ago
    Eh that sounds kind of forced. Web always had value exchange from the beginning - in fact a big part of the largest companies we have today were built around that value. In fact I was naive enough to think the web would eventually become more free of that "need" for value exchange (like processing power and network speeds would be enough for everyone to have their own "node" to host and share what ever they wanted), but the endgame o web3 seems to be to have micro transactions everywhere.
  • Liron 5y ago
    web3 = people, information, value = a man, a plan, a canal = panama
    • thr0waw4yz 5y ago
      or let's just say, fuck taxes
• _vufv 5y ago
  One aspect that I strongly dislike about "web3" is that it poisons the discourse with its incentives. I don't believe that every person on Twitter with $BTC in their profile understands or can knowledgeably argue the benefits of Web3, but their crypto holdings make them a hard-lined crypto zealot in the hopes of multiplying few hundred dollars they've put in. It's fairly widely known how laughable it is to look for unbiased opinion in the interviews of pundits talking finance. This is since it's become expected that none of their advice is going to be untethered to their investments, but given the opportunity they're talk their book all they long. I don't see that much wrong with talking your book, but desperately trying to cover it up under the guise of "knowing the tech is superior" while only having superficial understanding of what's going on - makes intelligent people reading your stuff distrust you immediately. I know people on both sides of the fence. I know of only one person that's skeptical of Web3 but still hedges on its success. I'm surprised that there is no middle ground - there are either fervent advocates or fervent opposition, and with very few exceptions (!), the opposition seems to think more clearly and is better informed.
  • ojr 5y ago
    there's middle ground people just choose to ignore it. So many similarities to the dot com bubble. As more time passes I truly feel I would have been one of the people who could spot out Amazon from the webvans and pets.coms. The strength in web3 is bitcoin and ipfs.
    • Sargos 5y ago
      Bitcoin isn't really part of Web3 as it's just a currency. You realize this yes? If you really are betting on Web3 then be careful and be prepared for a lot more research.
  • pornel 5y ago
    The thing that cryptocurrencies have really successfully decentralized and democratized is becoming a shareholder — of cryptocurrency schemes. Anyone can buy a share of a coin, and make a profit as long as the amount of fiat currency put into the chain keeps growing. Every new user convinced it's going "to the moon" pays dividends to existing holders. This automatically creates a financial incentive to become an astroturfer for the project.
• jillesvangurp 5y ago
  If you've read Anathem by Neal Stephenson; he has an amusing made up word "bullshytt" (https://anathem.fandom.com/wiki/Bulshytt https://anathem.fandom.com/wiki/Bulshytt) that is being used in the book by the avout to denote exactly the kind of stuff web3 seems to be about. In the book, the Avout are basically science & philosphy nerds that the rest of society has locked up in monasteries where they are not allowed to use any form of modern technology after a few incidents in the past where they went off and invented things like gene manipulation, nuclear weapons, etc. The outside world still has technology and interacting with them every few decades is hard for the avout because they seem to adopt all sorts of technical jargon every few years (i.e. bullshytt). So, they need to figure out what these people are talking about every time they are allowed out (every 1, 10, 100, or a 1000 years). Asking the question if it is bullshit is kind of answering it, I would say. But it's definitely bullshytt.
• throwaway4good 5y ago
  Ignoring its association with Ethereum and crypto. I think standards for the following: - Authentication - Payments - Storage That could be used without a server-side component would be useful and bring web client-side programming forward.
• pictur 5y ago
  web3 is a complete marketing marvel. the only goal is money and more money and more..
• throwaway4good 5y ago
  "Web 2.0" was the modern web around 2008, and concurrent with or associated with things like AJAX and Ruby-on-Rails - here is an old article expanding on the term: https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1310178 https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1310178 "Web 2.0 is a term (or rather buzzword) that you often hear when describing most “modern” web sites; however, it shouldn’t be a new concept to web developers. Web 2.0 is actually a consolidation of many existing technologies that allows you to provide a rich interactive user experience over the web. Examples of Web 2.0 technologies include, but aren’t limited to, the following areas: - Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), which include AJAX, Adobe Flash, Silverlight, and Moonlight - Web services - Blogs - Wikis - Social networking - Social bookmarking - RSS/Atom" Just a reminder on how easy it is not seeing the forest because of the trees, and instead focusing on things that are shiny and noisy yet will not last. What lasted was to move from server-side computing where all the UI was rendered server side as HTML pages, to a world where a lot of the computing and all of the UI rendering was done client-side. So it meaningful to ask: Are we going into a world where the centralised server gets even less of a role because of things like data storage, payments, authentication are done in a distributed manner or purely client-side?
  • ctvo 5y ago
    The difference between Web 2 and 3 is that no one had to write long Twitter threads daily on why Web 2 was the revolution, and what builders should be making with it. It was organic because there was demand from consumers, and people used the tools available to them to fulfill that demand. Web 3 is artificial, with little to no demand outside of being a vehicle for unregulated speculation. The people most excited for Web 3 aren't builders nor consumers, but venture capitalists and people with a financial stake waiting to cash out.
    • achiandet 5y ago
      As someone trying to understand the space beyond trading/speculation, this is what I keep running up against. Philosophically I like a lot of the ideas conveyed but everything seems to keep going back to money and getting further and further away from the free and open web.
