13 ms·

The Third Web

105 points by omnibrain 5y ago

nyolfen 5y ago
then don’t use it
mattwilsonn888 5y ago
"Web 3 can't work because it doesn't work right now." Remain ignorant.
- SirFatty 5y ago
  Very insightful!
egypturnash 5y ago
This juxtaposition near the end makes me chuckle. “I understand that especially creative people are desperately looking for ways to make a decent living and selling NFTs looks like a very simple way to make some serious cash. I get it. We need to find a mode of life that allows people to work on their art or whatever else they want to do and still be clothed, fed, sheltered and otherwise taken care of. Comfortably.” ... “Take a second to support tante on Patreon!” ITS RIGHT THERE, Patreon is working just fine to keep a lot of creators paid with no ultra-inefficient distributed databases or cryptocurrency or whatnot. Just some profoundly unsexy credit card/PayPal/stripe transactions.
- mhitza 5y ago
  Problem is that you can get booted of those platforms and payment processors. Or they unilaterally change their terms of what kind of content creators they want on their platform (a la onlyfans wanting to distance themselves from sexual explicit content)
  - unchocked 5y ago
    That’s a feature, which rhymes with the author’s argument: that there are politics and that people decide norms, and whether or not you agree with the decisions, having immutable code just go ahead and enforce/permit/control whatever is a dystopia that we should not want.
    - Vetch 5y ago
      Sometimes laws are not just and governments are not aligned with their people. Some examples: sci-hub is not legal in most jurisdictions despite its immense positive benefits. Since being deplatformed, their primary means of receiving donations has been crypto. Then there are the unplatformed (from a global transactions perspective), where the cruel realities of poverty, scams and fraud means the majority are punished as collateral damage for the actions of a minority. Poverty means a cost benefit calculus has deemed fine-grained distinctions are not worth it. I can understand the justifications but still feel it as deeply unfair. When social media are used to highlight and organize protests of corruption, extra judicial killings and more, governments will ban social media and block the financial accounts of anti-corruption organizations. Coupled with being in countries where global transactions are already high friction, crypto provided real benefits. A non-crypto example is having to use VPNs to access certain university websites because its administrators subscribe to a lazy service that has blanket banned IPs from certain countries. Not unlike Tor, it's one of those things whose main use is by criminals in sane regimes but a high positive option in despotic or oppressive ones.
      - captn3m0 5y ago
        The unstated argument here is whether the extra-judicial quasi-ethical use-cases for crypto (donations for SciHub, payments for NSFW artists) are worth the current valuations in the space. I don’t think so. Most NFTs I’ve seen are not for art that would get booted off Patreon or DeviantArt. Is the additional complexity and weirdness and loss of legal protections worth the extra hassles that crypto brings even when existing payment workflows work well - I say no, but we’ll find out.
        5y ago
  - rhtgrg 5y ago
    I just want to point out that you can also get booted off crypto platforms under the right circumstances. This is what happened to Ethereum after the infamous $60MM hack. [0] The key difference is only that the community has to agree, rather than a single entity — however this isn't strictly true, since founders and core devs hold outsized sway. [0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/ethereum-hack-blockchain-fork-bitcoin-1.3719009 https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/ethereum-hack-blockchain-for...
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - egypturnash 5y ago
    Payment processors wanting to distance themselves from porn is a constant fight and I think it's really telling that porn has not embraced blockchains, crypto, or NFTs as a way to get paid.
    - LewisVerstappen 5y ago
      >I think it's really telling that porn has not embraced blockchains, crypto, or NFTs as a way to get paid Uh, how do you think Pornhub accepts payments? Crypto has been the only option for paying for Pornhub Premium for several months now. (I know this because I read a news article on it, just to be clear) Edit Sorry, ACH is also an option, my mistake. But Pornhub Premium's sign up page says they don't accept credit cards.
      - senko 5y ago
        I applaud your propriety, but it looks like your information is incorrect. Their FAQ states they accept credit cards from Probiller: https://www.probiller.com/ https://www.probiller.com/ Edit: and it doesn't mention crypto.
        mckeed 5y ago
        The signup page says "Unfortunately we are unable to accept credit cards at this moment" and has ACH/SEPA and Cryptocurrency as the payment options.
      - e0 5y ago
        One can also pay through ACH, so it's not like they're completely cut off from the traditional financial systems. It would be interesting to know what percentage of their users use each payment method.
        LewisVerstappen 5y ago
        Sure, and to be clear, the payment experience with cryptocurrency is still pretty terrible. That being said, it's getting better quite quickly and you're now seeing big tech players like Stripe enter the market.[1] [1] - https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/13/payments-giant-stripe-says-its-re-entering-the-crypto-market/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/13/payments-giant-stripe-says...
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    It may be that a plurality of people prefer a web where rules may exclude those people lacking a certain civility, leaving web3 to be a haven of the banned and otherwise unhostable. Freenet has been doing that for 20 years now so its unclear that crypto really adds anything to the basic social dilemmas of sharing platforms with people you wouldn’t give the time of day to. sidebar but onlyfans banning porn may have just been a genius marketing move that made them a household name - a porn site banning porn, what late night host could resist?
  - mmcgaha 5y ago
