20 ms·

Web3 is going just great

299 points by hnbad 5y ago

throwbynight38 5y ago
Reminds me a bit of f*ckedcompany.com back in the day.
ggambetta 5y ago
Please invest in the Meatverse (http://meatver.se http://meatver.se), it's totally not a joke.
- Nicksil 5y ago
  That's the most deliciousverse so far
  - kreeben 5y ago
    But how can the first wave of people get rich off of it at the expense of the second and third wave of people?
    - WJW 5y ago
      You can age the meats to make them more expensive: https://straitsresearch.com/blog/dry-aged-beef-what-makes-it-so-expensive/ https://straitsresearch.com/blog/dry-aged-beef-what-makes-it... You could say it's like st(e)aking your meatcoins.
      - kreeben 5y ago
        But what if I spend months dry aging my meat and then someone comes along and just forks it?
- aledalgrande 5y ago
  LOL OK this is really funny, great puns!
ShamelessC 5y ago
The decision to call all of this "web 3.0" without actually consulting any developers (that don't own/trade cryptocurrencies) was such a mistake. No - I don't want to write inherently buggy smart contracts for your scam. If I wanted to do that, I would have gone into fintech awhile ago.
- paulgb 5y ago
  I agree that it's a shame, but looking back at “web 2.0”, wasn't it kind of the same? I'm absolutely guilty about being excited about it at the time, but in retrospect, a bunch of rounded corners and incremental inclusion of Ajax didn't really warrant a SemVer major version update either. Edit: actually, maybe the justification of the SemVer bump is that people stopped caring about IE5 support :)
  - pbourke 5y ago
    Web 2.0 was a hokey name, but at least it was a new approach to building web apps, built on the techniques and technology that preceded it. Web 3 is ... not that.
    - fastball 5y ago
      How is web3 not a new approach to building web apps? You might disagree with the approach, but using blockchain as the backend for an app is very different from previous iterations of the web.
      - pbourke 5y ago
        There have been plenty of new backend approaches since the term Web 2.0 was minted. The important change was a shifting from one request per view to multiple requests that comprise a view: it was the client/server interaction patterns that were important. The fact that you build your “web 3” application using Web 2.0 techniques (SPAs, etc) tells me that web 3 is not a thing. It’s another type of backend, and the web is designed to have those appear in perpetuity.
pcbro141 5y ago
I'm hearing disturbing reports of all sorts of hacking, thievery, and even trafficking of drugs and people spreading to lawless protocols like DNS, HTTP, TCP. The government must do something to get rid of these dangerous protocols before it's too late.
- bicx 5y ago
  Wait until you hear about IMAP, a protocol used by Nigerian scammers to deceive and bankrupt innocent Americans.
evergrande 5y ago
Anyone want to do a web2isgoinggreat.com version of this?
- vyrotek 5y ago
  Ha, it was available and I was about to snag it but held back. Someone else grabbed it now. I hope they do amazing things with it.
- gowld 5y ago
  It was at https://fuckedcompany.com/ https://fuckedcompany.com/
koboll 5y ago
I like how half of these supposed 'bad news' articles are something like "Some Famous Person made an NFT... and people on Twitter are mad about it!"
- nawgz 5y ago
  Conversely, aren't all the 'good news' articles just... that more money was poured into the ecosystem and its "value" went up? I don't really see anything else coming out of this space besides speculative valuations
doublerabbit 5y ago
I'll call Web3 Web3 when I don't need to keep an active whitelist via uMatrix. When I don't need to use uOrigin and when people actually host it on their own infrastructure rather then selling themselves short on the cloud. I will also call it Web3 when it actually brings people together just as Web1 did. And not Web2 where a platform has two social sides shouting at the same bandwagon.
yrral 5y ago
What are the goals behind these people who spend time making sites and long blogposts about the failings of blockchains/web3, etc? In real life, if I talk to people about crypto they are curious and open to learning about it and most just don't have the time to learn about it. However, when I go online and see a post about NFTs or crypto, there somehow is always tremendous backlash, generally by people not involved in the space. I'm curious what about this space brings out the critics moreso than other hot-button issues. Especially since crypto adoption doesn't really impact these people's lives the way other issues such as abortion, vaccine/mask mandates, or drug policy does.
- throwvirtever 5y ago
  When people think something is bad and keep encountering other people saying it is good, they respond. There's no reason why anyone should get "involved in the space" before expressing their opinion.
  - haswell 5y ago
    > There's no reason why anyone should get "involved in the space" before expressing their opinion. I think this really depends on what you mean by involved in the space. Far too often, someone will start commenting on something based on nothing other than a 2nd hand understanding of the thing, and that commentary is often misleading or naive (or both) as a result. I’d argue that expressing opinions prematurely is one of the fundamental problems with society today, and one that is amplified by tech. And even thinking about this in terms of “good” and “bad” seems problematic, when it’s not inherently either, much like the majority of modern technology. I’m not arguing against the creation of “here are some bad things about x” posts, but there is a subcategory that is not useful.
- bawolff 5y ago
  People arguing about the merits of various technologies on the internet is not a new phenomenon.
- ssss11 5y ago
  The topic is divisive because of human nature. People need to believe in the foundations of their life and the decisions they make, there are a lot of people who don’t want to see the change that crypto could bring and fundamentally no one knows if crypto will change the world but if it does it will change everyone’s lives. I try to reduce the flames by just talking about the technical or logical aspects with these types of topics. Personally I think education systems gear us up for difficulties later in life through competitiveness - the drive to win, come first, be right. We should be learning that it’s ok not to come first and sometimes everybody is wrong. We can be wrong on our opinion of crypto as well.
danlugo92 5y ago
So much FUD daily here against Bitcoin and Web3. Ask yourself, who is the most affected by these 2 technologies existing? Web3 is young still, I'll grant you that, but it will eat the world in 3 to 5 years. Bitcoin is already mature and it's the most democratic type of currency/money/property in the world, how can you argue against that? I hear you about the electricity usage, but Bitcoin Lightning will drive down the usage so much that it will become a moot point anyways.
- jimjimjim 5y ago
  electricity usage... the answer is always blah blah blah WILL or GOING TO. when?
  - aeonflux 5y ago
    I hope more countries will make this activity illegal. This is a zero sum game. Wasting energy makes it more expensive. If this madness will go on, everyone will have to pay for it.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > Ask yourself, who is the most affected by these 2 technologies existing? Speculators? Seriously though, can you tell us which Web3 technologies, specifically, are disrupting existing technologies in a way that really benefits the end users instead of speculators? > I hear you about the electricity usage, but Bitcoin Lightning will drive down the usage so much that it will become a moot point anyways. That's not how mining works. Layer 2 networks don't reduce the energy consumption of the Layer 1 network. They still produce 1 block every 10 minutes, and they'll continue mining as long as their costs are lower than the combined block reward and transaction fees. But your comment is a perfect example of the web3 hype: Proponents are convinced that every current problem is basically solved, we just need to wait for the solution to actually arrive and then everyone will see.
  - danlugo92 5y ago
    > Seriously though, can you tell us which Web3 technologies, specifically, are disrupting existing technologies in a way that really benefits the end users instead of speculators? Distributed systems where you own the data and there's no single point of failure. > That's not how mining works. Layer 2 networks don't reduce the energy consumption of the Layer 1 network. They still produce 1 block every 10 minutes, and they'll continue mining as long as their costs are lower than the combined block reward and transaction fees. I'm not an expert on the mining mechanics, I might be wrong but not due to the reasons you claim, transaction fees will approach zero as more people move into lightning and block reward will keep getting halved.
DantesKite 5y ago
All the Web3 criticisms remind me of my experiences with Star Trek. For context, I never watched Star Trek. I'd read stories about fans and it always struck me as the dorkiest possible show, with unabashed nerdiness making something like the Big Bang Theory look like a sophisticated work of art. But one day, I listened to a podcast about strength training and a question came up about which Star Trek leader the host liked more. And I was struck by how they described them. They were leaders. Competent, skilled, and wise men. This is not the impression I got listening from their rabid fans who were at their worst, at the far end of this (at least on first and worst impressions). I'd watch some scenes and it was in some respects closer to sci-fi Shakespeare than anything else. And so this gap between reality and impression stuck with me. How could I be so swayed by the worst version of something that never existed? Years later and the rabid users of cryptocurrency rile me up. There's so much abuse and corruption happening in this space, metered with gambling addictions and delusions. But the math and incentives are there. It would hard for me to make a case that eventually cryptocurrency will fail. There's a wide surface area of financial problems that even fintech hasn't solved yet. And a whole bunch of problems who we don't even realize exist that can one day be solved by these new mathematical properties embedded into software. So I'm not too keen on stepping too deeply into the cynicism. I'd like to wait without a final judgement on what it might become. I don't want to miss out on who Captain Picard might become.