• mercurialsolo 5y ago
  A lot of what seems jargon and bullshit is because of the initial applications sprouting on top. Do creators need to have better ways to retain ownership, monetize their work? Does open source creation need a better monetization model? I guess we would all be in sync with this. Do we see the initial applications of web3 about creating these decentralizing apps to decommission centralized infra & taxation ? I guess not. The web does need to fundamentally evolve from already now being turned into walled gardens. Web3 with decentralized protocols around not only comms but value will hopefully be a spur and movement towards this. Time will tell
• hbbio 5y ago
  I have the impression that most comments here are either biased against cryptocurrencies or trying to push for them blindly. That's a bit sad considering we should at least be discussing the technology here. web3 is a marketing brand that defines a future version of web apps where the frontend is a compiled SPA possibly hosted on decentralised platforms (IPFS) and where the backend is a decentralised blockchain (and in its purest form only that). This goes a step beyond web 2.0 where you would build a SPA with a cloud backend, e.g. Firebase / Google. With web 2.0, you have to trust the backend (so again in most cases Google or Amazon) and that is a limiting factor for sensitive apps, or simply if you care for decentralisation. Another addition of web3 is the payments, which could have been standardised in the web platform (I am a former W3C member and there were lots of discussions on that), but instead of the browser implementing payments, we ended up with a few centralised processors like Stripe. Same goes for identity. Quite interestingly, web3 solves both Identity + Payments with a technically elegant solution. Many people got rich by holding AMZN stock, which is in great part due to AWS -- the cash cow of the company. Why would you have a problem with a cryptocurrency token being used to pay for the backend infrastructure i.e. paying for accessing a database-as-a-service?
  • simonebrunozzi 5y ago
    For the ones that don't know: SPA = Single Page Application
  • ogogmad 5y ago
    I've been Googling the word SPA and I keep finding places to go for a holiday, but nothing relevant to what you're talking about.
    • manmal 5y ago
      SPA in this context would likely mean Single Page App. A Javascript module, to be run in a browser.
    • mkl 5y ago
      If you include a context word like "web" it pops right up.
• gitgud 5y ago
  I don't know what Web3 will be represented by, but Web4 will be operated with sticks and stones...
• brandonmenc 5y ago
  Crypto fans are always hurling accusations of FOMO on those of us who just "don't get it". But web3 strikes me as those very same people experiencing FOMO because they missed out printing a bunch of money for themselves in the early days of the web by actually providing novel value - which in hindsight now all looks like really obvious low-hanging fruit, hence the FOMO - so they're hoping to "get in on the ground floor" by rebooting the web and inserting themselves into and extracting a payment from every single transaction and interaction on this new web, hoping we use their magical tokens - which oh by the way are also speculative investments that they currently own a bunch of and you don't - as the currency. Of course, I'm just a hater who doesn't get it.
  • Yizahi 5y ago
    And conveniently they reserve for themselves double digit percentage amounts of future assets by the way of premine. The levels of hypocrisy in crypto are mind boggling.
    • bsenftner 5y ago
      And not a single one of the cryptocurrency developers in the entire enterprise has a single finance class under their belt. They are naïvely using pragmatic logic when they write their new distributed financial systems, yet finance does not follow pragmatic logic- it follows social and contractual agreements that are often nonpragmatic and nonlogical - as the contract holders intend. This entire concept is so ill formed it should be a Money Python skit with silly voices.
      • brightstep 5y ago
        The capacity of crypto believers to ignore social and political context is limitless. It has to be, because if you bring that context into your thinking, all their hopes for the technology fall apart.
      • fastball 5y ago
        Given how Wall Street has turned out, I think many would argue that a lack of finance degrees is a plus, not a negative.
• 627467 5y ago
  I don't know whether it is or (more importantly) will be bullshit but one aspect of web3 I think has been a victory to webstandards: an actual decentralized SSO standard. I know it must be easy to use Google's or Facebook SSO. But why rely on a Third party for this? And why - as user - must i open new accounts on all these webservice?
• GDC7 5y ago
  It’s like that headline about the internet being a glorified fax machine in 1999. [0] It was wrong to put your name on that piece for posterity to see (and mock you) , but if you listened to that article and shorted the Nasdaq you’d have made 5000% type returns . And if Krugman himself listened to his own brain , he’d have had enough money not to care about that piece or make people forget about it The web3 might not be bullshit , but if you want to make money the only trade out there is to bet that it is . Bulls who say that web3 is in its early days surely mean the technical early days , because financially the web3 is already priced for world domination . Bulls forget that when you have to learn a programming language to profit off a trend you already missed on life changing money and hockey stick price increase (bitcoin 2010-2020 and Ethereum 2015-2020) [0] https://twitter.com/kevincadogan/status/1195521960437932033?s=21 https://twitter.com/kevincadogan/status/1195521960437932033?...
  • ohCh6zos 5y ago
    It always comes back to money, not what cool things you can do with it.
