86 ms·

Web3? I have my DAOts

417 points by jaypinho 5y ago

shsbdncudx 5y ago
Whenever I hear “web3 will never be …”, it usually already is.
jaypinho 5y ago
Spent weeks investigating the mania around web3 and regret to say it does not live up to the hype.
- theplumber 5y ago
  I think it depends much of expectations. It actually exceeded my expectations. I recently built a small and useless program in solidity and deployed it within few hours. It's definitely better than what we had available years ago (i.e. on bitcoin platform) and I see a future for it. I think it has chances to survive in this age of censorship and surveillance. Something that really surprised me was the signing/metamask integration(a kind of webauthn). I would definitely use that to login into various websites instead of the invasive facebook/google login plugins we see all over the web. There is even something akin to oauth2 but without the requirement to have "developer keys".
  - justicezyx 5y ago
    Don't you need to pay someone to deploy the program?
    - lukeramsden 5y ago
      On the testnet you can get free ETH to deploy contract(s).
      - TigeriusKirk 5y ago
        Or run your own private chain/node for trying things out. Recently I've been working at converting an existing web business to web3 (at least my interpretation of web3), with the goal of making it all decentralized. My impression at this point is that it's mostly possible but not all that practical. It might make more sense if I reimagine what the business is, which is part of my exploration here.
    - theplumber 5y ago
      ETH is expensive but there are other "cheaper" blockchains compatible with ETH whose "gas" price is negligible. You can also deploy for free on the "testnet"
      - UncleMeat 5y ago
        A major reason why those blockchains have lower fees is because speculators have not driven up their token price. Unless there is some fundamental reason why the fees will stay low, you've got a time bomb on your hands as soon as people decide that this blockchain is a major speculation vehicle.
        cqwrtiq 5y ago
        This is an interesting topic that I feel like doesn't get discussed often. Vitalik Buterin posted today about Ethereum's expensive gas fees and the reasoning for it. It boiled down to decentralization vs. more operations per block. Blockchains like Algorand and Solana have large block sizes, so they can keep fees low per block (which they both do a very good job of doing so far, although exactly how cheap they'd be with Ethereum's adoption numbers is still uncertain). Tezos has had more adoptions through NFTs and they've managed to keep transaction fees low as well (although arguably running a Tezos node now requires better hardware specs than it did a few years ago). The tradeoff is that beefy hardware is needed to run a node, which hurts decentralization, as the average participant without deep pockets can't compete. This is part of why Ethereum has high gas costs.
        jazzyjackson 5y ago
        It got discussed a lot - years ago - and is sometimes referred to as the "Block Size Wars" https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy
  - serverholic 5y ago
    "Sign-In with Ethereum" will be huge. I purposefully avoid "Sign-in with Google" because putting too much power in a centralized authority terrifies me. I'd much rather have the convenience of "Sign-In with X" but backed by something I have control over.
    - yepthatsreality 5y ago
      Like OpenID?
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - theplumber 5y ago
        OpenID is a closed system both to the end-user and the website owner based on secrets(`state` `code`, developer keys) from identity providers(google/facebook) not cryptography.
      - Uehreka 5y ago
        I’m a long time blockchain skeptic (check my comment history) but I recently came around on the SSO stuff and can vouch for it enough to say the magic words: it is in fact a novel thing that cannot be done without blockchain using pre-existing crypto or auth tech. The reason is: With private key auth alone, you don’t have identity, just a non-human readable public key, and no universally known exclusive association with a particular username. With OpenID or WebAuthn or any of that, you would still need a company or org to keep a centralized database of everyone’s credentials and user info. With Blockchain you don’t: As long as the Ethereum blockchain keeps going, your info (username: “johndoe.eth” public_key: “420abc” avatar: “some HTTP or IPFS url”) will stay stored. This is the exact precise thing blockchains are unusually good at doing, and given how much people these days are hating on big tech companies managing their identities and harvesting data in the process, “SSO with no company attached” seems like a thing people actually want. I’m still highly skeptical of art NFTs and crypto as currency and lots of other blockchain stuff, but in this one case they’ve won me over. This seems legit.
  - Uehreka 5y ago
    > I think it depends much of expectations. Agreed (and I agree that ENS and the SSO stuff looks interesting). The problem here is that the crypto community are the ones setting the high expectations.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- moneywoes 5y ago
  What did you find?
- vvpan 5y ago
  Now that's solid analysis right there.
carlosdp 5y ago
> The root node [under which all ENS domains are registered] is presently owned by a multisig contract, with keys held by trustworthy individuals in the Ethereum community. For what it's worth, this is changing as we speak. ENS recently had a very successful launch of a DAO [1] which will soon be in control of these contracts, therefore making it fully decentralized. It's also already impossible for anyone (not even the root holder, be it mult-sig or DAO) to revoke your ENS registration. Also, NBA Top Shot is a very cherry-picked example. I'm not even sure I'd classify those as NFTs right now, given they are completely separated from the broader ecosystem and not yet interoperable at all. [1] https://ens.mirror.xyz/5cGl-Y37aTxtokdWk21qlULmE1aSM_NuX9fstbOPoWU https://ens.mirror.xyz/5cGl-Y37aTxtokdWk21qlULmE1aSM_NuX9fst...
- TigeriusKirk 5y ago
  I have some Top Shot moments, and I don't think of them as NFTs at all. As long as it's locked down on one platform, to me it's not an NFT. The get rich hype seems to be at an ebb with them right now, so I can just play around and collect. It's fun, but it's not an NFT. So far it's a case where I don't think the blockchain is adding any value whatsoever. Blockchain is just a poor fit if you're going to keep it locked down to one administrator.
TrackerFF 5y ago
RE: Censorship You often see advocates of decentralization hail networks for being pro-immutability, battling censorship. How does it deal with data you absolutely do _NOT_ want to be shared and propagated around? I'm talking about things like CP, terrorist media, fake news, scams/frauds, and what not.
- etaioinshrdlu 5y ago
  Crypto proponents are in favor of there being no technical restrictions that prevent such content being posted. An interesting possibility is that illegal content gets permanently inserted into a blockchain, which could make running, for example, an ethereum node very illegal.
  - api 5y ago
    > An interesting possibility is that illegal content gets permanently inserted into a blockchain, which could make running, for example, an ethereum node very illegal. I've heard this called a "pee in the pool attack." Block chains like Ethereum and Bitcoin have one intrinsic defense: they don't support very large data objects. So that makes inserting CP problematic. But someone determined enough and willing to spend money could insert a really horrible image as a series of transactions.
    - thebean11 5y ago
      At that point you'd need additional data (which transactions) and software in order to stitch things back together, at which point is it the (disjointed, seemingly random) data that's illegal, or the instruction set that allows you to assemble it into something illegal?
      - account-5 5y ago
        If it was the disjointed seemingly random data that was illegal I think that would make the number π illegal too.
stolenmerch 5y ago
I really don't think that Mona Lisa example is correct. Maybe I misunderstand NFTs, but wouldn't it be more like a printmaker who can make as many copies as desired, but the museum sells something like the Artist's Proof and documents the sale in an official newsletter that goes out to all members? Yes, everyone else has a print or a poster version, but only one buyer has the Artist's Proof and can prove its provenance. Not a perfect analogy, but closer in my opinion.
- Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
  NFTs don't necessarily represent ownership of the underlying asset. They're like minting a commemorative coin celebrating the asset, and only minting a single coin. The coin does not represent ownership of the asset. It's just...a coin. A token. Supposedly, the uniqueness gives it value, but if I decide to record a single fart, that fart is unique, but the uniqueness does not inherently create value. An NFT for the Mona Lisa caries no benefits or rights, other than saying "I own the NFT for the Mona Lisa". It's inherently worthless, with a supposed value being created from absolutely nothing. Anyone buying NFTs either doesn't know what they're actually paying for, or thinks they're going to be able to find a greater fool who will eventually be willing to pay more.
  - stolenmerch 5y ago
    Right, and that's why the physical art analogy breaks down. Was just trying to come up with a slightly better physical art analogy. Copies are possible, forgeries are possible, and provenance is a real challenge. However with NFTs it all takes an abusive amount of electricity.
    - jimkleiber 5y ago
      I like the idea of them being a commemorative coin. The analogy I've been using is that NFTs are like signatures. There may be a famous photo of Elvis that anyone can print, however, if someone had that photo printed and authentically signed by Elvis, it could be worth a lot more money, if people want to have the signature. If Elvis signed 500,000 of that same photo, the signature may not be worth much. Perhaps in the future if NFTs get some sort of legal backing and therefore more enforced property rights, maybe it'll be different, however I think the analogy works well for now. Thoughts?
daoismyname 5y ago
that Web2 VS Web3 schema pretty much summarize what's wrong with the new internet based on brand identities instead of technical merits. A brief rebuttal: - Twitter can censor any account or Tweet: yes, but Twitter is not the web, you can host your own tweets, even for free. - Web3 tweets are better because decentralized: translations -> your thought are going to be forever visible to everybody and not even the author will be able to remove them. Of course any of those new shiny web3 logs can fail and everything can disappear with them. - Payment services may decide to not allow payments: Web3 payments can do the same. There is nothing that forces me to accept a payment and if that was true, that would be a problem. I __do want__ to refuse payments from criminals and I do wanna know if someone is. - servers for gig economy may go down. web3 servers can go down as well, they are made of hardware and maintained by people too. If, for example, Uber can't keep their servers running despite their profits depend on them, imagine what would happen if Uber was running on someone else's node who DGAF if they lose money or not... Now imagine what would happen to me, a completely unknown anonymous individual, with no power. What happens if something goes wrong and "my income is affected"? Who is responsible? Who can I sue in case the SLA in the agreement haven't been guaranteed? Will "the decentralized network of 1000s of computers" reimburse me?
- chrisco255 5y ago
  If you create a "web3" website, it's up to you how decentralized you want that experience to be. You could have your content hosted on Filecoin, perform computation on ICP or Arweave, provide IPFS hashes to your users using open standards (HTML, JSON, Markdown, etc) with simple export functionality, open source code, ENS domain, etc. If you take payments on your site via crypto, I'm not sure what you mean by "not accepting payments from criminals", as this is not a service provided by Visa or MasterCard either. I have a feeling running a criminal background check on all your users might impact your conversion rate, but you are as free to do that in Web3 as in Web2. (What are you selling that you would need to be concerned with such things anyways? If I'm selling an honest product or service, I don't care who buys it.) There is no SLA. If you need an SLA you can create a hybrid site that both stores files in a central server and also backs them up to Filecoin or Arweave or Sia or Chia or whatever file network you like. But decentralization does tend to lend itself to resiliency, for example, Ethereum has 100% uptime over the past 6 years.
whoisjuan 5y ago
I think the problem with the current state of Web3 is that it really doesn't seem to solve meaningful, mainstream problems yet. Even the most widely accepted use case which is crypto-currency fails to break out of the theoretical value outlined in the different white papers. I own several crypto-currencies and there hasn't been a single moment in which I thought of buying something with a crypto-currency. I have crypto-currencies because I'm speculating in their asset class value, not necessarily because I'm betting on their utility. Now, I know that crypto coins are indeed used in real service/product transactions, but I think there's a difference between the present economical use of cryptos and its potential mainstream use where cryptos can effectively replace fiat currencies in super wide economic settings. I believe that Web3 would happen but I honestly can't see a clear trajectory for Cryptos, NFTs, DAOs etc to become effective instruments that can replace existing Web2 instruments. In fact the reason why everything in Web3 feels like BS right now is because everything in this space uses Web2 distribution. People promoting NFTs on Twitter feels a little bit like someone faxing you a webpage. Owning the rights to a random JPEG is something that feels too abstracted from the present Web2 mental model and value proposition.