- fab1an 5y ago
  This is a superb metaphor.
- tux3 5y ago
  So, that's a good argument for why you shouldn't dismiss a show or a thing in general based only on negative secondhand impressions. The lesson to takeaway is that you should judge a thing by its own quality, not by your negative impression of the fanbase. But from that, there is no way you should conclude that cynicism is wrong in general. You should not overreact to too much cynicism by discarding criticism entirely! You should react by seeking better information.
  - baby 5y ago
aledalgrande 5y ago
Wow, I mean not everything is positive with web 3, but why spending energy to make a site to spread negativity. We already have enough these times.
- brightstep 5y ago
  When a technology is as destructive as many crypto projects, it makes a lot of sense to spend your energy building a negative perception.
bawolff 5y ago
I hate this web3 bs as much as the next guy But, this seems more a list of people doing stupid shit with blockchain-y things, and not an argument against it as a whole. That doesn't distinguish blockchain that much from other technologies (e.g. consider WWW during the hype of dot-com bubble). I pretty much believe its all absolute bullshit, but picking some egregious examples, while amusing, doesn't really show that.
- antupis 5y ago
  This pets.com was bullshit but selling pet supplies at online definitely is not.
  - ojr 5y ago
    storing scarce jpegs is bullshit but decentralize storage definitely is not
    - heyitsguay 5y ago
      It's not bullshit but it's also not very useful compared to existing alternatives (compare latency, availability, and reliability), and it requires juuust enough technical knowledge to understand why that you can still build a convincing narrative about it for laypeople. Which you are incentivized to do when their buy-in makes you money.
  - gowld 5y ago
    pets.com was just a bit early, so the economy of scale didn't kick in. chewy.com made the same model work 20 years later, with 100x the potential userbase people comfortable shopping online.
- fab1an 5y ago
  My mouse hovered over the downvote button given your language here, but I understand that web3 has become this insanely emotional issue, so here's a comment instead: for every moronic ponzi scheme in crypto, there's one community that will blow your mind with their creativity and spirit. They're out there. Just consider the possibility that not all of it is crap, and that parts of it will play a significant role in our future. Give it a chance and you might be very positively surprised about what you can find on it.
diveanon 5y ago
This echo chamber is getting extremely stale.
awwstn 5y ago
web3 is so loosely defined that both the haters and the believers will be able to claim victory in a few years.
- dkarl 5y ago
  Yep, just like the dot-com era. Were 95% of the funded ideas complete bullshit? Yes. Did a bunch of them make craploads of money and create a world that nobody imagined fifteen years before? Also yes. I wouldn't be surprised if blockchain/defi/other web3 blah fails at 95% of what people are trying to use it for, and destroys 95% of the wealth that people gamble on it, and still changes the world and makes a bunch of people rich. I also wouldn't be surprised if people find uses for it in the plumbing of the conventional financial world in some invisible-but-consequential way.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
Reminds me a bit of the satirical “The State of LinkedIn” Twitter account: https://twitter.com/StateOfLinkedIn https://twitter.com/StateOfLinkedIn
aeonflux 5y ago
This is the best thing I will find in the Internets this week and it's only tuesday. Does it have RSS/Atom feed?
- throwanem 5y ago
  It doesn't and I really wish it did, although probably not enough to set up a scraper.
carlosdp 5y ago
These really well built "web3 is dumb" sites seem like peak Streisand Effect, I'm baffled so many people are spending so much time yelling about something they think has "no use-case" and is already doomed to fail...
- brightstep 5y ago
  The sooner it dies, the less carbon we'll dump into the atmosphere so people can buy monkey jpegs
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    still, fighting against something can be a sort of induced anti-demand: people will be attracted to the controversy and might just take up arms against you might be better to let sleeping dogs lie.
  - carlosdp 5y ago
    I could turn all blockchains off tomorrow and I guarantee nobody would notice the effect on the climate on any graphs that matter. Oil/gas/energy loves that everyone is for some reason concentrating on crypto as if it's the biggest polluter on the planet, so they get a break in the media.
- emerged 5y ago
  People will keep complaining about web3 until it stops being stuffed down our unwilling throats.
  - koonsolo 5y ago
    Funny that it keeps popping up on HN then... multiple times a day.
    - acdha 5y ago
      That's not surprising for a system whose participants won't get their money back unless they can find new people to buy into the system. If you've ever had a relative join an MLM and start posting about the TOTALLY AMAZING products their “business” can sell you, this is very familiar except that you don't even get Target-grade home goods.
3np 5y ago
The defining feature of Web3 is the absence of any central single-point-of-failure, moderation, or coercion in the technical stack - including individuals and businesses. Federated and/or P2P. Scrolling a bit, I see from the top: NFTs shilled on Twitter, centralized cryptocurrency exchanges getting hacked, things hosted on AWS, Peter Molyneux doing his thing... I don’t see a single example of Web3. Or even projects or technologies calling themselves such, legitimately or otherwise. Cryptocurrency and blockchain can play a part in Web3, they don’t constitute or define it. If you coordinate and communicate on Twitter and Discord, host the core platform functionality on AWS and Cloudflare, and send out newsletters via Mailchimp, there’s nothing decentralized or “web3” about what you’re doing. The OP is like criticizing Web2 because celebrity nudes were leaked via Gmail and this made someone get phished for their credit card believing they could stream more.
- kreeben 5y ago
  >> coercion in the technical stack Here are some things that I sincerely don't understand about DAO's. That tech stack that you speak of, it needs to become deployed onto a server before the public can interface with it. Who does that? Will every pull request become an NFT? Ok, so now you have an NFT and it's a crucial bug fix but what if most people don't want it to become deployed? What if I own the server and I really don't care what people think nor do I think smart contracts are especially smart and I decide, amma gonna deploy it, so I xcopy it onto the server. Now what are you going to do with your voting rights? Yell and scream? Will "automate everything by letting the blockchain decide what is the next thing to do" resolve the fact that the server owner can do whatever they feel like, at any point in time? Who owns the software? A blockchain? Who owns the hardware? A blockchain? Since when can blockchains own things?
  - 3np 5y ago
    > That tech stack that you speak of, it needs to become deployed onto a server before the public can interface with it. Who does that? The whole point of Web3 is that, no, it does not need to be deployed onto a server. Backends and frontends should be decoupled enough that in your given disagreement-scenario, you as the server-owner would be “forked away”. Think of the FreeNode/Libera debacle. The presence of a DAO doesn’t change anything in that sense. > Will every pull request become an NFT? I don’t see why any PR would need to be tokenized. There’s no need for transferable ownership (as opposed to authorship) of a PR. Or am I missing why this would be useful? (Aside: Who holds ownership of the PRs I make on GitHub.com on “your” repository today? Me, you, Microsoft, or “the community”? There are valid arguments for all of the above and it feels like a question of little practical use) > Since when can blockchains own things? They can’t. But they can keep track of who owns what. And smart contracts, including DAOs, can take programmed actions with the assets or informations it has acquired from others.
fab1an 5y ago
I'm flabberghasted at the amount of hate this space is getting from parts of the dev community and in particular HN. Web3 has its fair share of issues, but there's community and energy in the space that I haven't seen online since the early days of the world wide web. Consider this: if you are absolutely, 100% convinced that all of this is bogus, is going to go nowhere (despite the high number of talented individuals flocking to it...), fair enough: bet on it disappearing overnight or over long cold crypto winter. But if you think there's a slim chance that web3 may persist, and that it's not all just the bad bad things you think it is, do take a look, play around, join a community like Corruption(*s) (https://twitter.com/fabianstelzer/status/1470525607104684032 https://twitter.com/fabianstelzer/status/1470525607104684032) - I assure you you will reconsider your stance if you look close enough, and it'll position you in a much better way for what's to come compared to continuing to ignore it.
- satyrnein 5y ago
  Like Pascal's Wager, but denominated in ETH.
  - Yizahi 5y ago