    • GDC7 5y ago
      Everybody conceives cool things in their minds but the cooler the idea the more it’s a winner take all market Web1.0 teaches this just by looking at the big tech giants which dominate. There’s space for only one in each of the big tech sub fields. Search - social media -cloud - Desktop OS - phone OS The ideal is to bet on a trend instead of a company and do so when the rising tide lifts all boats such as Nasdaq 1995-2000 and Bitcoin 2010-2020. I get what you are saying but in today society there is not only no glory but outright ridicule and financial trouble for people who have a cool project which gets copied by a giant . It ends up in tears . I wish it was different . I contacted on LinkedIn the guy who put together the first Facebook like social network in 2000. He works for Sony and nobody knows his name
• Yizahi 5y ago
  Web3 is a web of lies. It promises proof or original for digital content which is a) nonsense and b) impossible. It promises easy transfer of digital rights while not doing that at all and it is actually impossible with current crypto tech. It promises decentralized money while making extremely centralized system. It promises severig ties with money printing and then blatantly money prints with zero oversight. It promises investments, but that that is completely manipulated by major player as they wish. It promises security but ”lol, not your keys not your money”. It promises getting rich, but conveniently forgets that crypto is negative sum casino. It promises going green, but is fully conscious that it will never happen because fundamentally there need to be punishment for bad actors and energy is it in crypto. Basically every tech where inventor looks you in the face and says that ”black is white” can be called web3.
• kevinak 5y ago
  Ironically the people pushing for Web3 are mostly those that do not understand why decentralisation is key^1. The projects pushed by these individuals and corporations are largely very centralised. Look at the Solana fiasco a while back where the network went down and required a coordinated restart. Another centralising power in these "smart" blockchains are the stable coin issuers. In the event of a hard fork^2 Tether and USDC essentially have the power to decide single-handedly decide which chain ends up being the correct one. Why? Because they can't support two chains, the value of the tokens would be split in half. So, for example. Let's say Tether decides that Eth 2.0 is not something they would like to support, they would simply say "We will not redeem any coins on Eth 2.0" and that would be it. The value of the DeFi on that chain would evaporate instantly and no one would use it. The fact that almost no-one talks about this is pretty scary. ^1 Only Bitcoin is actually sufficiently decentralised to withstand large take-over attempts and politics, IMO. ^2 Ethereum hard forks every 6 months by design, by the way
  • GDC7 5y ago
    The only real decentralisation is the one constituted of 8 billion brains and 8 billions bodies which are all roughly the the same size and strength All the other types of decentralisation are marketed to you by early adopters who want you to pump their coin in order for their asset to increase in price They are ironically using the concept of decentralisation to centralise wealth and power in their hands Of course even if with their dishonest intent they can never quite beat the real decentralisation provided by nature which makes it so that even the most powerful “human” ever (Jesus Christ) only has an extremely limited amount of power over the totality of humanity. Matter of fact “he” only gets to be the spokesman of otherwise already popular concepts such as compassion , love and the reward for those who practice them
  • splintercell 5y ago
    > Only Bitcoin is actually sufficiently decentralised to withstand large take-over attempts and politics, IMO. This is just a meme. If large blockers in the blocksize wars had won, the statement would still be true. Today, you cannot go against Blockstream's capture of bitcoin's IP (whatever happens will happen with the direction of /r/bitcoin, bitcointalk, @bitcoin, bitcoin.org, and bitcoin github owners). With complete censorship both bitcoin subreddit and bitcointalk site stopped and advocacy of increase in blocksize. I hardly consider this as 'defending a take-over attempts', but if you think that was a fair action then sure bitcoin is 'decentralized' enoguh to withstand take-over attempts and politics, whatever.
• senko 5y ago
  > Arguably the real innovation of the blockchain seems to me to be at least as cultural as it is technical, in its spooky ability to gather and organize a group of incredibly motivated people and continuously reward them for spreading the gospel of the blockchain. So, it's a religion.
• city17 5y ago
  Whenever I read about Web3 I always get the idea the feeling it's an entirely self-interested idea or movement, and there is nothing idealistic about it. Instead of control being with a single corporation, control will be with an exclusive limited group of founders who got in cheap, and to which access is sold at a significant premium. It pretends to democratize things, but rather moves from a monopoly to an oligarchy, which works great for the 'in' group but not necessarily for those outside it.
• gandutraveler 5y ago
  Web2 adoption was organic, driven by programmers and it definitely made the end user experience much better. With web3 we are jumping ahead of what it will be before even there has been consensus on it. For now it's an idea with possibilities. What is worse is VC's, hustlers, influencers (Gary Vee etc),Elite crypto tribes(polka) are selling the 'product' that doesn't exist yet. I say let it organically evolve and not prematurely bring in the marketers to sell it.
• Smithalicious 5y ago
  As with a lot of cryptocurrency stuff, web3 is very overhyped yet also genuinely promising and useful. The ecosystem is not yet at a point where it's streamlined enough for mainstream adoption, but it's possible to build working MVPs for very interesting services with privacy and decentralization guarantees that just weren't feasible pre-web3. Of course that does come at some cost and from a pure surface user experience level a lot of these services do still feel like "existing things but worse". It takes a while for these kinds of structural changes to catch up in some ways, though there's already plenty of web3 services that are genuinely useful in their own right, too. Disclaimer: I get paid to develop web3 applications and I like my job
  • gjulianm 5y ago
    > but it's possible to build working MVPs for very interesting services with privacy and decentralization guarantees that just weren't feasible pre-web3. Do you have any examples? Because up to this point most web3 projects I've seen fall in one of two categories: "you could do this before" and/or "nobody actually wants this".
    • brightstep 5y ago
      Don't forget "solves problem with blockchain that enables one of the first two"
• bsenftner 5y ago
  Yes it is bullshit. Any of you positive activists have any financial literacy? I've not met a single person who is positive about cryptocurrencies that also has a finance degree, that is not also a conman selling crap securities. Every respectable financially knowledgeable person I know calls them a fraud.