- dannyw 5y ago
  I use crypto on a weekly basis, from renewing domains and web hosting, to accessing loans in 15 seconds without gatekeepers.
  - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
    what happens if you stop paying your loan?
- Uehreka 5y ago
  I said this in another comment on this post, but check out ENS. I’ve been a blockchain skeptic for a long time (and still am about art NFTs and most other things) but the idea of “SSO without a company attached” feels like something the mainstream public actually does want (think of all the negative public sentiment around big tech companies harvesting data and the grudging acceptance people have of their dependence on FB and Google for identity and easy sign-in). It’s also something that requires blockchain and can’t be done without a “decentralized consensus” about who owns what username (this is how you get around relying on a particular company). And ENS works now, it’s the kind of thing you could just go ahead and add to a web app you’re working on without having to wait for “the tech to arrive” or anything. Again, I’m still skeptical about most of this stuff, but this one thing seems like a pretty good and somewhat practical idea.
laurex 5y ago
There's a kool-aide concern here, which is: to play in the web3 world, you seem to need to have either a LOT of capital that is fine to lose or have access to this small community. The communities I've joined are indistinguishable from Twitch communities where there's a lot of bro high-fives and mutual appreciation for the riches being invented, not much concern for what the side effects might be. And because there's an advantage in staking, people who can afford to just leave money in these volatile currencies get richer. Not saying this is really any different than the world in general, but it seems like web3 advocates paint a picture of "disruption" that feels more like "entrenchment" from an economic vantage.
knownjorbist 5y ago
Aside from the usual litany of talking points from the last decade that everyone is well aware of, this person is missing the forest for the trees when discussing "composability". Nevermind that this seems to be starting from their priors and working backwards. Here's a much more level-headed(and detailed) analysis of what is interesting, and not-so-interesting, about "web3": https://www.psl.com/feed-posts/web3-engineer-take https://www.psl.com/feed-posts/web3-engineer-take
mattwilsonn888 5y ago
Commentators on crypto will simply have to get used to this - because it isn't an argument. > For that same reason, I think people can genuinely believe they're obsessed with web3 because of its inherent interestingness when in fact it’s because web3 has made them a lot of money very quickly. The nature of crypto-currencies means that you are free to invest in protocols you believe will make money - either by providing value or some other less rational reason for others to purchase. It seems like bloggers writing on the subject haven't yet conceded that being confused about this fact is not an argument for or against any protocol - a healthy review will ignore the fact so sensationally stated in many writings: "people shill their investments." Would I review a Ford Motor Vehicle by closely examining how the CEO or marketing team behave, boldly discovering they don't have an incentive to be completely honest, and then assuming they are lying? No. I would ignore all of that and evaluate the vehicle itself. Denouncing crypto-currencies or distributed-ledger technologies has always been the cool, contrarian thing to do on HackerNews (stay poor lmao) - and there is certainly plenty to criticize which is usually missed, because blog posts like this focus on the most surface level aspects of a topic. I'm sure plenty of people really want to learn about Web3, so imagine a curious, neutral reader's disappointment when they go to learn about what many present as a technological, general protocol through the lens of what licensed NFT's the NBA is shilling. Every valuable new movement is going to have grifters. New movements without value will have grifters. There is one good reason HackerNews doesn't have anything positive to say about crytpo, and that is that with endorsement comes advertisement and shills - I only hope this place learns to talk in generalities about technology, protocols and economics rather than only doing the opposite of what attracts grifters (which is useful).
- outside1234 5y ago
  This is the technobabble that just drives me insane about this space.
  - fnoof 5y ago
    I think with any weird new technology, fundamentally no knows if it’s going to work. People who can’t see or imagine use cases become sceptics. But others who piece together enough observations to tell themselves stories of why it will work become believers. But neither can explain why the tech will or won’t work, so we end up with technobabblers and angry sceptics.
recursive 5y ago
So what are we going to call actual web if this definition takes off? I'd hate to see another "crypto" happen.
mrisse 5y ago
I really enjoyed this article and appreciated the author's sober take. That said I'm a little more optimistic about Web3. While NFTs can be confusing, over-hyped, or even fraudulent it is clear that they give artists new power. The power to create a scarce resource, prove that they created it, and sell it for substantially more than they could could otherwise sell electronic collectibles. How much of this is due to hype and how much is due to the ability to record and validate the "deed" to the NFT on the blockchain? I think that's an open question that will be more clear over time. The author also understates the importance of DAOs and smart contracts imo. The real power of a DAOs or smart contracts is not in replacing financial instruments, but in replacing legal ones. I think in a short amount of time it will not be unusual to see wills executed via smart contracts.
- dustintrex 5y ago
  But how exactly do they "prove they created it"? The art itself is not stored in the blockchain, just a pointer to it (NFT), which means anybody can create that pointer. This is exactly the same fundamental oracle problem as that discussed in the article: trustlessness etc applies only within the sandbox, not to anything outside it.
  - sorum 5y ago
    If you want an endless supply of examples of these scams, just follow https://twitter.com/NFTtheft https://twitter.com/NFTtheft
  - mrisse 5y ago
    The author could share their public key. It's awkward today, but I suspect services will arise to make signing and verification of NFTs more user-friendly for artists and fans alike.
chpmrc 5y ago
> NFTs prove neither ownership nor uniqueness Except that's literally what they do, using a combination of digital signatures and timestamp. You can have a copy of the same NFT even on a different chain but the timestamp will be higher, therefore proving it's not the original. Plus the problem of referencing the content is solved by having all data on chain (likely on layer 2). Recurring problems in the world of art trade such as provenance, certification etc. are elegantly solved by NFTs. > someone copied and pasted this guy’s real-life artwork, created an NFT out of it Ironically that's exactly because the artwork was not (referenced) on chain. If that was the case any subsequent copy would not be recognized as the original because of the timestamp and wouldn't have nearly the same value. That's why a simple digital signature scheme based on something like Keybase wouldn't work. I understand and appreciate the author's skepticism but, IMHO, he did end up looking like David Letterman in that video.
- rideontime 5y ago
  > Ironically that's exactly because the artwork was not (referenced) on chain. If that was the case any subsequent copy would not be recognized as the original because of the timestamp and wouldn't have nearly the same value. So the solution is that every artist mints every piece they create before showing it to anybody else. All because somebody decided that a "blockchain" is now what determines who created a piece of art. How convenient for the crypto holders.
  - chpmrc 5y ago
    The same can very well happen in the real world. I see an artwork online, upload it to my portfolio and claim it's mine. There are then many ways one can prove they are the original author and minting an NFT is just an easier one (assuming the claim doesn't get invalidated off chain). Otherwise it's like dismissing NFTs and not minting your own but then getting upset someone did it on your behalf. You can't have it both ways.
    - rideontime 5y ago
      > You can't have it both ways. Sure I can. I created the art, I own the copyright to it. If I choose not to sell prints of a piece, that doesn't give others the right to do so. Why would NFTs be any different? And yes, somebody could copy my art and sell it on RedBubble. The difference is that nobody's claiming that a RedBubble shop is a definite proof of provenance. (But why not? "First RedBubble store" has the same level of credence as "first minted NFT," and it doesn't even require gas fees!)
dperfect 5y ago
I completely agree with the author. I've been reading a lot about the EVM, and while there's some interesting technology involved, it feels unlikely to be able to support any worthwhile applications outside of blockchain finance or moving $ around the world[0] (since the code can really only directly reference the blockchain itself). It's a bit like playing with a programming language in a sandbox that has (1) has no I/O functions[1], and (2) has enormous costs associated with even the most basic of computations. Ok, it's not like that; it is exactly that. Sure, you could build a crypto toy and convince some suckers to transfer some of their wealth to you, but calling it an app platform or the next evolution of the web is definitely a stretch. I sincerely wish that wasn't the case (I'd love to find an exception), but that's what I've come to conclude. [0] Don't get me wrong, there's tremendous value in being able to move money around the world without the blessing of governments and central banks! [1] Any interaction with entities outside the blockchain require oracles, and at that point, you might as well throw away the other benefits of being on a blockchain.
- p2p_astroturf 5y ago
  tell us something we didnt already know. you can solve the speed problem by using solana or literally any of the other 100 coins that claim to be fast, or eth2 in six months i am not even a person who is a fan of blockchains (since they are mostly poorly designed, unfounded, etc)
  - jonny_eh 5y ago
    > you can solve the speed problem by using solana or literally any of the other 100 coins that claim to be fast, or eth2 in six months I've been seeing this claim for years now. It's gotten quite old.
    - gfodor 5y ago
      Which claim? The meme that transaction throughput is inherently low in crypto is falsified via solana (as mentioned) or avalanche. Bitcoin will likely always be low TPS. Ethereum 2 maybe will eventually ship.
rgreen 5y ago
I'm disappointed the author glazed over flash loans since it's such a perfect example of something that did't exist previously. The things that "make you dizzy for free" are the things to pay attention to. In crypto I can borrow effectively limitless money _uncollateralized_ if I pay it back within an atomic transaction. Why is that interesting? It's because it's not something that was ever possible before and there's no telling what it will enable. The lowest hanging fruit is stuff like arbitrage where you can now effectively operate without capital constraints but there will assuredly be more interesting uses discovered. Even ignoring the specifics of flash loans, the ability to compose financial primitives into atomic transactions is new.
- diveanon 5y ago
  This is a great example. Flash loans, arb bots, fully autonomous companies interacting via smart contracts. Its really pretty fascinating.
Animats 5y ago
OK. The reason all this happening is that Bitcoin really did go to the moon. That's what powers all this speculation. If the price of Bitcoin had been stable for a decade, and it worked reliably, it would be a useful medium of exchange, but nobody would care. This is all about MAKE MONEY FAST. Bitcoin found some early use cases. Drugs first. Then getting money out of China. Money laundering. Tax evasion. Scams. Bitcoin is the scammers dream - remote, anonymous, irreversible transactions. Much less risk of the mark coming for the scammer with a baseball bat. Then China cracked down on cryptocurrency, shut down all the miners, and arrested a few hundred of them. Financial regulators in the more legit countries started regulating Bitcoin exchanges, so the operators couldn't just steal the money. Know Your Customer became a thing. In the US, the IRS, FinCen, the FBI, and the SEC all started paying attention to what was happening on blockchains. Cryptocurrency crime was no longer risk-free for the crooks. But by now, sheer momentum kept Bitcoin going up. That's a powerful force. It's not forever, though. Check out meme stocks a few years later. Remember, all this stuff is zero-sum. For every winner, there has to be a loser. That's what provides the engine behind "Web3", NFTs, DAOs, and whatnot. It's not the technology.
- gfodor 5y ago