    Precisely. Very good comparison. PS: and for some reason I still don't see need to believe, even for an off chance of going to heaven. Same with crypto.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > I'm flabberghasted at the amount of hate this space is getting from parts of the dev community and in particular HN. Web3 has its fair share of issues, but there's community and energy in the space that I haven't seen online since the early days of the world wide web. If you're familiar with the space, you have to at least admit that it's filled to the brim with grifters and people looking to acquire life-changing wealth for themselves by hyping things that they have a vested financial interest in. There is a lot of energy in the space, but that's because it's just about the only thing web3 has going for it right now. The value of an asset has an exponential relationship with the hype around it, so everyone is working overtime to hype hype hype. Few people are interested in discussing what's underneath all of the hype, though, and instead allude to all of the vague future uses of the technology (which will allow everyone to flip their current investments for huge profits, or so the narrative goes).
pcmaffey 5y ago
Web2 was born from the ashes of Web1, which crashed under the weight of expectations, cash, and inexperience. Web2 is still booming. I don't see that bubble popping anytime soon, unless world governments get super serious about regulation. That's not to say that a web3 couldn't come into the world while web2 is still going strong, but... it seems less likely that we'll see any real transformation until web2 and the tech oligarchies it gave rise to start to falter. Web3 has expectations, cash, and lots of experienced people behind it, but there's little space in the market to occupy because web2 is still thriving. To take a leap, this casually makes me think of the theory around disenfranchised nobility causing the fall of the roman empire...
- shagie 5y ago
  Web1 is still alive and doing fine on every web page that doesn't have a comments section and isn't built by some community that a company is hoping to monetize.
adam12 5y ago
Site should be called NFTisgoinggreat.com
IceWreck 5y ago
Haha this is excellent. Am gonna link this the next time someone shills their shitcoin and web3 BS. But who am I kidding, theyre gonna call me uninformed and chase after the next upcoming scam to make quick buck.
RONROC 5y ago
People will pile in here and argue in all earnestness that stirring the pot and making an earnest, snarky, and (maybe) contentious point out in the open is not an effective manner of brushing up against the “discourse”. But they’re wrong. In a world where data brokers can (and will) shake out your whoIS info for the right price which can cost you personally, I commend any effort to re-frame the conversation and “speak truth to power” as corny as that sounds. This type of thing is an actual example of effective altruism. You’re not saving the snow leopard, sure, but it’s important to do what you can as much as possible. Web 3 is a marketing grift aimed at high-minded idealism with one goal: to turn your lights off in the name of the next “new thing” because god forbid you don’t get in on the first floor.
dumbfoundded 5y ago
As someone building in web3, I'll give an example. When I sold my first business, escrow.com wanted >$20K for the domain transfer from godaddy. If you sell a domain on ethereum (ENS), the escrow requires only a smart contract and fees scale with the network so like $50 right now. I'm working on connecting the two. Intermediaries are a huge reason the web is the way it is. If we can eliminate them, the internet looks very different. My biggest prediction is that fundamental protocols like TLS will altered to integrate with blockchain protocols. Web3 isn't just a scam or waste of resources. It will enable us to do things we already do but much cheaper than we do them now. Lots of smart people are flooding into the space. It will take at least a decade but it's already happening.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > As someone building in web3, I'll give an example. When I sold my first business, escrow.com wanted >$20K for the domain transfer from godaddy. If you sell a domain on ethereum (ENS), the escrow requires only a smart contract and fees scale with the network so like $50 right now. I'm working on connecting the two. A quick look at https://www.escrow.com/fee-calculator https://www.escrow.com/fee-calculator shows that fees only reach $20K if you're selling a $2.2 million domain name. At that level, lawyers should be involved on both sides anyway and your $20K fee is better spent on proper legal services to get it done. Escrow.com is notoriously expensive. ENS domains may allow for smart contract transfers, but the downside of this is that anyone who gets access to your keys can now permanently own your domain name for that same $50 (likely higher) transfer fee. For companies, this means that a single security slip-up or even a single disgruntled employee with the right access can forever destroy your company's internet presence with no recourse. The current domain name system isn't perfect, but there is recourse for hijacked and stolen domain names. Nothing comparable exists in the blockchain space, specifically because people don't want it to. Sounds great if you're sitting on the sidelines, criticizing other people for their poor OpSec when things go wrong. Doesn't sound great when you're trying to secure a business and realize that loss or theft of the domain keys means irreversible destruction of your domain name.
  - carlosdp 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pshc 5y ago
Why blame web3? Proof of work (Bitcoin specifically) is the entity pouring lighter fluid on the planet. Bitcoin isn't even part of web3. If we want to realistically reduce CO2 emissions by cryptocurrencies, displacing Bitcoin and other proof-of-work chains is step one. Thankfully this seems to be happening. Check out any chart of BTC-ETH. With power-efficient proof of stake coming next year I'm hoping we can reduce the incentives for anyone who's thinking about starting up a coal power plant.
- ShamelessC 5y ago
  Proof of stake simply won't work without some sort of proof-of-work coin backing it. I'm sure the Ethereum people would love for you to believe otherwise - but there's a reason they keep punting to "one more year"; they can't do it.
  - pshc 5y ago
    The beacon chain has been operational for a year now. Progress is slow and steady.
dvt 5y ago
I'm not a Web3 shill, but this is so insanely disingenuous it's not even funny. First of all, the argument that web3 is the biggest ecological problem of our time -- when essentially all of Asia is contributing 80% of ocean pollution, and the supply chain contributes to more than 50% of greenhouse gas emissions, is just straight-up delusional. The claim that Web3 is rife with hacks, when you have daily hacks of Web2 (are we just ignoring Log4j, which is a huge deal and happened 2 days ago), including egregious privacy leaks (Cambridge Analytica), and comical wrist-slaps (Equifax anyone?) is just silly. I could make the same argument about technology in general and it would be wrong (you'd still have snake-oil salesmen roaming the streets). Finally, the idea that rug pulls don't happen in other markets is also just such a jejune interpretation of markets. I take it author is not familiar with SPACs and IPOs? It's just clueless posturing. Look at what happened with Nikola just earlier this year. Is that not a rug pull?
- artursapek 5y ago
  Anyone making the "crypto is killing the environment" argument is basically just regurgitating a trope they read in the corporate media. Pretty obvious red flag.
  - AlexandrB 5y ago
    Great. What's the counterargument? Just because it's a trope doesn't mean it's not true. PoW is insanely inefficient compared to traditional database technology, doesn't actually replace "the banking system" (so both have to run at the same time), and in practice only provides theoretical decentralization since most people invest in crypto through intermediaries.
    - artursapek 5y ago
      web3/Metamask apps like NFT marketplaces are generally used with a wallet (software or hardware+software) which the end user is custodian of; not a third party. Much of the crypto space is moving towards Proof of Stake, including Ethereum. These critics also fail to ever mention that.
- 5y ago
hwers 5y ago
As a side note, I love the way this was presented. Seeing news in chronological order and well summarized like this really organized in my mind a lot of random pieces of news I'd heard tangentially over the months.
- TheresNoTime 5y ago
  it's nicely made, no?
endisneigh 5y ago
Don’t see how web3 can succeed. Are we not all posting here because it’s centralized and moderated? No decentralized service has ever succeeded. The closest is email which is federated at this point and even though most people use five providers. Curious of a solid use case for web3 that surpasses in performance or in usability a trusted “web2” site.
stevebmark 5y ago
I find it both sad and funny watching folks discard efficient, regulated, centralized financial systems, and turn to a decentralized one and deal with the constant scams that such a system would obviously produce. Irreversible transactions, 90% wash trading, the hilariously bad idea of "smart contracts," and surprisingly inefficient core technology designed to become more wasteful as it scales. Who knows what the future holds, though. There's clearly huge hype in this space. Will anything come of it once the pyramid scheme and ponzi scheme foundational core of web3 is realized and replaced? Or will that day never come? I don't think it will and this is just another gold rush. Some people are surprisingly open about it, running scams and hyping up other people to try to strengthen their own pump-and-dump scams. We see things like this with people Tweeing/Telegraming/Reddting/whatever about AMC stock too. At least in regulated markets this is easier to catch and change, and it's the minority of trades, where it's the foundation of cryptocurrency. Thinking more about it, I think I feel bad for the people caught up thinking this will be useful or game changing technology. I wonder how much they realize the core technology has limited use, and all of the hype is around trading unregulated, untaxed asset bubbles.
- adam_arthur 5y ago
