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Is Web3 anything?

• Shadonototra 5y ago
  [flagged]
  • dang 5y ago
    Users flagged this submission. I didn't see it until now. Please don't post this sort of rhetoric to HN. It's boring and almost always based on false assumptions (as in this case). Edit: and could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN generally? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately, and we ban that sort of account—it's not what the site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• shams93 5y ago
  Ultimately you do have an issue with who controls the browser. You would think that web3 people would invest in Firefox so that you do not have a duopoly owning the browser space between apple and google.
• jolux 5y ago
  [flagged]
  • keyle 5y ago
    Saved you a search Betteridge's law (of headlines) is an adage that states "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
  • tome 5y ago
    tome's law: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17918772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17918772
• tracyhenry 5y ago
  > Once submitted, that “contract” will be carried out exactly as specified. It is observable to everyone, debuggable, and non-falsifiable. But a centralized database can also achieve this, right? The premise of the general public trusting a blockchain more than an established, centralized 3rd party (e.g. government) seems so feeble.
  • jen729w 5y ago
    Isn’t it the visibility thing? Yeah a centralised database can do this. Good luck getting access to it. “Security” says you can’t. I think that one of the allures of the blockchain is that it’s publicly visible. This may or may not be a fallacy of reasoning but hey, we’re human.
    • newaccount74 5y ago
      A lot of government databases are publicly accessible. For example, in Austria we have the "Grundbuch", a register of land ownership. Everyone can inspect the Grundbuch database. Authenticity is guaranteed by requiring a public notary or a court to confirm any changes in the database, and there is a paper trail for every change to a record. It's boring old tech, but it works, and doesn't have all the gotchas of blockchains.
      • hansonkd13 5y ago
        Same thing exists in the US. Property ownership and property tax is open and publicly accessible
      • berkes 5y ago
        Many people complain about transaction fees and limited throughput of a blockchain. I can only imagine this ancient system to be a magnitude worse in those regards.
        • nicbou 5y ago
          Depends on the system. We served webpages quickly 20 years ago. Berlin also has an open data portal, and it's as fast as any other website.
• echelon 5y ago
  Web 3.0 was the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web was coming into prominence at the peak of Bittorrent and P2P. It allowed people to publish data in schemas without centralized databases. Protocols in markup. You could declare and share schemas for things, build on top of other people's schemas, and remix endlessly. It was powerful. You could define your contact details in FOAF and a client could ingest that and make contacts. You could consume articles as RSS or Atom and use any client you wanted. Clients that were faster and more performant than HTML-based websites. We could have shed HTML and Javascript for many schema-aware applications. If we'd built Reddit back then, it'd have been topics and comments that were digitally signed and exchanged p2p, with signed voting, interest graphs, and curated peer groups. Unfortunately, this was just as the VC and ad-money fueled Google and Facebook were coming into prominence. They built centralized systems that were easy to use faster than the Semantic Web community could move. (Semantic Web was much broader - some were interested in predicate logic distributed databases, which were a bit much.) Web 3.0 was the Semantic Web. Do not forget. We can still use the lessons today. This is what the web could have become if the advertising gravity well hadn't sucked it in.
  • pjmlp 5y ago
    > You could consume articles as RSS or Atom and use any client you wanted. Clients that were faster and more performant than HTML-based websites. We could have shed HTML and Javascript for many schema-aware applications. I still can do that today, granted on the sites that keep publishing feeds.
  • elliottinvent 5y ago
    Exactly. In my view the crypto community have hijacked the name coined by timbl because calling it web4 would have highlighted that web3.0 (the semantic web) failed, at least outside academia. Wikipedia has two articles, it’s all about the “.0” apparently, see the page on Web3.0 [0] vs the page on Web3 [1] I’ve seen plenty of crypto community content [2] claiming that blockchain is a key part of the original timbl vision [3], perhaps the missing piece of the puzzle. I think it’s clear timbl’s “decentralisation” point meant “not Google”. It definitely didn’t mean “not http, use blockchain”. You’re right that there was an opportunity where we could have delivered on the original vision of the semantic web but that time has long passed and Google have stepped into that void, to become the gatekeeper of the web. The vision of the semantic web was supposed to make every organisation, person, place and thing machine readable. Twenty years later and we basically just use it to share pretty links on Facebook. Plug: I’m working on a DNS-based protocol to fix this, making it easy for organisations to provide machine-readable data direct to users. We launched it in the UK last month and have machine readable data for 5m businesses. US roll out next year. I wrote up the launch in a blog post [3]. 0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3.0 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3.0 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3 2. https://www.coincarp.com/learn/what-is-web30-crypto/ https://www.coincarp.com/learn/what-is-web30-crypto/ 3. https://www.num.uk/blog/we-crawled-5m-uk-websites-and-published-23m-data-points-to-dns https://www.num.uk/blog/we-crawled-5m-uk-websites-and-publis...
• GameOfKnowing 5y ago
  This is a system dreamed up by those who have been on the right side of hard power for long enough to forget it exists.
• baby 5y ago
  A much more interesting news in the space, not being discussed on HN: polygon just acquired Mir for 400 million $. They are slowly acquiring every zero-knolwedge teams in the space. https://blockworks.co/polygon-acquires-mir-in-400m-deal-to-scale-ethereum-and-web3/ https://blockworks.co/polygon-acquires-mir-in-400m-deal-to-s...
