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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,
by _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 agoYou'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
- azangru 5y ago> every single crypto project But it's not a specific crypto project. It is a paradigm within which various different services are being built. Comparing "web3" (whatever it's supposed to mean) with Juicero or even with Google, for that matter, makes no sense. You could compare "web3" with "software as a service", I suppose. Or with "containerization", or "devops". (Although my original point wasn't about predicting internet-like success for web3; but just saying that the criticism based on the number of grannies using a certain new technology, or the number of people it is lifting out of poverty at any given moment, is misguided; we are still at a very early adoption stage, which may or may not go anywhere.)
- dmitriid 5y ago> But it's not a specific crypto project. It is a paradigm within which various different services are being built. And the paradigm is, of course, the Internet. Not, you know, Juicero.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoThe introduction to TFA does one of the best jobs I've seen of explaining this. If that doesn't make it clear to you what it is, I am not sure what will. ps. I am an extreme web3-is-blockchain skeptic.
- the_snooze 5y ago>People compare the Internet to web3, but it is a false comparison. Forerunners to the modern Internet were useful from the get-go. ARPANET was designed to share data and compute resources between government and university labs. Two years after ARPANET came online, the first email system was developed on it. ARPANET had actual value and use cases immediately, and kept adding more. If we're comparing the development of the Internet to that of web3 (or whatever they call blockchain technology these days), then it's safe to conclude the latter has very stunted development.