  My favorite new thing are these metaverse land sales. Not like there's an infinite amount of land in a virtual world or anything...
- guntars 5y ago
  To the proponents of the "efficient, regulated, centralized financial systems" I want to ask - why can't I pay $0.10 to a random paywalled site to access a single article?
  - ShamelessC 5y ago
    See, that's the whole problem with the approach though. Paywalls are shitty. Nobody wanted that to happen except for the money-men. It's for this very reason that if an article gets linked here and has a pay-wall, a few volunteers will go hunt down a free version of the article and post it on archive.org for everyone else to view. You may see this as flawed - but I see it as beautiful. The way the "good parts" of the web still work. Money/currency/blockchain absolutely does _not_ have to be a fundamental structure of the internet. There is zero reason why a currency needs to be fundamental to the basic operation of "the web" other than for incumbents to try to increase the value of said currency. Like - seriously; the internet was supposed to be about democratization of information. I realize that didn't exactly happen due to big-tech extrapolating value out of everything - but the "solution" you are proposing is to say "oh you don't have any [insert coin here]? Yeah - you'll need to exchange 20$ USD first before you can even use our internet. Or if you don't have any cash we can give you some freebies so you can shill for us." Like - what? No. Not going to work. Or maybe it will. But, not because it should.
nikolay 5y ago
Web3 = the new way to scam and steal in the 21st century!
sergiotapia 5y ago
Justin Kan of Twitch fame just started a new startup for NFTs, I wonder what drove him into this? I don't get it. It smells and feels like a grift where people are pretending it's not because they have nfts they want to appreciate and then dump.
- acdha 5y ago
  One thing I remember from the dotcom and real estate bubbles was that it took much longer than I expected between something being obviously unsustainable and actually popping. Just as now, there were people talking about how the rules were completely different and you were a fool if you didn’t buy in because someone else was certain to pay even more soon. They were right about that, until they weren’t. This feels like a more extreme version of both. There were a lot of dotcoms which could at least have been plausible businesses with better management (pets.com & Kozmo cost to mind) and overpaying for a house at least meant you had somewhere to live but a cryptocurrency has no utility unless you talk it up to a buyer.
vasilipupkin 5y ago
I am less interested in the contents of this project than in the fact that Molly White is obviously a talented web engineer.
TheresNoTime 5y ago
The ratio of "but Web3 good lol" comments to those actually appreciating a well made site giving a playful jab at silly net fads is a bit low eh..
debrice 5y ago
I do love where web 3 is going but I wouldn’t want to underestimate the problems that its complete reliance on cryptocurrency also brings. Cryptocurrencies used to be decentralized but it isn’t the case anymore (if you hate banks prepare to hate large mining farms… until proof of stake allow the top 1% to be in charge), It’s anonymous (but governments don’t want anonymous money movement… I personally don’t want that either) and public (but if it stops being anonymous then who wants everybody to know they bought a sex toy online?). Contracts are awesome but still cost a fortune. All successful cryptos do not inflate which means the incentive to spend it does not exist, you’re better off investing in the currency itself than using it (you want a light inflation of your currency to help your economy by sponsoring real companies)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
che_shirecat 5y ago
I'm actually more interested in Web3 now actually after reading this lol. Sounds like the Wild West of experimentation in new systems, complete with high drama and lawlessness. Sounds fun.
sneak 5y ago
I don't normally post a comment about this sort of thing, but in the context of the domain name itself, this is sort of funny: > You need to enable JavaScript to view this timeline. Web3 must be going pretty well if my Web1/2 lifestyle can't even read its text on a webpage.
hnburnsy 5y ago
>...took the classic approach of those burned by crypto issues, and tried to get the cash back by... asking nicely. My favorite quote so far. Need to find the RSS feed for this.
CedarMills 5y ago
I'm not a Web3 hater - but I think VCs lighting the fuel with money is to blame. Now, every wantrepreneur is launching some sort of "decentralized" product and trying to capitalize on the hype. We'll see most of these projects die in the next 18 months as people move on to the next hyped topic. I think at the end of the day, Web3, like VR, will have certain use cases that will make sense but won't have a huge effect on majority of the population.
tdrdt 5y ago
I'm into webdevelopment since 1999 but I still don't know what web2 is. As a matter of fact the internet did not change that much as most people think. Ofcourse CSS changed and made things easier, Javascript is making application development more easy but in the end we are still transferring text and media. Maybe the biggest change came when browser plugins started listening to http traffic. The change to https was one of the fastest on the internet and right now almost all our interactions on the web are 'secure'. While I think blockchain tech is in some sense a new idea, I don't think it will change the internet very soon. I think it will come as soon as ipv6.
ThalesX 5y ago
I think web3 is still a fuzzy concept, but if it's less divisive maybe it would be better to call it a possible evolution of how we share cat pictures. The boom of cryptocurrencies, and NFTs, and all the jazz, sparked a need for thinking about data differently. We already had much in terms of traditional protocols, and there was already work in the space in terms of IPFS, so we already had some tools for reasoning about the data. What's important for a decentralized internet, is learning to stop referring to data by location, and instead, refer to it by its contents. This is an interesting shift in thinking about accessing data, the integrity of data, and other things which can yield real benefits in certain areas. So my bet is, whatever this web3 / possible next step of the way we distribute cats between ourselves is, it will involve a lot of immutable data structures, a lot of hashing, of merkle trees, a lot of consensus building, p2p routing, encryption, the jazz, and I think our infrastructure will become more resilient and scalable for that. This might be a new internet, this might be a side-thing with web2 still going strong, but there is work being done in the space, there are a lot of traditional data structures and algorithms and it's exciting to reason about data in a new way after all these years.
- ShamelessC 5y ago
  If you remove every occurence of the notion of payments and/or currency and instead focus on the good parts like IPFS and BitTorrent, maybe it stands a chance. Like it or not, people will always have love hate relationships with money.
treelovinhippie 5y ago
Of course the mods removed this from the frontpage. Yay censorship.
AareyBaba 5y ago
Site is down. Wayback link = https://web.archive.org/web/20211214210514/https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20211214210514/https://web3isgoi...
- TheresNoTime 5y ago
  Nope?
victorvosk 5y ago
The vast majority of the stuff on this timeline are hacks and user mistakes, not sure that constitutes a "grift". The only difference between this and all of other tech sectors is they can't cover up the fact they got hacked. I think the biggest hurdle to web3 is user responsibility and tech savviness. There was an assumption that younger generations would become better at advanced tech as time went on but that doesn't seem to be playing out. Using an iPhone effectively and avoiding online scams are two different skillsets. The problem is rampant in all tech, not just crypto. Centralized organizations protect users from the absurdly dumb stuff they do. You can't have decentralized institutions and an adult nanny service at the same time. All that being said, most of HN seems hypocritically upset at crypto. Its a distributed encrypted database, with some having distributed remote procedures. Nothing more than fancy tech. Are people scamming with it? Sure, but people have scammed with everything under the sun since the beginning of time, nothing has changed about human nature.
authed 5y ago
I gave my private key to some random person on the internet and he drained my wallet... Why do we need JavaScript to see a simple list of random events anyways?
beej71 5y ago
Seems like there are three classes of tech people around web3: 1. Love it (for reasons) 2. Hate it (for reasons) 3. Confused Vince Vega Meme I'm in category 3. Maybe I just need some RFCs to come out, 'cause Wikipedia ain't helping.
- bawolff 5y ago
  I think that's one reason i dislike it - its basically overly vauge and confusing to evade criticism. Hard to criticize something without a clear definition. The other side can just always say you're defining it wrong and deflect all criticism
moistly 5y ago
I really can’t see much difference between blockchain/coin/nft promoters and the door-to-door JWs and Mormons. They are all pushing their religion in a desperate attempt to keep the faith alive.
adam_arthur 5y ago
Can't wait for the crypto bubble to pop so can stop hearing about it. No intrinsic value = doomed to fail. Crypto has crashed 80% even when economy was otherwise strong. Imagine what it would have done during the GFC? It's inevitable the entire leveraged, lending, shitcoin, tokens, whatever will epically collapse. Because at the end of the day they are useless bits on a machine that provide no real world value. When shit hits the fan people will come to this conclusion and sell it first above any other asset. Every "use case" is just a self referential web of perfectly valid technology obscuring the fact that there is no intrinsic value in the application or tie to the real world.