  • diveanon 5y ago
    This is laughably false and easily disproved by even a cursory search of who is putting time and money into this space.
    • bsenftner 5y ago
      Do more than a cursory search and you'll find questionable ethical backgrounds and questionable ethics in their employers for every finance industry pro-cryptocurrency advocate. They are grifters, operating a scale.
      • diveanon 5y ago
        This is a stupid generalization and straw man. If this is your argument then just stick to your 401k and fuck off.
• neiman 5y ago
  I dedicated the last 3 years of my life to build "web3". In my case it means building a new democratic Internet (whatever that means) on top of ENS+IPFS. I a few projects in this direction, the current one is Esteroids. Is this a good idea? dunno yet. Is this BS? I hope not, my intentions are surely good, no BS in them. Are there plenty of BS web3 projects? Yes, of course, same as in any other area of IT. But I really don't think the web3 idea is inherently BS, there's really plenty of value to be found in it.
• timdaub 5y ago
  Is an article that starts with an Elon Musk tweet quote bullshit?
• seba_dos1 5y ago
  I'm surprised there's so many comments here. My usual reaction to anything "Web 3.0" is usually "nothing to see here, move along".
  • booleandilemma 5y ago
    I think it’s reached a critical point where everyone feels they need to have an opinion on it.
• pmlnr 5y ago
  > Is Web3 Bullshit? Yes.
• sixQuarks 5y ago
  Note to people reading these comments: HN Is notoriously anti-bitcoin and crypto. It was within hacker news discussions that I first heard about bitcoin, back when it was trading for less than one dollar. I did not buy bitcoin because I figured the hacker news crowd was very intelligent and knew a scam when they saw one. Just Keep this in mind when reading these comments make sure you take them with a grain of salt.
  • oleks 5y ago
    Just because you can earn money on something, does not make it good.
    • mccorrinall 5y ago
      I think that bitcoin is actually a good solution to the double spending problem in decentralized currencies.
      • pas 5y ago
        Um, what double spending problem? Do you mean the problem that the US has with cashing paper checks?
        • mccorrinall 5y ago
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-spending https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-spending
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • jazzyjackson 5y ago
    hey you could have lost a lot of money if you tried to cut losses when it crashed to a quarter every dollar made in bitcoin is someone else’s dollar lost, it’s a casino, nothing more
  • pas 5y ago
• kennu 5y ago
  "First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you." Recently it feels like the general sentiment toward Web3 has been moving from the ridicule phase to the attack phase. Then finally comes the acceptance. In my view, the entire Web3 movement (not just the speculative virtual currencies and NFTs) is so big and covers so many new areas that it's here to stay forever. It's going to fundamentally change the way that people work together all around the world. In the coming decades there will be huge inventions around Web3 that we have no way to predict yet.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• bikamonki 5y ago
  Let's agree on a definition first: web 3.0 is using blockchain tech to replace current server-side computing (static file hosting, functions/processing, databases, etc) and online centralized services (payments, identity, etc). So, is it bs? No, it is not. If you are a developer, you can go now and build a dapp (a web3 application or distributed app). So far so good, but: A simple dapp will cost cents to host/run (even better: will cost only once!) but, can it scale? How easy/cheap would be to run a big, very big, social net? An online store such as Amazon? Uber? No "password-reset" mechanism. That just sucks. Keeping the current web safe for your uncle is a pain, yes, that uncle that clicks on every link sent from the rich African prince. Imagine keeping it safe once you help him install a chrome-ext crypto wallet so he can login and consume content from a dapp social net? It is not really decentralized: you public facing dapp cannot be directly served from the nodes of a blockchain, you need a gateway, that is a centralized web server (good luck making SSL work for your registered domain!). It would take many years for businesses to migrate/adopt web 3.0 standards. We are barely finishing moving tech to "online versions" from traditional client-server apps. Miners are businesses, running nodes costs money, they ought to make more of what they spend otherwise they will just disconnect the node. Your data/code may be distributed but its persistence/availability depends on the economic success of whatever project you choose to trust. Early adopters of web 2.0 server-less apps experienced this first hand when they had to port their projects from Parse to something else when FB bought it and shut it down. Professional miners are needed. You are not going to build your banking dapp on the spare capacities of our laptop's hard drives and CPUs, or are you? Might as well trust the engineers at Google or AWS who have it already figured out and are charging reasonably for it, no? In sum: web 3.0 tech is here, it is interesting, but it is not a hammer for every nail.
  • leifg 5y ago
    How does the nail for the web3 hammer look like? Because every use case I heard so far can already be solved more efficiently without blockchains.
• john37386 5y ago
  Maybe web3 is not only about crypto bs. It's probably more about accountability and repudiation. To remove the control to central corporations like the FANG. To stop spreading hate speech and encourage to destroy the planet. I really hate the web 2.0 personally and I stay far away from it. I'm not trying to convince anyone to follow my path, but I'm hoping that the true meaning of Internet will shine soon. Maybe the 3.0 is the way to go and in my opinion it cannot be worst than 2.0.
• mupuff1234 5y ago
  Not quite sure what web3 stands for, but seems like decentralization is suppose to be a big part of it. But I think all the proponents of stronger algorithmic decentralization ignore the fact that the web doesn't quite live in a vacuum, and "real world" power will mostly like be translated into virtual/web power as well, and the decentralization will just make it less transparent, and with even less accountability.