  No, that is a necessary but insufficient condition to come up with Web3. Web3 also requires the concept put forward by Ethereum of having an instruction set one can pay to run on chain. That would have probably been thought up and deployed independently from Bitcoin's price action. But both probably were necessary to provide sufficient foundational momentum to building things like DeFi.
  - worik 5y ago
    It turns out to be a floored concept
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  that's how i felt about social networking. People posting their breakfast, ridiculous. Baby pictures, silly. Cat pictures, kids these days. Yet somehow the vanity/reality show is making billions 10 years later
moneywoes 5y ago
Can anyone highlight one viable application of Web3?
- syntheticcdo 5y ago
  TFA listed two killer apps: buying drugs over the internet, and extortion (ransomware). I'll throw in a third: funding terrorism.
vagabund 5y ago
It's disingenuous for the author to present instances where some level of trusted actors is required in the near-term to make a service operational as voiding any claim of decentralization; obviously, the centralization of a network exists on a spectrum and where it's present in Web3 tech it's almost invariably more limited in scope than the centralization of their Web2.0 counterparts. Likewise his claim that APIs represent the same sort of composability as intrinsically public smart contracts belies the extent to which companies limit the usage of their APIs, assuming they give access at all. And that true composability of Web3.0 should temper concerns about centralization: if ever powerful figures in a project breach some threshold of control tolerated by the community, the project can trivially be forked and their positions removed. Where trustlessness can't be hardcoded into the system it can be achieved through the alignment of incentives, and the result is services that are more beholden to their users than any that have come before them. As for real-world applications of this technology that couldn't be achieved prior, I'd point to Helium [1]. [1] https://www.helium.com/ https://www.helium.com/
- vvpan 5y ago
  Arguments about blockchain here on HN are frustrating. There are plenty of good examples of where it works very well but the mental gymnastic people go through to deny the obvious are incredible. The most basic to me is the Automatic Market Maker system. For example Uniswap is a system with only a few (relatively speaking) lines of a code at its core and a team of a couple of dozen. The system does billions of dollars worth of trades every day. If anybody can point out to me a broker that does similar volumes that would allow me to make million-dollar trades with a few lines of code with no possibility of censorship I will happily concede that web3 is a failure. Oh and BTW, love Helium, just started researching it a few days ago. As always all great projects are easy to dismiss until one can no longer do it. I think I'll get in line for a hotspot/miner.
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    > Mining HNT with Hotspots is done via radio technology, not expensive or wasteful GPUs. > Hotspots work together to form a new global wireless network and undertake ‘Proof-of-Coverage’. Okay that's actually quite clever. I've previously wondered why no one has tried a similar idea for wired networks, implementing "Proof of possession of IPv4 address". It may be possible for a nation state to take control of a large IP range for some short period of time, but I don't think it's plausible that even conspiring adversaries could control 51% of the internet for a week without anyone noticing.
Eric_WVGG 5y ago
“No one wants to sound like David Letterman.” eh? Bill Gates’s explanation of the Internet was idiotic. If he had explained penicillin like that any listener would decide it sounded like nonsense.
zagrebian 5y ago
> decentralized apps that run on the blockchain How do you install these apps?
Ambolia 5y ago
The technology is really there, the problem with crypto is that it ends up sucking all of its energy into pyramid schemes because people take part on it as if it were a new gold rush. I would be more interested if there was zero money to be made from web3. Aside from that, the problem of distributed social media is that it ends up looking like a spam folder or like a cesspool of the worst kind of perversities, but I think this should solvable with chains of trust, like you "whitelist" / "blacklist" your friends or people you trust, and maybe anybody who has been vetoed by your friends (could go 1 or 2 levels further)
apatters 5y ago
So Web3 is built on blockchains which are decentralized and decentralization confers benefits such as censorship resistance, downtime resistance etc. But blockchains require resources to operate. At great scale they will require great cost. What's to stop powerful actors from leveraging economies of scale and consolidating those resources, then ultimately using their control to manipulate the blockchains themselves? This is exactly what happened with web servers. The web was initially very decentralized, due to economies of scale it consolidated and is hosted mostly in a few large datacenters now. The owners of those datacenters are by necessity very close partners with the government du jour, and now manipulate the content they host.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
  The cost in blockchains usually comes from security garuntees, but there's a strong force of resisting centralization in many forms in the blockchain space, e.g. https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/12/06/endgame.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/12/06/endgame.html We'll see what the endgame actually is as time inexorably marches on
  - apatters 5y ago
    In that post Vitalik actually says he thinks there's a high chance block production will end up centralized. If it happens, what's to stop the government from going to the dominant block producers and forcing them to impose limits on the kind of data a block can store? Then dragging them to court or enacting some other form of political retribution if they fail to do so.
    - TarasBob 5y ago
      Read the whole post carefully. Your question is answered in it.
treelovinhippie 5y ago
Yup. If you joined crypto after 2017, there's a very high chance you're only in it for the money. Those people will of course lie to themselves about this.
heeebeeejeebees 5y ago
have fun staying poor
G3rn0ti 5y ago
Cryptos and Web3 are currently there where Web 1.0 was in the nineties. It was silly to order Pizza over the Internet like it was laughable listening to a baseball radio transmission over the internet instead using a … radio. LOL 20 years later everybody‘s ordering food over the internet while watching Netflix.
- lifeplusplus 5y ago
  This is a false statement.
- Jasper_ 5y ago
  It wasn't silly to order Pizza over the internet. In fact, it was maybe the first example of a web order form on the world wide web [0]. And this is after the existing 20-year widespread success of pizza delivery by phone. I don't know why so many people willfully ignore history here. [0] https://seclists.org/interesting-people/1994/Aug/57 https://seclists.org/interesting-people/1994/Aug/57
  - adnzzzzZ 5y ago
    This is like saying it wasn't silly to order pizza using bitcoin 10 years ago. Obviously you can find examples of people doing it and people praising them for it, but it was clearly not the general feeling of the public at the time, just like it isn't the general feeling of the public with cryptos now.
    - acdha 5y ago
      That doesn't match my memory — it was novelty at first but an awful lot of people very quickly figured out that it was nice to be able to order things online, where it's really easy to see what's available and thinking about what you want and saving the time delay of mailing catalog orders or waiting on hold. There was a generational divide, of course, but while a few old people made jokes by the mid-90s it was normal for non-tech people to talk about online ordering or stock trading. The difference is that online ordering was useful: it was easier, saved time, and businesses loved that it was cheaper, reduced errors, and avoided needing to pay people in phone banks to avoid busy signals. If you built things on the web, you had clients beating down your door from all kinds of businesses because they and their customers saw immediate benefits from adopting it. In contrast, that Bitcoin pizza buyer was going against the grain of a deflationary currency — they paid a processing fee to use a more difficult, slower process to order a pizza and the deflationary model means that they were taking a long-term loss versus holding it — and a decade later, the vast majority of people still have no benefit to using a cryptocurrency.
lngnmn2 5y ago
It seems that we degraded to the stage of theoretical technology (not to be confused with theoretical computer science) with pure abstract bullshit terminology and "models". The utter bullshit like in the last Friedman's Wolfram podcast (there is no multiple threads of time lmao). This reminds me of literally years of Chainlink (scam) abstract bullshit (no wonder the guy studied abstract philosophy). Musk was right with his cartoon tweet - this crap has no real demand. Web3 not needed.
freen 5y ago
That crypto currencies were useless for porn has essentially informed my entire perspective.
nathias 5y ago
Instead of reading all this garbage about why not to learn web3, just use this time and try to implement a smartcontract, so you at least know what's going on.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
streamofdigits 5y ago
There are two logical somersaults embedded with the crypto scene in its various mutations over the last decade that undermine the whole proposition irrespective of any other value system or vision. * That digital decentralization is somehow equivalent to the tightly coupled blockchain architecture. In fact, if people were empowered to run their own "nodes" in a display of increasingly scarce digital self-sovereignty, there are infinite possible ways to connect devices over http (or gopher or ftp any other protocol the future may spawn). NB: The web was born decentralized. Many of those ways will arguably be much more useful in solving real problems as they do not put artificial constraints on how information flow is organized. * That one can create artificial digital scarcity and put the genie of zero marginal cost back in the bottle. In fact already the very proliferation of thousand of cryptocurrency variants shows that digital scarcity could only ever be achieved by oppressive means. This is the very social malfunction purportedly (some) adherents of crypto are fighting against. Why are we still talking about a set of ideas that is so distorted and orthogonal to both the true nature of the digital medium and our needs? Blame it on the self-financing juggernaut of bitcoin that triggered every possible speculative instinct out there, whether a new generation of noise day-traders, widows or orphans or professional blood-suckers.
0x00000000dead 5y ago
An excellent explanation. Unable to participate
jagermo 5y ago
So, what I don't understand: Why would companys use it? For example "Twitter can censor any account or tweet" (its not censorship, but that is another can of worms). vs "Web3 tweets would be uncensorable". Why should Twitter give up control? Why would they want someone to use their platform to publish stuff they can't delete or hide (for example, a live-stream of someone shooting up a mosque)? Why would any of the big players get in bed with web3 content? they would be turned into a bitpipe?
- brightstep 5y ago
  This is the big question most "web3" proponents miss or ignore. They want a decentralized internet to combat the power of FAANG, governments, etc. But those powers will _never_ allow a technology to succeed if it meaningfully threatens their power.
OneTimePetes 5y ago
Crypto is what Roko's Basilisk would dream up, to acquire freedom of (financial) movement and calculation capacity, and independence of whatever entity grew it to push their agenda, thinking themselves beyond manipulation. To oppose our new overlord - that would be unwise. So all in on crypto, even though its financially bad advise.
ThomPete 5y ago
This essay sets up puritan standards that nothing in this world can live up to. The only relevant question to ask yourself is whether this solves something and whether that something is worth solving. So if you think thats skins bought in games by kid gamers is better of by being owned by the gaming company than the gamer who bought it. If you think that governments printing money at will to solve problems they created is better than having more deflatory assets available for normal citizens who cant afford a house. If you think the current cobol and pre internet protocol based banking system is better than a more flexible system allowing for solutions which were impossible before. If you think that the digital world should be governed using physical world tools. If you think only accredited investors should be able to make high risk bets. Then by all means be against Web3. But this idea that only if perfect is it worth moving forward with web3 is an absurd standard only allowed by philosophers and other academics who dont actually move the world forward. And yes Web3 have its own set of problems, but they are much better problems to have than a world without Web3
misja111 5y ago
I can see the benefit of having a platform to run decentralised applications, as described in the article. And yes one could use smart contracts for that. But what I fail to see is why this would need blockchain. It just seems overhead for me for this particular use case. The only benefit I see is that mentoning 'blockchain' is guaranteed to get plenty of investor money for whatever distributed app you're building. But maybe I'm missing someting?
