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Web3/Crypto: Why Bother?

• 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  Dumb questions: Why does "web3" need venture capital. Why are VC (like this author) pushing for web3. Someone suggested it is because they have invested heavily in ETH mining.
  • grey-area 5y ago
    Because VCs have heavily invested over the last few years in blockchain companies and cryptocurrencies in general, they need to keep pumping this bubble, so NFTs, web3 etc became necessary to invent. Web3 is just the latest excuse to keep the game of musical chairs going and preserve the chimera of use-value for cryptocurrencies since very few people want to use them to actually transact.
  • kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    Interest rates are zeroed out and they need another tulip frenzy.
  • JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
    ETH mining is going away forever with ETH 2.0’s The Merge that is set for June 2022. https://cointelegraph.com/news/eth2-devs-put-out-call-to-community-to-help-test-out-the-merge/ https://cointelegraph.com/news/eth2-devs-put-out-call-to-com...
    • pudo 5y ago
      You mean the thing when the ETH people are going to hand the power over the people with the most money? I'm sure this idea is deeply chilling to... venture capitalists, they're probably shaking in their boots.
      • JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
        How do you think proof of work operates now? Do you think big mining operations don’t take massive capital? They do, and also waste ungodly amounts of power at the same time.
        • whywhywhywhy 5y ago
          The difference is PoW can still be distributed beyond what exists today if someone decides to get involved and take power away from the consensus. With PoS the consensus chooses if they want to give up power and you can only gain decentralization if they choose to give it up.
          • yazaddaruvala 5y ago
            POS only works with an active economy i.e. validation requires something to validate e.g. consumers using ETH to buy goods and services. This implies the general population has access to large amounts of liquidity of the currency. A new institutional investor just needs to start hoarding that easily accessible liquidity and the biggest players in the space will need to give up their share or risk the price of the currency dropping to zero because it’s too hard to transact in it and therefore it’s no longer profitable to tie up 32 ETH and run validators.
        • latchkey 5y ago
          You're conflating bitcoin mining with ethereum mining. Anyone with a GPU can mine eth and therefore the capital requirements are far lower. Now, of course if you want to make big money, then that requires big capital... but that could be said of nearly any business out there.
      • stavros 5y ago
        Whereas now power is with the people with the most... GPUs? Those don't grow on trees either.
        • M2Ys4U 5y ago
  • shrikant 5y ago
    Gatekeeping access to (edit: online, but I suppose this could also apply to offline) resources based on digitally verifiable ownership and the subsequent rent-seeking is a capitalist wet dream. I'm not the least bit surprised the VCs are slavering over web3.
  • onion2k 5y ago
    Why does "web3" need venture capital. There's no reason why a business trying to use "web3" wouldn't need to raise a round. Every business that wants to grow more quickly than the founders can manage alone needs some sort of capital to pay people to help. One way to do that is by giving up a bit of equity in return for money.
    • pudo 5y ago
      That sounds a lot like, you know, web 2.0. Let's scheme this out: Facebook (and its corporate policies) is often named a motivating factor for web3. If I wanted to make a web3 replacement (let's call it MastoCoin), how would the economics of that actually work? People would still want to upload lots of posts and pictures and stuff, and that would presumably continue to live on S3 (etc.). Somebody needs to pay the bills for that monthly. So even if I had to pay $3 bucks in gas to post my sarcastic tweet, someone else would incur an indefinite expenditure on it, no? I really cannot think of a non-pyramid model here.
      • onion2k 5y ago
        Society should certainly protect people from being scammed by others, but I don't think that's what web3 is. It's not a "pyramid scheme" in the traditional sense because it's not a scheme. It's just a pyramid. It's a collective delusion. If people believe in it, great. If they think they can profit from it then they should try. If they win, cool. If they lose, also cool. I definitely don't think web3 should be 'stopped' on moral grounds. Maybe it should on environment grounds, or on the grounds of how annoying web3 evangelists are, but stopping it to protect people from investing in something silly is not a good idea. Let people learn from their mistakes (or maybe I'll learn to be less cynical when NFTs turn out to be the next BTC, which I also regret not buying, or Amazon stock that I didn't buy, or Apple, or Pixar, or MSFT... this is a long list.)
      • chrisco255 5y ago
        Filecoin, Sia, and Arweave are three of the bigger chains involved in decentralized file storage. A combination of IPFS for data verification and one of these services for storage is typically enough. Many apps will store both on S3 and on Filecoin and link the IPFS hash for redundance. It's not a pyramid model, the native tokens are used to purchase storage and incentivize the bootstrapping of the storage network build out. Arweave has created an endowment like structure to guarantee data storage for 200 years.
  • mattwilsonn888 5y ago
    What makes you think it needs it? If every person in the world shilled something they called Web3 that wouldn't change the conclusion of this blog post? What are you on about, exactly?
  • hnbad 5y ago
    Because Proof of Work requires computational power, which is expensive and thus requires a lot of capital, and Proof of Stake requires controlling a significant amount of the currency, which also requires a lot of capital. Basically the consensus is built around ways to demonstrate you already have a lot of money, either through conspicuous consumption (PoW) or flaunting your balance (PoS). As to why VCs would invest in it: it's currently dodging most regulations that apply to financial transactions (money laundering, pyramid schemes, pump & dump schemes, etc) much like loot boxes dodge most gambling regulations (and it turns out selling gambling to kids is extremely profitable). This makes the market uniquely profitable to invest in right now with promises of extreme ROI as long as it remains unregulated. "Humanitarian" campaigns to normalize tracking public records and qualifications on the blockchain in technologically underdeveloped countries also produce a high amount of technological lock-in while increasing the capabilities of automated decision making on the blockchain without having to bother with externalities. For example, if one's ability to use an NFT on social media hinges on demonstrating ownership of that NFT, copyright law becomes a tangential consideration much like systems like ContentID make it harder to claim fair use rights because the ContentID claim is not based in copyright law but in the terms of service. Additionally a lot of the more vocal tech VCs are libertarians bordering on anarcho-capitalism (i.e. free market maximalists who think humanity's survival and progress hinges on a few Great Men rather than the unsophisticated masses). The greater Web3 ecosystem is trying to solve cooperation with people you actively distrust and represents every interaction as a financial transaction. This is extremely appealing to them. Their problem with capitalism isn't that it inevitably leads to a massive wealth disparity (because after all, some people are "just better") but that the government gets in the way. This makes the promise of decentralization (even if it defers to consensus between the already wealthy) ideologically appealing to them. Based on my conversations with web3 believers, they would generally agree with most of what I said but object to the language I'm using because it doesn't sound very flattering.