• mov 5y ago
  I would like to see more discussion around P2P solutions like https://dat-ecosystem.org/ https://dat-ecosystem.org/ and the fundamental principles around distributed networks/economies. I really like the idea of being able to "git clone" your data/website into your own local browser and just make it's own webserver. For most of content we generate, that would probably be enough. I don't see the point of trying to place everything in a blockchain. I understand the power (and need) to decentralization though. And I'm not sure just one tech/coin/protocol/chain will be enough, but maybe if we pack: - a P2P browser, with a wallet for authentication+payment (abstracting money away together with authentication is a near idea) - a versioned content manager that make it easy to pull/push from/to peers - ways to P2P nodes to sign their own content and give permission or not to peers to read/write, so we can trace ownership through version logs - a way to run serverless functions to share computational power, but only for complex tasks like ML training, rendering, etc - a way to automatically (and collectively) parse in-browser data to add annotations (bringing semantics to random data, or labels to ML datasets) - automate renderers of such data to create (and host) 2D websites, data visualizations, or 3D content (you can call it your own miniverse) Or what I just described is the Web we're already building, we just need more hands on deck to actually build it instead of wasting our time with bs.
  • JofArnold 5y ago
    I wish more people said this: P2P is discussed far less than it should be, in my opinion. Blockchains have their uses - some of which I think offer real value - but from both a utility and ideological standpoint, if many people in "web3" truly stood by their principles they would be working on these kinds of technologies first. (For context, for my small part I'm attempting to build P2P zk rollups to allow users to prove to each other the correctness of their off-chain work)
    • detaro 5y ago
      The "current" use of web3 kind of started like that (at least my impression), it's only somewhat recently that the big noise about it comes from the blockchain corner. Which is kind of annoying, because it drowns out the rest.
• shoulderfake 5y ago
  Anytime I see a crypto post, I open the comments to see what the HN masses have upvoted this time as the top crypto bashing / skeptic comment. This one doesn't miss the mark either.
• biggestlou 5y ago
  Yes
• almost 5y ago
  The absolute best argument I’ve seen so far against “web3” is this very pro-web3 and very clear article. https://www.preethikasireddy.com/post/the-architecture-of-a-web-3-0-application https://www.preethikasireddy.com/post/the-architecture-of-a-... Read that, and make sure you understand the basics of what Ethereum, IPFS and maybe a few more technologies from the article etc actually are, then think about if that sounds like sensible thing to do. If you can still take it seriously afterwards then I’m impressed!
  • woodruffw 5y ago
    It astonishes (and saddens) me that someone could design the architecture diagram at the bottom of that article and genuinely believe that what they’ve described is an improvement to the status quo. The number of middlemen alone is farcical.
• oytis 5y ago
  I think many comments are either missing the point or just use it the article as an excuse to talk about something else. The key point is that today everything is seen as a kind of speculation, and in order to have a decent life (provide for a family, and have a secure place to live, including in the old age) one has to be good at it. It is one of the central problems of our society, and whatever is called web3.0 seems to only make it worse. As someone who is extremely unenthusiastic about being bearish, bullish and anything around stock markets I can understand author's sentiment very well
• Incerto 5y ago
  I remember people saying WEB 2.0 / AJAX was bullshit too. It's easy to lampoon the buzzwords / early failures of a new paradigm. People will be tinkering to learn new ways to working. Personally I believe Web3 has a huge future.
  • diveanon 5y ago
    Most of these people will be working on and investing in web3 backed projects within 5 years. There is a lot of effort being made to discredit web3 because existing players are aware that it means a loss of control.
• adenozine 5y ago
  I think a lot of web3 products thus far are bullshit, but I can't deny the sort of eventual absolution of re-federating the internet. Things can't continue to FAANG forever. The ever-marching disappearance of offline-only humans also points towards a higher standard of understanding for the average internet user. Someday everybody might run their cloud or at least be involved in a direct way somehow
  • brightstep 5y ago
    A new technology will not kill FAANG. What supports them is not "web2", it is a social and political structure. To defeat them requires working in, or around, those structures.
• k__ 5y ago
  I think, web3 has potential. Is it full with grifters? Sure, but I wouldn't call the stuff that happened in the last 20 years on the internet as sound, even if it was often law abiding. Web3 is full of ponzi schemes and, at least to me, the rich people web2 "created" tell there is something wrong too. Decentralization is an opportunity, and I know this doesn't require blockchains, but I had the impression that OSS, and software in general, lacked in terms of "payment on the protocol level". So, I think, this could lead to a new, better, era, for the internet. If we take the right steps.
  • jrochkind1 5y ago
    I keep wondering where all those millions invested in NFTs (fairly insanely, it seems to me) are actually coming from, and one plausible potential answer is "all those rich people web2 'created'" who now have more money than they know what to do with. I don't think they are somehow separate things in that or other ways, as if "web3" is like some new counter-power to "web2".
    • k__ 5y ago
      Yes. I think so too. In the best case it will be some kind of redistribution of value.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• JohnFen 5y ago
  "web3" certainly looks like BS to me. Or, at least, it's just a buzzword lacking any real meaning. But perhaps I simply don't understand it sufficiently. No matter how many explanations or advocacy pieces I've read about bringing the blockchain to the web, I don't see what the actual value of doing that is. The cost/benefit ratio of it seems incredibly unfavorable.