spoonjim 5y ago
Web3 is a really amazing grift that I feel very stupid to have missed out on.
spoonjim 5y ago
The only way any of this is ever meaningful is if it interacts with the non-Web3 world in a defined or enforced way. If there is an NFT that the US Copyright Office can enforce as being tied to the copyright of The Hunger Games, then that is definitely a valuable and tradable asset. Otherwise it's just one person telling another person that their Hunger Games DVD is super duper special.
wolframhempel 5y ago
I think that just like Web 1 and 2, Web 3 is sorta an evolving term. Web 2 meant at different times and for different people a) web with user generated content (as opposed to admin generated), b) websites with AJAX requests, c) websites with glossy buttons and mirror effects. Right now, the consensus seems to be that Web 3 is decentralized/blockchain stuff - but I also hear the Metaverse concept increasingly referred to as "Web 3" I suppose my point is that the web doesn't develop along a linear, one dimensional scale, but rather a branching and recombining tree.
- netcan 5y ago
  Agreed. Web 2.0 was also supposed to be democratizing. Blogging, user participation. A web the dissolves the user/webmaster dichotomy. Less gatekeepers, barriers to entry, etc. Walled gardens, gatekeepers, centralization and monopoly hardening happened. They were never the stated ideal. Just like web 2.0, web 3.0's idealistic description tends to to be the opposite of whatever 2.0's shortcomings are. Just like with 2.0, reality is likely to have its own say.
benreesman 5y ago
I find both the evangelism of and the hostility towards “Web 3” kind of silly. Obviously there’s some amount of interesting stuff and obviously there’s some amount of tech bro assholes getting rich who “shouldn’t”. Just like ~2008-2012, ~1999-2002, ~1994-1996, ~1982-1986, etc. On the technology side: distributed Byzantine consensus is an open problem with some promising prototypes. It would have very cool use cases: remittance is huge, ENS is fucking cool, Brave/BAT is cool, NFTs for e.g. concert tickets or restaurant reservations or whatever would be cool, IPFS is cool. The technology isn’t there yet. POW doesn’t scale. Ouroboros Praus/Genesis needs a clock oracle (see: Spanner), Tendermint/Algorand/PBFT are too slow (global 3-phase. commit, right). Solana/ICON/etc. are expensive cloud databases. L2 rollups/Lightning/sharding are “kick-the-can” exercises. But it took time to go from the Paxos paper to Chubby as well, maybe someone solves it. Yeah, it’s mostly scams today. But it’s always been mostly scams. Microsoft bundling IE was a scam. Pets.com was a scam. Path was a scam. Uber and AirBnB were (are?) illegal as hell. Third-party cookies powering Google and FB is a scam. When the dust settles some amount of this stuff will have been worked out technically, legally, and financially, and the rest will be “lol do you remember when…”. This time some people will be rich who neither had rich parents nor knew Bay Area royalty, but YC wasn’t always part of the machine either. I’m sure Goldman and YC will eventually embrace those people with open arms. I for one look forward to us collectively getting our knickers untwisted about it so we can go back to rewriting every calculator app on earth in Rust (I kid! Don’t hit me! Doofy Haskell is better than no Haskell!). ;)
- lekevicius 5y ago
  This is the best take I've seen on HN. It's unfair to judge tech by its scummiest users, just as it is unfair to present future potential as if it's already here. There is remarkable amount of technological innovation being created, if you care to dig deep. I think Web3 will be a thing… we just don't know what and how exactly. It's like going to a very misty field, hoping to find something there. We'll find _something_.
  - serverholic 5y ago
    By HN standards email is a scam because of phishing.
netcan 5y ago
Practical Comparisons Web 2.0 censors people on Twitter | VS | Web 3.0 won't do this Web 2.0 servers can fail | VS | Web 3.0 servers won't fail Web 2.0 reality | VS | Web 3.0 ideals Circa 2004, when web 2.0 was inspiring similar articles. The ideals were democratisation, participation, bridging the web-user/webmaster dichotomy. A web where everyone could participate fully. Just like today's web 3.0, the web 2.0 concept started from new technologies (ajax, xml, etc.) and it weaved an idealistic roadmap to where these would lead. The participatory, user generated web. I think idealistic perspectives tend to fall into determinism fallacies. To pick on a cliche, Marx thought of socialism/communism as something that would happen almost inevitably. Web 2.0's technologies did not determine its outcomes. Neither will web 3.0's. It matters who will gain prominence. What their ideas are. What their interests are. What people choose. etc. I agree that crypto, and other technologies have a lot of positive potential. Potential isn't outcomes though. A web 3.0 Zuckerberg is a scary thought, and I think it's just as likely as a positive outcome.
MrDresden 5y ago
I do wonder if there will be a similar trajectory to crypto as happened to the web in the 90's. It started as this niche academic/techno subculture thing and slowly grew over the next few years though still in relative obscurity. Then over only a few short years it exploded into the common consciousness but still most people did not use it nor have access to it. Some even ridiculed it (see Krugman & Letterman). As we know the hype grew each year then each month and then each week. And before we knew it there were enormous amounts of money being pumped into building ludicrous businesses without a clear plan, product or use case. This was still at a time where internet access and daily usage did not exist for most people, not even in the western world. This all came to head in the Dot Com bubble at the beginning of the new century. And ever since we have seen mostly level headed investment and buildup of capabilities on the web. While it never went away, the type of hype cycle that was seen in the 90's never materialized to the same degree. Utility and more level headed thinking took over. Rational (buisness) decisions have mostly been made ever since, rather than those more tending to give way to emotion and bro selling (selling a product/tech/idea without really understanding and coming to terms with the fundamentals and limitations of it). Now, in my perspective there is some utility in crypto. I am not sure the utility is as much as has been reported, nor do I believe the nations on this planet will allow it to go as far as some believe it might simply for the fact that our societies run on taxes. And I am absolutely for any kind of restriction on any kind of crypto that relies of PoW with its enormous energy usage (we have better things to use it for). But I do hope there will be a crash akin to the dot com bubble which will clean out the clutter a bit and leave room for the more mature and levelheaded inventors to grow out from the ashes.
bsenftner 5y ago
Just give up, crypto-kiddies. Your decentralized crypto fantasies will not materialize without exponential fraud. Do scientific level financial and legal-financial research to grasp the impossibility of your methods. Use your STEM education to review the methods this decentralized effort plans to employ and compare that against economic graph theory - they do not gel.
gandutraveler 5y ago
Web3 is all about not trusting big tech corps but trusting few hustlers, TikTok influencers, NFT enthusiasts who seem to have users best interest and know all about the tech.
kranke155 5y ago
Hard to be more wrong in this subject. You sound exactly like David Letterman. Technical issues always get solved. All of this is misconceptions, poorly informed takes, or poor implementations that are true today but won’t be there tomorrow. My take on this is that HN users are tech stack obsessed. HN users only see an inferior tech stack, but fail to understand that an inferior tech stack might have Greater Utility for the common people. HN users earn their living by being the best at what they do and choosing the best tech stack is a part of it, which is why they don’t understand blockchain. It’s an inferior tech stack, but it beats every other stack on game theory, which is not the usual purview of the average developer. Hence they reject it as “inefficient” because they keep looking at it through the prism of tech instead of society. For society trustless distributed systems are better, but if you keep looking at it from a tech/throughout perspective, you’ll never get it. The trick to this is understanding the following - nobody trusts you to hold a centralised database. Stop talking about centralised databases - centralised databases did not solve the digital art problem. NFTs did. Centralised databases mean we have to trust you - the developer - and your company or business. But we don’t. Nobody does, and neither do you if you’re completely honest with yourself. How many times has a developer changed or deleted a service you needed and you had no recourse whatsoever ? How often are services “sunsetted” alongside the entire database? Stop looking at it as a tech stack problem, and start looking at it as a trust problem. People don’t trust you to run their services, for good reason, and they would much prefer an open source, immutable, decentralised ledger than your SQL, 10 times out of 10.
- Ygg2 5y ago
  Did you read the article? > Technical issues always get solved. There are deeper issues with crypto than just technical. Even if it wasn't. Crypto is like every anarchistic idea implemented in reality. In essence, they are burning the wheel, only to reinvent it again. Badly.
  - kranke155 5y ago
    I skimmed it. The amount of wrong takes in crypto is so large, you could spend your entire life doing it. Not worth it.
neuroma 5y ago
This space appears filled with two types of folk: Those looking for the positives Those looking for the negatives Is it possible that the tech and culture is deeply flawed and hypocritical, and yet the space is exploring new ground that will prove important... I understand the attraction of writing a killer article that makes extreme claims and backs each subheading with a carefully picked strawman, but really, I'd just love to read about it all without the hot air. It's a complex space and I want quality, balanced, open minded commentary. Suggestions welcome
vmception 5y ago
> #2: NFTs prove neither ownership nor uniqueness NFTs can prove current possession, it's not about legal ownership of the art. Colloquially this is called ownership, which is why we say ownership. Surprising how complicated this is for people, when the user experience doesn't have any ambiguity about it at all.
- lifeplusplus 5y ago
  if you sell nft of your car, do I legally own your car?.. No I just own NFT that refers to your car.
  - vmception 5y ago
    Correct, a plain reading of what I wrote says that as well. NFTs convey current possession of the NFT. Nobody is confused about that and there is an entire market for that because its good enough, people can prove current possession of the NFT for gated goods, clubs, credit, royalties, dividends and more.
vmception 5y ago
> Imagine if personal bank accounts were this rife with fraud! They are. Nobody is prosecuted. The user experience is nice because the depositor is typically reimbursed quickly. Banks often do lose the actual money though. Insurance and other redundancies were added retroactively by banks who didn't want to pay for insurance, and got the state to do it, simultaneously adding enough confidence to stuff their coffers under any circumstance. There is insurance in the DeFi space too. People that open policies are reimbursed in hacks. It is interesting that these thought pieces seem to lack any use of the products or integration in the community as the language would be pretty different, but the irony is that nobody in the community is interested in writing these thought pieces. It eludes most people that are disillusioned or were already chronically skeptical, but the most productive approach is to talk about the future state of these systems and how they can be improved. For example, I think it is absurd that people have to manually understand that there are competing third party insurance platforms they have to use for every DeFi operation they make, so it could instead be automatic to craft the best policy alongside their transaction into another DeFi platform. It is incredibly lucrative to make ever-so-slight improvements to this space. The people that do build here do that, the activist investors in the space push teams towards roadmaps the teams didn't originally consider. I think many people miss that they can have outsized influence, its not going away so make it better.
sureklix 5y ago
There are lots of points in the article challenging smart contracts because they need a social contract. Ethereum community also understands that social contract > smart contract. See below: From Vitalik https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html: "...What's going on here is a pattern of a similar type to what we saw with the not-yet-issued Bitcoin and Ethereum coin rewards: the coins were ultimately owned not by a cryptographic key, but by some kind of social contract." "...Once again, millions of dollars of value are being controlled and allocated, not by individuals or cryptographic keys, but by social conceptions of legitimacy." So the point is a bit moot, money is not flowing to web3 because of immutability per se. For most venture capital, mainly it is an effort to create a levelled playing field for startups –"decentralized x" etc. For retail investors, highly volatile, information symmetric (perceived) assets.
- trkulja 5y ago
  Could you expand on the VC part please? What is their exact interest here?