299 points by hnbad 5y ago

throwbynight38 5y ago

Reminds me a bit of f*ckedcompany.com back in the day.

ggambetta 5y ago

Please invest in the Meatverse (http://meatver.se http://meatver.se), it's totally not a joke.

Nicksil 5y ago
That's the most deliciousverse so far
- kreeben 5y ago
  But how can the first wave of people get rich off of it at the expense of the second and third wave of people?
  - WJW 5y ago
    You can age the meats to make them more expensive: https://straitsresearch.com/blog/dry-aged-beef-what-makes-it-so-expensive/ https://straitsresearch.com/blog/dry-aged-beef-what-makes-it... You could say it's like st(e)aking your meatcoins.
    - kreeben 5y ago
      But what if I spend months dry aging my meat and then someone comes along and just forks it?
aledalgrande 5y ago
LOL OK this is really funny, great puns!

ShamelessC 5y ago

The decision to call all of this "web 3.0" without actually consulting any developers (that don't own/trade cryptocurrencies) was such a mistake. No - I don't want to write inherently buggy smart contracts for your scam. If I wanted to do that, I would have gone into fintech awhile ago.

paulgb 5y ago
I agree that it's a shame, but looking back at “web 2.0”, wasn't it kind of the same? I'm absolutely guilty about being excited about it at the time, but in retrospect, a bunch of rounded corners and incremental inclusion of Ajax didn't really warrant a SemVer major version update either. Edit: actually, maybe the justification of the SemVer bump is that people stopped caring about IE5 support :)
- pbourke 5y ago
  Web 2.0 was a hokey name, but at least it was a new approach to building web apps, built on the techniques and technology that preceded it. Web 3 is ... not that.
  - fastball 5y ago
    How is web3 not a new approach to building web apps? You might disagree with the approach, but using blockchain as the backend for an app is very different from previous iterations of the web.
    - pbourke 5y ago
      There have been plenty of new backend approaches since the term Web 2.0 was minted. The important change was a shifting from one request per view to multiple requests that comprise a view: it was the client/server interaction patterns that were important. The fact that you build your “web 3” application using Web 2.0 techniques (SPAs, etc) tells me that web 3 is not a thing. It’s another type of backend, and the web is designed to have those appear in perpetuity.

pcbro141 5y ago

I'm hearing disturbing reports of all sorts of hacking, thievery, and even trafficking of drugs and people spreading to lawless protocols like DNS, HTTP, TCP. The government must do something to get rid of these dangerous protocols before it's too late.

bicx 5y ago
Wait until you hear about IMAP, a protocol used by Nigerian scammers to deceive and bankrupt innocent Americans.

evergrande 5y ago

Anyone want to do a web2isgoinggreat.com version of this?

vyrotek 5y ago
Ha, it was available and I was about to snag it but held back. Someone else grabbed it now. I hope they do amazing things with it.
gowld 5y ago
It was at https://fuckedcompany.com/ https://fuckedcompany.com/

koboll 5y ago

I like how half of these supposed 'bad news' articles are something like "Some Famous Person made an NFT... and people on Twitter are mad about it!"

nawgz 5y ago
Conversely, aren't all the 'good news' articles just... that more money was poured into the ecosystem and its "value" went up? I don't really see anything else coming out of this space besides speculative valuations

doublerabbit 5y ago

I'll call Web3 Web3 when I don't need to keep an active whitelist via uMatrix. When I don't need to use uOrigin and when people actually host it on their own infrastructure rather then selling themselves short on the cloud. I will also call it Web3 when it actually brings people together just as Web1 did. And not Web2 where a platform has two social sides shouting at the same bandwagon.

yrral 5y ago

What are the goals behind these people who spend time making sites and long blogposts about the failings of blockchains/web3, etc? In real life, if I talk to people about crypto they are curious and open to learning about it and most just don't have the time to learn about it. However, when I go online and see a post about NFTs or crypto, there somehow is always tremendous backlash, generally by people not involved in the space. I'm curious what about this space brings out the critics moreso than other hot-button issues. Especially since crypto adoption doesn't really impact these people's lives the way other issues such as abortion, vaccine/mask mandates, or drug policy does.

throwvirtever 5y ago
When people think something is bad and keep encountering other people saying it is good, they respond. There's no reason why anyone should get "involved in the space" before expressing their opinion.
- haswell 5y ago
  > There's no reason why anyone should get "involved in the space" before expressing their opinion. I think this really depends on what you mean by involved in the space. Far too often, someone will start commenting on something based on nothing other than a 2nd hand understanding of the thing, and that commentary is often misleading or naive (or both) as a result. I’d argue that expressing opinions prematurely is one of the fundamental problems with society today, and one that is amplified by tech. And even thinking about this in terms of “good” and “bad” seems problematic, when it’s not inherently either, much like the majority of modern technology. I’m not arguing against the creation of “here are some bad things about x” posts, but there is a subcategory that is not useful.
bawolff 5y ago
People arguing about the merits of various technologies on the internet is not a new phenomenon.
ssss11 5y ago
The topic is divisive because of human nature. People need to believe in the foundations of their life and the decisions they make, there are a lot of people who don’t want to see the change that crypto could bring and fundamentally no one knows if crypto will change the world but if it does it will change everyone’s lives. I try to reduce the flames by just talking about the technical or logical aspects with these types of topics. Personally I think education systems gear us up for difficulties later in life through competitiveness - the drive to win, come first, be right. We should be learning that it’s ok not to come first and sometimes everybody is wrong. We can be wrong on our opinion of crypto as well.

danlugo92 5y ago

So much FUD daily here against Bitcoin and Web3. Ask yourself, who is the most affected by these 2 technologies existing? Web3 is young still, I'll grant you that, but it will eat the world in 3 to 5 years. Bitcoin is already mature and it's the most democratic type of currency/money/property in the world, how can you argue against that? I hear you about the electricity usage, but Bitcoin Lightning will drive down the usage so much that it will become a moot point anyways.

jimjimjim 5y ago
electricity usage... the answer is always blah blah blah WILL or GOING TO. when?
- aeonflux 5y ago
  I hope more countries will make this activity illegal. This is a zero sum game. Wasting energy makes it more expensive. If this madness will go on, everyone will have to pay for it.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> Ask yourself, who is the most affected by these 2 technologies existing? Speculators? Seriously though, can you tell us which Web3 technologies, specifically, are disrupting existing technologies in a way that really benefits the end users instead of speculators? > I hear you about the electricity usage, but Bitcoin Lightning will drive down the usage so much that it will become a moot point anyways. That's not how mining works. Layer 2 networks don't reduce the energy consumption of the Layer 1 network. They still produce 1 block every 10 minutes, and they'll continue mining as long as their costs are lower than the combined block reward and transaction fees. But your comment is a perfect example of the web3 hype: Proponents are convinced that every current problem is basically solved, we just need to wait for the solution to actually arrive and then everyone will see.
- danlugo92 5y ago
  > Seriously though, can you tell us which Web3 technologies, specifically, are disrupting existing technologies in a way that really benefits the end users instead of speculators? Distributed systems where you own the data and there's no single point of failure. > That's not how mining works. Layer 2 networks don't reduce the energy consumption of the Layer 1 network. They still produce 1 block every 10 minutes, and they'll continue mining as long as their costs are lower than the combined block reward and transaction fees. I'm not an expert on the mining mechanics, I might be wrong but not due to the reasons you claim, transaction fees will approach zero as more people move into lightning and block reward will keep getting halved.