  • aunty_helen 5y ago
    That doesn’t fit the narrative a bunch of cranky 40 year old engineers want to believe in. Let’s all instead gather around and discuss how code run on an aws ec2 instance solves any problem blockchain could ever hope to solve
    • arlcode 5y ago
      But that's a reality I can believe in. Some large actors dominating the market and with that come regulations (AML/KYC), laws and borders and in the end it's like the traditional financial system with a VM and JavaScript instead of COBOL. Whether that has any practical benefits to regular people remains to be seen. Perhaps, Perhaps not.
    • dang 5y ago
      Could you please review the site guidelines and stick to them in the future? Comments like this manage to break several of them, such as: "Don't be snarky." "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3." "Eschew flamebait." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      • aunty_helen 5y ago
        Dang, I appreciate that moderation is used sparingly and your resources are always stretched, my appologies. These articles slagging off web3 / crypto are appearing front page every 2-3 days at the moment and the comments section always becomes a shitshow. In a recent comment section for ~140 comments there were over 30 mentions of "ponzi" WRT to my comment, yes agreed it breaks the rules and probably could have gone unspoken. But it is born of frustraition in seeing AWS being touted by people that haven't either bothered to understand the technology but want to fling mud. This constant echo chamber HN is engaging in is making it less of a place for discussing intellectual ideas and more about pushing viewpoints. Once again, appologies for lowering the bar.
• lmm 5y ago
  But is there any case where you'd actually trust a pile of blockchains more than an existing trust mechanism (whether that's neighbourliness, contract law, or something else)? If you're not a programmer, getting a programmer to review your smart contract probably costs more than getting a lawyer to review your regular contract. If you are a programmer, you probably know better than to rely on some code being bug-free.
  • pengwing 5y ago
    The irony of course being that you would have to fully trust the programmer who reviews your contract.
    • onion2k 5y ago
      You don't have to trust a single developer if you pay multiple independent reviewers though. If you paid a bonus for finding problems you could even incentivize their honesty.
      • Jyaif 5y ago
        Note that if the bonus is less than what the reviewers would gain from using the exploit, then they are not fully incentivised to be honest.
    • js4ever 5y ago
      Even if you trust the programmer, and even if he is competent he might still miss a very complex edge case ... and since there is no court / jury to take a human decision, you can be totally screwed.
      • biztos 5y ago
        Even worse (better?) no sane programmer is going to sign a real-world contract guaranteeing the code is bug-free, and if you trust the wrong programmer to work on your complex blockchain program they might put in a sufficiently complex exploitable code path, and be first in line to (anonymously) exploit it.
• jolux 5y ago
  All of the examples of having to trust the government in this article neglect the fact that trusting the government is not just trusting the government, and it’s not just the government storing a deed or giving you a Social Security Number that makes it real. It’s the whole complex web of laws and regulations that created these policies that make them real, and the people (your fellow citizens) who have collectively decided to run society by these rules. Your recourse when somebody runs afoul of these rules is the courts, which you may feel free to criticize, but pretending they don’t exist is just silly.
  • meken 5y ago
    Yes, it seems like we need some kind of crypto police to enforce that people actually do what they say they will do on the blockchain.
  • CryptoPunk 5y ago
    The government encompasses all of those things, so I think when the author says "trust the government", it implies all of those things.
    • jolux 5y ago
      Right, but the government is not just some unaccountable third party that sits between you and the rest of society. It is meant to embody the society, and, in a democracy, represent its interests effectively.
      • CryptoPunk 5y ago
        The government, and all of its institutions, are indeed a third party. The government is not some representative of the collective will. Thomas Sowell provides his experience at the Department of Labor in 1960 as a poignant demonstration of the fallacy of that notion: https://youtu.be/v6PDpCnMvvw?t=38 https://youtu.be/v6PDpCnMvvw?t=38 Another example would be the latest $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill. It was 1,500 pages long and no legislator read even an appreciable fraction of it. There were provisions in it that the public was discovering a week before it was voted on, like one threatening to classify cryptocurrency nodes as brokers with KYC requirements for any transaction they processed. Apparently Treasury had worked behind the scenes to get this provision in the bill, to give DeFi the Patriot Act treatment: https://twitter.com/jswihart/status/1422785103386669058?s=20 https://twitter.com/jswihart/status/1422785103386669058?s=20
• westoncb 5y ago
  > Most of the descriptions I’ve seen focus on mechanisms - block chains, smart contracts, tokens, etc - but I would argue those are implementation details ... The real question is what fundamental capability are people pointing to when they talk about web3? That's exactly the change in focus needed in order for discussions of this topic to be more rational/sober/productive, imo.
  • aardvarkr 5y ago
    Then it just becomes a solution in search of a problem. Utterly useless.
    • westoncb 5y ago
      The way I see it: 1. many of the people doing originating work with the tech had deep understanding of the domain it applies to (and most software engineers to do not) 2. that gets diluted by people incentivized to shill for various reasons 3. so now we're not "in search of a problem" it's just been lost amid diverse noisy communication—and it's also defined in a domain unfamiliar to most programmers, so describing it is non-trivial 4. a good starting point for communicating this to programmers might be in terms of technical capability, then working toward more specific social/economic applications from there
      • aardvarkr 5y ago
        If you can’t communicate this to programmers then good luck communicating the idea to a general audience.
    • mattwilsonn888 5y ago
      That's only the most negative way to frame it, and it assumes from your own opinions facts about what people in general want.