    • SyzygistSix 5y ago
      regarding "free market maximalists who think humanity's survival and progress hinges on a few Great Men rather than the unsophisticated masses" - Libertarianism may have changed in character, or perhaps more in how it is characterized in media, but it used to be that libertarians believed in lots of little people acting freely and that states and the large corporations they are mutually supported by are the opposite of what they want. Hopefully it is because the little people have largely left the relatively pointless large media spaces online and does not represent a genuine change in how the majority of libertarians, who used to not be terribly wealthy if they were wealthy at all, think.
  • Ekaros 5y ago
    Even deeper question. Why does "web3" need to make money? Wouldn't it be better to go hobbyist providing services? Or everyone running their own things at their own cost, marginal let's say 10 or 100 a year? Like true decentralization, that isn't burden to profit...
    • aryc19 5y ago
      Because incentives. The beauty of crypto/web3 is to reward the service providers with incentives for their services. Nobody is going to provide things for free and even if they do it won't be sustainable in the long run.
    • 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
      This is more or less what I am asking. Apparently Web3 does not solve the problem of VC. Perhaps it does not even contemplate this as a problem.
  • whywhywhywhy 5y ago
    > Someone suggested it is because they have invested heavily in ETH mining. VCs own ETH from the presale not from investing in mining.
    • latchkey 5y ago
      That is simply not true. VCs have invested in mining operations.
  • UncleMeat 5y ago
    VC funding is needed to raise funds for software engineers and provide access to mentorship and community, like every other software company that uses VC funding. You can raise funds through other means (bootstrapping, ICOs, etc) but these have their own sets of downsides.
• rambambram 5y ago
  Web3 is nothing but an echo chamber. A very empty echo chamber, so it echoes pretty nice. I'm back to the world wide web.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • dqpb 5y ago
    There are actually two rooms. A big one full of people who barely know what a data structure is, yelling about whether or not Web3 is a Ponzi scheme. And a much smaller room where Engineers are actually building things.
    • qeternity 5y ago
      As if that somehow confers value or usecase. Most engineers I know think web3 is beyond stupid.
    • rambambram 5y ago
      > where Engineers are actually building things. These things have names. Web3 is a name without being a thing.
      • dqpb 5y ago
        > Web3 is a name without being a thing. Then it’s just as meaningless to argue against it as it is to argue for it.
        • rambambram 5y ago
          Exactly! You get the point.
• nathias 5y ago
  It seems like the VC's are coming to harvest crypto. They will try to regulate it and squeeze out all the tech and profit for themselves, but at least they will counter the much worse regulation that would submit crypto under the control of central banks.
• vmception 5y ago
  One person in the comments there asked about how its better from a corporate marketer’s angle, I think Web3 has the perfect funnel. For any application The funnel is practically nonexistent, except to the luddites that still need onboarding into a wallet. No different than trying to show an existing experience to an AOL user in 1995 versus showing it to the people writing editorials questioning what the World Wide Web was. “Is there any useful application on the World Wide Web, why has nobody convinced me for me, why has everyone started ignoring my bait about what useful means! I swear I wont move the goalpost if you talk to me, this time!” For marketing theory its matches perfectly, get a user to pay $1 and you’ve found the audience that would pay more, while bouncing the freeloaders. Any web3 application has authorized payments built in and users prepared to create a transaction with a fee.
• cillian64 5y ago
  > some proponents who present web3 as bringing about a libertarian nirvana. What bothers a lot of us isn't the libertarian nirvana ideal, it's the fact that most loud proponents have a financial interest and stand to gain by increasing adoption, even if only temporarily. Even if they truly believe the technology is pointless and has no future, they are incentivised to pretend that it is revolutionary in order to increase the value of their investments so they can offload their holdings. This makes it difficult to trust anybody writing positively about cryptocurrency-related topics. It's like knowing a manufacturer pays people to write positive reviews about their product and then suddenly seeing lots of blogs and comments raving about how great the products are with little justification. If you can separate the distributed database technology from the financial speculation then I will be a lot more enthusiastic about it. However, without the get-rich-quick aspect I suspect such a technology won't get nearly as much excitement overall. Mastodon and Diaspora are already working examples of decentralised social networks and this article doesn't state what advantage web3-based products would have over them and people generally don't seem very excited about them.
  • vmception 5y ago
    The standard you want is not reconcilable and you will simply have to find other signals to pay attention to. The general idea amongst crypto enthusiasts is: no conflict, no interest. So its not about just listening to someone and trusting them, its about having the tools to find something that works for a goal you have, within that ecosystem.
  • mattwilsonn888 5y ago
    You make a good point, and you deserve appreciation for your ability not to confuse all of Web3 with the vocal majority behind Web3 right now - who I agree are empty salesman. > If you can separate the distributed database technology from the financial speculation then I will be a lot more enthusiastic about it. Tough pill to swallow for you: the consensus mechanism fundamental to Bitcoin and blockchains in general (assuming they are fully decentralized) is economic. It relies on block producers spending or staking their money for no profit if they lie or cheat. The tokens or coins associated with the network are the digital collateralizations of that money, and are therefore subject to shift in valuations relative to anything else you might trade it for. Crypto is inherently financial as long as its consensus mechanism is economic - that is not a bad thing, but it should inform how communities interact with the topic. Despite believing in crypto, this is why I believe some spaces should not consider it polite to talk about specific crypto-currencies versus others, as it quickly deteriorates into shilling of one's own holdings. This is the same reason novice's can't reliably make money in the market - since everyone advertises coins/tokens they hold as the next coming of Jesus, the only productive way to make decisions about which are good or bad is to not only have a deep understanding of them but also their context in the market as it is currently. Even then you might fall victim to the 'clown market' when hype trumps fundamentals. Long story short crypto-currencies are inherently economic and therefore financial and subject to price fluctuations which attract speculators. This does not make "crypto" a scam, but it does mean that novices have little recourse for understanding the space sans becoming more independently competent or having a trusted advisor.