• jrochkind1 5y ago
  I think this is a pretty astute analysis/taxonomy of analysis. I'm interested in read/study more about: "the broad political-economic or cultural questions: who is participating in, sponsoring, and getting rich off of web3 technologies? What is the particular political or economic dynamic that makes the blockchain attractive? Given this, what will it be used for?", or "the culture, values, and especially the backers of the web3 world." These are all things to be investigated that don't have a "yes" or "no" answer, but are instead "what's going on and what might it mean.". The only thing I found myself taking issues with is the author's confidence that the technical issues ("Can the blockchain do anything that other currently existing technology cannot do and/or do anything better or more efficiently than other currently existing technology?") are "difficult to definitively resolve to everyone's satisfaction" but the second category "Will the blockchain form the architecture of the internet of the future" has a simple yes or no answer that will somehow be definitively resolvable. My own thinking-as-an-engineer reaches the opposite conclusion -- the first category are relatively simple technical answers which can be be evaluated on technical merit, while the second category is future-prediction, political dispute, and narrative choice, and that's what's difficult to "resolve to anyone's satisfaction" with a consensus determination somehow. Probably both categories are actually a mixture of both. But what's going on right now is more knowable than predictions of future paradigm shifts, either way. That's actually the main thing I take from OP, let's lessen my interest in arguing about predicting the future, and increase it into looking into "what the hell is going on right now anyway". (Like what are the social and cultural and political factors in the current rise of blockchain interest, and who does it benefit?)
  • PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > I'm interested in read/study more about: "the broad political-economic or cultural questions: who is participating in, sponsoring, and getting rich off of web3 technologies? This is the key question that gets overlooked in these discussions. Web3 is a vague term, but it’s difficult to get straight answers about who’s using Web3 technologies because most of the Web3 narrative refers to hypothetical future technologies. But even though these hypothetical future Web3 products don’t exist yet or aren’t actually useful in their current form, there are numerous ways to buy their tokens in preparation for their imagined future usefulness. More specifically: These projects will sell you arbitrary tokens now that supposedly will become more valuable in the future when other future people actually want to use the service. As an early adopter, you will be well positioned to sell your tokens to them at a huge markup! The obvious question is: Why does every new service need a new, unique token to pay for it? Why must these products built on chains like Ethereum go out of their way to not use Ethereum as their payment method? The reason is that they can’t generate huge speculative profits unless they introduce arbitrary new tokens, so of course they must play the new token game. But now the profit comes not from building an actual usable service, but from selling tokens for hypothetical future services. In fact, even the developers understand this and will often jump from one new project to the next, capitalizing on token speculation instead of actually finishing anything because that’s where the money is. If any of the web3 projects want to be taken seriously, they need to stop introducing new arbitrary tokens and just use the existing infrastructure and coins. Build an actual service, not a new currency with a grand idea of a future Web3 service attached to it.
• alexjplant 5y ago
  As I recall the original conception of the web was such that it was inherently browsable _and_ editable (the first web browser was also a WYSIWYG editor). After people forgot about this and subsequently rediscovered an easier form of publishing user-generated content via web apps (PHP) "Web 2.0" took off. Ever since then I've used "Web 3.0" as a casual tongue-in-cheek reference to emerging web technologies and concepts; I never thought I'd see it seriously applied to technologies like blockchain and asymmetric key cryptography.
• archibaldJ 5y ago
  Web3 makes great sense when energy is abundant [1] and we're more concerned with the "ownership problem" and who should become wealthy and who not and its socio-economic (and political) justifcation, which was largely what we had occupied ourselves in the past 100 years, but in a different lingo: eg communism/socialism vs capitalism. [1]: when we reach Type 1 as a civilization with eg large-scale application of fusion power. (According to mass–energy equivalence, Type I implies the conversion of about 2 kg of matter to energy per second https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#Type_I_civilization_methods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#Type_I_civiliz... ) It'll never be a perfect system. But overall we shouldn't under-estimate the impacts of the wealth transfer [2] created by BTC, ETH, etc, to the hands of young and tech-believed optimists. And what this means from an evolutionary consumer-market perspective and how cultures are being shaped very differently (in US, EU, China, etc). (I’m in Hangzhou now and it's quite surreal to hear random people chatting about NFT in a cafe here despite CCP's ban of cryptos.) [2] There were ponzi schemes for sure. But there are (a larger number of) honest people that became wealthy simply because they bought some BTC at $10 and are holding to this day too.
