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>NOBODY CAN TAKE AWAY API ACCESS OF DEVS ON ETHEREUM, JACK. THAT IS THE POINT. I see this kind of take all the time but people don't seem to realize that distr

>NOBODY CAN TAKE AWAY API ACCESS OF DEVS ON ETHEREUM, JACK. THAT IS THE POINT. I see this kind of take all the time but people don't seem to realize that distributed computing doesn't imply decentralized services. Nobody can take away your internet access (well technically someone can) but that doesn't help you when you're stuck on Facebook. You can always send http over a wire. Jack is exactly right in that "web3" is just a way to build third party owned services on top of a distributed infrastructure, just like companies right now sit on top of the internet. People who don't want to be censored or any third parties can already do this on the internet by running their own site. People aren't going to interact with ethereum at the protocol level (except for enthusiasts) for the same reason they're now on Twitter and not on Mastodon. Also if "web3" was disintermediated VC's wouldn't spend a single dollar on it, because you can't extract profit from something you don't own.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago
"VC's wouldn't spend a single dollar on it, because you can't extract profit from something you don't own." You can build business and infrastructure without VC involvement. Sometimes it will be healthier for it.
- KarlKemp 5y ago
  Yea, but has little to do with OP’s point, which was VC attention -> (requires, and therefore proves) centralized entities. The reverse isn’t true, and nobody claimed it to be.
- soneca 5y ago
  I would appreciate a list of web3 projects that don’t have and explicitly don’t want to have any VC involvement (or big company involvement, as it would mean the same thing). I am interested in learning what that liberty it might bring to those projects.
  - riffic 5y ago
    look at the activitypub ecosystem then, where no one needs permission to become a participant, and vc's refuse to even acknowledge its existence. https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-for-activitypub-apps https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-fo...
    - ognarb 5y ago
      the fediverse is in no way related to this web3/blockchain bullshit. It's actually more related to the original idea of web 3.0 as semantic web due to the usage of similar protocols e.g. json-ld.
  - clpm4j 5y ago
    I'd be interested in that list as well. All of the major / currently most popular ones seem to be in bed with a16z: https://a16z.com/portfolio/#crypto https://a16z.com/portfolio/#crypto
  - fleddr 5y ago
    You'll find that VCs, the shortlist of usual suspects, have their hands in almost all web3 projects. And even if they missed one, they'll get in later anyway by simply buying the token. Big capital always wins.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- gnu8 5y ago
  We should just euthanize everyone and blow up the planet if the only worthwhile reason for doing anything is for VCs to extract profit from it. People who think accumulating more wealth than they need at the expense of people who are starving is ok should be thrown into a volcano.
  - dang 5y ago
    "Please don't fulminate." It's tedious and repetitive. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html p.s. No, I'm not trying to defend profit-extracting VCs or whatever; just trying to defend this place from burning itself to a crisp. Comments like this one and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29588384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29588384 are just what we don't need in that regard.
- 8bitsrule 5y ago
  Telephone co-ops still exist, and have for a long time. They manage to stay small enough to never become tasty meals. Sea eagles fly right by. There are -many- kinds of co-ops. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_cooperative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_cooperative] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_utility_cooperatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_utility_cooperatives] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co-operative_federations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co-operative_federatio...]
suikadayo 5y ago
I’m personally hopeful for platforms like http://gm.xyz http://gm.xyz as they go from centralization to decentralizing parts of their app
Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
> Jack is exactly right in that "web3" is just a way to build third party owned services on top of a distributed infrastructure, just like companies right now sit on top of the internet. People who don't want to be censored or any third parties can already do this on the internet by running their own site. I always thought that "web3" meant everything was on the blockchain. In other words, you could theoretically re-invent Twitter as an Ethereum Smart Contract. In doing so, every "Tweet" would be on the Eth block chain. You'd probably want a web page that interacts with the block chain to read/post tweets, but even a static HTML file on your local hard drive that interacts with Metamask could achieve that. You wouldn't need to run a site. Of course, therein lies a new problem: Scale. A quick Google says that there are 6,000 tweets sent per second. Meanwhile, the Eth block chain handles what, 10-20 transactions per second, and ends up with fees that are several dollars worth of Eth? Nobody other than political figures and spammers are going to want to pay $5 to send a Tweet.
- bastiantower 5y ago
  Layer 2 solutions, specially zk ones like StarkNet, solve the scaling issue
  - jagger27 5y ago
    And gleefully introduce contradictory trust issues that no one asked for.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  Apart from scale the bigger issue is incentives and the governance of ethereum. It has already forked itself once at the orders of the Leadership, so people are rightly worried about what will happen after it switches to PoS
yosito 5y ago
> "web3" is just a way to build third party owned services on top of a distributed infrastructure Isn't in the opposite? Web3 is a decentralized app that runs on top of distributed web2 and centralized infrastructure.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> Also if "web3" was disintermediated VC's wouldn't spend a single dollar on it, because you can't extract profit from something you don't own. Then why are VCs pouring money into web3 projects every chance they can get? Web3 has been pitched as a sort of idealized, democratic, community-owned concept, but the reality is mostly a bunch of projects pitching token sales to speculators who think they can sell those tokens to someone else in the future. Investors are cashing in by using their publicity to hype the token in exchange for some of those tokens to re-sell to other speculators. The actual service doesn't actually have to work because it's all speculation at this point.
- waprin 5y ago
  The dotcom boom was mostly fueled by rabid speculation. Today, people love their tech stocks, even though none of them pay dividends - the only reason to buy GOOG or AMZN is the hope that you can sell that stock down the line to a "greater fool". Some might call it a Ponzi scheme since only way investors make money off AMZN or GOOG stock is from new investors money coming in. When I look at projects like ethereum, I see a lot of excitement and innovation around how cooperative game theory can innovate new business models and ways of coordination. The way Twitter repeatedly rugpulled devs is a perfect example of how broken the web2 model can be. And now the founder of Twitter wants to criticize crypto projects for taking VC money, as if Twitter somehow didn't take VC money and enrich those VCs in its rise to power? The hypocrisy is astounding. As far as the services, the goal posts keep moving. First there's no application, then store of value is an application, then art collection, then decentralize automatic market makers, then social tokens, then decentralized autonomous organizations. These are young, immature ideas but clearly stuff is happening. Whether it will live up to the grandiose promises, we can't say. But if you want to complain about the web3 advocates making grandiose promises about how their code is going to change the world, well, they stole that playbook directly from the likes of the Google and Twitter founders. When Dorsey and Google execs complain about crypto, I'm reminded of a quote from HBO's Silicon Valley: "I don't want to live in a world where someone else is making the world a better place better than we are."
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Kranar 5y ago
Not remotely similar at all. Right now if you don't like Facebook, there's nothing you can do to change it... but hypothetically if Facebook ran its infrastructure on a decentralized platform like Ethereum, then anyone could trivially fork the entire system with backwards integration. It's similar to how if someone doesn't like Chrome, they can fork Chromium and make their own version of it and keep complete compatibility with Chromium. The decentralized web does a similar thing except it does it for services instead of strictly software. It's a fully transparent and accessible ecosystem of services whose entire history is immutable and available for anyone to access. That said, no blockchain technology is remotely close to the point where a massive system like Facebook could possibly hope to run and it may never get to that point either, it's hard enough getting even trivial services to be cost effective on Ethereum... but in principle that's the idea.
zrm 5y ago
The advantage with decentralized services is that they scale and distribute costs. If you want to compete with YouTube in the traditional way, better have a CDN, and if it becomes popular even though you're not taking in any revenue, the bandwidth bill is getting paid with VC money or you're going out of business. If you can more easily build it on top of something like BitTorrent, you don't need the VC money as much. Now what you need is a payment system so your creators can get paid. The more of these pieces get built and work decentralized, the less capital it takes to compete without relying on or yourself being a centralized service.
mdoms 5y ago
Remember when the Ethereum "community" decided to roll back millions of dollars of transactions? All of these decentralised services are under the total control of a small number of powerful people. It's a myth.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