• pudo 5y ago
  > Put differently: it turned out that permissionless publishing alone was insufficient. We also need permissionless data. Has the author ever heard of OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia, or a million other projects like them? I'm also not quite sure "permissionless data" is how I'd describe a database that stores tiny amounts of data at a massive cost. Pay-to-play is permissionless iif you have the money. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.
  • throway453sde 5y ago
    Wikipedia database is managed by the wikimedia staff. You have the permission to edit it for now but can not guarantee it will be make available always. This is what the author meant.
    • lottin 5y ago
      Doesn't wikipedia keep a history of all the edits, and aren't these available to wikipedia users?
      • throwaway744678 5y ago
        I believe they do; you can download archives at [0]. It mentions that the edit history can be downloaded by looking for dumps with page-meta-history in their name at [1] The same is probably true for OpenStreetMap et al. [0] https://dumps.wikimedia.org/ https://dumps.wikimedia.org/ [1] https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/ https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/
      • DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
        They're just rows in a MySQL database. Traditional RDBMS for OLTP are built around the assumption that all data is mutable. An unscrupulous Wikipedia DBA could unilaterally delete new history rows before anyone downloads a hard-copy and then no-one would be the wiser. On the topic of OLTP RDBMS: things are changing though: ISO SQL (and at least MS SQL Server) have added support for "LEDGER" tables that extend the Temporal Table system (...that we know and love...er...hate) with immutability secured with cryptographic keys. Basically, you get to have your own centralized blockchain-like table.... so long as you trust your DBMS (and DBA) with the keys. There's two types: append-only and updatable (which is still append-only under-the-hood, as destructive DML operations are still just appended to current history, just like with git). https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/ledger-how-to-append-only-ledger-tables https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/le... https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/ledger-how-to-updatable-ledger-tables https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/le... It's pretty cool, I'll admit - I've been wanting support for true "read-only" tables for ages - the only thing I'm dreading is having to put-up with poor tooling support for a decade or two (e.g. Entity Framework Core still doesn't support temporal-tables, and SQL Server still only supports SYSTEM versioning and not the (far more useful) APPLICATION versioning system, argh). That said, I don't think Wikipedia would really want crypto-signed page edit histories: it would obligate them to host truly objectionable content (otherwise the hash references would break), and there's far too many sociopathic griefers online for that to not happen...
• dmitriid 5y ago
  > When (now Sir) Tim Berners-Lee invented the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) he unleashed what we now think of as permissionless publishing. 1. Retconning 2. As always, web3 and crypto is the next WWW, and the next Internet, and the next car, and the next wheel. Even though literally all signs are pointing to it being the next Juicero or the next Enron. > We also need permissionless data. Why do we need this? Because otherwise we are left with a few large corporations ... We of course know where this winds up and that’s why pretty much everyone hates their cable company and their electric utility. That's quite a logic leap. We need permissionless data because that's why everyone hates their cable company. > prior to the Bitcoin Paper we literally didn’t know how to have permissionless. 1. We did. 2. Retconning yet again. Bticoin paper is literally this: --- start quote --- A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network. --- end quote --- The etire paper mentions permissions or permissionless exactly zero times. > It is difficult to overstate how big an innovation this is. Yes, you have. Yoi have just significantly overstated how big it is. > As such Web3 can, if properly developed and with the right kind of regulation, provide Ah yes, regulations. Which, if I remember from just a few paragraphs above "then leads us to all sort of regulatory contortions aimed at rectifying the power imbalance but in practice mostly cementing it. " > And if widely adopted Web3/crypto technology will also start to improve along other dimensions. It will become faster and more efficient. And that will surely happen just because you say it will happen. Also because innovation I guess? > And much like the PC was a platform for innovation that never happened on mainframes or mini computers, Web3 will be a platform for innovation that would never come from Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc. Innovation never came from Juicero either. Somehow, your web3 is surely the next Internet, and not the myriad of failed "innovations".
  • Ygg2 5y ago
    To add to the list of complaints. > No single entity or small group of entities controls it In practice they will. The moment +50% of miners agrees on any transaction, regardless of it happening - it will happen. So having +50% of Bitcoin miners means you control the Bitcoin market. And we're back to square one. Edit: Fine they only control current transactions, but forking as a solution to this implies the current network won't be able to just join and takeover a new bitcoin fork. Which is highly suspect.
• madrox 5y ago
  I'm slowly coming around to web3 as an idea after giving it a lot of thought. For me, MMOs are a great boostrap for thinking about this. People pay real money for in-game items and currency...usually from the developer, but web3 enables players to buy/sell directly (and allowing this can be a product draw, much like APIs were for Twitter). Web3 technologies can enable an ecosystem for this without a bunch of bespoke work that likely isn't core to what a business is trying to achieve. However, I don't see it as a "web3 all the things" like web2 was, but as a set of protocols for certain kinds of behavior we're beginning to see online more and more. We'd probably add it in without thought (like we did Facebook's share buttons 10 years ago) if the tech weren't so complicated and the energy concerns so pernicious. A lot of the success will come down to how successful everyone is at standardizing on schemas. In a decentralized world, I'm skeptical of that working out better than it did for web2, but I wish everyone luck.
  • dmitriid 5y ago
    > but web3 enables players to buy/sell directly (and allowing this can be a product draw, much like APIs were for Twitter). Web3 technologies can enable an ecosystem for this without a bunch of bespoke work that likely isn't core to what a business is trying to achieve. I'm old enough to remember that in the ancient history of just 10 years ago Diablo III was released with an auction house that let people buy and sell items from other players for real money. I'm also old anough to remember that in the ancient history of just 7 years ago it was removed from the game and I also am old enough to remember the reasons. Having players trade in-game items is not as good a proposition for "what a business is trying to achieve" as you think it is.
    • Ekaros 5y ago
      9 years ago Valve launched Steam Community Market. Still running still making them stupid amounts of money and providing some value to consumers. I see no reason why this blockchainless centralized solution couldn't be replicated by anyone else in industry... No need for NFTs. Just do it...