• brotchie 5y ago
  I feel like web3 continues the trend (in a good way) of the financialization of everything. The primitives of web3 effectively enable the fine grained economic measurement and distribution of every element of value-exchange, and gives folks the ability to participate in these cashflows where they were previously not able to. Now that there's standards for representations of value / governance / etc (ERC-20) now any protocol that supports ERC-20 tokens can be applied to any ERC-20 token. Ditto for NFTs. As an example, if you want to split cashflows from any source based on some pro-rata ownership of tokens: there's a off-the-shelf battle tested contract for that. This composability and remixability of economic value flows has never existed before. Mix that with governance concepts in DAOs and you effectively have a parallel system of capital allocation and investment decision making. p.s. Charles Stross was amazingly prophetic in Accelerando where the Superintelligent AIs create a system of economics called Economics 2.0, which is indecipherable to humans. Reminds me of smart contracts interacting :)
  • thr0waway2 5y ago
    Like a company can literally spin off a division and make it public in a similar way. Or you can securitize cash flows into an ABS. The investment bank's fees will be a lot lower than the gas fees.
  • XorNot 5y ago
    Economics 2.0 in Accelerando was considered a failure state for civilizations.
  • shagie 5y ago
    Btw, for anyone who wants to read this book (its an interesting one) - https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler... Economics 2.0 starts at "Welcome to decade eight, third millennium" A bit further down: > Collapse of the trans-Lunar economy: Deep in the hot thinking depths of the solar system, vast new intellects come up with a new theory of wealth that optimizes resource allocation better than the previously pervasive Free Market 1.0. With no local minima to hamper them, and no need to spawn and reap start-ups Darwin-style, the companies, group minds, and organizations that adopt the so-called Accelerated Salesman Infrastructure of Economics 2.0 trade optimally with each other. The phase change accelerates as more and more entities join in, leveraging network externalities to overtake the traditional ecosystem. Amber and Sadeq are late on the train, Sadeq obsessing about how to reconcile ASI with murabaha and mudaraba while the postmodern economy of the mid-twenty-first century disintegrates around them. Being late has punitive consequences – the Ring Imperium has always been a net importer of brainpower and a net exporter of gravitational potential energy. Now it's a tired backwater, the bit rate from the red-shifted relativisitic probe insufficiently delightful to obsess the daemons of industrial routing. In other words, they're poor.
• aardvarkr 5y ago
  I have yet to see a good example of what “web3” is useful for… honestly this just smells like it’s going to be the next major hype train of 2022. Just like VR/AR and ML/AI of yesteryear. Note that both of these examples are wonderful pieces of tech but they were blown wildly out of proportion by everyone.
  • yokoprime 5y ago
    Agreed. It's like when people starting throwing around "blockchain" as the solution for every problem. The same lot has adopted web3 as the thing they are shouting from their soap-boxes, without really understanding the difference between concept, technology and implementation.
  • latenightcoding 5y ago
    "Just like VR/AR and ML/AI of yesteryear." More like the same silly blockchain ideas that didnt work X years ago, getting recycled with a new buzzwords.
    • monkeydust 5y ago
      Yes, feel people have forgotten about the Blockchain-for-x period but I suspect it will now make a comeback for the wrong reasons.
      • giantrobot 5y ago
        We'll need to crowdsource some Big Data for some push content. Luckily it's all Object Oriented so we can run some AR social media code on it. I'll get an IM when it's finished on my 5G.
• EGreg 5y ago
  [flagged]
  • brotchie 5y ago
    +1, EGreg gets it :)
  • fatbird 5y ago
    Ethereum has twice hard forked the blockchain to revert the results of "code is law", clearly saying that code is only law when a quorum of powerful individuals accept the outcome. Code isn't law, "code is law" is a slogan with as much veracity as slogans usually have.
    • EGreg 5y ago
      I will quote from an article I wrote in CoinDesk last year: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/03/12/in-defense-of-blockchain-voting/ https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/03/12/in-defense-of-block... For every technology we use today, there was a time it was laughably inadequate as a replacement for what came before. Code isn’t law, code is better than law. I wondered what I would have done 300 years agi before computers, and realized I’d probably be an architect or one of those lawmaker guys who wrote the Constitution. I mean think about it … you’re setting initial conditions, trying to think of edge cases, putting in Byzantine Consensus (checks and balances between branches of government, mutually distrusting parties checking election results etc.), but making it an Upgradeable smart contracts (process to do amendments etc.) Now CODE can do a lot more. In our applications for instance, you can: 1) Know the average amount spent on food or clothing by a citizen of a city 2) Vote on how much of food, clothing etc to simply subsidize by issuing more currency and airdropping it to the people (universal basic income) 3) Take a dot product between 1 and 2, and issue the universal basic income or stipend etc. and redistribute the wealth in the community according to the And best of all — it is entirely voluntary, thanks to smart contracts. No one has to accept your currency by fiat. But if they do, they’re helping to end food insecurity in your community. Just like that. No representative democracy and out of touch elites. Just the community taking care of its business and its vulnerable. Via a smart contract and decision making. And that is just ONE of the many applications that are possible. Intercoin has produced 10-15 applications that can all work together like LEGOs. Now we will be giving them to communities. Here are some more possibilities: https://intercoin.org/communities.pdf https://intercoin.org/communities.pdf
• Semaphor 5y ago
  Is Web3 even a thing? Outside HackerNews, I only see it mentioned in crypto-circles, but on HN there’s another article at the top every day.