    Around 20 years ago, I registered my account on a web based simulation game by putting a check in the mail. Around 7 years ago I verified an account by putting a dollar in an envelope and putting it in the mail. I am not sure why no one is putting their snail mail address on the site any more because this can still work.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- LewisVerstappen 5y ago
  >ITS RIGHT THERE, Patreon is working just fine to keep a lot of creators paid with no ultra-inefficient distributed databases or cryptocurrency or whatnot. Just some profoundly unsexy credit card/PayPal/stripe transactions. Why don't you take a look at https://www.patreon.com/policy/benefits https://www.patreon.com/policy/benefits? Millions of creators are disenfranchised by Patreon. Also, you need a credit card / bank account to accept transactions from Patreon. With crypto, you can create a wallet in seconds and immediately start accepting payment.
  - shatteredgate 5y ago
    I'm not sure what is objectionable about that or who is being disenfranchised, most of those policies seem to be based around restricting gifting of illegal or highly regulated products which would also be illegal or require extra compliance steps to be taken if done using cryptocurrency. I can't imagine a comparable donation platform using cryptocurrency would be built any differently. For creators trying to make a living, they still need a bank account to extract the money from their crypto wallet if they want to use that money to pay rent and buy groceries, and volatile currencies with high transaction fees like Bitcoin are a really bad choice for that; stablecoins may be an option there eventually but it's still unclear to me what benefit those provide over cash for the small-time independent creator.
  - senko 5y ago
    > Also, you need a credit card / bank account to accept transactions from Patreon. > With crypto, you can create a wallet in seconds and immediately start accepting payment. And how are you going to use that to buy groceries or pay rent?
    - reaperducer 5y ago
      And how are you going to use that to buy groceries or pay rent? The big American chain supermarket near my home has a crypto ATM at the front, next to the shopping buggies. So I guess you could get cash that way and buy groceries. Rent? Good luck. Every building has its own methods, customs, and policies, even within a single company; and I've never seen one that takes crypto for rent.
- nathias 5y ago
  It works 'just fine' until you say something that someone doesn't like and then you're wondering how stupid was to entrust all your future to a platform that has no problem baning you because Mastercard or Visa said they would like that. Just like youtube works just fine until one day your adblocker doesn't work because Chrome has full market control and you see that youtube is unusable without it. etc.
- ozten 5y ago
  I have looked at a lot of Patreon pages and almost of all of them the creator is making $10 - $400 a month (usually a guesstimate based on tiers and subscriber numbers). This is great in terms of an additional revenue stream, but it is no Medici family patronage.
desireco42 5y ago
Essentially "I don't want world to change and therefore it should not change".
HugoDaniel 5y ago
No new ideas. Another megaphone to the common ideologies that go against Web3 that are so widespread as deprived of critical reasoning. Hacker community used to be about more than this. Trying to write an apparently neutral point of view with a condescending tone that carries a lot of negative weight towards a tech subject reeks of mold. Thanks daddy. Thanks school system. Thanks commonly accepted society roles. Now let me tinker with tech... it might just change something in the future.
jerf 5y ago
Web 3 is a marketing term by some people who have built a system that is still at least 3 years, if not perhaps 10 or more years, from being anything remotely resembling "web" scale, where several billion non-technical people can just push a button on some website and "be" on the Web 3.0, which mostly just works. It's a cynical play to position themselves as the Next Inevitability simply by grabbing the next number before anyone else and planting themselves down in your mind as being The Next Number, because 3 inevitably follows 2. They'd like to borrow that inevitability in your mind. It won't work. Web 2 doesn't have enough hype (that cycle cycled a long time ago) for anyone to get too excited about updates on the term. But it may establish itself enough as "3" that the net effect in the end is to kill the Web (Number) naming scheme. That'll be the biggest thing it accomplishes. Marketing can do a lot but it can't literally just name things into existence like this. This comment is strictly about the terminology. The tech is what it is, but at the moment, I don't even see what I'd call a prototype of any "Web 3.0" deserving of the name. It is still at best in the benchtesting phase. I couldn't explain anything currently called Web 3.0 to my non-computer-technical but generally-computing-savvy father, let alone the general public, and most of what I've tried out of the "Web 3.0" straight-up didn't work when I tried it. All best wishes to people working on this and I don't mean this to be a discouragement per se (unless you are working on this and do mistakenly believe you're on the verge of breakout... sorry, you're a long ways from that, I'm just the messenger here), there's interesting things going on and a lot of silly things going on, just like you'd expect from the very early bench-test phase, but that's where you are. You're not in a position to be claiming to be an inevitability. "Web 3.0" isn't. The more likely "Web 3.0" is, sad to say, the Metaverse, if companies can work out some way of carrying over the "linking" concept and sharing space in there. That, to be honest, isn't very likely either, but it's comparable in probability to any of these "web 3.0" technologies actually making it to web scale, i.e., both very low. (In the Metaverse's case, the reality is that it'll be at least a decade at a minimum before you can just "decide" to be something and find that it carries over everywhere. Look at the direction the increasingly sharded streaming space is to get a clue about what the reality will look like.)
- qquqq 5y ago