      • 5y ago
• vmception 5y ago
  A novel platform that can’t block its users from deploying on it, or commerce, and people have trouble seeing some value in that? Even the somewhat centralized platforms have so much high speed commerce on them that they don’t disrupt anyone. Even people that quickly exit to the bridges are not stopped and couldn't be, on the centralized-ish ones. That’s a lot of alpha and value extraction to miss. Especially if you invest in the bridge :) Don’t worry you’ll read about it late, in 2030, ngmi
  • lottin 5y ago
    > Even the somewhat centralized platforms have so much high speed commerce on them that they don’t disrupt anyone. Even people that quickly exit to the bridges are not stopped and couldn't be, on the centralized-ish ones. What do you mean by "high speed commerce" and "people that exit to the bridges"? Why do you talk in riddles?
    • vmception 5y ago
      There is lots of trading, borrowing, arbitraging, building and releasing new products, marketplaces. Thats the commerce, a lot of it is high speed. Bridges are the technologies that move assets between blockchains, so because there are trillions of dollars of assets in this ecosystem already, they dont rely on the exchanges to move fiat in and out anymore, they rely on the bridges to move other assets to other blockchains. There usually is a service fee to the bridge operator. It is lucrative. > riddles? I’m not here to explain, I’m just using the terms as they are. If people are stuck in 2017 or earlier with their older skeptics arguments, then they wont try to learn and just be more and more confused as the space keeps evolving, not my problem.
      • qeternity 5y ago
        > There is lots of trading, borrowing, arbitraging, building and releasing new products, marketplaces. I’ve seen you post about crypto many times before, and you obviously have a large bag. But all of the trading you’re talking about is of crypto, the very thing we’re trying to establish what the usecase is. There are no products outside of crypto, and building a bridge/exchange/marketplace for assets does not automatically confer value to either the assets or the venue.
• asattarmd 5y ago
  As someone who has just heard the name Web3 over and over again, is there anything tangible that I can try? I have tried IPFS, but I don't know if it's "web3".
  • Ygg2 5y ago
    Just heavily invest into badly drawn monkey NFTs and you'll soon become a devout web3 enthusiast.
  • i_hate_pigeons 5y ago
    there are a few clones of social media sites like https://orbis.club/ https://orbis.club/, there are others that are like reddit or similar but I don't remember their urls. As other commenter mentioned below, "web3" is mostly storing transactional info into a blockchain and then linking stuff to ipfs + some layer on top to display this. For example that orbis site, indexes/caches the data in the bc to be able to display it as per their use case. So the only real difference is that the "tweets" are not owned by them but by each user. For anything else it's still a normal web app. I don't know how this works legally, but there was a link from Vitalik's blog a few days ago explaining this. Say if a user uploads CP or some other illegal/offensive content the site can hide it but can't delete it. I'm not sure where liability would fall on here. Similar, the case with Twitter blocking Trump a few years ago, maybe another site could still allow him to continue if they wish to do so by displaying the same content I guess there are more use cases that distill from here, not sure how beneficial they are or might be, and just as many things in technology it is not 100% neccessary that the solution is better than something that already exists, it just needs to get traction and attract people/investment. Whether that happens with web3 is just to be seen I suppose. Also descentralised exchanges are things coming up, but this gets even muddier with all the compliance requirements so not sure where those will end up
  • rodiger 5y ago
    DeFi is pretty cool. Check out some of the strategies on yearn.finance or the simpler ability to be a market maker on uniswap.org.
• nathell 5y ago
  > The canonical example here is the personal computer (PC). The first PCs were worse computers than every existing machine. They had less memory, less storage, slower CPUs, less software, couldn’t multitask, etc. But they were better at one dimension: they were cheap. And for those people who didn’t have a computer at all that mattered a great deal. It is exactly this odd combination that made existing computer manufacturers (making mainframes down to mini computers) ignore the PC. Wow. There are so many factual errors in these sentences that I’m not even sure where to start. I’ll start by giving the author the benefit of doubt and assume that by „personal computer” they meant the IBM PC (1981) and its family. (Otherwise we’d have to assume that they completely ignore the existence of pre-PC home computers, many of which were both less powerful and significantly cheaper.) It’s also not true that the PC was unable to multitask (remember Concurrent CP/M-86?) First, note that IBM, at the time of introducing the PC, was – and continued to be, well into the 21st century – _the_ major purveyor of mainframes. So saying that they „ignored the PC” implies that they ignored themselves, which doesn’t make sense. Second, the initial PCs were just not powerful enough to compete with mainframes or minicomputers. The sets of usecases of „big” computers vs. PCs were almost completely disjoint until perhaps the 1990s. There were reasons why the PC exploded in popularity in the 1980s (open architecture being the #1 reason), but the author is silent about that. I know this is tangential, but I see a lot of handwaving in this post and, frankly, not much else. Why should I listen to someone who can’t get their facts straight? Why bother, indeed?
  • beachy 5y ago
    The only concrete point in your rant seems to be this: > So saying that they „ignored the PC” implies that they ignored themselves, which doesn’t make sense. This makes perfect sense to anyone who has seen a large lumbering schizophrenic beast like IBM. It's commonplace for one division to despise, ignore and undermine another.
• enisdenjo 5y ago
  If Web3 is built on blockchain, do people (miners per se) need to download the whole _internet_ in order to keep it decentralized?
  • mattwilsonn888 5y ago
    That vision of Web3, "Just put everything on the blockchain" is doomed to fail and I don't know anyone who ever seriously proposed it. Blockchains are best suited for data subject to manipulation, i.e. data in which there is profit to alter. If we were to naivly build "Web3" in theory with this in mind, then the majority of activity would be peer-to-peer, federated, or partially centralized, while the exchange of security credentials would take place on an efficient broadcast layer. The trick is to do as much off chain as possible - and if trust becomes an issue, develop a minimally on chain scheme. Its still early days, if you ask me how exactly this looks in 20 years I couldn't tell you.
    • enisdenjo 5y ago
      How do you develop a minimal chain scheme for increasing trust? As in, do you first get people to your website and then ask them to contribute in decentralization by downloading the chain? Bitcoin cannot work without people noticing and liking Bitcoin. If it didn't get traction, it'd still be centralized haha - only one entity would have the whole chain.
  • shrimpx 5y ago
    Not sure why you’re downvoted because this is a legit question. Even if web3 is build on a large number of blockchains, you still need whole blockchains downloaded in order to be trustless. Currently probably only a tiny percentage of crypto users have downloaded whole blockchains, and instead defer to third parties.