417 points by jaypinho 5y ago

shsbdncudx 5y ago

Whenever I hear “web3 will never be …”, it usually already is.

jaypinho 5y ago

Spent weeks investigating the mania around web3 and regret to say it does not live up to the hype.

theplumber 5y ago
I think it depends much of expectations. It actually exceeded my expectations. I recently built a small and useless program in solidity and deployed it within few hours. It's definitely better than what we had available years ago (i.e. on bitcoin platform) and I see a future for it. I think it has chances to survive in this age of censorship and surveillance. Something that really surprised me was the signing/metamask integration(a kind of webauthn). I would definitely use that to login into various websites instead of the invasive facebook/google login plugins we see all over the web. There is even something akin to oauth2 but without the requirement to have "developer keys".
- justicezyx 5y ago
  Don't you need to pay someone to deploy the program?
  - lukeramsden 5y ago
    On the testnet you can get free ETH to deploy contract(s).
    - TigeriusKirk 5y ago
      Or run your own private chain/node for trying things out. Recently I've been working at converting an existing web business to web3 (at least my interpretation of web3), with the goal of making it all decentralized. My impression at this point is that it's mostly possible but not all that practical. It might make more sense if I reimagine what the business is, which is part of my exploration here.
  - theplumber 5y ago
    ETH is expensive but there are other "cheaper" blockchains compatible with ETH whose "gas" price is negligible. You can also deploy for free on the "testnet"
    - UncleMeat 5y ago
      A major reason why those blockchains have lower fees is because speculators have not driven up their token price. Unless there is some fundamental reason why the fees will stay low, you've got a time bomb on your hands as soon as people decide that this blockchain is a major speculation vehicle.
      - cqwrtiq 5y ago
        This is an interesting topic that I feel like doesn't get discussed often. Vitalik Buterin posted today about Ethereum's expensive gas fees and the reasoning for it. It boiled down to decentralization vs. more operations per block. Blockchains like Algorand and Solana have large block sizes, so they can keep fees low per block (which they both do a very good job of doing so far, although exactly how cheap they'd be with Ethereum's adoption numbers is still uncertain). Tezos has had more adoptions through NFTs and they've managed to keep transaction fees low as well (although arguably running a Tezos node now requires better hardware specs than it did a few years ago). The tradeoff is that beefy hardware is needed to run a node, which hurts decentralization, as the average participant without deep pockets can't compete. This is part of why Ethereum has high gas costs.
        jazzyjackson 5y ago
        It got discussed a lot - years ago - and is sometimes referred to as the "Block Size Wars" https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy
- serverholic 5y ago
  "Sign-In with Ethereum" will be huge. I purposefully avoid "Sign-in with Google" because putting too much power in a centralized authority terrifies me. I'd much rather have the convenience of "Sign-In with X" but backed by something I have control over.
  - yepthatsreality 5y ago
    Like OpenID?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - theplumber 5y ago
      OpenID is a closed system both to the end-user and the website owner based on secrets(`state` `code`, developer keys) from identity providers(google/facebook) not cryptography.
    - Uehreka 5y ago
      I’m a long time blockchain skeptic (check my comment history) but I recently came around on the SSO stuff and can vouch for it enough to say the magic words: it is in fact a novel thing that cannot be done without blockchain using pre-existing crypto or auth tech. The reason is: With private key auth alone, you don’t have identity, just a non-human readable public key, and no universally known exclusive association with a particular username. With OpenID or WebAuthn or any of that, you would still need a company or org to keep a centralized database of everyone’s credentials and user info. With Blockchain you don’t: As long as the Ethereum blockchain keeps going, your info (username: “johndoe.eth” public_key: “420abc” avatar: “some HTTP or IPFS url”) will stay stored. This is the exact precise thing blockchains are unusually good at doing, and given how much people these days are hating on big tech companies managing their identities and harvesting data in the process, “SSO with no company attached” seems like a thing people actually want. I’m still highly skeptical of art NFTs and crypto as currency and lots of other blockchain stuff, but in this one case they’ve won me over. This seems legit.
- Uehreka 5y ago
  > I think it depends much of expectations. Agreed (and I agree that ENS and the SSO stuff looks interesting). The problem here is that the crypto community are the ones setting the high expectations.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
moneywoes 5y ago
What did you find?
vvpan 5y ago
Now that's solid analysis right there.

carlosdp 5y ago

> The root node [under which all ENS domains are registered] is presently owned by a multisig contract, with keys held by trustworthy individuals in the Ethereum community. For what it's worth, this is changing as we speak. ENS recently had a very successful launch of a DAO [1] which will soon be in control of these contracts, therefore making it fully decentralized. It's also already impossible for anyone (not even the root holder, be it mult-sig or DAO) to revoke your ENS registration. Also, NBA Top Shot is a very cherry-picked example. I'm not even sure I'd classify those as NFTs right now, given they are completely separated from the broader ecosystem and not yet interoperable at all. [1] https://ens.mirror.xyz/5cGl-Y37aTxtokdWk21qlULmE1aSM_NuX9fstbOPoWU https://ens.mirror.xyz/5cGl-Y37aTxtokdWk21qlULmE1aSM_NuX9fst...

TigeriusKirk 5y ago
I have some Top Shot moments, and I don't think of them as NFTs at all. As long as it's locked down on one platform, to me it's not an NFT. The get rich hype seems to be at an ebb with them right now, so I can just play around and collect. It's fun, but it's not an NFT. So far it's a case where I don't think the blockchain is adding any value whatsoever. Blockchain is just a poor fit if you're going to keep it locked down to one administrator.

TrackerFF 5y ago

RE: Censorship You often see advocates of decentralization hail networks for being pro-immutability, battling censorship. How does it deal with data you absolutely do _NOT_ want to be shared and propagated around? I'm talking about things like CP, terrorist media, fake news, scams/frauds, and what not.

etaioinshrdlu 5y ago
Crypto proponents are in favor of there being no technical restrictions that prevent such content being posted. An interesting possibility is that illegal content gets permanently inserted into a blockchain, which could make running, for example, an ethereum node very illegal.
- api 5y ago
  > An interesting possibility is that illegal content gets permanently inserted into a blockchain, which could make running, for example, an ethereum node very illegal. I've heard this called a "pee in the pool attack." Block chains like Ethereum and Bitcoin have one intrinsic defense: they don't support very large data objects. So that makes inserting CP problematic. But someone determined enough and willing to spend money could insert a really horrible image as a series of transactions.
  - thebean11 5y ago
    At that point you'd need additional data (which transactions) and software in order to stitch things back together, at which point is it the (disjointed, seemingly random) data that's illegal, or the instruction set that allows you to assemble it into something illegal?
    - account-5 5y ago
      If it was the disjointed seemingly random data that was illegal I think that would make the number π illegal too.

stolenmerch 5y ago

I really don't think that Mona Lisa example is correct. Maybe I misunderstand NFTs, but wouldn't it be more like a printmaker who can make as many copies as desired, but the museum sells something like the Artist's Proof and documents the sale in an official newsletter that goes out to all members? Yes, everyone else has a print or a poster version, but only one buyer has the Artist's Proof and can prove its provenance. Not a perfect analogy, but closer in my opinion.

Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
NFTs don't necessarily represent ownership of the underlying asset. They're like minting a commemorative coin celebrating the asset, and only minting a single coin. The coin does not represent ownership of the asset. It's just...a coin. A token. Supposedly, the uniqueness gives it value, but if I decide to record a single fart, that fart is unique, but the uniqueness does not inherently create value. An NFT for the Mona Lisa caries no benefits or rights, other than saying "I own the NFT for the Mona Lisa". It's inherently worthless, with a supposed value being created from absolutely nothing. Anyone buying NFTs either doesn't know what they're actually paying for, or thinks they're going to be able to find a greater fool who will eventually be willing to pay more.
- stolenmerch 5y ago
  Right, and that's why the physical art analogy breaks down. Was just trying to come up with a slightly better physical art analogy. Copies are possible, forgeries are possible, and provenance is a real challenge. However with NFTs it all takes an abusive amount of electricity.
  - jimkleiber 5y ago
    I like the idea of them being a commemorative coin. The analogy I've been using is that NFTs are like signatures. There may be a famous photo of Elvis that anyone can print, however, if someone had that photo printed and authentically signed by Elvis, it could be worth a lot more money, if people want to have the signature. If Elvis signed 500,000 of that same photo, the signature may not be worth much. Perhaps in the future if NFTs get some sort of legal backing and therefore more enforced property rights, maybe it'll be different, however I think the analogy works well for now. Thoughts?

daoismyname 5y ago

that Web2 VS Web3 schema pretty much summarize what's wrong with the new internet based on brand identities instead of technical merits. A brief rebuttal: - Twitter can censor any account or Tweet: yes, but Twitter is not the web, you can host your own tweets, even for free. - Web3 tweets are better because decentralized: translations -> your thought are going to be forever visible to everybody and not even the author will be able to remove them. Of course any of those new shiny web3 logs can fail and everything can disappear with them. - Payment services may decide to not allow payments: Web3 payments can do the same. There is nothing that forces me to accept a payment and if that was true, that would be a problem. I __do want__ to refuse payments from criminals and I do wanna know if someone is. - servers for gig economy may go down. web3 servers can go down as well, they are made of hardware and maintained by people too. If, for example, Uber can't keep their servers running despite their profits depend on them, imagine what would happen if Uber was running on someone else's node who DGAF if they lose money or not... Now imagine what would happen to me, a completely unknown anonymous individual, with no power. What happens if something goes wrong and "my income is affected"? Who is responsible? Who can I sue in case the SLA in the agreement haven't been guaranteed? Will "the decentralized network of 1000s of computers" reimburse me?

chrisco255 5y ago
If you create a "web3" website, it's up to you how decentralized you want that experience to be. You could have your content hosted on Filecoin, perform computation on ICP or Arweave, provide IPFS hashes to your users using open standards (HTML, JSON, Markdown, etc) with simple export functionality, open source code, ENS domain, etc. If you take payments on your site via crypto, I'm not sure what you mean by "not accepting payments from criminals", as this is not a service provided by Visa or MasterCard either. I have a feeling running a criminal background check on all your users might impact your conversion rate, but you are as free to do that in Web3 as in Web2. (What are you selling that you would need to be concerned with such things anyways? If I'm selling an honest product or service, I don't care who buys it.) There is no SLA. If you need an SLA you can create a hybrid site that both stores files in a central server and also backs them up to Filecoin or Arweave or Sia or Chia or whatever file network you like. But decentralization does tend to lend itself to resiliency, for example, Ethereum has 100% uptime over the past 6 years.

