11 ms·

What is Web3? Interview with Gavin Wood, who coined the term in 2014

30 points by conanxin 5y ago

Alex3917 5y ago
IMHO my definition here is both better and earlier, and also better nails the key promise of distributed ledger technology, in terms of it being a mechanism for better allowing large organizations and societies to reach consensus: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1550059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1550059
- beepbooptheory 5y ago
  Do you really still think that is what's happening still in our horizon? Web3 seems to promise smaller, balkanized services, compared to social media monoliths we have now, in the service of, presumably, creating self-governing groups communities/businesses. At least I think that's the idea? Isn't twitter already society expressing ideas? If anything this idea is "better" by being more vague.
  - dehrmann 5y ago
    Web3 will be to Twitter et al. what Bitcoin is to the dollar. Expressing ides as plenty easy on Twitter, so these balkanized services will only be used for hate speech, organizing criminal activities, and CP. Legitimate use will be limited to ultra hardcore libertarians and true believers. Unlike Bitcoin, there isn't an appreciating asset headline to get the attention of regular people, so won't even have the legitimacy halo Bitcoin benefits from.
yaomtc 5y ago
Web 3.0 is a concept being pushed by fans of cryptocurrency. And it sure is going great. https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
dvt 5y ago
> “Less trust, more truth.” What a neat platitude that means absolutely nothing. As a society, over, oh I don't know, like 15000 years, we figured out the the best way to enforce truth is via some sort of centralized institution: the court of law. > They could, right. They sort of do—there’s the star thing that you can only do once per day. But guess what? They're a profit-motivated company. So if you pay Tinder enough, you can just send as many stars as you want. Wait, crypto miners aren't profit-motivated? Maybe we should introduce Mr. Wood to flashbots[1] -- a "sub-network" of Ethereum miners (a fork of geth) who's entire purpose for existing is front-running (for a price, of course). Truth as long as you can pay for it -- got it. Web3 is end-stage capitalism and we've been down this road in the early 1900s. Yawn. [1] https://github.com/flashbots/pm https://github.com/flashbots/pm
- rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
  The best way to enforce truth is via mathematics. A court can declare 1+1!=2, which does not make it so. Courts are fundamentally human constructs. I find the ancient universal truths of numbers to be better.
  - loktarogar 5y ago
    If someone manages to steal money from a crypto wallet (hacking, social engineering, whatever), does that make it theirs by the ancient universal truth of numbers? Money is a fundamentally human construct.
    - rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
      Practically, yes. Whomever has the private key can make a transaction. Proof of knowledge (of a private key) is equivalent to ownership. This is how it works. Money is a human construct. But it can live on a system backed by physical universal quantities like computation, to remove the need for human trust constructions.
      - loktarogar 5y ago
Yhippa 5y ago
I'm going to go ahead and coin the term Web4. I'm reserving the name with the right to fill in what it means at some undetermined point in the future. I will take no further questions at this time.
- adoxyz 5y ago
  Dibs on Web5
  - mkaic 5y ago
    Only if I get web 6.283, or Webτ as the cool kids are calling it these days.
    - camelcasing 5y ago
      that might be a course name at MIT
  - brutal_chaos_ 5y ago
    Claiming Web7. :)
  - jdblair 5y ago
    It's going to be called WebV (like RISC-V). Then we go back to Arabic numerals for web6.
  - Yhippa 5y ago
    Why didn't I think of that :-(
- jaredsohn 5y ago
  Dibs on Web3 if this Web3 has the same fate as the semantic web.
  - masswerk 5y ago
    I still remember, when the semantic web was Web 3.0… (Arguably, Web 3.0 rather was the mash-up web of early centralisation of services, with widgets and things like Yahoo! Pipes, etc. Time to to think of Web4.)
knorker 5y ago
> The Father of Web3 I didn't know yet another pump and dump scam or pyramid scheme reinvention required a "father".
- woodruffw 5y ago
  The "father" terminology is consistent with other attempts at technical mis/reappropriation in the cryptocurrency community (cf. "crypto," "trustless," &c).
cmckn 5y ago
Blockchains are, by design, incredibly inefficient. I'm not talking about mining; take storage as an example. The consensus may be distributed, but the data is purely redundant. The majority of nodes in the network will have to hold a complete copy of the entire chain. If Web3 takes off, it will become more difficult (read: expensive) to operate a node in the network -- doesn't that seem backwards? I haven't seen a protocol address this in a meaningful way, it seems to be shrugged off as a bridge to be crossed at a later date. Storage is cheap! But I don't see how these systems could scale to be truly impactful while remaining so inefficient.