"VC's wouldn't spend a single dollar on it, because you can't extract profit from something you don't own." You can build business and infrastructure without VC involvement. Sometimes it will be healthier for it.

KarlKemp 5y ago
Yea, but has little to do with OP’s point, which was VC attention -> (requires, and therefore proves) centralized entities. The reverse isn’t true, and nobody claimed it to be.
soneca 5y ago
I would appreciate a list of web3 projects that don’t have and explicitly don’t want to have any VC involvement (or big company involvement, as it would mean the same thing). I am interested in learning what that liberty it might bring to those projects.
- riffic 5y ago
  look at the activitypub ecosystem then, where no one needs permission to become a participant, and vc's refuse to even acknowledge its existence. https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-for-activitypub-apps https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-fo...
  - ognarb 5y ago
    the fediverse is in no way related to this web3/blockchain bullshit. It's actually more related to the original idea of web 3.0 as semantic web due to the usage of similar protocols e.g. json-ld.
- clpm4j 5y ago
  I'd be interested in that list as well. All of the major / currently most popular ones seem to be in bed with a16z: https://a16z.com/portfolio/#crypto https://a16z.com/portfolio/#crypto
- fleddr 5y ago
  You'll find that VCs, the shortlist of usual suspects, have their hands in almost all web3 projects. And even if they missed one, they'll get in later anyway by simply buying the token. Big capital always wins.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
gnu8 5y ago
We should just euthanize everyone and blow up the planet if the only worthwhile reason for doing anything is for VCs to extract profit from it. People who think accumulating more wealth than they need at the expense of people who are starving is ok should be thrown into a volcano.
- dang 5y ago
  "Please don't fulminate." It's tedious and repetitive. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html p.s. No, I'm not trying to defend profit-extracting VCs or whatever; just trying to defend this place from burning itself to a crisp. Comments like this one and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29588384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29588384 are just what we don't need in that regard.
8bitsrule 5y ago
Telephone co-ops still exist, and have for a long time. They manage to stay small enough to never become tasty meals. Sea eagles fly right by. There are -many- kinds of co-ops. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_cooperative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_cooperative] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_utility_cooperatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_utility_cooperatives] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co-operative_federations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co-operative_federatio...]