    • enisdenjo 5y ago
      Exactly, the chain would increase indefinitely begging 2 questions: - Who would even want to keep it? - Is using blockchains even worth it? Like, if you defer the download to third parties - isn't it again being centralized?
• lngnmn2 5y ago
  This is technical wishful thinking, or an abstract tech, if you wish. In the old times we called this "a solution in search of a problem", but these solutions are imaginary. This, probably, hints the the top of a couple of bubbles.
• hermitcrab 5y ago
  99% of the foundation of crypto seems to be grift. Just waiting for the bubble to pop when they run out of suckers. Lets see how much their ugly JPEGs are worth then.
  • dqpb 5y ago
    Which is important if you’re talking about whether lay people should buy random crypto. It’s totally irrelevant if you’re talking about the potential of the technology.
    • hermitcrab 5y ago
      Any genuine potential is totally obscured by the grift and the hype that comes with it.
      • dqpb 5y ago
        If that’s true for you then you’re probably better off staying away from it.
• almost 5y ago
  It’s weird that this article waffles on about PCs and how the author thinks that’s a good analogy. It’s not very convincing because you could easily pick another technology pair and show it the other way (often worse is just worse). But the thing that really seems weird is that all you need to do make it interesting is 1) define what you mean by web3 (it’s a slippery weasel word that changes meaning whenever the people using it needs it to) 2) define a few uses that are obviously better than the alternatives and justify them without hand waving (including explaining why what would appear to be fundamental show stopping flaws are not in fact that) If you can’t do that (and no one seems to be able to) the maybe, just maybe, it is bullshit?
  • xwolfi 5y ago
    Me I d define web3 by referencing the websocket arrival that evolved from Ajax polling to have better data subscription and the rise of full js frameworks which transformed the amount of work clients do on web resources that sometimes couldnt be done by the backend (drawing a financial graph full of beautiful indicator and refreshing live for instance). I can understand web4 could be self financing unstoppable web resources with no central authority able to close them but I dont see yet a proper use case beyond criminal endeavour. Plus, we're far from it, we'd need an organic transmission network that goes out of the traditional ISP system, like a global bluetooth peer to peer mobile network every phone contributes to in exchange for payment... that would be fast enough...
    • Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
      Criminal endeavours are not equal. Some are trading drugs and murdering people, others are overthrowing authoritarian dictators like Putin or Lukashenko. As you can imagine, the latter activity is criminal in Russia and Belarus.
      • eurasiantiger 5y ago
        Trading drugs is not equal to murdering people. For many, the only access to life-enabling medicine such as medicinal cannabis is buying it illegally.
• diegocg 5y ago
  So what you are saying is that the internet should be built on a model where people can upload children pornography or propaganda from state actors and nobody can do anything to stop it? Thanks I pass. I'm also curious about how to provide distributed storage that competes with google in terms of size, reliability and performance. The fun thing about cryptography is that allows building internet services that can beat the blockchain. There is nothing preventing you from creating a service where people upload encrypted stuff that is only associated to a key id. In fact there are already services that kind of do this.
  • mattwilsonn888 5y ago
    Why consider data redundancy the use case at all? If you really care about a file you could always back it up on multiple local drives and email it to those who want it - that's not what Web3 or crypto is about. Its about the storage of valuable data i.e. data whose integrity holds a lot of value: Public keys, account balances, etc. I'm interested in culling the superfluous aspects of crypto, heaven knows they exist, so if you want to be involved in helping with that you should first become more competent on the subject.
  • WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
• skilled 5y ago
  I just find it a little concerning that there are people out there, who are blindly following this Web3 "trend" by spending their money on digital "art". For the average person, there is no real use for Web3 because there is no actual definition for it. My impression is that Web3 is being praised as decentralized, yet it is people with a lot of money who are the one's regulating the pace right now. And that is a tad bit concerning to say the least, because if I invest millions into something (whether as an individual or a VC) - I'd like to feel a sense of "ownership", otherwise that money could have been spent helping real causes. I'd go as far as saying that for most people, including those entrenched in spending their hard earned money, the word Web3 is immediately associated with NFTs, not the actual blockchain technology. And that says a lot.
  • berkes 5y ago
    I'm not at all convinced that "web3" is positive. But when people say things like > otherwise that money could have been spent helping real causes It bleeds their personal opinion and hampers the debate. Apperently you think "digital art", or cryptocurrencies are not a "real cause". Which begs the question: who defines what "a real cause" is? The International World Causes Committee? Isn't anything that people want to spend money (resources) on by definition a real and worthy cause to at least those people?
    • skilled 5y ago
      I'm talking about ownership, more specifically - market control. I don't care about "Web3" if a handful of people/companies are the one's controlling its growth. It's so stupid it actually hurts my brain just to type it.
      • chrisco255 5y ago
        Who are these handful of companies that you believe control web3?
        • uncomputation 5y ago
• muglug 5y ago
  People sometimes claim that there's a generational divide in crypto adoption — younger people "get it" while older people (those who came of age with the early web) are stuck in their ways. But there’s a large group of older people who cling to crypto because they think it'll make their ideas sound relevant again. While appearing "disruptive", the crypto space actually privileges those (generally older) folks who already have money to burn (like the Winklevoss twins, whose payout from FB provided more money than they could ever spend on themselves in one lifetime).
  • OtomotO 5y ago
    Counterexample: Me. Relatively young, not at all into crypto, due to environmental reasons
    • xur17 5y ago
      If Ethereum completes its migration to proof of stake as expected this year, would you be interested?
      • OtomotO 5y ago
        Yes
        • codehalo 5y ago
          There are many new systems that are superior to Ethereum (e.g Polkadot, Terra LUNA) that already satisfy your requirement.
          • OtomotO 5y ago
            That may well be, I am not that interested in crypto. I found the idea of a non governmental controlled currency with an upper bounded amount interesting, as inflation can't be a thing. But as a means to satisfy greed... Nope, I am happy with what I have. So there are other spaces in science and computer science I am more invested and interested in.