- knorker 5y ago
  What do you mean? It has negligible performance overhead according to the "Performance" section here: https://github.com/zhuowei/nft_ptr https://github.com/zhuowei/nft_ptr /s
  - vhiremath4 5y ago
    I think the OP means less about perf and more about dollar cost since you have to either be able to trust the uptime of a storage node (and likely pay more) or make more copies (and therefore pay more) in order to be guaranteed your data isn't lost when a node goes down. The performance of splitting up files and storing them on multiple nodes tends to be very good since you're not as bottlenecked to one node feeding out all of the bytes (think about bitorrent and how fast it is to download a well-seeded file). That said, network egress might become a problem if the node you're seeding content from lives within AWS or another cloud provider. I don't think this egress price penalty exists in any major ISPs that I know of.
    - cmckn 5y ago
      The comment you’re replying to is poking fun at a gag project; but I agree with you as well. The ETH chain was about 500 gigs over the summer when I synced a full node, but it was growing fast. The amount of data stored is monotonically increasing for every full node in the network. You also need fast storage, you can’t use dirt cheap spinning platters. Maybe it won’t grow faster than storage cheapens, but I’m not sure I’d make that bet.
knorker 5y ago
> Yes and no. I think trust in itself is actually just a bad thing all around. Trust implies that you are you're placing some sort of authority in somebody else, or in some organization, and they will be able to use this authority in some arbitrary way. This is just such a fantasy land. There's a guy who wrote The Knowledge, a book that (for fun, basically) describes the knowledge we would need to rebuild society if we suddenly forgot everything. Like when and how do we grow crops. What do effective tools for sowing look like? Like if we instantly forget everything, this book is what we need to bootstrap quickly. He was asked "what about government?". His answer was "there's no point. The guy with the biggest gun will be the government". And that's true today. And it's why web3 is idiotic. "Truth" won't help you, and "trust" doesn't matter, when the government (in the form of the police) knock on your door and say no, actually, your smart contract is an illegal scheme and we are going to put you in a locked room for a while now. You neither have to believe in the government, nor trust it, for it to force society's will upon you.
- berberous 5y ago
  The world is not black and white, and I think you are missing the point. While what you are saying is true to an extent, we can still decrease trust and replace it with verifiable and auditable mechanisms at the margins. For example, the Fed currently states that they target a 2% annual inflation. Well, the US could just adopt a virtual currency, and hard code a 2% inflation amount that was verifiable in public code. Note that I’m not saying this contrived example is necessarily good or bad, but let’s just assume everyone agrees 2% inflation is good and hard coding a 2% money increase rate is equivalent and it’s not better to give the government flexibility. This change has the effect of reducing our need to trust that the government will act consistent with its messaging; we can prove it. And while the men with guns can always change the rules (and maybe they should in some scenarios), it’s easy to see when the rules are being changed, and it’s likely harder to do so if it’s not a good idea since there are structural forces that make it more difficult. The US government is filled with mechanisms to reduce trust (eg checks and balances). And the reduction of trust is not just a government point. Twitter grew by having a great public API which it then knee capped and harmed the developers who trusted them. Would it not be better to have a protocol incentive that you could more readily trust would not be changed under you? What if the Twitter API had a governance token where the indie developers had owned a large stake of such tokens?
MaxMoney 5y ago
russellbeattie 5y ago
Help me out with the web3 tech basics? As a baseline, let's do web 1.0. To set up a basic web server today, I need: 1) A public connection to the internet so I get an IP address. 2) A server computer listening on port 80 or 443 for incoming HTTP connections over TCP, returning data from a file system or database in the form of HTML/JS/CSS text documents and/or media files as requested. 3) A computer with a web browser which finds the server usually via DNS, and then requests data from the web server by passing it URLs. Now, you can replace the browser with an API client and the server with a cloud provider and HTML with JSON and you get Web 2.0 (more or less). Which brings us to "Web3". I honestly have no idea what the hell it's supposed to be or how it works. I've read some things that say it uses IPFS, others which are just about communicating with the Ethereum network of servers, specifically for managing NFTs. Is there some sort of key technical solution in Web3 that I'm missing? Let's say I'm supposed to start work tomorrow on a cool new web3 app... What is it that I'll be doing exactly?