suikadayo 5y ago

I’m personally hopeful for platforms like http://gm.xyz http://gm.xyz as they go from centralization to decentralizing parts of their app

Sohcahtoa82 5y ago

> Jack is exactly right in that "web3" is just a way to build third party owned services on top of a distributed infrastructure, just like companies right now sit on top of the internet. People who don't want to be censored or any third parties can already do this on the internet by running their own site. I always thought that "web3" meant everything was on the blockchain. In other words, you could theoretically re-invent Twitter as an Ethereum Smart Contract. In doing so, every "Tweet" would be on the Eth block chain. You'd probably want a web page that interacts with the block chain to read/post tweets, but even a static HTML file on your local hard drive that interacts with Metamask could achieve that. You wouldn't need to run a site. Of course, therein lies a new problem: Scale. A quick Google says that there are 6,000 tweets sent per second. Meanwhile, the Eth block chain handles what, 10-20 transactions per second, and ends up with fees that are several dollars worth of Eth? Nobody other than political figures and spammers are going to want to pay $5 to send a Tweet.

bastiantower 5y ago
Layer 2 solutions, specially zk ones like StarkNet, solve the scaling issue
- jagger27 5y ago
  And gleefully introduce contradictory trust issues that no one asked for.
cblconfederate 5y ago
Apart from scale the bigger issue is incentives and the governance of ethereum. It has already forked itself once at the orders of the Leadership, so people are rightly worried about what will happen after it switches to PoS

yosito 5y ago

> "web3" is just a way to build third party owned services on top of a distributed infrastructure Isn't in the opposite? Web3 is a decentralized app that runs on top of distributed web2 and centralized infrastructure.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> Also if "web3" was disintermediated VC's wouldn't spend a single dollar on it, because you can't extract profit from something you don't own. Then why are VCs pouring money into web3 projects every chance they can get? Web3 has been pitched as a sort of idealized, democratic, community-owned concept, but the reality is mostly a bunch of projects pitching token sales to speculators who think they can sell those tokens to someone else in the future. Investors are cashing in by using their publicity to hype the token in exchange for some of those tokens to re-sell to other speculators. The actual service doesn't actually have to work because it's all speculation at this point.

waprin 5y ago
The dotcom boom was mostly fueled by rabid speculation. Today, people love their tech stocks, even though none of them pay dividends - the only reason to buy GOOG or AMZN is the hope that you can sell that stock down the line to a "greater fool". Some might call it a Ponzi scheme since only way investors make money off AMZN or GOOG stock is from new investors money coming in. When I look at projects like ethereum, I see a lot of excitement and innovation around how cooperative game theory can innovate new business models and ways of coordination. The way Twitter repeatedly rugpulled devs is a perfect example of how broken the web2 model can be. And now the founder of Twitter wants to criticize crypto projects for taking VC money, as if Twitter somehow didn't take VC money and enrich those VCs in its rise to power? The hypocrisy is astounding. As far as the services, the goal posts keep moving. First there's no application, then store of value is an application, then art collection, then decentralize automatic market makers, then social tokens, then decentralized autonomous organizations. These are young, immature ideas but clearly stuff is happening. Whether it will live up to the grandiose promises, we can't say. But if you want to complain about the web3 advocates making grandiose promises about how their code is going to change the world, well, they stole that playbook directly from the likes of the Google and Twitter founders. When Dorsey and Google execs complain about crypto, I'm reminded of a quote from HBO's Silicon Valley: "I don't want to live in a world where someone else is making the world a better place better than we are."
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago

Kranar 5y ago

Not remotely similar at all. Right now if you don't like Facebook, there's nothing you can do to change it... but hypothetically if Facebook ran its infrastructure on a decentralized platform like Ethereum, then anyone could trivially fork the entire system with backwards integration. It's similar to how if someone doesn't like Chrome, they can fork Chromium and make their own version of it and keep complete compatibility with Chromium. The decentralized web does a similar thing except it does it for services instead of strictly software. It's a fully transparent and accessible ecosystem of services whose entire history is immutable and available for anyone to access. That said, no blockchain technology is remotely close to the point where a massive system like Facebook could possibly hope to run and it may never get to that point either, it's hard enough getting even trivial services to be cost effective on Ethereum... but in principle that's the idea.

zrm 5y ago

The advantage with decentralized services is that they scale and distribute costs. If you want to compete with YouTube in the traditional way, better have a CDN, and if it becomes popular even though you're not taking in any revenue, the bandwidth bill is getting paid with VC money or you're going out of business. If you can more easily build it on top of something like BitTorrent, you don't need the VC money as much. Now what you need is a payment system so your creators can get paid. The more of these pieces get built and work decentralized, the less capital it takes to compete without relying on or yourself being a centralized service.

mdoms 5y ago

Remember when the Ethereum "community" decided to roll back millions of dollars of transactions? All of these decentralised services are under the total control of a small number of powerful people. It's a myth.