  > I couldn't explain anything currently called Web 3.0 to my non-computer-technical but generally-computing-savvy father, let alone the general public Maybe you don't understand it well enough? I've successfully explained crypto/web3 to my otherwise "mostly tech-illiterate, has his iPhone font at 200% with all default customization, doesn't work in the tech field or anything adjacent, still asks me what a computer scientist does" father and he seems to understand it pretty well.
Kiro 5y ago
When I first heard of Bitcoin I thought "cool idea but will never take off". Then with the ICO madness I thought "ok, people are idiots". Now with DeFi, "Web3" and all these articles I'm starting to think the cliché "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win" may actually be true. Why are people spending so much time arguing against it if it wasn't significant? We see all these rational arguments and yet the industry keeps growing exponentially. What is actually going on? Is this a pivotal moment unfolding right in front of our eyes without us seeing it?
- unboxingelf 5y ago
  What is actually going on is the creation of a new infrastructure layer of the Internet. This is pivotal.
- maxwell 5y ago
  Developers of proprietary SaaS back-ends fighting the increasing irrelevance of their legacy skills?
- pooper 5y ago
  When I first learned of Dropbox, I thought that was stupid. A full 2 GB of storage for free online? How would they afford this? Turns out storage is cheap and more importantly it keeps getting cheaper over time. I am very willing to admit I was an idiot. However, that does not mean anything I say is stupid is NOT stupid. I still think NFT is stupid. I don't know how I can support cryptocurrency and not support NFT but I am sure people will laugh at me for not being practical for saying transaction fees should be as close to zero as possible if not zero.
  - oldsecondhand 5y ago
    But it was never the question whether online storage is useful or not, unlike with NFTs.
- m_ke 5y ago
  Because it's a ponzi scheme that will probably end up getting to the "too big to fail" stage before the music stops. All of these new blockchain schemes like ICOs, NFTs and web3 are just a way to recruit new segments of the population into the crypto universe in order to pump up the value of crypto currencies. I have friends who are artists and musicians who completely drank the koolaid and are convinced that NFTs and web3 will liberate them from poverty. They will repeat all of the talking points about blockchains but have no idea what a database is. I ask them to show me a web3 website and they can't name one, show me someone they know who buys NFTs and they can't name any. Here are some recent quotes from one of my friends: "crypto is fairly new it’s quantum mechanics as well." "NFTs make you a shareholder" "yeah the Internet didn’t exist until people applied concepts to it as well. blockchain is a system where new concepts can exist on the Internet. " "the meta data you're able to embed can be anything now so creators can make any type of art. whereas before it was just mp3 or MP4 but now u can monetize any type of digital content" "You can protect your music or visual via an NFT and control the royalty split " "Having the ability to retain royalties to creators is a feature we’ve never had we can sell links to exclusive bonus content, recipes, any idea whereas u post it on reg social media and it’s unprotected w no protection "
jamiethompson 5y ago
Does anyone else remember "Web 2.0" being talked about as "The Semantic Web"? Because I sure do.
- pohl 5y ago
  It was actually 3.0, but yeah. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
- Lamad123 5y ago
  I thought that 3.0 would be semantic and the current web was noot semantic.
Lamad123 5y ago
I hate this forced casual tone and these hippyish introductionless articles.
maxwell 5y ago
In this latest round of defensive anti-web3 posts from established technologists, I've been looking for mention of Tezos, CleanNFTs, HEN, Cardano, Algorand, Hedera, Harmony, Dragonchain, etc. but instead get tired critiques of BTC, ETH, and OpenSea that have been made over and over for years now. Yeah, Bitcoin/Dogecoin and Ethereum aren't viable, but what about the newer/better tech? http://blockchain.cs.ucl.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/UCL_CBT_DPS_Q32021_updated-2.pdf http://blockchain.cs.ucl.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/UC...
- YorickPeterse 5y ago
  > but what about the newer/better tech? But what about existing and proven technology that has been around for decades? This whole "web3" thing seemingly focuses on problems nobody has, cares for, or can be solved with what already exists in far more efficient ways.
  - maxwell 5y ago
    The problem it solves is making money. Traditionally, many have solved for this by founding/working for government-registered companies and building proprietary software that's sold for government-issued notes. Now there's an alternative to that pattern.
    - shatteredgate 5y ago
      That doesn't follow though. Your thesis is "the problem it solves is making money" but then in the second paragraph you say the problem is already solved in other ways that don't involve any web3 or cryptocurrency. Maybe you could revise it to "The problem it solves is making money without the government knowing what you're doing" but that seems like the type of statement that would attract tax cheats, ransomware distributors, and other criminals, and it's also not really true of cryptocurrency anyway; most governments have already made moves to regulate cryptocurrency.
      - maxwell 5y ago
astoor 5y ago
It is incredible how divisive web3 has made people. I don't think I recall anything quite like it. I think it is because: 1. It is primarily about politics rather than technology. Those in favour of web3 typically come from the right-libertarian camp, often with a strong dislike of government, banks, taxes etc., which those against web3 associate with anti-social ideas such as anti-vax, permissive gun laws, conspiracy theories and the like. 2. It is an existential struggle. Those in favour of web3 have a vested interest now and don't want to see the value of their coins and tokens fall, while those against web3 don't want to see the last vestiges of the free and open web as we know it destroyed by the tokenisation and monetisation of every interaction.
- volkk 5y ago
  > while those against web3 don't want to see the last vestiges of the free and open web as we know it destroyed by the tokenisation and monetisation of every interaction. i'm confused here. isn't the free and open web that we currently have already destroyed by monetization and data capture of your every click and move?