- pedalpete 5y ago
  This is essentially the project I'll be doing over the holidays. I run a 3d virtual world start-up (today you'd call it a metaverse for sports - https://ayvri.com https://ayvri.com). Most sports tracking apps view owning the user data as lock-in. I think that GPS/IGC/TCX/FIT data are a good target for decentralized and "personal" storage. For our app, we have tons of different user types, lots of pilots who want us to build a "flight log" for them, hikers and runners don't need any of this stuff, and there are already a bunch of flight logs that exist. So, my thinking is that I'll build what essentially to most people will look like an API to a users data. With the exception that I won't be running the only service that can access and use this API. It's open source, and available to anybody that wants to run it. Anybody who is storing their tracks using any app that uses that open and common API can use easily try out any other app. From the developer side, the technologies are still servers and databases. From the client side, I'll probably be hosting their "wallets" until they decide they want to take them somewhere else, or if I can figure out a nice UX a non-technical user can understand. So no, I don't think you are missing any key technical solution. Unless you are building your own blockchain, which I liken to building your own database because your app needs a database. That's my 2 cents at the moment, but I may change my mind in the coming weeks.
gorgoiler 5y ago
Me, an old fart… 8-D }{ …reading about “web3” ^ | (butterfly) Is this… NNTP?
CyberRabbi 5y ago
> Gavin Wood, who coined the term Web3 in 2014, believes decentralized technologies are the only hope of preserving liberal democracy. Pushing the idea that the fate of liberal democracy is tied to the fate of “web3” is so incredibly cynical, it makes me nauseous.
esjeon 5y ago
OMG, who coined "the term"? "web3" is a name of a project, not a general technical term that people agreed upon. This is a marketing scheme, and mere delusion from a cult of people that never clearly and strongly defined. Maybe this was the very beginning of the misery of blockchain - the cult only looked into their own dream, and never looked outside.
- keyle 5y ago
  Can I just please "coin" the term web5? I'd love to do web4 but I'm pretty sure someone's already done it. web5 = the web is in your brain. Think of it, and <ADVERT> you <ADVERT> have the <NIS ENLARGEMENT ADVERT> answ <MAKE MY LOGO BIGGER CREAM> er! You can skip this advert in 0:49. I will see you at the inter <ADVERT> view! You didn't like this advert? TELL US WHY.
  - taylorhughes 5y ago
    The father of web5 has spoken!
    - keyle 5y ago
      pray<ADVERT>emoji
  - adventured 5y ago
    Someone already did Web3 a long time before Gavin Wood supposedly coined it (he didn't). People were writing about Web 3, aka Web 3.0, two decades back. It was supposed to be about the semantic Web and various related concepts that would revolutionize information and knowledge systems. The tech industry hype machine is a self-humiliating con machine more often than not. Web3 should be aggressively mocked to the extent the clown parade attempts to use it to hype more shit. It was not uncommon to write about it as of 2009-2011. Even CNN wrote an article about it circa 2009: "Web 2.0 is so over. Welcome to Web 3.0" https://money.cnn.com/2009/01/07/technology/hempel_threepointo.fortune/index.htm https://money.cnn.com/2009/01/07/technology/hempel_threepoin... (yeah but, uhhhh, if we call it Web3 then it's totally different from calling it Web 3.0 and not so embarrassing mkay)
DarylZero 5y ago
LOL as if coining that term was a positive qualification.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
euske 5y ago
I wonder who would be actually interested in the decentralization part if there was no Bitcoin/NFT bubble? My guess is "not many". I mean, those people exist, but it's probably the same number of people who are into Mastodon, etc. They are not the mainstream. The majority of people seem happy with the current model. So, while the concept of Web3 looks interesting, after this initial frenzy dies down, I bet there will be a long winter coming to Web3 town.
jfdi 5y ago
I don’t understand the cynics beyond surface-level. Still trying to. Web3 is a backend change to the current internet so you hold your assets in your wallet and sign to allow/revoke their use on a service. Combined with the transparency into underlying chains you can do some really interesting stuff (e.g., opensea). Ultimately the new paradigm could fix the first sin of web2 which is some mix of getting off the ad model & eliminating the credentials everywhere issue. What am I missing? Genuinely interested in a valuable counter.