DantesKite 5y ago

All the Web3 criticisms remind me of my experiences with Star Trek. For context, I never watched Star Trek. I'd read stories about fans and it always struck me as the dorkiest possible show, with unabashed nerdiness making something like the Big Bang Theory look like a sophisticated work of art. But one day, I listened to a podcast about strength training and a question came up about which Star Trek leader the host liked more. And I was struck by how they described them. They were leaders. Competent, skilled, and wise men. This is not the impression I got listening from their rabid fans who were at their worst, at the far end of this (at least on first and worst impressions). I'd watch some scenes and it was in some respects closer to sci-fi Shakespeare than anything else. And so this gap between reality and impression stuck with me. How could I be so swayed by the worst version of something that never existed? Years later and the rabid users of cryptocurrency rile me up. There's so much abuse and corruption happening in this space, metered with gambling addictions and delusions. But the math and incentives are there. It would hard for me to make a case that eventually cryptocurrency will fail. There's a wide surface area of financial problems that even fintech hasn't solved yet. And a whole bunch of problems who we don't even realize exist that can one day be solved by these new mathematical properties embedded into software. So I'm not too keen on stepping too deeply into the cynicism. I'd like to wait without a final judgement on what it might become. I don't want to miss out on who Captain Picard might become.

fab1an 5y ago
This is a superb metaphor.
tux3 5y ago
So, that's a good argument for why you shouldn't dismiss a show or a thing in general based only on negative secondhand impressions. The lesson to takeaway is that you should judge a thing by its own quality, not by your negative impression of the fanbase. But from that, there is no way you should conclude that cynicism is wrong in general. You should not overreact to too much cynicism by discarding criticism entirely! You should react by seeking better information.
- baby 5y ago

aledalgrande 5y ago

Wow, I mean not everything is positive with web 3, but why spending energy to make a site to spread negativity. We already have enough these times.

brightstep 5y ago
When a technology is as destructive as many crypto projects, it makes a lot of sense to spend your energy building a negative perception.

bawolff 5y ago

I hate this web3 bs as much as the next guy But, this seems more a list of people doing stupid shit with blockchain-y things, and not an argument against it as a whole. That doesn't distinguish blockchain that much from other technologies (e.g. consider WWW during the hype of dot-com bubble). I pretty much believe its all absolute bullshit, but picking some egregious examples, while amusing, doesn't really show that.

antupis 5y ago
This pets.com was bullshit but selling pet supplies at online definitely is not.
- ojr 5y ago
  storing scarce jpegs is bullshit but decentralize storage definitely is not
  - heyitsguay 5y ago
    It's not bullshit but it's also not very useful compared to existing alternatives (compare latency, availability, and reliability), and it requires juuust enough technical knowledge to understand why that you can still build a convincing narrative about it for laypeople. Which you are incentivized to do when their buy-in makes you money.
- gowld 5y ago
  pets.com was just a bit early, so the economy of scale didn't kick in. chewy.com made the same model work 20 years later, with 100x the potential userbase people comfortable shopping online.
fab1an 5y ago
My mouse hovered over the downvote button given your language here, but I understand that web3 has become this insanely emotional issue, so here's a comment instead: for every moronic ponzi scheme in crypto, there's one community that will blow your mind with their creativity and spirit. They're out there. Just consider the possibility that not all of it is crap, and that parts of it will play a significant role in our future. Give it a chance and you might be very positively surprised about what you can find on it.

diveanon 5y ago

This echo chamber is getting extremely stale.

awwstn 5y ago

web3 is so loosely defined that both the haters and the believers will be able to claim victory in a few years.

dkarl 5y ago
Yep, just like the dot-com era. Were 95% of the funded ideas complete bullshit? Yes. Did a bunch of them make craploads of money and create a world that nobody imagined fifteen years before? Also yes. I wouldn't be surprised if blockchain/defi/other web3 blah fails at 95% of what people are trying to use it for, and destroys 95% of the wealth that people gamble on it, and still changes the world and makes a bunch of people rich. I also wouldn't be surprised if people find uses for it in the plumbing of the conventional financial world in some invisible-but-consequential way.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

Reminds me a bit of the satirical “The State of LinkedIn” Twitter account: https://twitter.com/StateOfLinkedIn https://twitter.com/StateOfLinkedIn

aeonflux 5y ago

This is the best thing I will find in the Internets this week and it's only tuesday. Does it have RSS/Atom feed?

throwanem 5y ago
It doesn't and I really wish it did, although probably not enough to set up a scraper.

carlosdp 5y ago

These really well built "web3 is dumb" sites seem like peak Streisand Effect, I'm baffled so many people are spending so much time yelling about something they think has "no use-case" and is already doomed to fail...

brightstep 5y ago
The sooner it dies, the less carbon we'll dump into the atmosphere so people can buy monkey jpegs
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  still, fighting against something can be a sort of induced anti-demand: people will be attracted to the controversy and might just take up arms against you might be better to let sleeping dogs lie.
- carlosdp 5y ago
  I could turn all blockchains off tomorrow and I guarantee nobody would notice the effect on the climate on any graphs that matter. Oil/gas/energy loves that everyone is for some reason concentrating on crypto as if it's the biggest polluter on the planet, so they get a break in the media.
emerged 5y ago
People will keep complaining about web3 until it stops being stuffed down our unwilling throats.
- koonsolo 5y ago
  Funny that it keeps popping up on HN then... multiple times a day.
  - acdha 5y ago
    That's not surprising for a system whose participants won't get their money back unless they can find new people to buy into the system. If you've ever had a relative join an MLM and start posting about the TOTALLY AMAZING products their “business” can sell you, this is very familiar except that you don't even get Target-grade home goods.

3np 5y ago

The defining feature of Web3 is the absence of any central single-point-of-failure, moderation, or coercion in the technical stack - including individuals and businesses. Federated and/or P2P. Scrolling a bit, I see from the top: NFTs shilled on Twitter, centralized cryptocurrency exchanges getting hacked, things hosted on AWS, Peter Molyneux doing his thing... I don’t see a single example of Web3. Or even projects or technologies calling themselves such, legitimately or otherwise. Cryptocurrency and blockchain can play a part in Web3, they don’t constitute or define it. If you coordinate and communicate on Twitter and Discord, host the core platform functionality on AWS and Cloudflare, and send out newsletters via Mailchimp, there’s nothing decentralized or “web3” about what you’re doing. The OP is like criticizing Web2 because celebrity nudes were leaked via Gmail and this made someone get phished for their credit card believing they could stream more.

kreeben 5y ago
>> coercion in the technical stack Here are some things that I sincerely don't understand about DAO's. That tech stack that you speak of, it needs to become deployed onto a server before the public can interface with it. Who does that? Will every pull request become an NFT? Ok, so now you have an NFT and it's a crucial bug fix but what if most people don't want it to become deployed? What if I own the server and I really don't care what people think nor do I think smart contracts are especially smart and I decide, amma gonna deploy it, so I xcopy it onto the server. Now what are you going to do with your voting rights? Yell and scream? Will "automate everything by letting the blockchain decide what is the next thing to do" resolve the fact that the server owner can do whatever they feel like, at any point in time? Who owns the software? A blockchain? Who owns the hardware? A blockchain? Since when can blockchains own things?
- 3np 5y ago
  > That tech stack that you speak of, it needs to become deployed onto a server before the public can interface with it. Who does that? The whole point of Web3 is that, no, it does not need to be deployed onto a server. Backends and frontends should be decoupled enough that in your given disagreement-scenario, you as the server-owner would be “forked away”. Think of the FreeNode/Libera debacle. The presence of a DAO doesn’t change anything in that sense. > Will every pull request become an NFT? I don’t see why any PR would need to be tokenized. There’s no need for transferable ownership (as opposed to authorship) of a PR. Or am I missing why this would be useful? (Aside: Who holds ownership of the PRs I make on GitHub.com on “your” repository today? Me, you, Microsoft, or “the community”? There are valid arguments for all of the above and it feels like a question of little practical use) > Since when can blockchains own things? They can’t. But they can keep track of who owns what. And smart contracts, including DAOs, can take programmed actions with the assets or informations it has acquired from others.

fab1an 5y ago

I'm flabberghasted at the amount of hate this space is getting from parts of the dev community and in particular HN. Web3 has its fair share of issues, but there's community and energy in the space that I haven't seen online since the early days of the world wide web. Consider this: if you are absolutely, 100% convinced that all of this is bogus, is going to go nowhere (despite the high number of talented individuals flocking to it...), fair enough: bet on it disappearing overnight or over long cold crypto winter. But if you think there's a slim chance that web3 may persist, and that it's not all just the bad bad things you think it is, do take a look, play around, join a community like Corruption(*s) (https://twitter.com/fabianstelzer/status/1470525607104684032 https://twitter.com/fabianstelzer/status/1470525607104684032) - I assure you you will reconsider your stance if you look close enough, and it'll position you in a much better way for what's to come compared to continuing to ignore it.