• Ozzie_osman 5y ago
  I'm generally a web3 skeptic, turned off by all the hype and ideology, but the interesting thing about "web3" is you a potentially critical mass of zealots working together and building on ideas. I'm sure something interesting will emerge out of that. Will it require crypto? Maybe, but probably not. In fact, I think what will likely happen is interesting ideas will come out of web3 but then they'll just end up implemented without crypto/decentralization.
• CryptoPunk 5y ago
  I rememeber someone on Twitter describing the invention of public blockchains by way of an analogy of computers being invented as part of an effort by someone to invent pong. A permissionless database was invented as part of an effort to create p2p electronic cash.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• Traubenfuchs 5y ago
  Well, where are the killer apps? Where are the mass usage use cases beyond "get rich quick" schemes? We have had the technology for years and all we got are NFC schemes, speculation and hot air.
  • Closi 5y ago
    Absolutely agree - any technology is only useful if it solves a problem. IMO, Blockchain/Crypto seem to come from a perspective of "how can we apply blockchain to X?" rather than asking "What problem are we trying to solve, and what requirements would any solution need to meet?" BEFORE deciding what technology options there are which could solve it. Pitching 'Web 3' as a technical solution rather than solving a problem inevitably leads to 'when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail' (which is my personal opinion of the whole crypto space).
    • mattwilsonn888 5y ago
      And what of any hidden nails which there was previously no motivation to search for?
      • Closi 5y ago
        Well you don't look for ways to use nails, you try to work out what you want to build first and then use nails if they are the best tool for the job. i.e. work out the problem you want to solve, then see what the right technology is afterwards.
        • mattwilsonn888 5y ago
          The phrase is "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." We can stretch the analogy but I'll reiterate my point literally: Longstanding problems do not have bootstrap solutions, i.e. they are longstanding because simple hard work and known strategies could not solve them. To think that you can go around looking at longstanding problems and come up with solutions top down is out of touch with how innovation drives technology. Innovations are small miracles - there is no formula for them, they don't come around often. When rare advancements are made it makes sense to test what good they can do for problems which do not give way to the old toolset. To put it back in the analogy: When you invent a hammer to drive nails, check and see what else it might be good for. You may not like the over extension of applied crypo currencies, but nobody is forcing you to invest in any of it. I for one would rather have experimentation with failure than none at all.
• delegate 5y ago
  Web3 is 'the future' if you're invested in crypto. If you're not (or have been and got out), then it's nothing but the delusion of a sect of believers who want to wish it into existence. Being invested fundamentally changes the way people think and allows them to come up with any justification for their investment. It's not just crypto, but pretty much everything else where people expect easy returns at the expense of other people, nature, other countries, the future, etc. There is nothing special or magical about this technology. Just because it uses an immutable data structure called 'block chain' and cryptographic hashes left and right, doesn't automatically make it useful or needed. In fact, the opposite is true due to the POW being a race to burn as much (mostly) coal for the benefit of very few. The fact that the vast majority of crypto enthusiasts, who have absolutely no idea how it works and what it represents, decided to part with their fiat in the hope that money grows on Merkle trees and pushed the price to astronomical levels does not validate the technology itself, but rather is an example of human psychology and greed at work. I hope the whole crypto delusion crumbles as quickly as possible before it takes down the whole world economy with it. Or maybe that is exactly what must happen so that the world wakes up to reality. Maybe that is the whole point of it.
  • timdaub 5y ago
    For fairness then I think we should consider that everyone that is anti web3 and has no crypto might have too much Google and FB stock according to your logic?
    • malermeister 5y ago
      Both Google and FB have a clear value prop. Web3 and crypto don't, which is exactly what the poster was criticizing.
      • jakupovic 5y ago
        They don't according to you and the author, but others think it does have value, which makes your point moot also.
• timdaub 5y ago
  > A blockchain is a worse database. It is slower, requires way more storage and compute, doesn’t have customer support, etc. Please Mr Albert Wenger. You are a VC and not a technical expert on what is a database or a blockchain. It makes absolutely no sense to compare a database to a blockchain. These things are completely different and have entirely nothing in common except that they persist data. You wouldn't compare a file to a database to make a point, would you? Also, you don't have the authority anyways to make that comparison as I doubt you know the technical details that differentiate a database from a blockchain. Databases aren't blockchains and blockchains aren't databases. Stop comparing them for your ignorance's sake.
  • weego 5y ago
    Yes, he's talking about them at the level of abstraction that is 'things that persist data' You wouldn't compare a file to a database to make a point, would you? If the comparison fitted the abstraction level the conversation was at, absolutely. For most purposes that have ever been implemented on a blockchain, a database of some kind would just be a far superior persistance backend. The mistake is thinking that interesting underlying technology gives something de facto justification for existing in 'user' space when it does not.
    • timdaub 5y ago
      For me it's just cringe. Imagine a VC would start selling hash trees to programmers. That's the feeling that his blog post invokes.
  • mad182 5y ago
    File system is a database. Spreadsheet is a database. And surely blockchain is also a database.
    • timdaub 5y ago
      I think you should adhere to the HN guidelines and not make such unsubstantiated claims.
• armchairhacker 5y ago
  Publishing a website is not permissionless. You have to get a public IP address and register a domain name with an ICAAN provider, and various ISPs have the power to block your site. Actually promoting your site, scaling your site, integrating with common services, require more centralized servers, they're just just more implicit and you can choose from multiple providers (e.g. AWS or Azure). But you can choose to post to Facebook or Twitter. The problem isn't centralization. It's centralization through a company which exerts too much of its own influence and censorship and monetizes your usage for its own benefit. Plenty of centralized databases allow free speech and don't seem to monetize your data: look at HN or if you're more radical, 4chan. Idk if all centralized services are doomed to be corrupt so decentralized is the best we can do, like all monarchies are doomed to be corrupt so democracy is the best we can do. But unlike monarchies that hasn't really been shown. Maybe if someone invents a more efficient way to serve decentralized data the web will transition, but until then most decentralized services are most useful only as a backup to centralized services.
  • eldelshell 5y ago
    End of day you have to deal with physics. All those bits have to be stored somewhere. Have we really reached the point where the Facebook database can be stored in a distributed system across personal devices? Hell no! As a matter of fact, being centralized, FB can store that amount of data more efficiently than any Blockchain can even dream about.