  • vmception 5y ago
    Kinda? It’s under ridicule here because it’s quite contrived of a name and it adopts an ethos that is not put into practice by its developers and proponents. There is a popular library called web3.js as well, which is used to find and communicate with nearby nodes of distributed ledgers. It’s pretty clever and convenient. Since those kind of nodes store variables forever for free, developers dont need any other server side infrastructure and are able to make services extremely quickly, cheaply, and have a quick goto market strategy and it is extremely lucrative, and the users absorb all the costs of writing data. This is where things are 10x better than existing alternatives: revenue paths, overhead costs, speed. not the user experience or the performance of the underlying technology.
  • can16358p 5y ago
    Interesting. For me it's all around pretty much everywhere, from TV ads to billboards. To be fair: Not necessarily web3 but generally crypto, but still.
    • Semaphor 5y ago
      I neither see tv ads nor billboards, but I also don’t mean crypto in general. Specifically, all the Web3 posts feel like people arguing against something that’s actually just a minor blip no-one (outside of crypto) cares about at all. Essentially all the outrage being the only thing giving it publicity.
      • can16358p 5y ago
        I think it's one of those things that many don't realize that they need until they have it. We're so used to financially being controlled by authorities so it's deemed normal. Governments can tax you however they want and that is "normal". Coming from an extremely corrupted country/government I know how taking control of your assets is important, which web3 aims. To which extent it can succeed is another question though.
• TekMol 5y ago
  An interesting angle to look at Web3 is the media angle. How it is talked about in the media. It seems it is: 1: A very popular topic For example, it comes up very often here at Hacker News. 2: A very controversial topic On one side, there are many people who expect it to change the world in a fundamental way. Investors are investing billions of dollars into it. On the other side, there are many people who call it useless, a fraud and outright evil. 3: This has been going on for years now. Has there ever been any other technology for which 1,2 and 3 held true?
  • 6nf 5y ago
    Bitcoin?
    • TekMol 5y ago
      I would say Bitcoin is a part of Web3.
      • 6nf 5y ago
        Whats the rest of Web3?
• CurrentB 5y ago
  Nice read. What I don't get about all the crypto haters, who will probably make up the majority of replies here, are they really just happy with the status quo? Do they really think the current financial system is great and their online bank account is perfect and nothing radical is worth trying? That usernames and passwords given to each of a million different companies are so great, why would people want to manage their own information? I get it, it's hard to see past the memes and bubbles and bullshit and buzzwords in the crypto industry. But there is a very real, very powerful, politically agnostic idea of self-sovereignty at the core to all this stuff. You dictate the terms of your data and your money and your stuff to an ultimate degree.
  • bushbaba 5y ago
    Idk. I get my direct deposit into my account from my employer for free. I can transfer funds to pay bills for free. And I can go anywhere in the world and withdraw money for less than a 5$ fee in less than a minute. Try doing that with crypto.
    • __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
      I don't think that the convenience of moving money around has much to do with what the article's talking about. It's more about flexibility when there're more than just one party involved--the kind of stuff that with fiat you'd have to hire lawyers for.
    • GVRV 5y ago
      You must live in a developed nation. I'm from one of the tier-2 cities in India. I cannot hold stable, diversified collection of global currencies in my bank account and cannot invest in global markets without going to a branch in a bigger town and without significant paperwork. I cannot legally accept money from around the world for my software development skills without being a part of the existing banking system. My relatives in my native village just 100 KMs away don't even have a bank they can walk into (they have mobile phones with data though). Do we just have to wait for regulated, for-profit entities to calculate when it will be profitable for them to provide us with services? What benefit did maintaining the status quo provide for people in countries where inflation wiped out savings overnight? If we have the skills and the opportunity to participate in an alternative, mostly open system, how long should we need to wait for permission?
• __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
  > this isn’t about removing trust, it’s about increasing what you can do at a given level of it I think this is at the center of a lot of arguments. The proponents come from circles where trust is a dirty word, so they don't want to say too loudly that they need it. The critics see this as an unnecessarily extreme position, which isn't the kind of thing you back down from, so they end up arguing that new tech is unnecessary/incapable when applied to this task.
• costac 5y ago
  > what if the neighbors collude and vote that you failed to improve the park despite having done what was specified. The contract could further specify that some neutral third party acts as an arbiter in that case. If there's anything that shows that Web3.0, smart contracts and so on are a bad solution in search of a non-existent problem, it's this. The ``problem'' is apparently that we don't trust each other and our institutions. The ``solution'' is to create a protocol for trust-less commitments. The bug is that the protocol ultimately relies on the fact that we trust each other and our institutions. Can Web. 3.0 remove some friction from the system? Maybe. Enough to revolutionize it? Highly doubt it.
  • recursive 5y ago
    I've been to some HOA meetings. I think it's more likely that there's no consensus than that people agree that the park was improved. Even if the organizer did their best and spent a thousand bucks on supplies. There's no way to "make everyone whole again". Or maybe a majority of neighbors just aren't good people and realize they can get a nice park and their money back just by voting "no" as a bloc. All the fancy number theory hasn't really achieved anything.
  • soco 5y ago
    It also assumes that neutral third party (should we call them judges, or jurors?) would act in good faith. What's stopping them from rolling with the majority? And how exactly is the problem of trust solved by trusting a third party? It would be laughable if it wasn't a straight faced affirmation. The "radically new" proposal is basically to recreate the old structures, just with new web3 labels. Is there a reason this would work better, only because it's proposed by software folk instead of politician folk? Or is it better only because it's proposed by "my gang"?