satyrnein 5y ago
Like Pascal's Wager, but denominated in ETH.
- Yizahi 5y ago
  Precisely. Very good comparison. PS: and for some reason I still don't see need to believe, even for an off chance of going to heaven. Same with crypto.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> I'm flabberghasted at the amount of hate this space is getting from parts of the dev community and in particular HN. Web3 has its fair share of issues, but there's community and energy in the space that I haven't seen online since the early days of the world wide web. If you're familiar with the space, you have to at least admit that it's filled to the brim with grifters and people looking to acquire life-changing wealth for themselves by hyping things that they have a vested financial interest in. There is a lot of energy in the space, but that's because it's just about the only thing web3 has going for it right now. The value of an asset has an exponential relationship with the hype around it, so everyone is working overtime to hype hype hype. Few people are interested in discussing what's underneath all of the hype, though, and instead allude to all of the vague future uses of the technology (which will allow everyone to flip their current investments for huge profits, or so the narrative goes).

pcmaffey 5y ago

Web2 was born from the ashes of Web1, which crashed under the weight of expectations, cash, and inexperience. Web2 is still booming. I don't see that bubble popping anytime soon, unless world governments get super serious about regulation. That's not to say that a web3 couldn't come into the world while web2 is still going strong, but... it seems less likely that we'll see any real transformation until web2 and the tech oligarchies it gave rise to start to falter. Web3 has expectations, cash, and lots of experienced people behind it, but there's little space in the market to occupy because web2 is still thriving. To take a leap, this casually makes me think of the theory around disenfranchised nobility causing the fall of the roman empire...

shagie 5y ago
Web1 is still alive and doing fine on every web page that doesn't have a comments section and isn't built by some community that a company is hoping to monetize.

adam12 5y ago

Site should be called NFTisgoinggreat.com

IceWreck 5y ago

Haha this is excellent. Am gonna link this the next time someone shills their shitcoin and web3 BS. But who am I kidding, theyre gonna call me uninformed and chase after the next upcoming scam to make quick buck.

RONROC 5y ago

People will pile in here and argue in all earnestness that stirring the pot and making an earnest, snarky, and (maybe) contentious point out in the open is not an effective manner of brushing up against the “discourse”. But they’re wrong. In a world where data brokers can (and will) shake out your whoIS info for the right price which can cost you personally, I commend any effort to re-frame the conversation and “speak truth to power” as corny as that sounds. This type of thing is an actual example of effective altruism. You’re not saving the snow leopard, sure, but it’s important to do what you can as much as possible. Web 3 is a marketing grift aimed at high-minded idealism with one goal: to turn your lights off in the name of the next “new thing” because god forbid you don’t get in on the first floor.

dumbfoundded 5y ago

As someone building in web3, I'll give an example. When I sold my first business, escrow.com wanted >$20K for the domain transfer from godaddy. If you sell a domain on ethereum (ENS), the escrow requires only a smart contract and fees scale with the network so like $50 right now. I'm working on connecting the two. Intermediaries are a huge reason the web is the way it is. If we can eliminate them, the internet looks very different. My biggest prediction is that fundamental protocols like TLS will altered to integrate with blockchain protocols. Web3 isn't just a scam or waste of resources. It will enable us to do things we already do but much cheaper than we do them now. Lots of smart people are flooding into the space. It will take at least a decade but it's already happening.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> As someone building in web3, I'll give an example. When I sold my first business, escrow.com wanted >$20K for the domain transfer from godaddy. If you sell a domain on ethereum (ENS), the escrow requires only a smart contract and fees scale with the network so like $50 right now. I'm working on connecting the two. A quick look at https://www.escrow.com/fee-calculator https://www.escrow.com/fee-calculator shows that fees only reach $20K if you're selling a $2.2 million domain name. At that level, lawyers should be involved on both sides anyway and your $20K fee is better spent on proper legal services to get it done. Escrow.com is notoriously expensive. ENS domains may allow for smart contract transfers, but the downside of this is that anyone who gets access to your keys can now permanently own your domain name for that same $50 (likely higher) transfer fee. For companies, this means that a single security slip-up or even a single disgruntled employee with the right access can forever destroy your company's internet presence with no recourse. The current domain name system isn't perfect, but there is recourse for hijacked and stolen domain names. Nothing comparable exists in the blockchain space, specifically because people don't want it to. Sounds great if you're sitting on the sidelines, criticizing other people for their poor OpSec when things go wrong. Doesn't sound great when you're trying to secure a business and realize that loss or theft of the domain keys means irreversible destruction of your domain name.
- carlosdp 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

pshc 5y ago

Why blame web3? Proof of work (Bitcoin specifically) is the entity pouring lighter fluid on the planet. Bitcoin isn't even part of web3. If we want to realistically reduce CO2 emissions by cryptocurrencies, displacing Bitcoin and other proof-of-work chains is step one. Thankfully this seems to be happening. Check out any chart of BTC-ETH. With power-efficient proof of stake coming next year I'm hoping we can reduce the incentives for anyone who's thinking about starting up a coal power plant.

ShamelessC 5y ago
Proof of stake simply won't work without some sort of proof-of-work coin backing it. I'm sure the Ethereum people would love for you to believe otherwise - but there's a reason they keep punting to "one more year"; they can't do it.
- pshc 5y ago
  The beacon chain has been operational for a year now. Progress is slow and steady.

dvt 5y ago

I'm not a Web3 shill, but this is so insanely disingenuous it's not even funny. First of all, the argument that web3 is the biggest ecological problem of our time -- when essentially all of Asia is contributing 80% of ocean pollution, and the supply chain contributes to more than 50% of greenhouse gas emissions, is just straight-up delusional. The claim that Web3 is rife with hacks, when you have daily hacks of Web2 (are we just ignoring Log4j, which is a huge deal and happened 2 days ago), including egregious privacy leaks (Cambridge Analytica), and comical wrist-slaps (Equifax anyone?) is just silly. I could make the same argument about technology in general and it would be wrong (you'd still have snake-oil salesmen roaming the streets). Finally, the idea that rug pulls don't happen in other markets is also just such a jejune interpretation of markets. I take it author is not familiar with SPACs and IPOs? It's just clueless posturing. Look at what happened with Nikola just earlier this year. Is that not a rug pull?

artursapek 5y ago
Anyone making the "crypto is killing the environment" argument is basically just regurgitating a trope they read in the corporate media. Pretty obvious red flag.
- AlexandrB 5y ago
  Great. What's the counterargument? Just because it's a trope doesn't mean it's not true. PoW is insanely inefficient compared to traditional database technology, doesn't actually replace "the banking system" (so both have to run at the same time), and in practice only provides theoretical decentralization since most people invest in crypto through intermediaries.
  - artursapek 5y ago
    web3/Metamask apps like NFT marketplaces are generally used with a wallet (software or hardware+software) which the end user is custodian of; not a third party. Much of the crypto space is moving towards Proof of Stake, including Ethereum. These critics also fail to ever mention that.
5y ago

hwers 5y ago

As a side note, I love the way this was presented. Seeing news in chronological order and well summarized like this really organized in my mind a lot of random pieces of news I'd heard tangentially over the months.

TheresNoTime 5y ago
it's nicely made, no?

endisneigh 5y ago

Don’t see how web3 can succeed. Are we not all posting here because it’s centralized and moderated? No decentralized service has ever succeeded. The closest is email which is federated at this point and even though most people use five providers. Curious of a solid use case for web3 that surpasses in performance or in usability a trusted “web2” site.

stevebmark 5y ago

I find it both sad and funny watching folks discard efficient, regulated, centralized financial systems, and turn to a decentralized one and deal with the constant scams that such a system would obviously produce. Irreversible transactions, 90% wash trading, the hilariously bad idea of "smart contracts," and surprisingly inefficient core technology designed to become more wasteful as it scales. Who knows what the future holds, though. There's clearly huge hype in this space. Will anything come of it once the pyramid scheme and ponzi scheme foundational core of web3 is realized and replaced? Or will that day never come? I don't think it will and this is just another gold rush. Some people are surprisingly open about it, running scams and hyping up other people to try to strengthen their own pump-and-dump scams. We see things like this with people Tweeing/Telegraming/Reddting/whatever about AMC stock too. At least in regulated markets this is easier to catch and change, and it's the minority of trades, where it's the foundation of cryptocurrency. Thinking more about it, I think I feel bad for the people caught up thinking this will be useful or game changing technology. I wonder how much they realize the core technology has limited use, and all of the hype is around trading unregulated, untaxed asset bubbles.