• myownpetard 5y ago
  I think that the original idea behind crypto is still the most interesting. It's programmable money. Large swaths of the finance industry exist to make money programmable. Why not build it into the monetary system directly? The general historical trend is to make money more abstract and to be able to perform more complicated functions with it. But fundamentally money is a social technology that consists of three things: An abstract unit of value in which money is denominated, a system of accounts, which keeps track of the individuals' or the institutions' credit or debt balances as they engage in trade with one another and the possibility that the original creditor in a relationship can transfer their debtor's obligation to a third party in settlement of some unrelated debt. [0] Crypto seems to satisfy the essence of that in a pretty cool way. DeFi projects are experimenting with the question of, "can we build the financial instruments and capabilities that a complex economy require on top of, and directly integrated with, this type of monetary system. Like any technology that requires a large network of users to be valuable it has a difficult bootstrapping problem. But it seems to be gradually working its way to larger and more important transactional contexts. First with illegal digital marketplaces and now in countries with weak monetary system like El Salvador (and with unbridled speculation along the way). Maybe all of the current crypto projects will fail but it will be interesting to see the nature of monetary systems in 10, 20 and 50 years from now. What aspects of these current experiments have been adopted? [0] Money: The Unauthorized Biography
• MrPatan 5y ago
  Just buy some, this is tiresome.
• gexla 5y ago
  It's a long article which says that Web3 is a database which nobody owns followed by a lot of hand-wavy stuff that you see everywhere else. The worst part of this is that I feel like I could get dragged into this. That at some point I'll have no choice but to start digging into this and dedicate time to other stacks because the money behind Web3 succeeds in shoving it down everyone's throats. This is someone talking about technology fixing problems, but ignoring the messy real world. For example, we have repeatedly seen how governments can control things which "nobody owns." Another item which stood out was the idea of Web3 taking back control from the big tech companies. But if they are monopolies, then shouldn't it be the government which takes them down?
  • chrisco255 5y ago
    The government has been completely weak on antitrust law since the 90s.
• rsp1984 5y ago
  Ok, so how is this remotely the same as PCs being cheaper? Well because to some people this matters a great deal. Why? Because much of the power held by large companies (and by governments) comes from the fact that they operate and control databases. What a naive and short sighted world-view this is, it's almost grotesque. No company or government derives its power from holding a big database. By the same argument it would follow that Venezuela must be a really wealthy country because it's got lots of oil. And it's the same kind of argument as saying Stripe or Paypal or some other Fintech got big because they had the idea of "enabling payments on the internet". Power is derived from getting others behind a cause and then executing on it. That's it.
  • brightstep 5y ago
    "executing on it" is doing a lot of work here, i.e. it requires resources, political connections, etc. But ultimately you're right, and this is what "Web3" believers always miss. A technology alone is not going to bring about the change you want to see. Absent the associated "execution" (which often requires political action), a new tool/tech will be adopted if and only if it serves existing power
• mad182 5y ago
  Since the ICO craze in 2017 I've seen countless ideas and millions spent trying to use blockchain and crypto for everything you could possibly imagine, and yet I don't see anything meaningful has ever came out of it, apart from get rich quick schemes, ponzis and some virtual novelty items. Bitcoin has been around for 12 years, but in real life I don't know anyone who has ever used something crypto related for anything else than risky investment, or basically gambling. I'm very skeptical.
  • corobo 5y ago
    Drugs too, don't forget drugs!
  • chrisco255 5y ago
    I've never met anyone who's ever used their stock certificates for anything other than speculation. However, I have participated in a multisig that controls six figures of funds with a handful of strangers on the internet. I have used my governance tokens to vote on DAO proposals regarding new product lines and features. I have created and sold NFT artwork. I have registered a domain name and set an immutable record on a smart contract linking to a website and an Ethereum wallet. I have used it for logging in to software. I've built software that gates access based on ownership of a particular NFT. I've stored data on Filecoin and archived it on Arweave. I've borrowed money on-chain. I've commissioned artwork and paid in ETH. I've bought gold with Bitcoin. I've helped raise a million dollars for charity with a major celebrity. I've contributed to Gitcoin grants for public goods software funding. Your skepticism just closes your mind and blinds you to what's possible.
    • bp0017 5y ago
      and none of these things were impossible before. what's the value add of doing it in this way opposed to the old way?
      • ausbah 5y ago
        the big argument you'll likely hear is that everything the OP did was "decentralized", a virtue worthy in and into itself
• spyder 5y ago
  "A blockchain is a worse database. It is slower, requires way more storage and compute, doesn’t have customer support, etc. And yet it has one dimension along which it is radically different. No single entity or small group of entities controls it ..." No, blockchain in itself doesn't mean it's not controlled by a single entity. There are many permissioned and private blockchains: https://www.foley.com/en/insights/publications/2021/08/types-of-blockchain-public-private-between https://www.foley.com/en/insights/publications/2021/08/types...
• Exendroinient 5y ago
  Web3 is just an excuse to still shilling crypto while using it as a payment system has not taken off. They need to hype the next empty buzzwords to keep parade going.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• trabant00 5y ago
  I stayed away from crypto coins despite having a lot of friends get into this very early and I even refused gifted bitcoins. I still have zero interest or regrets. That being said I have no ideea where this tech is going. Maybe it will tranform enough times it becomes useful to me. A better analogy for me is the gold rushes. A lot of bad things happened during those but it also encouraged migration and settlement of some unexplored regions. If I don't get involved it doesn't cost me very much that other people try. Let them do the work and take the risks. If they produce anything useful I will profit. If not... (I know about the environment cost)
  • w_TF 5y ago
    I totally get why people stay away from this stuff, but I've found the best way to understand what is going on in this space and what it potentially has to offer is to actually use it and experiment with it which is something any naturally inquisitive person would do. The quality of journalism (which as far as I can tell many are relying on to form opinions) surrounding anything crypto or "web 3" related has been astonishingly lazy and just flat out bad for a long time.
• low_tech_love 5y ago
  So basically web3 is the solution to money-hungry super companies centralizing power? Then why is it that we only seem to be discussing it after big names on Twitter decided to talk about it?
• alkonaut 5y ago
  I really don't get it. What is the appeal? Is it an anonymous web like existing darknets? They exist and work already. Obviously, so long as there is a more convenient/cheaper/more accessible non-dark-web, the only people who will be on the dark web are criminals. What is the connection between "web3" and "NFTs" and "Cryptocurrency"? I mean apart from all being loosely related to the same underlying blockchain tech - are there other points of contact?