  • dogles 5y ago
    I think the bigger problem (which the example conveniently sidesteps) is that smart contracts don’t involve people. They involve _wallets_. I can have as many wallets as I want. Unless there is some external (centralized, trusted) unique identity mechanism, there’s no way to ensure the vote isn’t rigged. It also means that I could make a smart contract where I’m on all sides of the contract (e.g. say I’m trying to pump the market value of park-improvement projects…). Outside of “a few neighbors who all know/trust each other and the public key for each other’s wallets” example, this all falls apart.
• keyle 5y ago
  Every disastrous technology/standard has been when people have shoehorned different agendas into one thing. The shorter the keyword and catchier the better. Web 3 is shaping up to be excellent for this! Prepare your resume. Start early, add Web 3 in there. To marketers, it means better targeted advertising (more is just a side effect they love). To hackers, it means decentralization and going back to 1.0... IRC, but better, Usenet, but better, Blogs, but better... To Megacorps, it means more control, more moneeeeey. To governments, more control, more transparency. To humanists, absolutely nothing. This is shaping to advance humanity in absolutely no way better than 1.0 did. So get the popcorn ready, update your resumes and join the penthouse of the jaded.
• manmal 5y ago
  Escrow services do exist, and usually one of the parties has more power over the transaction than the other. Either the buyer or the seller can cheat the other one out of their money or goods. How do you prove that the package didn’t just contain a heavy brick instead of the promised tablet? I‘m not convinced this can be solved by any kind of contract.
  • zupa-hu 5y ago
    This. The requirement for trust is not eliminated just shifted. That’s the elephant in the room.
  • Animats 5y ago
    That's a big problem with "smart contract" systems. The "trustless" part only works if you stay within the smart contract system. About all you can do with that is speculate in various crypto items. The ties to the real world are weak. Yes, there are "oracles" for widely available non-controversial info, such as the DJIA. But how do you get an oracle for "house is complete as specified and is ready for occupancy"? Or "package was delivered and contained contents as ordered"? In systems where transactions are reversable, such as credit cards, problems can be fixed up later. But with instant irreversible transactions, you don't have that feature.
• ttiurani 5y ago
  > Unfortunately with trust in low supply these days... This is at the core of the issue: no technology, but especially not web3, is just a tool. Tech is inherently political because of both these kinds of underlying assumptions about the world, and how it shapes habits and beliefs of people using it. Creating tech which accepts "trust is in low demand" and proceeds to fix it by making trusting people unnecessary, is a very effective way to promote right-libertarian policies. So I understand why right-libertarian people support "web3". What I don't understand is why so many people with very different political values do. IMO we need tech that promotes trusting each other, not tech where we can make do with a war of all against all.
  • __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
    You might be interested in CirclesUBI, which is pretty leftist as crypto's go. I think it's in the minority only only because bitcoin gave the right leaning folk a head start. The cryptocommunists will be along any minute now.
• largely_sitting 5y ago
  All of these systems are pay-to-play systems, and just like pay-to-play games favor whales and their large wallets. Proof-of-work just means more bots hard at work. Voting systems will botted. Swarm investments will seem like democracy to the average user, but all orchestrated from a single source.
• dools 5y ago
  What’s missing from this discussion is that you are trusting a blockchain. So if someone goes around and raises money from a bunch of people they are exchanging currency for some crypto asset. How do they know that crypto asset is actually genuine Etherium and not Etheriumm?
  • vmception 5y ago
    …. Easily? The signature and state. It’s the same technology as PGP signers use in their email for proving which relies on the impossibility of collisions.
    • dools 5y ago
      Oh cool, how many people in your community do you know who are comfortable using PGP in their email?
      • vmception 5y ago
        Thats kinda the point, PGP had 25 years to get any use and failed, this form of crypto reached accelerated saturation very quickly You thought you had a rebuttal and walked right into why its working Those users can learn not to get taken advantage of
        • seoaeu 5y ago
          > Those users can learn not to get taken advantage of Spoken like a true scammer. It is pretty obvious to anyone who is even vaguely aware of phone scams that this will never be enough.
          • vmception 5y ago
            Debit cards, credit cards and ATMs came with new best practices to be aware of. And no, not all gaffs result in reimbursals from the bank. Here, we are acknowledging thats there are humans that commit malicious actions and they shouldn’t do that, and also acknowledge that there are programs that exist in perpetuity to do this which means there is no malicious human to educate, and requires (not just advises) the potential and actual victims to have agency themselves and their victim status is prevented by actually following the best practices that all predate the malicious actors to begin with.
• vmception 5y ago
  To me its just the open deployment and one time payment. Other development and cloud environments do not compete, from a founder or developer perspective. Users pay to use with no convincing necessary.
• sheerun 5y ago
  Indeed, good luck convincing a corporation or some government to sign up. Not impossible, but very hard
  • SparkyMcUnicorn 5y ago
    Some already are.
• Turfie 5y ago
  This whole 'smart contracts' thing is stupid. The issue is trust. Smart contracts as a solution are a sad attempt at solving that issue. There's always edge cases you can't code in. E.g. in the example of the neighbour buying goods; What if the other neighbours don't really like this guy, and conspire against him? The solution to trust, isn't codifying every possible variable and putting in on some silly unmodifiable chain. That solution just shifts the trust. Instead of trusting humans, we're now trusting some poorly written code... The solution to the trust issue is good ethics, mindfulness and good upbringing. If someone violates your trust, it's probably due to some stress factor in that person's life. We need to create a better world for everyone and actually help the people that our violating our trust, and show them the way.