  • ctvo 5y ago
    > It'll never be a perfect system. But overall we shouldn't under-estimate the impacts of the wealth transfer [2] created by BTC, ETH, etc, to the hands of young and tech-believed optimists. The wealth transfer is through ponzi schemes, shit coin pumping, and luck. There's no new merit here--instead of lucking out and making a fortune because you majored in finance, you lucked out and majored / are interested in computer science at an opportune time and place. The systemic issues still exist, and the same class of people are still benefiting. Framing this as the money is going to tech bros instead of finance bros, like that was a quality we wanted in the system, is hilarious. Please recognize your own bias. (Not you directly, but the people who are justifying this after the fact)
• lkrubner 5y ago
  For awhile I insisted that all cryptocurrencies were bullshit and also Ponzi schemes, but given how many people take pleasure in buying them, selling them, and talking about them, I've come round to viewing them as a kind of in-game currency, with the game being a bit like those role-playing games that you play in your neighborhood while interacting with the real world. Anyone who grew up playing some variation of Assassin, especially the multi-day assassin games where you and your friends were still playing even when you went to school, and occasionally you had to tell teachers "I don't want to run this message to the main office because I think my friend Jim has a plan to get me if I go there." Much laughter. Cryptocurrencies are starting to feel like that, a massive game that people take pleasure in. Nothing wrong with that. I've enjoyed real-world role-playing games, so I don't want to judge anyone else who is into such things. Is it crazy to make a game currency your main form of investment? Maybe, but not automatically. You should, of course, invest in a diversified portfolio, but if you want to go long on this particular kind of game, it might pay off huge in the end. I recall when I was a child me and my friends played Dungeons and Dragons -- long running campaigns that went on for years. One of the parents of my friends was upset by this and said it wasn't really a game because it didn't end and nobody could be declared a winner. I'm afraid my initial reaction to cryptocurrencies was similar, not seeing it as a game and rejecting it as not being real. Of course, a big difference is that we insisted Dungeons and Dragons was a game, whereas the proponents of cryptocurrencies continue to insist that this is not a game. Some make some variation of the argument "there is so much money in this, it's too big to be a game" but that's an incorrect understanding of a game. There is a lot of money in esports, but we are still talking about games. I've come round to accepting that cryptocurrencies are here to stay. I no longer consider them Ponzi schemes, I do regard them as a kind of play activity, one that deliberately tries to blue the line between play and non-play. To the extent that they enable certain kinds of criminal activity, they become real and can be used in non-play contexts. But mostly, this is a kind of play that some people find pleasure in, and there is no point in berating them for it.
  • paulryanrogers 5y ago
    The ratio of crime to harmless fun does concern me. For example if Monero is 90% ransomware and violent gangs and only 10% innocent gambling then I'd rather not use it.
• feldrim 5y ago
  Yes.
• mihamaker 5y ago
  Web3 or what is meant by it is just a database in the form of a blockchain. Nothing else. And to interact with this database, you still need a centralized server. This is the main problem, having solved which, I believe, we could reach a new level. If browsers could communicate directly with the blockchain, bypassing centralized servers, this would take the technology to a new level.
• rufius 5y ago
  Yes.
• cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  If I had a fraction of a bitcoin for every recruiter who has contacted me in the last two months with a breathless crypto startup job posting with boatloads of seed capital, I'd be "rich." If the tech industry bubble pops in the near future, it will be because of crypto. (EDIT: As a sidenote, it is interesting that when I filed my taxes for 2020 revenue Canada had added a question about cryptocurrency assets.)
• goodcharles 5y ago
  Yes. Metaverse also. The phrase "social media" has become passé and even toxic. The language around BTC & Crypto have political & other baggage. Web3 is an attempt to re-package the past 10-15 years of web trends in a hip new label that leaves behind the baggage and allows for the appearance of "new stuff happening". But nothing much new is happening.
• intrasight 5y ago
  > Something that has frustrated me so far about the debate over web3 is the extent to which it's articulated in the latter terms — those of a prediction market > ... all discourse is subconsciously understood to be people taking speculative positions on various topics > ... can I at least just get slowly tanked on free booze and annoy people with a reminder that the house always wins? So clearly the author thinks that "Web3" is just a rebranding of crypto. I didn't see anywhere in the article an explanation of Web3 or any examples. Let me premise my take by saying that I am not a crypto zealot. If I hear a financial/investing podcast talk about crypto, I will fast forward. I think the vast majority of investors should steer clear. What about Web3? Let me tell you my story of independently "discovering" the concept now being called Web3 - as I'm sure thousands of others have done in the last few years. In July I was out on my walk and an idea popped into my head. It was interesting enough that I took out my phone and recorded as I thought it though out loud. Here it is in a nutshell: Distributed smart contracts can empower information consumers. And here's the specific form that my idea took, and why, when I got home from my walk, I bought some ETH, having never owned any cryptocurrency before. My screens are going to be "Web3 clients". This client will have a new feature that my current TV does not. It will have available an overlay like Amazon X-ray. It will display info about what is on my screen, and most importantly a "truth meter". While I couldn't work out the details of how this would work, I did decide that a) it's a feature that I think will arrive, and b) Ethereum is likely to play a role. Here's another idea: Discuss Web3 without even mentioning cryptocurrencies. Instead, just give your idea as I did, and explain how blockchain smart contracts will play a role in the implementation, and perhaps at the very end of presenting your idea, mention that it may be considered a form of Web3.
  • SahAssar 5y ago
    > Let me tell you my story of independently "discovering" the concept now being called Web3 Alright, listening... > It will display info about what is on my screen, and most importantly a "truth meter". While I couldn't work out the details of how this would work You are describing dislikes, reviews, stars and similar systems. They exist. They are pretty universally considered bad and when they are not it is not because magic decentralization. I'd also ask why/how a universal "truth meter" would work. Saying "I couldn't work out the details of how this would work" makes this sorta like someone saying "Imagine if we had infinite power, wouldn't that be nice?" or "What if people could just get along?". > Discuss Web3 without even mentioning cryptocurrencies I'd love to! But the Magic Internet Money cryptocurrency people seem to have decided it must involve cryptocurrencies so the term is tainted. I consider web3 a term similar to php6 or ipv5. Something that was but also wasn't, isn't rescuable as a term since it implies something that never actually was.