adam_arthur 5y ago
My favorite new thing are these metaverse land sales. Not like there's an infinite amount of land in a virtual world or anything...
guntars 5y ago
To the proponents of the "efficient, regulated, centralized financial systems" I want to ask - why can't I pay $0.10 to a random paywalled site to access a single article?
- ShamelessC 5y ago
  See, that's the whole problem with the approach though. Paywalls are shitty. Nobody wanted that to happen except for the money-men. It's for this very reason that if an article gets linked here and has a pay-wall, a few volunteers will go hunt down a free version of the article and post it on archive.org for everyone else to view. You may see this as flawed - but I see it as beautiful. The way the "good parts" of the web still work. Money/currency/blockchain absolutely does _not_ have to be a fundamental structure of the internet. There is zero reason why a currency needs to be fundamental to the basic operation of "the web" other than for incumbents to try to increase the value of said currency. Like - seriously; the internet was supposed to be about democratization of information. I realize that didn't exactly happen due to big-tech extrapolating value out of everything - but the "solution" you are proposing is to say "oh you don't have any [insert coin here]? Yeah - you'll need to exchange 20$ USD first before you can even use our internet. Or if you don't have any cash we can give you some freebies so you can shill for us." Like - what? No. Not going to work. Or maybe it will. But, not because it should.

nikolay 5y ago

Web3 = the new way to scam and steal in the 21st century!

sergiotapia 5y ago

Justin Kan of Twitch fame just started a new startup for NFTs, I wonder what drove him into this? I don't get it. It smells and feels like a grift where people are pretending it's not because they have nfts they want to appreciate and then dump.

acdha 5y ago
One thing I remember from the dotcom and real estate bubbles was that it took much longer than I expected between something being obviously unsustainable and actually popping. Just as now, there were people talking about how the rules were completely different and you were a fool if you didn’t buy in because someone else was certain to pay even more soon. They were right about that, until they weren’t. This feels like a more extreme version of both. There were a lot of dotcoms which could at least have been plausible businesses with better management (pets.com & Kozmo cost to mind) and overpaying for a house at least meant you had somewhere to live but a cryptocurrency has no utility unless you talk it up to a buyer.

vasilipupkin 5y ago

I am less interested in the contents of this project than in the fact that Molly White is obviously a talented web engineer.

TheresNoTime 5y ago

The ratio of "but Web3 good lol" comments to those actually appreciating a well made site giving a playful jab at silly net fads is a bit low eh..

debrice 5y ago

I do love where web 3 is going but I wouldn’t want to underestimate the problems that its complete reliance on cryptocurrency also brings. Cryptocurrencies used to be decentralized but it isn’t the case anymore (if you hate banks prepare to hate large mining farms… until proof of stake allow the top 1% to be in charge), It’s anonymous (but governments don’t want anonymous money movement… I personally don’t want that either) and public (but if it stops being anonymous then who wants everybody to know they bought a sex toy online?). Contracts are awesome but still cost a fortune. All successful cryptos do not inflate which means the incentive to spend it does not exist, you’re better off investing in the currency itself than using it (you want a light inflation of your currency to help your economy by sponsoring real companies)

deleted 5y ago

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che_shirecat 5y ago

I'm actually more interested in Web3 now actually after reading this lol. Sounds like the Wild West of experimentation in new systems, complete with high drama and lawlessness. Sounds fun.

sneak 5y ago

I don't normally post a comment about this sort of thing, but in the context of the domain name itself, this is sort of funny: > You need to enable JavaScript to view this timeline. Web3 must be going pretty well if my Web1/2 lifestyle can't even read its text on a webpage.

hnburnsy 5y ago

>...took the classic approach of those burned by crypto issues, and tried to get the cash back by... asking nicely. My favorite quote so far. Need to find the RSS feed for this.

CedarMills 5y ago

I'm not a Web3 hater - but I think VCs lighting the fuel with money is to blame. Now, every wantrepreneur is launching some sort of "decentralized" product and trying to capitalize on the hype. We'll see most of these projects die in the next 18 months as people move on to the next hyped topic. I think at the end of the day, Web3, like VR, will have certain use cases that will make sense but won't have a huge effect on majority of the population.

tdrdt 5y ago

I'm into webdevelopment since 1999 but I still don't know what web2 is. As a matter of fact the internet did not change that much as most people think. Ofcourse CSS changed and made things easier, Javascript is making application development more easy but in the end we are still transferring text and media. Maybe the biggest change came when browser plugins started listening to http traffic. The change to https was one of the fastest on the internet and right now almost all our interactions on the web are 'secure'. While I think blockchain tech is in some sense a new idea, I don't think it will change the internet very soon. I think it will come as soon as ipv6.

ThalesX 5y ago

I think web3 is still a fuzzy concept, but if it's less divisive maybe it would be better to call it a possible evolution of how we share cat pictures. The boom of cryptocurrencies, and NFTs, and all the jazz, sparked a need for thinking about data differently. We already had much in terms of traditional protocols, and there was already work in the space in terms of IPFS, so we already had some tools for reasoning about the data. What's important for a decentralized internet, is learning to stop referring to data by location, and instead, refer to it by its contents. This is an interesting shift in thinking about accessing data, the integrity of data, and other things which can yield real benefits in certain areas. So my bet is, whatever this web3 / possible next step of the way we distribute cats between ourselves is, it will involve a lot of immutable data structures, a lot of hashing, of merkle trees, a lot of consensus building, p2p routing, encryption, the jazz, and I think our infrastructure will become more resilient and scalable for that. This might be a new internet, this might be a side-thing with web2 still going strong, but there is work being done in the space, there are a lot of traditional data structures and algorithms and it's exciting to reason about data in a new way after all these years.

ShamelessC 5y ago
If you remove every occurence of the notion of payments and/or currency and instead focus on the good parts like IPFS and BitTorrent, maybe it stands a chance. Like it or not, people will always have love hate relationships with money.

treelovinhippie 5y ago

Of course the mods removed this from the frontpage. Yay censorship.

AareyBaba 5y ago

Site is down. Wayback link = https://web.archive.org/web/20211214210514/https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20211214210514/https://web3isgoi...

TheresNoTime 5y ago
Nope?

victorvosk 5y ago

The vast majority of the stuff on this timeline are hacks and user mistakes, not sure that constitutes a "grift". The only difference between this and all of other tech sectors is they can't cover up the fact they got hacked. I think the biggest hurdle to web3 is user responsibility and tech savviness. There was an assumption that younger generations would become better at advanced tech as time went on but that doesn't seem to be playing out. Using an iPhone effectively and avoiding online scams are two different skillsets. The problem is rampant in all tech, not just crypto. Centralized organizations protect users from the absurdly dumb stuff they do. You can't have decentralized institutions and an adult nanny service at the same time. All that being said, most of HN seems hypocritically upset at crypto. Its a distributed encrypted database, with some having distributed remote procedures. Nothing more than fancy tech. Are people scamming with it? Sure, but people have scammed with everything under the sun since the beginning of time, nothing has changed about human nature.

authed 5y ago

I gave my private key to some random person on the internet and he drained my wallet... Why do we need JavaScript to see a simple list of random events anyways?

beej71 5y ago

Seems like there are three classes of tech people around web3: 1. Love it (for reasons) 2. Hate it (for reasons) 3. Confused Vince Vega Meme I'm in category 3. Maybe I just need some RFCs to come out, 'cause Wikipedia ain't helping.

bawolff 5y ago
I think that's one reason i dislike it - its basically overly vauge and confusing to evade criticism. Hard to criticize something without a clear definition. The other side can just always say you're defining it wrong and deflect all criticism

moistly 5y ago

I really can’t see much difference between blockchain/coin/nft promoters and the door-to-door JWs and Mormons. They are all pushing their religion in a desperate attempt to keep the faith alive.

adam_arthur 5y ago

Can't wait for the crypto bubble to pop so can stop hearing about it. No intrinsic value = doomed to fail. Crypto has crashed 80% even when economy was otherwise strong. Imagine what it would have done during the GFC? It's inevitable the entire leveraged, lending, shitcoin, tokens, whatever will epically collapse. Because at the end of the day they are useless bits on a machine that provide no real world value. When shit hits the fan people will come to this conclusion and sell it first above any other asset. Every "use case" is just a self referential web of perfectly valid technology obscuring the fact that there is no intrinsic value in the application or tie to the real world.