• nibbio84 5y ago
  More than "disparate ideas", web3 seems a bunch of "desperate ideas" to make blockchains useful.
• supermatt 5y ago
  The term "Web3" was hijacked by ethereum. web 3.11 (crypto optional edition) as I see it is about decentralised services over p2p networks (which may include crypto/blockchain).
  • dehrmann 5y ago
    > web 3.11 I hear there's something called "Web NT" (new technology) that'll be big in 5 years.
    • supermatt 5y ago
      glad someone got the reference :D
• bitwize 5y ago
  [flagged]
• laserbeam 5y ago
  I'm tired of circular web3 discussions. All I see is people arguing for "but, maybe you shouldn't trust the government, maybe you should trust some math that works like a government in this limited scope". All I see is markets which sidestep all the rules enforced by governments to keep them fair (which prevent things like trading with yourself to create fake transactions), and none of the "park renovation" or "enabling trade for people in oppressed regimes" hypothetical examples. Whatever crypto claimed as values they are not actually being used in practice. The only things it visibly succeeded at were enabling ponzi schemes, enabling dark web trade, making lives easier for ransomware, and using a ton of electricity. I can't buy that web3 will deliver on any value it claims based on the monumental screw-up that industry did with cryptocoins. Especially when all values are hypothetical, and deal with abstract things like "trust".
  • throwaway405769 5y ago
    More than 2 billions of people live in authoritarian regimes where the government rules exist only to oppress the population and make it more easily controlled. Bitcoin gives them the option to maintain their property rights, avoid financial surveillance and money controls. Saying that crypto is only used for ponzi schemes is simply false and disingenuous.
    • peoplefromibiza 5y ago
      and Cryptos would help them, how? Authoritarian regimes are very good at filtering and blocking unwanted content. Bitcoin is as easy to block as any other traffic that's easy to recognize.
      • throwaway405769 5y ago
        Have you heard about VPNs and TOR? What authoritarian regimes are we talking about?
    • qaq 5y ago
      This is crypto equivalent of think of the children.
• treelovinhippie 5y ago
  Does anyone actually want a society of hyper-financialized trustless interactions? Sounds dystopian to me.
• sheerun 5y ago
  There is certainly some hope: for example Decentraland joining Blender as a sponsor equal to Aws, Facebook, or Nvidia. It's all about who controls the money
• mattwilsonn888 5y ago
  > But I think it’s a mistake to see the current mechanisms and lose sight of the actual capability they’re attempting to provide. This is magnitudes wiser than the typical sentiment of crypto here or in other skeptical communities. When the potential is first recognized, the criticisms then build toward that potential rather than simply having the purpose of tearing something down. Thanks for the piece, Chris.
• agumonkey 5y ago
  meta comment (npi), i find it really odd that very very often on crashes <x>, you really notice an increase in criticizing articles about <x>.
• dmz73 5y ago
  I am starting a campaign for web4. Optionally decentralised internet with no trust. It is simple, you can browse anything anywhere anytime and you can never trust any of it. It can be static forever or dynamic so it always changes. It can use blockchain as a way to verify history or as anonymous messages as you can make them. No obligations, no commitments. Free or not. Just do it!
  • soulofmischief 5y ago
    I just created web5, which is web4 but written in Rust.
• jfoster 5y ago
  Blockchain solves the "how do we keep track of everything?" problem. We already had databases for that, but OK, blockchain is decentralized. The much harder problem of "how do we bridge data & reality?" is mostly unsolved, and sometimes especially unsolved when blockchain is involved. (eg. paying via Apple/Google Pay will generally go OK in many stores, but paying via a blockchain-based cryptocurrency not so much...)
• padolsey 5y ago
  People keep saying 'trustless', without realizing the upsetting and very real truth that no mechanism is trustless. Even if you can, if well informed, verify the cryptographic integrity of any communication or data, you are also relying on and trusting the device, UI, and OS that you're using (+myriad stacks, libs, protocols). You are relying on every single medium between you and whatever it is that's verifiable. Let's not kid ourselves. There is no 'trustless'. We just end up assigning the burden of trust to other things. Unless you've built every element from transister upwards, then you're assigning trust. If we implemented, e.g., blockchain based democracy you can bet your bottom dollar that vulnerabilities will be found and utilized.
  • lordnacho 5y ago
    Maybe it's a bit of a marketing sleight-of-hand, but the difference is the nature of what you trust. Authority, tradition, laws, that kind of everyday thing, or math, cryptography, algorithms? I won't get into the weeds of whether you can actually trust math, just pointing out that this is what crypto proponents seem to mean when they say trustless.
    • mmcnl 5y ago
      Isn't the first question we should answer more whether math, cryptography and algorithms can actually replace authority, tradition and laws? I personally have my doubts.
      • lordnacho 5y ago
        Totally. Also, since we're in the weeds, you can ask yourself why you believe in math. Did someone tell you that Public Key cryptography works, or did you verify it yourself? I've read through a lot of crypto code, and in the end I can't say I really understand the details. I can point at the readings, but really, do I actually get what a pairing group is? Chances are I'm relying on authority.
      • immibis 5y ago
        In order to answer that we need to know what math, cryptography and algorithms can do and the cryptocurrency movement is doing a great job of exploring that space.