30 points by conanxin 5y ago

IMHO my definition here is both better and earlier, and also better nails the key promise of distributed ledger technology, in terms of it being a mechanism for better allowing large organizations and societies to reach consensus: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1550059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1550059

beepbooptheory 5y ago
Do you really still think that is what's happening still in our horizon? Web3 seems to promise smaller, balkanized services, compared to social media monoliths we have now, in the service of, presumably, creating self-governing groups communities/businesses. At least I think that's the idea? Isn't twitter already society expressing ideas? If anything this idea is "better" by being more vague.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  Web3 will be to Twitter et al. what Bitcoin is to the dollar. Expressing ides as plenty easy on Twitter, so these balkanized services will only be used for hate speech, organizing criminal activities, and CP. Legitimate use will be limited to ultra hardcore libertarians and true believers. Unlike Bitcoin, there isn't an appreciating asset headline to get the attention of regular people, so won't even have the legitimacy halo Bitcoin benefits from.

yaomtc 5y ago

Web 3.0 is a concept being pushed by fans of cryptocurrency. And it sure is going great. https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web3isgoinggreat.com/

dvt 5y ago

> “Less trust, more truth.” What a neat platitude that means absolutely nothing. As a society, over, oh I don't know, like 15000 years, we figured out the the best way to enforce truth is via some sort of centralized institution: the court of law. > They could, right. They sort of do—there’s the star thing that you can only do once per day. But guess what? They're a profit-motivated company. So if you pay Tinder enough, you can just send as many stars as you want. Wait, crypto miners aren't profit-motivated? Maybe we should introduce Mr. Wood to flashbots[1] -- a "sub-network" of Ethereum miners (a fork of geth) who's entire purpose for existing is front-running (for a price, of course). Truth as long as you can pay for it -- got it. Web3 is end-stage capitalism and we've been down this road in the early 1900s. Yawn. [1] https://github.com/flashbots/pm https://github.com/flashbots/pm

rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
The best way to enforce truth is via mathematics. A court can declare 1+1!=2, which does not make it so. Courts are fundamentally human constructs. I find the ancient universal truths of numbers to be better.
- loktarogar 5y ago
  If someone manages to steal money from a crypto wallet (hacking, social engineering, whatever), does that make it theirs by the ancient universal truth of numbers? Money is a fundamentally human construct.
  - rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
    Practically, yes. Whomever has the private key can make a transaction. Proof of knowledge (of a private key) is equivalent to ownership. This is how it works. Money is a human construct. But it can live on a system backed by physical universal quantities like computation, to remove the need for human trust constructions.
    - loktarogar 5y ago

Yhippa 5y ago

I'm going to go ahead and coin the term Web4. I'm reserving the name with the right to fill in what it means at some undetermined point in the future. I will take no further questions at this time.

adoxyz 5y ago
Dibs on Web5
- mkaic 5y ago
  Only if I get web 6.283, or Webτ as the cool kids are calling it these days.
  - camelcasing 5y ago
    that might be a course name at MIT
- brutal_chaos_ 5y ago
  Claiming Web7. :)
- jdblair 5y ago
  It's going to be called WebV (like RISC-V). Then we go back to Arabic numerals for web6.
- Yhippa 5y ago
  Why didn't I think of that :-(
jaredsohn 5y ago
Dibs on Web3 if this Web3 has the same fate as the semantic web.
- masswerk 5y ago
  I still remember, when the semantic web was Web 3.0… (Arguably, Web 3.0 rather was the mash-up web of early centralisation of services, with widgets and things like Yahoo! Pipes, etc. Time to to think of Web4.)

knorker 5y ago

> The Father of Web3 I didn't know yet another pump and dump scam or pyramid scheme reinvention required a "father".

woodruffw 5y ago
The "father" terminology is consistent with other attempts at technical mis/reappropriation in the cryptocurrency community (cf. "crypto," "trustless," &c).

cmckn 5y ago

Blockchains are, by design, incredibly inefficient. I'm not talking about mining; take storage as an example. The consensus may be distributed, but the data is purely redundant. The majority of nodes in the network will have to hold a complete copy of the entire chain. If Web3 takes off, it will become more difficult (read: expensive) to operate a node in the network -- doesn't that seem backwards? I haven't seen a protocol address this in a meaningful way, it seems to be shrugged off as a bridge to be crossed at a later date. Storage is cheap! But I don't see how these systems could scale to be truly impactful while remaining so inefficient.