  - astoor 5y ago
    There are still bits of the original web around if you know where to look. That's why I used the terms "last vestiges" and "existential struggle". Web3 would be the stake through the heart.
    - pas 5y ago
      > Web3 would be the stake through the heart. why? it seems to me that these new digital lands that are currently being dreamed up will be right next to the old-new ones of FB/Instagram/Google+. The old-old ones are either still where they used to be (eg. old school forums, IRC, blogs). web3 at this point is basically a big sign put up next to an empty desert claiming "the future is built here" with a few shoddy tents selling wallet extensions for browsers, which you need if you want to buy sandcastles from the strange circus folks over there, between those dunes littered with old collectible cards. if people who currently spend most of their time on "social media" start to spend some/all of their time in web3 land, that still doesn't mean much for the true old-old parts of the web. most users already have no idea of what the web was like ~20 years ago.
riffic 5y ago
I might have missed it but it'd be nice if this piece or any other web3 think-piece acknowledged the capabilities of tools such as Indieweb or the federated social web, showing the promise of distribution wholly without blockchains.
nathias 5y ago
I like the design of the website, too bad the content is so dumb. How are you not tired of regurgitating the same FUD for 10 years? If you don't like crypto that's ok, its not for you, just don't buy in and leave us alone.
_xnmw 5y ago
All this talk about Web3 and I still don't know what it is. Show me some normal, non-tech people who use this fancy web3 tech? Show me some critical human need, like food, energy, or housing that is powered by this fairy tale? What capability does it enable? What can I do, as a normal human being who needs food, air and shelter, that I couldn't do without web3? Whose grandfather or grandmother uses some web3 app without realizing it? People compare the Internet to web3, but it is a false comparison. All of the above questions could be answered by the Internet -- everyone and their grandmother relies on the Internet in some way, directly or indirectly, to power their basic human needs. When my grandmother goes to the grocery store to buy milk, she uses the Internet without realizing it. And this was true from the very early days of the Internet. Not so for this mysterious "web3".
- azangru 5y ago
  > All this talk about Web3 and I still don't know what it is. > People compare the Internet to web3, but it is a false comparison. All of the above questions could be answered by the Internet Imagine that today is 1994. Now replace the word web3 in tour first paragraph with the word "internet", and read it again, as a person living in 1994. How many critical human needs was it meeting, and how many grannies were using it then? (As an aside, how many critical human needs are satisfied by video gaming? Why does a tech phenomenon need to satisfy a critical human need to be viable and interesting?)
  - jmull 5y ago
    You're kind of dodging the question though. The internet was competing with physically produced and distributed media and information. But web3 is competing with the internet. So... What is web3 better for than the current internet?
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    > Imagine that today is 1994. Now replace the word web3 in tour first paragraph with the word "internet" Imagine today is 2013. Now replace the word web3 with the word Juicero. Somehow every single crypto project is always, without fail, the next Internet. And not the next Juicero or ET: The Extraterrstrial video game
deft 5y ago
A lot of you guys have no idea what you're talking about. If you're on hn and salty you missed blockchain until now, don't start thinking about writing a blogpost on it. We have enough of these, and they are all the same. If you get it, you get it. If not, you'll just be left behind (maybe your shitty blogpost will sell as an nft one day)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pengwing 5y ago
This is a good example of knowledge rot. The author used to be an authority in the field of IT, but has a mid-level understanding of blockchain tech and almost zero understanding for blockchain culture. For example "With a blockchain based system all these protections go away because there is no “undo”. If you have your life’s savings in Bitcoin and someone gains access to your key, those coins are gone and you are shit out of luck" This is a great passage. If you do have all you life savings in one hot wallet, then you are ngmi. If however you have a small proportion of your networth in a hot wallet and it gets compromised, no problem, you didn't even lose something. You just paid a small price for a failing a gullibility test and probably gained some experience. The author's tendency to overprotect people corresponds exactly to the criticism of the "accredited investor" status. Of course some investments are risky if you go in with 100% or more of your capital. This problem is solved by asset allocation, not by grouping and denying people based on their networth. Additional request: If you are aware of any organization monitoring "experts" who are allowed to advise the German parliament, please mention them.
- recursive 5y ago
  I don't trust myself to manage a bitcoin wallet. How is this ever going to displace boring centralized banking? If someone uses my credit card without my permission, that's not my responsibility. That's a big feature.
  - pengwing 5y ago
    "Wallet" is already such a great term for it. Much like a real wallet, just put an amount into it that you are willing to lose. Credit card chargebacks can be a feature and they can be a nightmare + all CC interactions definitely come at a 2%-3% cost to the merchant. Just providing the consumer perspective doesn't help the discussion at all.
    - recursive 5y ago
      Cash I don't keep in my wallet I keep in my bank. Where's the bank? Is it insured? In cases of fraud will the transaction be reversed?
Sloppy 5y ago
This article defines what web3 IS then criticizes it. If web3 were only blockchain it might be forgiven but IMO it is about a lot more like IPFS, no-trust networks, peer-2-peer computing, etc. This article therefore makes some points while missing a lot more.