• endymi0n 5y ago
  It's not supposed to mean something. It's supposed to mean anything, so your imagination, excitement and greed can inpaint the rest. "Then they go up one more level: people send files, but web browsers also “send” requests for web pages. And when you think about it, calling a method on an object is like sending a message to an object! It’s the same thing again! Those are all sending operations, so our clever thinker invents a new, higher, broader abstraction called messaging, but now it’s getting really vague and nobody really knows what they’re talking about any more. Blah. When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don’t know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don’t actually mean anything at all." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28353157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28353157 — Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You (2001) (joelonsoftware.com)
• ajdegol 5y ago
  I like crypto, it’s interesting, from a technical perspective. And if you e ever had to send money to a foreign currency and pay exchange rates then sending a bit of crypto is like “huh, so that’s how that should feel”. However, the argument that you need it to be free from government and society troubles me because it all runs on electricity and other infrastructure. Maybe solar panels and satellites will help in the short term, but we’d need a bit more of a robust internet solution. I really like cardano’s approach. Trial in places that aren’t developed countries. That will teach you a lot. Everyday on hacker news there is a new shit-on-web3 post on the fp. To me this would be a strong signal to buy some.
• streamofdigits 5y ago
  > trust-less commitments seem to be at the heart of what web3 really is and that feels much harder to dismiss than owning JPEGs or speculating on currencies This is indeed the core feature of this whole genre but arguably makes it easier to dismiss in its entirety as concept and philosophy. Technology should enable building trust. Simply enabling a trust-less society to limb along in a transactional way reveals the libertarian bitcoin roots of web3 that actually believes "there is no such a thing as society". Designing institutions that are authoritative while democratically accountable is a continuous struggle against power grabbing insiders but it is not impossible.
• adenozine 5y ago
  This is the guy who ditched light table. Personally, I can't think of someone I despise more. I thought light table was the most innovative and slick products I'd ever seen on a computer.
• antihero 5y ago
  Is Web3 GPG finally going mainstream?
• tim333 5y ago
  The examples he gives don't work very well in practice: >How do you prove you own a house? The crypto idea of having a private key to a token goes wrong when you lose the key or get hacked, and then say to the court the house is still yours which it is in law >you want to fix up your local neighborhood’s park. You have the time, but doing so will take a few thousand dollars in supplies. You could go to your neighbors ... You might just get your neighbours to go on some fixmypark.com site and contribute normal dollars. Getting them all to buy crypto and transfer to smart contracts is not going to happen in the near future. The whole interaction between crypto and the physical world is very clunky. It seems to work better for flipping virtual assets like jpegs and imaginary coins. If web3 is a thing it'll probably be more stuff like funding websites by selling NFTs to have ape avatars by your account rather than interacting with parks and houses. But selling imaginary stuff and images and the like can be powerful. I mean US$ are largely imaginary things represented by 0s and 1s in some databases and they do a lot of stuff.
• Sosh101 5y ago
  How about we pause for reflection before the next iteration. It seems like the web is dying. I'd happily return to web 1.x
• partido3619463 5y ago
  With the neighbors example, don’t you need to trust your neighbors to actually confirm you did the work? What happens if you put in begonias and they wanted daisies? Or they just don’t want to pay you $200 and see they can back out and have you holding the bag. More generally, I still don’t understand how the “third party oracle” issue (ie how do you make real world add to blockchain) doesn’t undermine the trust less idea.
  • meken 5y ago
    I don’t know anything about blockchain, but setting up beforehand some kind of auto trigger to buy daisies with the funds would seem to solve that problem. Whether the work actually happens after that point, yes I agree, I don’t see a way for that to happen without human trust.
• mmcnl 5y ago
  Implicit assumptions always seem to be that trust authorities are a bad thing, something that exists for the lack of a better alternative. It is kept implicit that if we can go around trust authorities, we definitely should. But should we? I truly wonder if that is actually the case. I can imagine there to be also quite some benefits to trust authorities. This whole web3 thing seems very similar to centralized/decentralized movements that always end up being a sine curve. For me any analysis like this always ends up with the same question in my mind: what problem are we trying to solve here?
• tarkin2 5y ago
  Crypto, in its current form, is a brainstorm of half-thought-out, half-spec'd and soon-to-be-replaced-with-something-better implementations that has stumbled upon the web in its never ending task of enticing more converts to invest in its hype train, thereby justifying the previous investors' investments. We've seem to be inundated with articles talking about web3's vacuous nature, as if crypto's blackhole has enveloped the idea of web3 and now, in its place, leaving nothing but a vacuum.
• whazor 5y ago
  I think Web3 is interesting for authorities and notaries. Authorities can still perform identity checks and detect money laundering schemes. But still use web3 underneath, which still has benefits for interoperability with other countries and other companies as well. For example you could potentially have a decentralized global real estate ETFs, where the cost of joining many markets would be (potentially) lower. I do personally believe for consumers it is better to have services helping with security and advice.
• jmvoodoo 5y ago
  > The government issues you a deed declaring that some parcel of land and whatever is on it is yours. Small nitpick but this is not how deeds work, at least not in the US. In the US the seller provides you with a deed. The government simply records it, and the title company insures it based on their research of the chain of title. The government doesn't issue deeds unless they are the seller or grantor of the land.
• gandutraveler 5y ago
  End users don't care about government trust or privacy as much as we would want them too. Had it been the case Signal would have already replaced Whatsapp. Unless Blockchain based product solves a real problem it would be hard to see larger adoption. What makes it worse is most of the web3 products are always centered around coins, why do I need a coin to use a decentralized social network? It makes users feel like it's a financial scheme and early adopters have incentives to sell it.