whoisjuan 5y ago

I think the problem with the current state of Web3 is that it really doesn't seem to solve meaningful, mainstream problems yet. Even the most widely accepted use case which is crypto-currency fails to break out of the theoretical value outlined in the different white papers. I own several crypto-currencies and there hasn't been a single moment in which I thought of buying something with a crypto-currency. I have crypto-currencies because I'm speculating in their asset class value, not necessarily because I'm betting on their utility. Now, I know that crypto coins are indeed used in real service/product transactions, but I think there's a difference between the present economical use of cryptos and its potential mainstream use where cryptos can effectively replace fiat currencies in super wide economic settings. I believe that Web3 would happen but I honestly can't see a clear trajectory for Cryptos, NFTs, DAOs etc to become effective instruments that can replace existing Web2 instruments. In fact the reason why everything in Web3 feels like BS right now is because everything in this space uses Web2 distribution. People promoting NFTs on Twitter feels a little bit like someone faxing you a webpage. Owning the rights to a random JPEG is something that feels too abstracted from the present Web2 mental model and value proposition.

dannyw 5y ago
I use crypto on a weekly basis, from renewing domains and web hosting, to accessing loans in 15 seconds without gatekeepers.
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  what happens if you stop paying your loan?
Uehreka 5y ago
I said this in another comment on this post, but check out ENS. I’ve been a blockchain skeptic for a long time (and still am about art NFTs and most other things) but the idea of “SSO without a company attached” feels like something the mainstream public actually does want (think of all the negative public sentiment around big tech companies harvesting data and the grudging acceptance people have of their dependence on FB and Google for identity and easy sign-in). It’s also something that requires blockchain and can’t be done without a “decentralized consensus” about who owns what username (this is how you get around relying on a particular company). And ENS works now, it’s the kind of thing you could just go ahead and add to a web app you’re working on without having to wait for “the tech to arrive” or anything. Again, I’m still skeptical about most of this stuff, but this one thing seems like a pretty good and somewhat practical idea.

laurex 5y ago

There's a kool-aide concern here, which is: to play in the web3 world, you seem to need to have either a LOT of capital that is fine to lose or have access to this small community. The communities I've joined are indistinguishable from Twitch communities where there's a lot of bro high-fives and mutual appreciation for the riches being invented, not much concern for what the side effects might be. And because there's an advantage in staking, people who can afford to just leave money in these volatile currencies get richer. Not saying this is really any different than the world in general, but it seems like web3 advocates paint a picture of "disruption" that feels more like "entrenchment" from an economic vantage.

knownjorbist 5y ago

Aside from the usual litany of talking points from the last decade that everyone is well aware of, this person is missing the forest for the trees when discussing "composability". Nevermind that this seems to be starting from their priors and working backwards. Here's a much more level-headed(and detailed) analysis of what is interesting, and not-so-interesting, about "web3": https://www.psl.com/feed-posts/web3-engineer-take https://www.psl.com/feed-posts/web3-engineer-take

mattwilsonn888 5y ago

Commentators on crypto will simply have to get used to this - because it isn't an argument. > For that same reason, I think people can genuinely believe they're obsessed with web3 because of its inherent interestingness when in fact it’s because web3 has made them a lot of money very quickly. The nature of crypto-currencies means that you are free to invest in protocols you believe will make money - either by providing value or some other less rational reason for others to purchase. It seems like bloggers writing on the subject haven't yet conceded that being confused about this fact is not an argument for or against any protocol - a healthy review will ignore the fact so sensationally stated in many writings: "people shill their investments." Would I review a Ford Motor Vehicle by closely examining how the CEO or marketing team behave, boldly discovering they don't have an incentive to be completely honest, and then assuming they are lying? No. I would ignore all of that and evaluate the vehicle itself. Denouncing crypto-currencies or distributed-ledger technologies has always been the cool, contrarian thing to do on HackerNews (stay poor lmao) - and there is certainly plenty to criticize which is usually missed, because blog posts like this focus on the most surface level aspects of a topic. I'm sure plenty of people really want to learn about Web3, so imagine a curious, neutral reader's disappointment when they go to learn about what many present as a technological, general protocol through the lens of what licensed NFT's the NBA is shilling. Every valuable new movement is going to have grifters. New movements without value will have grifters. There is one good reason HackerNews doesn't have anything positive to say about crytpo, and that is that with endorsement comes advertisement and shills - I only hope this place learns to talk in generalities about technology, protocols and economics rather than only doing the opposite of what attracts grifters (which is useful).

outside1234 5y ago
This is the technobabble that just drives me insane about this space.
- fnoof 5y ago
  I think with any weird new technology, fundamentally no knows if it’s going to work. People who can’t see or imagine use cases become sceptics. But others who piece together enough observations to tell themselves stories of why it will work become believers. But neither can explain why the tech will or won’t work, so we end up with technobabblers and angry sceptics.

recursive 5y ago

So what are we going to call actual web if this definition takes off? I'd hate to see another "crypto" happen.

mrisse 5y ago

I really enjoyed this article and appreciated the author's sober take. That said I'm a little more optimistic about Web3. While NFTs can be confusing, over-hyped, or even fraudulent it is clear that they give artists new power. The power to create a scarce resource, prove that they created it, and sell it for substantially more than they could could otherwise sell electronic collectibles. How much of this is due to hype and how much is due to the ability to record and validate the "deed" to the NFT on the blockchain? I think that's an open question that will be more clear over time. The author also understates the importance of DAOs and smart contracts imo. The real power of a DAOs or smart contracts is not in replacing financial instruments, but in replacing legal ones. I think in a short amount of time it will not be unusual to see wills executed via smart contracts.

dustintrex 5y ago
But how exactly do they "prove they created it"? The art itself is not stored in the blockchain, just a pointer to it (NFT), which means anybody can create that pointer. This is exactly the same fundamental oracle problem as that discussed in the article: trustlessness etc applies only within the sandbox, not to anything outside it.
- sorum 5y ago
  If you want an endless supply of examples of these scams, just follow https://twitter.com/NFTtheft https://twitter.com/NFTtheft
- mrisse 5y ago
  The author could share their public key. It's awkward today, but I suspect services will arise to make signing and verification of NFTs more user-friendly for artists and fans alike.

chpmrc 5y ago

> NFTs prove neither ownership nor uniqueness Except that's literally what they do, using a combination of digital signatures and timestamp. You can have a copy of the same NFT even on a different chain but the timestamp will be higher, therefore proving it's not the original. Plus the problem of referencing the content is solved by having all data on chain (likely on layer 2). Recurring problems in the world of art trade such as provenance, certification etc. are elegantly solved by NFTs. > someone copied and pasted this guy’s real-life artwork, created an NFT out of it Ironically that's exactly because the artwork was not (referenced) on chain. If that was the case any subsequent copy would not be recognized as the original because of the timestamp and wouldn't have nearly the same value. That's why a simple digital signature scheme based on something like Keybase wouldn't work. I understand and appreciate the author's skepticism but, IMHO, he did end up looking like David Letterman in that video.

rideontime 5y ago
> Ironically that's exactly because the artwork was not (referenced) on chain. If that was the case any subsequent copy would not be recognized as the original because of the timestamp and wouldn't have nearly the same value. So the solution is that every artist mints every piece they create before showing it to anybody else. All because somebody decided that a "blockchain" is now what determines who created a piece of art. How convenient for the crypto holders.
- chpmrc 5y ago
  The same can very well happen in the real world. I see an artwork online, upload it to my portfolio and claim it's mine. There are then many ways one can prove they are the original author and minting an NFT is just an easier one (assuming the claim doesn't get invalidated off chain). Otherwise it's like dismissing NFTs and not minting your own but then getting upset someone did it on your behalf. You can't have it both ways.
  - rideontime 5y ago
    > You can't have it both ways. Sure I can. I created the art, I own the copyright to it. If I choose not to sell prints of a piece, that doesn't give others the right to do so. Why would NFTs be any different? And yes, somebody could copy my art and sell it on RedBubble. The difference is that nobody's claiming that a RedBubble shop is a definite proof of provenance. (But why not? "First RedBubble store" has the same level of credence as "first minted NFT," and it doesn't even require gas fees!)

dperfect 5y ago

I completely agree with the author. I've been reading a lot about the EVM, and while there's some interesting technology involved, it feels unlikely to be able to support any worthwhile applications outside of blockchain finance or moving $ around the world[0] (since the code can really only directly reference the blockchain itself). It's a bit like playing with a programming language in a sandbox that has (1) has no I/O functions[1], and (2) has enormous costs associated with even the most basic of computations. Ok, it's not like that; it is exactly that. Sure, you could build a crypto toy and convince some suckers to transfer some of their wealth to you, but calling it an app platform or the next evolution of the web is definitely a stretch. I sincerely wish that wasn't the case (I'd love to find an exception), but that's what I've come to conclude. [0] Don't get me wrong, there's tremendous value in being able to move money around the world without the blessing of governments and central banks! [1] Any interaction with entities outside the blockchain require oracles, and at that point, you might as well throw away the other benefits of being on a blockchain.

p2p_astroturf 5y ago
tell us something we didnt already know. you can solve the speed problem by using solana or literally any of the other 100 coins that claim to be fast, or eth2 in six months i am not even a person who is a fan of blockchains (since they are mostly poorly designed, unfounded, etc)
- jonny_eh 5y ago
  > you can solve the speed problem by using solana or literally any of the other 100 coins that claim to be fast, or eth2 in six months I've been seeing this claim for years now. It's gotten quite old.
  - gfodor 5y ago
    Which claim? The meme that transaction throughput is inherently low in crypto is falsified via solana (as mentioned) or avalanche. Bitcoin will likely always be low TPS. Ethereum 2 maybe will eventually ship.

rgreen 5y ago

I'm disappointed the author glazed over flash loans since it's such a perfect example of something that did't exist previously. The things that "make you dizzy for free" are the things to pay attention to. In crypto I can borrow effectively limitless money _uncollateralized_ if I pay it back within an atomic transaction. Why is that interesting? It's because it's not something that was ever possible before and there's no telling what it will enable. The lowest hanging fruit is stuff like arbitrage where you can now effectively operate without capital constraints but there will assuredly be more interesting uses discovered. Even ignoring the specifics of flash loans, the ability to compose financial primitives into atomic transactions is new.

diveanon 5y ago
This is a great example. Flash loans, arb bots, fully autonomous companies interacting via smart contracts. Its really pretty fascinating.