The Third Web

105 points by omnibrain 5y ago

nyolfen 5y ago

then don’t use it

mattwilsonn888 5y ago

"Web 3 can't work because it doesn't work right now." Remain ignorant.

SirFatty 5y ago
Very insightful!

egypturnash 5y ago

This juxtaposition near the end makes me chuckle. “I understand that especially creative people are desperately looking for ways to make a decent living and selling NFTs looks like a very simple way to make some serious cash. I get it. We need to find a mode of life that allows people to work on their art or whatever else they want to do and still be clothed, fed, sheltered and otherwise taken care of. Comfortably.” ... “Take a second to support tante on Patreon!” ITS RIGHT THERE, Patreon is working just fine to keep a lot of creators paid with no ultra-inefficient distributed databases or cryptocurrency or whatnot. Just some profoundly unsexy credit card/PayPal/stripe transactions.

mhitza 5y ago
Problem is that you can get booted of those platforms and payment processors. Or they unilaterally change their terms of what kind of content creators they want on their platform (a la onlyfans wanting to distance themselves from sexual explicit content)
- unchocked 5y ago
  That’s a feature, which rhymes with the author’s argument: that there are politics and that people decide norms, and whether or not you agree with the decisions, having immutable code just go ahead and enforce/permit/control whatever is a dystopia that we should not want.
  - Vetch 5y ago
    Sometimes laws are not just and governments are not aligned with their people. Some examples: sci-hub is not legal in most jurisdictions despite its immense positive benefits. Since being deplatformed, their primary means of receiving donations has been crypto. Then there are the unplatformed (from a global transactions perspective), where the cruel realities of poverty, scams and fraud means the majority are punished as collateral damage for the actions of a minority. Poverty means a cost benefit calculus has deemed fine-grained distinctions are not worth it. I can understand the justifications but still feel it as deeply unfair. When social media are used to highlight and organize protests of corruption, extra judicial killings and more, governments will ban social media and block the financial accounts of anti-corruption organizations. Coupled with being in countries where global transactions are already high friction, crypto provided real benefits. A non-crypto example is having to use VPNs to access certain university websites because its administrators subscribe to a lazy service that has blanket banned IPs from certain countries. Not unlike Tor, it's one of those things whose main use is by criminals in sane regimes but a high positive option in despotic or oppressive ones.
    - captn3m0 5y ago
      The unstated argument here is whether the extra-judicial quasi-ethical use-cases for crypto (donations for SciHub, payments for NSFW artists) are worth the current valuations in the space. I don’t think so. Most NFTs I’ve seen are not for art that would get booted off Patreon or DeviantArt. Is the additional complexity and weirdness and loss of legal protections worth the extra hassles that crypto brings even when existing payment workflows work well - I say no, but we’ll find out.
      - 5y ago
- rhtgrg 5y ago
  I just want to point out that you can also get booted off crypto platforms under the right circumstances. This is what happened to Ethereum after the infamous $60MM hack. [0] The key difference is only that the community has to agree, rather than a single entity — however this isn't strictly true, since founders and core devs hold outsized sway. [0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/ethereum-hack-blockchain-fork-bitcoin-1.3719009 https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/ethereum-hack-blockchain-for...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- egypturnash 5y ago
  Payment processors wanting to distance themselves from porn is a constant fight and I think it's really telling that porn has not embraced blockchains, crypto, or NFTs as a way to get paid.
  - LewisVerstappen 5y ago
    >I think it's really telling that porn has not embraced blockchains, crypto, or NFTs as a way to get paid Uh, how do you think Pornhub accepts payments? Crypto has been the only option for paying for Pornhub Premium for several months now. (I know this because I read a news article on it, just to be clear) Edit Sorry, ACH is also an option, my mistake. But Pornhub Premium's sign up page says they don't accept credit cards.
    - senko 5y ago
      I applaud your propriety, but it looks like your information is incorrect. Their FAQ states they accept credit cards from Probiller: https://www.probiller.com/ https://www.probiller.com/ Edit: and it doesn't mention crypto.
      - mckeed 5y ago
        The signup page says "Unfortunately we are unable to accept credit cards at this moment" and has ACH/SEPA and Cryptocurrency as the payment options.
    - e0 5y ago
      One can also pay through ACH, so it's not like they're completely cut off from the traditional financial systems. It would be interesting to know what percentage of their users use each payment method.
      - LewisVerstappen 5y ago
        Sure, and to be clear, the payment experience with cryptocurrency is still pretty terrible. That being said, it's getting better quite quickly and you're now seeing big tech players like Stripe enter the market.[1] [1] - https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/13/payments-giant-stripe-says-its-re-entering-the-crypto-market/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/13/payments-giant-stripe-says...
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  It may be that a plurality of people prefer a web where rules may exclude those people lacking a certain civility, leaving web3 to be a haven of the banned and otherwise unhostable. Freenet has been doing that for 20 years now so its unclear that crypto really adds anything to the basic social dilemmas of sharing platforms with people you wouldn’t give the time of day to. sidebar but onlyfans banning porn may have just been a genius marketing move that made them a household name - a porn site banning porn, what late night host could resist?
- mmcgaha 5y ago
  Around 20 years ago, I registered my account on a web based simulation game by putting a check in the mail. Around 7 years ago I verified an account by putting a dollar in an envelope and putting it in the mail. I am not sure why no one is putting their snail mail address on the site any more because this can still work.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
LewisVerstappen 5y ago
>ITS RIGHT THERE, Patreon is working just fine to keep a lot of creators paid with no ultra-inefficient distributed databases or cryptocurrency or whatnot. Just some profoundly unsexy credit card/PayPal/stripe transactions. Why don't you take a look at https://www.patreon.com/policy/benefits https://www.patreon.com/policy/benefits? Millions of creators are disenfranchised by Patreon. Also, you need a credit card / bank account to accept transactions from Patreon. With crypto, you can create a wallet in seconds and immediately start accepting payment.
- shatteredgate 5y ago
  I'm not sure what is objectionable about that or who is being disenfranchised, most of those policies seem to be based around restricting gifting of illegal or highly regulated products which would also be illegal or require extra compliance steps to be taken if done using cryptocurrency. I can't imagine a comparable donation platform using cryptocurrency would be built any differently. For creators trying to make a living, they still need a bank account to extract the money from their crypto wallet if they want to use that money to pay rent and buy groceries, and volatile currencies with high transaction fees like Bitcoin are a really bad choice for that; stablecoins may be an option there eventually but it's still unclear to me what benefit those provide over cash for the small-time independent creator.
- senko 5y ago
  > Also, you need a credit card / bank account to accept transactions from Patreon. > With crypto, you can create a wallet in seconds and immediately start accepting payment. And how are you going to use that to buy groceries or pay rent?
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    And how are you going to use that to buy groceries or pay rent? The big American chain supermarket near my home has a crypto ATM at the front, next to the shopping buggies. So I guess you could get cash that way and buy groceries. Rent? Good luck. Every building has its own methods, customs, and policies, even within a single company; and I've never seen one that takes crypto for rent.
nathias 5y ago
It works 'just fine' until you say something that someone doesn't like and then you're wondering how stupid was to entrust all your future to a platform that has no problem baning you because Mastercard or Visa said they would like that. Just like youtube works just fine until one day your adblocker doesn't work because Chrome has full market control and you see that youtube is unusable without it. etc.
ozten 5y ago
I have looked at a lot of Patreon pages and almost of all of them the creator is making $10 - $400 a month (usually a guesstimate based on tiers and subscriber numbers). This is great in terms of an additional revenue stream, but it is no Medici family patronage.