knorker 5y ago
What do you mean? It has negligible performance overhead according to the "Performance" section here: https://github.com/zhuowei/nft_ptr https://github.com/zhuowei/nft_ptr /s
- vhiremath4 5y ago
  I think the OP means less about perf and more about dollar cost since you have to either be able to trust the uptime of a storage node (and likely pay more) or make more copies (and therefore pay more) in order to be guaranteed your data isn't lost when a node goes down. The performance of splitting up files and storing them on multiple nodes tends to be very good since you're not as bottlenecked to one node feeding out all of the bytes (think about bitorrent and how fast it is to download a well-seeded file). That said, network egress might become a problem if the node you're seeding content from lives within AWS or another cloud provider. I don't think this egress price penalty exists in any major ISPs that I know of.
  - cmckn 5y ago
    The comment you’re replying to is poking fun at a gag project; but I agree with you as well. The ETH chain was about 500 gigs over the summer when I synced a full node, but it was growing fast. The amount of data stored is monotonically increasing for every full node in the network. You also need fast storage, you can’t use dirt cheap spinning platters. Maybe it won’t grow faster than storage cheapens, but I’m not sure I’d make that bet.

knorker 5y ago

> Yes and no. I think trust in itself is actually just a bad thing all around. Trust implies that you are you're placing some sort of authority in somebody else, or in some organization, and they will be able to use this authority in some arbitrary way. This is just such a fantasy land. There's a guy who wrote The Knowledge, a book that (for fun, basically) describes the knowledge we would need to rebuild society if we suddenly forgot everything. Like when and how do we grow crops. What do effective tools for sowing look like? Like if we instantly forget everything, this book is what we need to bootstrap quickly. He was asked "what about government?". His answer was "there's no point. The guy with the biggest gun will be the government". And that's true today. And it's why web3 is idiotic. "Truth" won't help you, and "trust" doesn't matter, when the government (in the form of the police) knock on your door and say no, actually, your smart contract is an illegal scheme and we are going to put you in a locked room for a while now. You neither have to believe in the government, nor trust it, for it to force society's will upon you.

berberous 5y ago
The world is not black and white, and I think you are missing the point. While what you are saying is true to an extent, we can still decrease trust and replace it with verifiable and auditable mechanisms at the margins. For example, the Fed currently states that they target a 2% annual inflation. Well, the US could just adopt a virtual currency, and hard code a 2% inflation amount that was verifiable in public code. Note that I’m not saying this contrived example is necessarily good or bad, but let’s just assume everyone agrees 2% inflation is good and hard coding a 2% money increase rate is equivalent and it’s not better to give the government flexibility. This change has the effect of reducing our need to trust that the government will act consistent with its messaging; we can prove it. And while the men with guns can always change the rules (and maybe they should in some scenarios), it’s easy to see when the rules are being changed, and it’s likely harder to do so if it’s not a good idea since there are structural forces that make it more difficult. The US government is filled with mechanisms to reduce trust (eg checks and balances). And the reduction of trust is not just a government point. Twitter grew by having a great public API which it then knee capped and harmed the developers who trusted them. Would it not be better to have a protocol incentive that you could more readily trust would not be changed under you? What if the Twitter API had a governance token where the indie developers had owned a large stake of such tokens?

MaxMoney 5y ago

russellbeattie 5y ago

Help me out with the web3 tech basics? As a baseline, let's do web 1.0. To set up a basic web server today, I need: 1) A public connection to the internet so I get an IP address. 2) A server computer listening on port 80 or 443 for incoming HTTP connections over TCP, returning data from a file system or database in the form of HTML/JS/CSS text documents and/or media files as requested. 3) A computer with a web browser which finds the server usually via DNS, and then requests data from the web server by passing it URLs. Now, you can replace the browser with an API client and the server with a cloud provider and HTML with JSON and you get Web 2.0 (more or less). Which brings us to "Web3". I honestly have no idea what the hell it's supposed to be or how it works. I've read some things that say it uses IPFS, others which are just about communicating with the Ethereum network of servers, specifically for managing NFTs. Is there some sort of key technical solution in Web3 that I'm missing? Let's say I'm supposed to start work tomorrow on a cool new web3 app... What is it that I'll be doing exactly?