Animats 5y ago

OK. The reason all this happening is that Bitcoin really did go to the moon. That's what powers all this speculation. If the price of Bitcoin had been stable for a decade, and it worked reliably, it would be a useful medium of exchange, but nobody would care. This is all about MAKE MONEY FAST. Bitcoin found some early use cases. Drugs first. Then getting money out of China. Money laundering. Tax evasion. Scams. Bitcoin is the scammers dream - remote, anonymous, irreversible transactions. Much less risk of the mark coming for the scammer with a baseball bat. Then China cracked down on cryptocurrency, shut down all the miners, and arrested a few hundred of them. Financial regulators in the more legit countries started regulating Bitcoin exchanges, so the operators couldn't just steal the money. Know Your Customer became a thing. In the US, the IRS, FinCen, the FBI, and the SEC all started paying attention to what was happening on blockchains. Cryptocurrency crime was no longer risk-free for the crooks. But by now, sheer momentum kept Bitcoin going up. That's a powerful force. It's not forever, though. Check out meme stocks a few years later. Remember, all this stuff is zero-sum. For every winner, there has to be a loser. That's what provides the engine behind "Web3", NFTs, DAOs, and whatnot. It's not the technology.

gfodor 5y ago
No, that is a necessary but insufficient condition to come up with Web3. Web3 also requires the concept put forward by Ethereum of having an instruction set one can pay to run on chain. That would have probably been thought up and deployed independently from Bitcoin's price action. But both probably were necessary to provide sufficient foundational momentum to building things like DeFi.
- worik 5y ago
  It turns out to be a floored concept
cblconfederate 5y ago
that's how i felt about social networking. People posting their breakfast, ridiculous. Baby pictures, silly. Cat pictures, kids these days. Yet somehow the vanity/reality show is making billions 10 years later

moneywoes 5y ago

Can anyone highlight one viable application of Web3?

syntheticcdo 5y ago
TFA listed two killer apps: buying drugs over the internet, and extortion (ransomware). I'll throw in a third: funding terrorism.

vagabund 5y ago

It's disingenuous for the author to present instances where some level of trusted actors is required in the near-term to make a service operational as voiding any claim of decentralization; obviously, the centralization of a network exists on a spectrum and where it's present in Web3 tech it's almost invariably more limited in scope than the centralization of their Web2.0 counterparts. Likewise his claim that APIs represent the same sort of composability as intrinsically public smart contracts belies the extent to which companies limit the usage of their APIs, assuming they give access at all. And that true composability of Web3.0 should temper concerns about centralization: if ever powerful figures in a project breach some threshold of control tolerated by the community, the project can trivially be forked and their positions removed. Where trustlessness can't be hardcoded into the system it can be achieved through the alignment of incentives, and the result is services that are more beholden to their users than any that have come before them. As for real-world applications of this technology that couldn't be achieved prior, I'd point to Helium [1]. [1] https://www.helium.com/ https://www.helium.com/

vvpan 5y ago
Arguments about blockchain here on HN are frustrating. There are plenty of good examples of where it works very well but the mental gymnastic people go through to deny the obvious are incredible. The most basic to me is the Automatic Market Maker system. For example Uniswap is a system with only a few (relatively speaking) lines of a code at its core and a team of a couple of dozen. The system does billions of dollars worth of trades every day. If anybody can point out to me a broker that does similar volumes that would allow me to make million-dollar trades with a few lines of code with no possibility of censorship I will happily concede that web3 is a failure. Oh and BTW, love Helium, just started researching it a few days ago. As always all great projects are easy to dismiss until one can no longer do it. I think I'll get in line for a hotspot/miner.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  > Mining HNT with Hotspots is done via radio technology, not expensive or wasteful GPUs. > Hotspots work together to form a new global wireless network and undertake ‘Proof-of-Coverage’. Okay that's actually quite clever. I've previously wondered why no one has tried a similar idea for wired networks, implementing "Proof of possession of IPv4 address". It may be possible for a nation state to take control of a large IP range for some short period of time, but I don't think it's plausible that even conspiring adversaries could control 51% of the internet for a week without anyone noticing.

Eric_WVGG 5y ago

“No one wants to sound like David Letterman.” eh? Bill Gates’s explanation of the Internet was idiotic. If he had explained penicillin like that any listener would decide it sounded like nonsense.

zagrebian 5y ago

> decentralized apps that run on the blockchain How do you install these apps?

Ambolia 5y ago

The technology is really there, the problem with crypto is that it ends up sucking all of its energy into pyramid schemes because people take part on it as if it were a new gold rush. I would be more interested if there was zero money to be made from web3. Aside from that, the problem of distributed social media is that it ends up looking like a spam folder or like a cesspool of the worst kind of perversities, but I think this should solvable with chains of trust, like you "whitelist" / "blacklist" your friends or people you trust, and maybe anybody who has been vetoed by your friends (could go 1 or 2 levels further)

apatters 5y ago

So Web3 is built on blockchains which are decentralized and decentralization confers benefits such as censorship resistance, downtime resistance etc. But blockchains require resources to operate. At great scale they will require great cost. What's to stop powerful actors from leveraging economies of scale and consolidating those resources, then ultimately using their control to manipulate the blockchains themselves? This is exactly what happened with web servers. The web was initially very decentralized, due to economies of scale it consolidated and is hosted mostly in a few large datacenters now. The owners of those datacenters are by necessity very close partners with the government du jour, and now manipulate the content they host.

X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
The cost in blockchains usually comes from security garuntees, but there's a strong force of resisting centralization in many forms in the blockchain space, e.g. https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/12/06/endgame.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/12/06/endgame.html We'll see what the endgame actually is as time inexorably marches on
- apatters 5y ago
  In that post Vitalik actually says he thinks there's a high chance block production will end up centralized. If it happens, what's to stop the government from going to the dominant block producers and forcing them to impose limits on the kind of data a block can store? Then dragging them to court or enacting some other form of political retribution if they fail to do so.
  - TarasBob 5y ago
    Read the whole post carefully. Your question is answered in it.

treelovinhippie 5y ago

Yup. If you joined crypto after 2017, there's a very high chance you're only in it for the money. Those people will of course lie to themselves about this.

heeebeeejeebees 5y ago

have fun staying poor

G3rn0ti 5y ago

Cryptos and Web3 are currently there where Web 1.0 was in the nineties. It was silly to order Pizza over the Internet like it was laughable listening to a baseball radio transmission over the internet instead using a … radio. LOL 20 years later everybody‘s ordering food over the internet while watching Netflix.

lifeplusplus 5y ago
This is a false statement.
Jasper_ 5y ago
It wasn't silly to order Pizza over the internet. In fact, it was maybe the first example of a web order form on the world wide web [0]. And this is after the existing 20-year widespread success of pizza delivery by phone. I don't know why so many people willfully ignore history here. [0] https://seclists.org/interesting-people/1994/Aug/57 https://seclists.org/interesting-people/1994/Aug/57
- adnzzzzZ 5y ago
  This is like saying it wasn't silly to order pizza using bitcoin 10 years ago. Obviously you can find examples of people doing it and people praising them for it, but it was clearly not the general feeling of the public at the time, just like it isn't the general feeling of the public with cryptos now.
  - acdha 5y ago
    That doesn't match my memory — it was novelty at first but an awful lot of people very quickly figured out that it was nice to be able to order things online, where it's really easy to see what's available and thinking about what you want and saving the time delay of mailing catalog orders or waiting on hold. There was a generational divide, of course, but while a few old people made jokes by the mid-90s it was normal for non-tech people to talk about online ordering or stock trading. The difference is that online ordering was useful: it was easier, saved time, and businesses loved that it was cheaper, reduced errors, and avoided needing to pay people in phone banks to avoid busy signals. If you built things on the web, you had clients beating down your door from all kinds of businesses because they and their customers saw immediate benefits from adopting it. In contrast, that Bitcoin pizza buyer was going against the grain of a deflationary currency — they paid a processing fee to use a more difficult, slower process to order a pizza and the deflationary model means that they were taking a long-term loss versus holding it — and a decade later, the vast majority of people still have no benefit to using a cryptocurrency.

lngnmn2 5y ago

It seems that we degraded to the stage of theoretical technology (not to be confused with theoretical computer science) with pure abstract bullshit terminology and "models". The utter bullshit like in the last Friedman's Wolfram podcast (there is no multiple threads of time lmao). This reminds me of literally years of Chainlink (scam) abstract bullshit (no wonder the guy studied abstract philosophy). Musk was right with his cartoon tweet - this crap has no real demand. Web3 not needed.

freen 5y ago

That crypto currencies were useless for porn has essentially informed my entire perspective.

nathias 5y ago

Instead of reading all this garbage about why not to learn web3, just use this time and try to implement a smartcontract, so you at least know what's going on.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

streamofdigits 5y ago

There are two logical somersaults embedded with the crypto scene in its various mutations over the last decade that undermine the whole proposition irrespective of any other value system or vision. * That digital decentralization is somehow equivalent to the tightly coupled blockchain architecture. In fact, if people were empowered to run their own "nodes" in a display of increasingly scarce digital self-sovereignty, there are infinite possible ways to connect devices over http (or gopher or ftp any other protocol the future may spawn). NB: The web was born decentralized. Many of those ways will arguably be much more useful in solving real problems as they do not put artificial constraints on how information flow is organized. * That one can create artificial digital scarcity and put the genie of zero marginal cost back in the bottle. In fact already the very proliferation of thousand of cryptocurrency variants shows that digital scarcity could only ever be achieved by oppressive means. This is the very social malfunction purportedly (some) adherents of crypto are fighting against. Why are we still talking about a set of ideas that is so distorted and orthogonal to both the true nature of the digital medium and our needs? Blame it on the self-financing juggernaut of bitcoin that triggered every possible speculative instinct out there, whether a new generation of noise day-traders, widows or orphans or professional blood-suckers.

0x00000000dead 5y ago

An excellent explanation. Unable to participate

jagermo 5y ago

So, what I don't understand: Why would companys use it? For example "Twitter can censor any account or tweet" (its not censorship, but that is another can of worms). vs "Web3 tweets would be uncensorable". Why should Twitter give up control? Why would they want someone to use their platform to publish stuff they can't delete or hide (for example, a live-stream of someone shooting up a mosque)? Why would any of the big players get in bed with web3 content? they would be turned into a bitpipe?

brightstep 5y ago
This is the big question most "web3" proponents miss or ignore. They want a decentralized internet to combat the power of FAANG, governments, etc. But those powers will _never_ allow a technology to succeed if it meaningfully threatens their power.

OneTimePetes 5y ago

Crypto is what Roko's Basilisk would dream up, to acquire freedom of (financial) movement and calculation capacity, and independence of whatever entity grew it to push their agenda, thinking themselves beyond manipulation. To oppose our new overlord - that would be unwise. So all in on crypto, even though its financially bad advise.