desireco42 5y ago

Essentially "I don't want world to change and therefore it should not change".

HugoDaniel 5y ago

No new ideas. Another megaphone to the common ideologies that go against Web3 that are so widespread as deprived of critical reasoning. Hacker community used to be about more than this. Trying to write an apparently neutral point of view with a condescending tone that carries a lot of negative weight towards a tech subject reeks of mold. Thanks daddy. Thanks school system. Thanks commonly accepted society roles. Now let me tinker with tech... it might just change something in the future.

jerf 5y ago

Web 3 is a marketing term by some people who have built a system that is still at least 3 years, if not perhaps 10 or more years, from being anything remotely resembling "web" scale, where several billion non-technical people can just push a button on some website and "be" on the Web 3.0, which mostly just works. It's a cynical play to position themselves as the Next Inevitability simply by grabbing the next number before anyone else and planting themselves down in your mind as being The Next Number, because 3 inevitably follows 2. They'd like to borrow that inevitability in your mind. It won't work. Web 2 doesn't have enough hype (that cycle cycled a long time ago) for anyone to get too excited about updates on the term. But it may establish itself enough as "3" that the net effect in the end is to kill the Web (Number) naming scheme. That'll be the biggest thing it accomplishes. Marketing can do a lot but it can't literally just name things into existence like this. This comment is strictly about the terminology. The tech is what it is, but at the moment, I don't even see what I'd call a prototype of any "Web 3.0" deserving of the name. It is still at best in the benchtesting phase. I couldn't explain anything currently called Web 3.0 to my non-computer-technical but generally-computing-savvy father, let alone the general public, and most of what I've tried out of the "Web 3.0" straight-up didn't work when I tried it. All best wishes to people working on this and I don't mean this to be a discouragement per se (unless you are working on this and do mistakenly believe you're on the verge of breakout... sorry, you're a long ways from that, I'm just the messenger here), there's interesting things going on and a lot of silly things going on, just like you'd expect from the very early bench-test phase, but that's where you are. You're not in a position to be claiming to be an inevitability. "Web 3.0" isn't. The more likely "Web 3.0" is, sad to say, the Metaverse, if companies can work out some way of carrying over the "linking" concept and sharing space in there. That, to be honest, isn't very likely either, but it's comparable in probability to any of these "web 3.0" technologies actually making it to web scale, i.e., both very low. (In the Metaverse's case, the reality is that it'll be at least a decade at a minimum before you can just "decide" to be something and find that it carries over everywhere. Look at the direction the increasingly sharded streaming space is to get a clue about what the reality will look like.)

qquqq 5y ago
> I couldn't explain anything currently called Web 3.0 to my non-computer-technical but generally-computing-savvy father, let alone the general public Maybe you don't understand it well enough? I've successfully explained crypto/web3 to my otherwise "mostly tech-illiterate, has his iPhone font at 200% with all default customization, doesn't work in the tech field or anything adjacent, still asks me what a computer scientist does" father and he seems to understand it pretty well.