pedalpete 5y ago
This is essentially the project I'll be doing over the holidays. I run a 3d virtual world start-up (today you'd call it a metaverse for sports - https://ayvri.com https://ayvri.com). Most sports tracking apps view owning the user data as lock-in. I think that GPS/IGC/TCX/FIT data are a good target for decentralized and "personal" storage. For our app, we have tons of different user types, lots of pilots who want us to build a "flight log" for them, hikers and runners don't need any of this stuff, and there are already a bunch of flight logs that exist. So, my thinking is that I'll build what essentially to most people will look like an API to a users data. With the exception that I won't be running the only service that can access and use this API. It's open source, and available to anybody that wants to run it. Anybody who is storing their tracks using any app that uses that open and common API can use easily try out any other app. From the developer side, the technologies are still servers and databases. From the client side, I'll probably be hosting their "wallets" until they decide they want to take them somewhere else, or if I can figure out a nice UX a non-technical user can understand. So no, I don't think you are missing any key technical solution. Unless you are building your own blockchain, which I liken to building your own database because your app needs a database. That's my 2 cents at the moment, but I may change my mind in the coming weeks.

gorgoiler 5y ago

Me, an old fart… 8-D }{ …reading about “web3” ^ | (butterfly) Is this… NNTP?

CyberRabbi 5y ago

> Gavin Wood, who coined the term Web3 in 2014, believes decentralized technologies are the only hope of preserving liberal democracy. Pushing the idea that the fate of liberal democracy is tied to the fate of “web3” is so incredibly cynical, it makes me nauseous.

esjeon 5y ago

OMG, who coined "the term"? "web3" is a name of a project, not a general technical term that people agreed upon. This is a marketing scheme, and mere delusion from a cult of people that never clearly and strongly defined. Maybe this was the very beginning of the misery of blockchain - the cult only looked into their own dream, and never looked outside.

keyle 5y ago
Can I just please "coin" the term web5? I'd love to do web4 but I'm pretty sure someone's already done it. web5 = the web is in your brain. Think of it, and <ADVERT> you <ADVERT> have the <NIS ENLARGEMENT ADVERT> answ <MAKE MY LOGO BIGGER CREAM> er! You can skip this advert in 0:49. I will see you at the inter <ADVERT> view! You didn't like this advert? TELL US WHY.
- taylorhughes 5y ago
  The father of web5 has spoken!
  - keyle 5y ago
    pray<ADVERT>emoji
- adventured 5y ago
  Someone already did Web3 a long time before Gavin Wood supposedly coined it (he didn't). People were writing about Web 3, aka Web 3.0, two decades back. It was supposed to be about the semantic Web and various related concepts that would revolutionize information and knowledge systems. The tech industry hype machine is a self-humiliating con machine more often than not. Web3 should be aggressively mocked to the extent the clown parade attempts to use it to hype more shit. It was not uncommon to write about it as of 2009-2011. Even CNN wrote an article about it circa 2009: "Web 2.0 is so over. Welcome to Web 3.0" https://money.cnn.com/2009/01/07/technology/hempel_threepointo.fortune/index.htm https://money.cnn.com/2009/01/07/technology/hempel_threepoin... (yeah but, uhhhh, if we call it Web3 then it's totally different from calling it Web 3.0 and not so embarrassing mkay)

DarylZero 5y ago

LOL as if coining that term was a positive qualification.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

euske 5y ago

I wonder who would be actually interested in the decentralization part if there was no Bitcoin/NFT bubble? My guess is "not many". I mean, those people exist, but it's probably the same number of people who are into Mastodon, etc. They are not the mainstream. The majority of people seem happy with the current model. So, while the concept of Web3 looks interesting, after this initial frenzy dies down, I bet there will be a long winter coming to Web3 town.

jfdi 5y ago

I don’t understand the cynics beyond surface-level. Still trying to. Web3 is a backend change to the current internet so you hold your assets in your wallet and sign to allow/revoke their use on a service. Combined with the transparency into underlying chains you can do some really interesting stuff (e.g., opensea). Ultimately the new paradigm could fix the first sin of web2 which is some mix of getting off the ad model & eliminating the credentials everywhere issue. What am I missing? Genuinely interested in a valuable counter.