ThomPete 5y ago

This essay sets up puritan standards that nothing in this world can live up to. The only relevant question to ask yourself is whether this solves something and whether that something is worth solving. So if you think thats skins bought in games by kid gamers is better of by being owned by the gaming company than the gamer who bought it. If you think that governments printing money at will to solve problems they created is better than having more deflatory assets available for normal citizens who cant afford a house. If you think the current cobol and pre internet protocol based banking system is better than a more flexible system allowing for solutions which were impossible before. If you think that the digital world should be governed using physical world tools. If you think only accredited investors should be able to make high risk bets. Then by all means be against Web3. But this idea that only if perfect is it worth moving forward with web3 is an absurd standard only allowed by philosophers and other academics who dont actually move the world forward. And yes Web3 have its own set of problems, but they are much better problems to have than a world without Web3

misja111 5y ago

I can see the benefit of having a platform to run decentralised applications, as described in the article. And yes one could use smart contracts for that. But what I fail to see is why this would need blockchain. It just seems overhead for me for this particular use case. The only benefit I see is that mentoning 'blockchain' is guaranteed to get plenty of investor money for whatever distributed app you're building. But maybe I'm missing someting?

spoonjim 5y ago

Web3 is a really amazing grift that I feel very stupid to have missed out on.

spoonjim 5y ago

The only way any of this is ever meaningful is if it interacts with the non-Web3 world in a defined or enforced way. If there is an NFT that the US Copyright Office can enforce as being tied to the copyright of The Hunger Games, then that is definitely a valuable and tradable asset. Otherwise it's just one person telling another person that their Hunger Games DVD is super duper special.

wolframhempel 5y ago

I think that just like Web 1 and 2, Web 3 is sorta an evolving term. Web 2 meant at different times and for different people a) web with user generated content (as opposed to admin generated), b) websites with AJAX requests, c) websites with glossy buttons and mirror effects. Right now, the consensus seems to be that Web 3 is decentralized/blockchain stuff - but I also hear the Metaverse concept increasingly referred to as "Web 3" I suppose my point is that the web doesn't develop along a linear, one dimensional scale, but rather a branching and recombining tree.

netcan 5y ago
Agreed. Web 2.0 was also supposed to be democratizing. Blogging, user participation. A web the dissolves the user/webmaster dichotomy. Less gatekeepers, barriers to entry, etc. Walled gardens, gatekeepers, centralization and monopoly hardening happened. They were never the stated ideal. Just like web 2.0, web 3.0's idealistic description tends to to be the opposite of whatever 2.0's shortcomings are. Just like with 2.0, reality is likely to have its own say.

benreesman 5y ago

I find both the evangelism of and the hostility towards “Web 3” kind of silly. Obviously there’s some amount of interesting stuff and obviously there’s some amount of tech bro assholes getting rich who “shouldn’t”. Just like ~2008-2012, ~1999-2002, ~1994-1996, ~1982-1986, etc. On the technology side: distributed Byzantine consensus is an open problem with some promising prototypes. It would have very cool use cases: remittance is huge, ENS is fucking cool, Brave/BAT is cool, NFTs for e.g. concert tickets or restaurant reservations or whatever would be cool, IPFS is cool. The technology isn’t there yet. POW doesn’t scale. Ouroboros Praus/Genesis needs a clock oracle (see: Spanner), Tendermint/Algorand/PBFT are too slow (global 3-phase. commit, right). Solana/ICON/etc. are expensive cloud databases. L2 rollups/Lightning/sharding are “kick-the-can” exercises. But it took time to go from the Paxos paper to Chubby as well, maybe someone solves it. Yeah, it’s mostly scams today. But it’s always been mostly scams. Microsoft bundling IE was a scam. Pets.com was a scam. Path was a scam. Uber and AirBnB were (are?) illegal as hell. Third-party cookies powering Google and FB is a scam. When the dust settles some amount of this stuff will have been worked out technically, legally, and financially, and the rest will be “lol do you remember when…”. This time some people will be rich who neither had rich parents nor knew Bay Area royalty, but YC wasn’t always part of the machine either. I’m sure Goldman and YC will eventually embrace those people with open arms. I for one look forward to us collectively getting our knickers untwisted about it so we can go back to rewriting every calculator app on earth in Rust (I kid! Don’t hit me! Doofy Haskell is better than no Haskell!). ;)

lekevicius 5y ago
This is the best take I've seen on HN. It's unfair to judge tech by its scummiest users, just as it is unfair to present future potential as if it's already here. There is remarkable amount of technological innovation being created, if you care to dig deep. I think Web3 will be a thing… we just don't know what and how exactly. It's like going to a very misty field, hoping to find something there. We'll find _something_.
- serverholic 5y ago
  By HN standards email is a scam because of phishing.

netcan 5y ago

Practical Comparisons Web 2.0 censors people on Twitter | VS | Web 3.0 won't do this Web 2.0 servers can fail | VS | Web 3.0 servers won't fail Web 2.0 reality | VS | Web 3.0 ideals Circa 2004, when web 2.0 was inspiring similar articles. The ideals were democratisation, participation, bridging the web-user/webmaster dichotomy. A web where everyone could participate fully. Just like today's web 3.0, the web 2.0 concept started from new technologies (ajax, xml, etc.) and it weaved an idealistic roadmap to where these would lead. The participatory, user generated web. I think idealistic perspectives tend to fall into determinism fallacies. To pick on a cliche, Marx thought of socialism/communism as something that would happen almost inevitably. Web 2.0's technologies did not determine its outcomes. Neither will web 3.0's. It matters who will gain prominence. What their ideas are. What their interests are. What people choose. etc. I agree that crypto, and other technologies have a lot of positive potential. Potential isn't outcomes though. A web 3.0 Zuckerberg is a scary thought, and I think it's just as likely as a positive outcome.

MrDresden 5y ago

I do wonder if there will be a similar trajectory to crypto as happened to the web in the 90's. It started as this niche academic/techno subculture thing and slowly grew over the next few years though still in relative obscurity. Then over only a few short years it exploded into the common consciousness but still most people did not use it nor have access to it. Some even ridiculed it (see Krugman & Letterman). As we know the hype grew each year then each month and then each week. And before we knew it there were enormous amounts of money being pumped into building ludicrous businesses without a clear plan, product or use case. This was still at a time where internet access and daily usage did not exist for most people, not even in the western world. This all came to head in the Dot Com bubble at the beginning of the new century. And ever since we have seen mostly level headed investment and buildup of capabilities on the web. While it never went away, the type of hype cycle that was seen in the 90's never materialized to the same degree. Utility and more level headed thinking took over. Rational (buisness) decisions have mostly been made ever since, rather than those more tending to give way to emotion and bro selling (selling a product/tech/idea without really understanding and coming to terms with the fundamentals and limitations of it). Now, in my perspective there is some utility in crypto. I am not sure the utility is as much as has been reported, nor do I believe the nations on this planet will allow it to go as far as some believe it might simply for the fact that our societies run on taxes. And I am absolutely for any kind of restriction on any kind of crypto that relies of PoW with its enormous energy usage (we have better things to use it for). But I do hope there will be a crash akin to the dot com bubble which will clean out the clutter a bit and leave room for the more mature and levelheaded inventors to grow out from the ashes.

bsenftner 5y ago

Just give up, crypto-kiddies. Your decentralized crypto fantasies will not materialize without exponential fraud. Do scientific level financial and legal-financial research to grasp the impossibility of your methods. Use your STEM education to review the methods this decentralized effort plans to employ and compare that against economic graph theory - they do not gel.

gandutraveler 5y ago

Web3 is all about not trusting big tech corps but trusting few hustlers, TikTok influencers, NFT enthusiasts who seem to have users best interest and know all about the tech.

kranke155 5y ago

Hard to be more wrong in this subject. You sound exactly like David Letterman. Technical issues always get solved. All of this is misconceptions, poorly informed takes, or poor implementations that are true today but won’t be there tomorrow. My take on this is that HN users are tech stack obsessed. HN users only see an inferior tech stack, but fail to understand that an inferior tech stack might have Greater Utility for the common people. HN users earn their living by being the best at what they do and choosing the best tech stack is a part of it, which is why they don’t understand blockchain. It’s an inferior tech stack, but it beats every other stack on game theory, which is not the usual purview of the average developer. Hence they reject it as “inefficient” because they keep looking at it through the prism of tech instead of society. For society trustless distributed systems are better, but if you keep looking at it from a tech/throughout perspective, you’ll never get it. The trick to this is understanding the following - nobody trusts you to hold a centralised database. Stop talking about centralised databases - centralised databases did not solve the digital art problem. NFTs did. Centralised databases mean we have to trust you - the developer - and your company or business. But we don’t. Nobody does, and neither do you if you’re completely honest with yourself. How many times has a developer changed or deleted a service you needed and you had no recourse whatsoever ? How often are services “sunsetted” alongside the entire database? Stop looking at it as a tech stack problem, and start looking at it as a trust problem. People don’t trust you to run their services, for good reason, and they would much prefer an open source, immutable, decentralised ledger than your SQL, 10 times out of 10.

Ygg2 5y ago
Did you read the article? > Technical issues always get solved. There are deeper issues with crypto than just technical. Even if it wasn't. Crypto is like every anarchistic idea implemented in reality. In essence, they are burning the wheel, only to reinvent it again. Badly.
- kranke155 5y ago
  I skimmed it. The amount of wrong takes in crypto is so large, you could spend your entire life doing it. Not worth it.

neuroma 5y ago

This space appears filled with two types of folk: Those looking for the positives Those looking for the negatives Is it possible that the tech and culture is deeply flawed and hypocritical, and yet the space is exploring new ground that will prove important... I understand the attraction of writing a killer article that makes extreme claims and backs each subheading with a carefully picked strawman, but really, I'd just love to read about it all without the hot air. It's a complex space and I want quality, balanced, open minded commentary. Suggestions welcome

vmception 5y ago

> #2: NFTs prove neither ownership nor uniqueness NFTs can prove current possession, it's not about legal ownership of the art. Colloquially this is called ownership, which is why we say ownership. Surprising how complicated this is for people, when the user experience doesn't have any ambiguity about it at all.

lifeplusplus 5y ago
if you sell nft of your car, do I legally own your car?.. No I just own NFT that refers to your car.
- vmception 5y ago
  Correct, a plain reading of what I wrote says that as well. NFTs convey current possession of the NFT. Nobody is confused about that and there is an entire market for that because its good enough, people can prove current possession of the NFT for gated goods, clubs, credit, royalties, dividends and more.

vmception 5y ago

> Imagine if personal bank accounts were this rife with fraud! They are. Nobody is prosecuted. The user experience is nice because the depositor is typically reimbursed quickly. Banks often do lose the actual money though. Insurance and other redundancies were added retroactively by banks who didn't want to pay for insurance, and got the state to do it, simultaneously adding enough confidence to stuff their coffers under any circumstance. There is insurance in the DeFi space too. People that open policies are reimbursed in hacks. It is interesting that these thought pieces seem to lack any use of the products or integration in the community as the language would be pretty different, but the irony is that nobody in the community is interested in writing these thought pieces. It eludes most people that are disillusioned or were already chronically skeptical, but the most productive approach is to talk about the future state of these systems and how they can be improved. For example, I think it is absurd that people have to manually understand that there are competing third party insurance platforms they have to use for every DeFi operation they make, so it could instead be automatic to craft the best policy alongside their transaction into another DeFi platform. It is incredibly lucrative to make ever-so-slight improvements to this space. The people that do build here do that, the activist investors in the space push teams towards roadmaps the teams didn't originally consider. I think many people miss that they can have outsized influence, its not going away so make it better.

sureklix 5y ago

There are lots of points in the article challenging smart contracts because they need a social contract. Ethereum community also understands that social contract > smart contract. See below: From Vitalik https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html: "...What's going on here is a pattern of a similar type to what we saw with the not-yet-issued Bitcoin and Ethereum coin rewards: the coins were ultimately owned not by a cryptographic key, but by some kind of social contract." "...Once again, millions of dollars of value are being controlled and allocated, not by individuals or cryptographic keys, but by social conceptions of legitimacy." So the point is a bit moot, money is not flowing to web3 because of immutability per se. For most venture capital, mainly it is an effort to create a levelled playing field for startups –"decentralized x" etc. For retail investors, highly volatile, information symmetric (perceived) assets.

trkulja 5y ago
Could you expand on the VC part please? What is their exact interest here?