Kiro 5y ago

When I first heard of Bitcoin I thought "cool idea but will never take off". Then with the ICO madness I thought "ok, people are idiots". Now with DeFi, "Web3" and all these articles I'm starting to think the cliché "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win" may actually be true. Why are people spending so much time arguing against it if it wasn't significant? We see all these rational arguments and yet the industry keeps growing exponentially. What is actually going on? Is this a pivotal moment unfolding right in front of our eyes without us seeing it?

unboxingelf 5y ago
What is actually going on is the creation of a new infrastructure layer of the Internet. This is pivotal.
maxwell 5y ago
Developers of proprietary SaaS back-ends fighting the increasing irrelevance of their legacy skills?
pooper 5y ago
When I first learned of Dropbox, I thought that was stupid. A full 2 GB of storage for free online? How would they afford this? Turns out storage is cheap and more importantly it keeps getting cheaper over time. I am very willing to admit I was an idiot. However, that does not mean anything I say is stupid is NOT stupid. I still think NFT is stupid. I don't know how I can support cryptocurrency and not support NFT but I am sure people will laugh at me for not being practical for saying transaction fees should be as close to zero as possible if not zero.
- oldsecondhand 5y ago
  But it was never the question whether online storage is useful or not, unlike with NFTs.
m_ke 5y ago
Because it's a ponzi scheme that will probably end up getting to the "too big to fail" stage before the music stops. All of these new blockchain schemes like ICOs, NFTs and web3 are just a way to recruit new segments of the population into the crypto universe in order to pump up the value of crypto currencies. I have friends who are artists and musicians who completely drank the koolaid and are convinced that NFTs and web3 will liberate them from poverty. They will repeat all of the talking points about blockchains but have no idea what a database is. I ask them to show me a web3 website and they can't name one, show me someone they know who buys NFTs and they can't name any. Here are some recent quotes from one of my friends: "crypto is fairly new it’s quantum mechanics as well." "NFTs make you a shareholder" "yeah the Internet didn’t exist until people applied concepts to it as well. blockchain is a system where new concepts can exist on the Internet. " "the meta data you're able to embed can be anything now so creators can make any type of art. whereas before it was just mp3 or MP4 but now u can monetize any type of digital content" "You can protect your music or visual via an NFT and control the royalty split " "Having the ability to retain royalties to creators is a feature we’ve never had we can sell links to exclusive bonus content, recipes, any idea whereas u post it on reg social media and it’s unprotected w no protection "

jamiethompson 5y ago

Does anyone else remember "Web 2.0" being talked about as "The Semantic Web"? Because I sure do.

pohl 5y ago
It was actually 3.0, but yeah. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
Lamad123 5y ago
I thought that 3.0 would be semantic and the current web was noot semantic.

Lamad123 5y ago

I hate this forced casual tone and these hippyish introductionless articles.

maxwell 5y ago

In this latest round of defensive anti-web3 posts from established technologists, I've been looking for mention of Tezos, CleanNFTs, HEN, Cardano, Algorand, Hedera, Harmony, Dragonchain, etc. but instead get tired critiques of BTC, ETH, and OpenSea that have been made over and over for years now. Yeah, Bitcoin/Dogecoin and Ethereum aren't viable, but what about the newer/better tech? http://blockchain.cs.ucl.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/UCL_CBT_DPS_Q32021_updated-2.pdf http://blockchain.cs.ucl.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/UC...

YorickPeterse 5y ago
> but what about the newer/better tech? But what about existing and proven technology that has been around for decades? This whole "web3" thing seemingly focuses on problems nobody has, cares for, or can be solved with what already exists in far more efficient ways.
- maxwell 5y ago
  The problem it solves is making money. Traditionally, many have solved for this by founding/working for government-registered companies and building proprietary software that's sold for government-issued notes. Now there's an alternative to that pattern.
  - shatteredgate 5y ago
    That doesn't follow though. Your thesis is "the problem it solves is making money" but then in the second paragraph you say the problem is already solved in other ways that don't involve any web3 or cryptocurrency. Maybe you could revise it to "The problem it solves is making money without the government knowing what you're doing" but that seems like the type of statement that would attract tax cheats, ransomware distributors, and other criminals, and it's also not really true of cryptocurrency anyway; most governments have already made moves to regulate cryptocurrency.
    - maxwell 5y ago

astoor 5y ago

It is incredible how divisive web3 has made people. I don't think I recall anything quite like it. I think it is because: 1. It is primarily about politics rather than technology. Those in favour of web3 typically come from the right-libertarian camp, often with a strong dislike of government, banks, taxes etc., which those against web3 associate with anti-social ideas such as anti-vax, permissive gun laws, conspiracy theories and the like. 2. It is an existential struggle. Those in favour of web3 have a vested interest now and don't want to see the value of their coins and tokens fall, while those against web3 don't want to see the last vestiges of the free and open web as we know it destroyed by the tokenisation and monetisation of every interaction.