• p2p_astroturf 5y ago
  well the article is certainly bullshit. but someone there wrote a useful and accurate comment: > people who claim to be working on web3 and crypto desperately try to fit their technology to user problems. none of them seems to be working on the fundamental issues or the foundation needed to solve the existing problems. > Most of them are half baked product/ marketing guys > pretty much they create glittering websites and post tweets threads like "here is why web3 is a big thing" and nothing else they do web3 can be proven bullshit the moment you realize all the implementations require web browsers instead of coming up with a solid foundation. this has caused major issues in ethereum (such as realizing their shit is completely broken and replacing it with metamask which is still bullshit). this on top of the fact that it's all MVP half working crap. almost all cryptocoin applications (and basically 100% of things titled "web3") require a web browser, which means you are trusting google/mozilla with all your money, on the web which is the most insecure, error-prone possible way to develop an application. even from a layman perspective it's crap. you get something competing to be a standard web app, with all the same bugs and slowness, instead of a properly developed "native" GUI. example: last time i tried to do something with metamask (a browser plugin), it didn't work on firefox. oh yeah, this was a top 10 (i.e, multi billion dollar market cap) cryptocoin's main use case which requires you to run code from a webpage on the internet that interfaces with metamask and you have to trust both of course as well as CA infra which is the opposite of decentralized. so i went with chrome. it tries to be a popup menu you're meant to just open and click one button in and close. if you open another window (like a text editor), it closes and you have to reopen it. so when i tried to open it to do some stuff and cross reference some number, i had to repeatedly: reopen metamask and press a bunch of buttons to bring me back to the same screen within metamask. let's also look at the standard web3 "onboarding" user experience: - they assume you're a giant moron (and are correct) - they make you setup a password to encrypt your private key and not tell you this will be used as an encryption key (do they really believe I as a giant moron will come up with a password with sufficient entropy to be used as an encryption key for the 5th application today that asked me to make a password?) - next, they display the seed used to generate your password in the form of 20 or so words and ask you to write it down - next, they force you to input the words to "prove" you wrote it down, typically with some hack to disable copy/paste - at this point you may have lasers and spaceships flying around your screen as well as animated 3D polygons, to emphasize how cool it is to go through this step (and lessen the chance the user understands what is going on) - they do not provide an option to skip any of the above (typically, you may need to go read undocumented internal API) let's look at web3.js - it's terribly documented - it's js - a language that does not support numbers - go-ethereum ships with a version that is several years old, i don't remember the numbers, but it's on an order of magnitude like 0.4.0 vs 2.3.4 - in go-ethereum, there is no real way to find documentation for the web3 JS APIs you can use from its shell. but that's fine since the web3 JS API largely is an incoherent mess anyway - it's full of quirky shit (largely for the sake of snakeoil) like: every time you use a function in the "personal" namespace, like personal.listAccounts, it erases that line from your shell history - in fact, they dont want you to use the shell, they want you to be a mindless consumer and use premade web applications (hosted behind web pages "secured" by CAs) to do everything - i never used it outside go-ethereum, because why would i want to use js. may as well just use the node API at that point - all these are a multi billion dollar companies that could easily have allocated resources to these problems let's look at how web3 wallets work: - it's a web app in electron, that takes between 4 seconds (eternity) and several minutes to display the main GUI - on most coins, there is no official wallet. not CLI. not GUI. so it is indeed an electron app by a 3rd party - the text "undefined" is written everywhere - menus mysteriously fail to open on certain occasions - it has several hundred thousand lines of code to do animations like lasers flying around the screen, yet the program literally has no features aside from "transfer in" and "transfer out", and "recover from seed" - the code is written by a mix of teenaged script kiddies, dot com boomers, and silicon valley startup hipsters (actually this applies everywhere in blockchain stuff, not just GUI wallets) - they do not tell you how you are synchronizing to coin #35. is it using an internal server owned by the wallet vendor? is it doing light sync? - they do not provide you with an option of *how* to connect to the coin's network, it "just works" tl;dr web3 is not real software
• ChicagoDave 5y ago
  Jury is out. I agree the speculative part of web3 is pointless. What I love? Young entrepreneurs diving head first into an opaque technology stack looking to build something good.
• booleandilemma 5y ago
  I don’t like how web3 supporters divide sentiment towards web3 into “you’re either a cool crypto-aware person or just a normie loser”. It comes off as a pressure tactic, like they’re trying desperately to sell something. This is a tactic used by charlatans, not by engineers.
• beirut_bootleg 5y ago
  Gonna save you a click. The answer is yes.
• Oddskar 5y ago
  I don't think we need to make this longer than it should: Yes. It's bullshit.
• nazgulnarsil 5y ago
  The crypto ecosystem does have a killer app. Just not one people are eager to talk about. The vast majority who know about it are making money off it. It is a subsidized casino. Casinos are wildly popular even though they take 5% of the betting flow. How popular would a casino that on average pays out 5% be? Where is the 5% coming from? Three sources: money launderers, scammers (tether etc), and longer term speculators, in order of size. Money laundering traditionally takes something like a 30% haircut. Taking only a 5% haircut in crypto is a massive improvement and thus we should expect to see a substantial fraction of all the world's money laundering to move on chain. The other two are self explanatory.