  • mattlondon 5y ago
    Yes this point about needing to "pay" for what so far has been free will be a blocker for 99% of people I expect. It will be a hard enough ask to ask the average non-tech user to dump whatsapp or tiktok for something else because of the network effect, then if you tell them "oh and you need to pay with this weird thing you've never heard of too" it will be impossible IMO. People can go on about paying vs "users are the product" etc, but the truth of the matter is the average person doesn't seem to care that Google et al sells ads.
• Shadonototra 5y ago
  [flagged]
• sjtindell 5y ago
  Are we getting one of these every day now? They all use the term Web3 unironically, which means in my opinion they’ve already lost.
• mwerd 5y ago
  Authors point about trustless commitments, ignoring the semantic arguments posed in the comments, is important. Not mentioned but I would argue as equally or of greater importance is interoperability. If you lose trust in the commitment you've made, you can move your capital/identity/etc. To the new thing relatively seamlessly. This is the DeFi experience already built that's so amazing to interact with relative to traditional banking and capital markets. If you apply that same functionality to other markets, such as social media or healthcare (using zero knowledge rollups to protect private data), I think that's inevitably an a-ha moment. It's like the Amazon API mandate - https://nordicapis.com/the-bezos-api-mandate-amazons-manifesto-for-externalization/ https://nordicapis.com/the-bezos-api-mandate-amazons-manifes... - if you build with interoperability at the core, the knock-on effects can be exponential. It's a game changer. The consumer is no longer captive to walled gardens. Drop play money into a low fee blockchain, stick to a stablecoin, and mess around with some of the DeFi apps. I think it's easy to become a believer if you do that and compare to your normal banking experience.
  • serverholic 5y ago
    The important part is the network itself. Bank of America is free to build on top of the network but by doing so it enters into competition with the rest of the network. You don't need them for a bank account so if you don't like their services then you can take your funds elsewhere. In my opinion this is a critical piece of what is missing in our current society. These corporations and government agencies have become too entrenched and too big to fail. We need to inject competition back into the system.
• aeturnum 5y ago
  I do think that the best critique of "web3" is that it's shifting the trust into a different and less well understood space. There are advantages and disadvantages to using computers instead of analog processes to resolve conflicts, but biology is kind of unavoidably analog. In the long term I'm bull(ish) on blockchains - I think they have some uses, but most of the excitement I'm seeing now feels like it's scammy or mistaken. I'm very skeptical about any claims about the correctness or the health of the blockchain ecosystem because, if you're interested in using flaws to take money, it's obviously much easier to scam people than to go after the fundamentals. Imagine you're a Superhacker who Only Cares About Money and you have found a flaw in crypto. You could make some money breaking the whole system, but you can probably make a lot more money taking crypto from poorly setup exchanges or individuals and maintaining the value of the things you took. We are well aware of the problems of using legal and social systems to adjudicate disagreements. People feel excited because we have found math that helps us adjudicate disagreements in a new way and I also think it's exciting - but it all feels too early.
• littlestymaar 5y ago
  This sentence is key: > This is ostensibly what the legal system provides, but anyone who’s actually tried to go through small claims court knows that the reality of that route is… painful. And it often ends unsatisfactorily And it is in fact a key feature of the contemporary modern world: the people don't have a realistic access to court anymore, and this deeply undermines the legitimacy of the State. This immediately reminded this article[1] which explained how the Taliban have rebuilt their power in Afghanistan in recent years, especially outside of their original ethnic group (Pashtuns): by appointing judges in every provinces, available for free, with no delay and hassle. A quick DeepL translation of the most relevant part of the article: > From a material point of view, these courts are rudimentary. The judges, dressed without distinctive signs, sit in village mosques, in private houses or under the cover of trees. “The Taliban courts operate in a very simple way, said one of them. The Taliban judge sits with a cup of green tea in front of him, he receives the requests in person. Then he calls a member of the movement and tells him to go and ask the people against whom a complaint has been filed to come the next day” The judges interview witnesses, examine the documents brought by the disputing parties, and render their verdict, often after a few days - at most a few months for the most sensitive cases. Most disputes concerned land or matrimonial matters, but judges also punished theft, murder and adultery, sometimes with very severe penalties (executions, amputations, stoning). […] > The same motivation was found in a relative of Mr. Faizal Akbar, governor of Kounar province between 2002 and 2005. Despite his political opposition to the Taliban, he was forced to turn to them for a theft of cattle because, since the regime's judges were "corrupt," the costs of filing a complaint with the police and of an official trial would have far exceeded the value of the stolen cattle. [1] https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2021/09/BACZKO/63487 https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2021/09/BACZKO/63487 (in French)
• diveanon 5y ago
  These comments brought to you by the community that dismissed Bitcoin while it was still trading at sub $1k. You could create a viable investment strategy based around doing the opposite of what HN thinks and you would do extremely well.
• bob667 5y ago
  Crypto is nothing, it is vapourware and has no use case other than for spivs gamblers.
• mrtksn 5y ago
  I wonder if HN is missing out in the new trends.
• mark_l_watson 5y ago
  I appreciate Chris’s Clojure work. I wish what people call web 3 would be called web 4. For me, Web 3 was the (mostly failed) semantic web. That said, ideas and tech behind the semantic web are alive and well in knowledge graphs. Life is good. I would welcome more opportunities for decentralization and privacy in Web 4, I hope it works out!