volkk 5y ago
> while those against web3 don't want to see the last vestiges of the free and open web as we know it destroyed by the tokenisation and monetisation of every interaction. i'm confused here. isn't the free and open web that we currently have already destroyed by monetization and data capture of your every click and move?
- astoor 5y ago
  There are still bits of the original web around if you know where to look. That's why I used the terms "last vestiges" and "existential struggle". Web3 would be the stake through the heart.
  - pas 5y ago
    > Web3 would be the stake through the heart. why? it seems to me that these new digital lands that are currently being dreamed up will be right next to the old-new ones of FB/Instagram/Google+. The old-old ones are either still where they used to be (eg. old school forums, IRC, blogs). web3 at this point is basically a big sign put up next to an empty desert claiming "the future is built here" with a few shoddy tents selling wallet extensions for browsers, which you need if you want to buy sandcastles from the strange circus folks over there, between those dunes littered with old collectible cards. if people who currently spend most of their time on "social media" start to spend some/all of their time in web3 land, that still doesn't mean much for the true old-old parts of the web. most users already have no idea of what the web was like ~20 years ago.

riffic 5y ago

I might have missed it but it'd be nice if this piece or any other web3 think-piece acknowledged the capabilities of tools such as Indieweb or the federated social web, showing the promise of distribution wholly without blockchains.

nathias 5y ago

I like the design of the website, too bad the content is so dumb. How are you not tired of regurgitating the same FUD for 10 years? If you don't like crypto that's ok, its not for you, just don't buy in and leave us alone.

_xnmw 5y ago

All this talk about Web3 and I still don't know what it is. Show me some normal, non-tech people who use this fancy web3 tech? Show me some critical human need, like food, energy, or housing that is powered by this fairy tale? What capability does it enable? What can I do, as a normal human being who needs food, air and shelter, that I couldn't do without web3? Whose grandfather or grandmother uses some web3 app without realizing it? People compare the Internet to web3, but it is a false comparison. All of the above questions could be answered by the Internet -- everyone and their grandmother relies on the Internet in some way, directly or indirectly, to power their basic human needs. When my grandmother goes to the grocery store to buy milk, she uses the Internet without realizing it. And this was true from the very early days of the Internet. Not so for this mysterious "web3".

azangru 5y ago
> All this talk about Web3 and I still don't know what it is. > People compare the Internet to web3, but it is a false comparison. All of the above questions could be answered by the Internet Imagine that today is 1994. Now replace the word web3 in tour first paragraph with the word "internet", and read it again, as a person living in 1994. How many critical human needs was it meeting, and how many grannies were using it then? (As an aside, how many critical human needs are satisfied by video gaming? Why does a tech phenomenon need to satisfy a critical human need to be viable and interesting?)
- jmull 5y ago
  You're kind of dodging the question though. The internet was competing with physically produced and distributed media and information. But web3 is competing with the internet. So... What is web3 better for than the current internet?
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > Imagine that today is 1994. Now replace the word web3 in tour first paragraph with the word "internet" Imagine today is 2013. Now replace the word web3 with the word Juicero. Somehow every single crypto project is always, without fail, the next Internet. And not the next Juicero or ET: The Extraterrstrial video game

deft 5y ago

A lot of you guys have no idea what you're talking about. If you're on hn and salty you missed blockchain until now, don't start thinking about writing a blogpost on it. We have enough of these, and they are all the same. If you get it, you get it. If not, you'll just be left behind (maybe your shitty blogpost will sell as an nft one day)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

pengwing 5y ago

This is a good example of knowledge rot. The author used to be an authority in the field of IT, but has a mid-level understanding of blockchain tech and almost zero understanding for blockchain culture. For example "With a blockchain based system all these protections go away because there is no “undo”. If you have your life’s savings in Bitcoin and someone gains access to your key, those coins are gone and you are shit out of luck" This is a great passage. If you do have all you life savings in one hot wallet, then you are ngmi. If however you have a small proportion of your networth in a hot wallet and it gets compromised, no problem, you didn't even lose something. You just paid a small price for a failing a gullibility test and probably gained some experience. The author's tendency to overprotect people corresponds exactly to the criticism of the "accredited investor" status. Of course some investments are risky if you go in with 100% or more of your capital. This problem is solved by asset allocation, not by grouping and denying people based on their networth. Additional request: If you are aware of any organization monitoring "experts" who are allowed to advise the German parliament, please mention them.

recursive 5y ago
I don't trust myself to manage a bitcoin wallet. How is this ever going to displace boring centralized banking? If someone uses my credit card without my permission, that's not my responsibility. That's a big feature.
- pengwing 5y ago
  "Wallet" is already such a great term for it. Much like a real wallet, just put an amount into it that you are willing to lose. Credit card chargebacks can be a feature and they can be a nightmare + all CC interactions definitely come at a 2%-3% cost to the merchant. Just providing the consumer perspective doesn't help the discussion at all.
  - recursive 5y ago
    Cash I don't keep in my wallet I keep in my bank. Where's the bank? Is it insured? In cases of fraud will the transaction be reversed?

Sloppy 5y ago

This article defines what web3 IS then criticizes it. If web3 were only blockchain it might be forgiven but IMO it is about a lot more like IPFS, no-trust networks, peer-2-peer computing, etc. This article therefore makes some points while missing a lot more.