• asimpletune 5y ago
  So, yeah, most crypto people don’t have the faintest clue how it works. And it’s kind of weird to embrace this very hyped/vc’d tech, while remaining mum on all the already decentralized tech that’s the bedrock of the internet. And exchanges + crypto is basically legacy decentralized web tech + Google/Meta. But one thing that I do have to say is interesting about the tech is embedding smart contracts. This is legitimately interesting and novel, and probably the best justification for web3 tech.
• low_tech_love 5y ago
  The concepts and ideas about web3 are interesting, but the comparisons with how web1 and web2 came to be are ludicrous. Both were fueled by real needs of real people and companies, and came to prominence slowly as people figured them out. It took a long time before it was profitable and money came into the picture. Lee’s web1 started in universities and it took years until people believed in it. Web2 came slowly as companies wanted to let their users interact more with their websites. I guess *AMP software was a major turning point in this, open source and available to everyone. You can be a part of web2 and never even know the name of a single VC. What is happening right now is the absolute opposite. Money is at the very center of the discussion to begin with. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a socialist, but I understand that a revolution such as web1 or 2 cannot be steered by money. If it happens (or when it happens I guess) it is probably going to be in a completely different way as what is being discussed on Twitter today.
• TacticalCoder 5y ago
  Not commenting on TFA's content but... It's using: text-align: justify; hypens: auto; That is, IMO, underrated. I'm reading this on a M1 MacBook Air: maybe at "retina" pixel density we can, at last, use text-align: justify and have pages looking (nearly) as nice as book pages. I'm not going to force justification for people on small devices (it looks bad on these) but it sure is pleasant to me on a high-density, kinda large, screen.
• marcus_holmes 5y ago
  It misses the point of why PC's were adopted, which was spreadsheets. No-one put a PC on your desk because you needed a PC. They put a PC on your desk because you suddenly needed to be able to use a spreadsheet to do your job [0]. And the reason we all got internet connections in the mid-90's wasn't Web0. It was email. Web0 was a toy thing that only us geeks played around with, that came free with your email account. All the "serious" stuff that we use the web for now was in the walled gardens (CompuServe or AOL). Web3 needs a "killer app" like email or spreadsheets. Still not seeing one. [0] Source: I had this happen to me. Working a desk job as an admin clerk in a transport company, and suddenly our monthly budget/financials had to be sent to head office in Lotus 123 instead of paper. So I got a PC (286, 4Mb of memory woot!) and learned Lotus 123. Fun times :)
  • pengwing 5y ago
    I agree: There is no killer-app from the perspective of a first-world citizen. For low-wage workers in developing countries the killer app is play2earn gaming.
    • pjc50 5y ago
      > play2earn gaming Where does the real economic benefit come from in this? "Paying people to play games" cannot possibly scale beyond the existing gold-farming niche. It's also something that historically games have tended to ban.
      • pengwing 5y ago
        You asked for the econ perspective, so prepare for some darkness: When judging the economic productivity of the lowest class of wage workers the usual expectation is negative. Violent crime and substance abuse leads to a huge cost in terms of medical care and law enforcement. If you have a way to keep them busy and earn esteem without hurting anybody, that's a huge economic benefit.
    • minzi 5y ago
      Admittedly I’m not very well read on the whole play2earn. However, I think the article posted on hn the other day about it makes a pretty compelling argument that it’s a Ponzi scheme. Article: https://paulbutler.org/2021/play-to-earn-and-bullshit-jobs/ https://paulbutler.org/2021/play-to-earn-and-bullshit-jobs/
• nickstinemates 5y ago
  Am a fence sitter. I think new technology and innovation is interesting. I think exploring new ideas is interesting. Theres enough capital to go around. Will be interesting to see how this develops
• galacticaactual 5y ago
  That HN universally eschews Web3 should be an indication that there is something of value to be found in it.
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
  I think web3 means, most generally, decentralized Internet without big tech. How can this be achieved? By people sharing their computer/internet resources instead of relying on big tech servers. Why would they do that? Because they will receive incentives in the form of digital currency. Who will pay those incentives? People investing dollars into digital coins with speculative purposes and people providing services for digital coins.
• blhack 5y ago
  Here's a good analogy for crypto that I think helps close the loop on people who don't seem to want to understand it. If I have a tungsten cube sitting on my table, it is theoretically possible that I could track that tungsten cube backwards through time. It's sitting on my desk now, but before that it was in a box on a UPS truck, before that in a foundry somewhere, before that it was in the earth, before that the elements were in a supernova which themselves could be traced back all of the way to the origin of the universe. So the fact of the cube sitting on my desk is really just an expression of all of the events leading to it sitting on my desk, and this isn't something that can be fabricated no matter how much authority you have (you could like, but the universe would know it as a lie). Blockchain is that. I have some value in my wallet, but that value can be traced all of the way back through various transactions to when it was mined/minted/whatever, and actually the entirety of the various crypto ecosystem could be traced back to, literally, the genesis block. That is a Very Big Deal. It means that the block chains are internally consistent universes of their own, with no central authority. That's a big deal for gaming, for ownership proxies (like NFTs), for currency, and for really anything else that exists within our own universe. To say it in a somewhat flowery way: our own universe is a physical blockchain.
  • qeternity 5y ago
    You write this as if this is profound, or otherwise not understood by the HN audience. What you’re describing is not a blockchain. You’ve described time. Every path dependent process is not a blockchain.
• alex_young 5y ago
  The author makes a great case for creating protocols such as http and xmpp and the like, which as protocols, are decentralized already. Why add magic number guessing for financial gain to something like a photo sharing platform? Maybe your answer is micro transactions, but then how do you protect consumers from fraud and abuse with reversibility and dispute resolution? This seems like a feature and not a bug of our current financial system. Things like Patreon and Kickstarter exist already and seem to do a fairly good job of this. Why do we need all of the downsides of cryptocurrency to do something that already works well for billions of people?
  • k__ 5y ago
    How many people use MANGA services despite open protocols allowing to build open things? I'd say, protocols being open isn't enough. Something seems to be missing, otherwise centralized services wouldn't have won.
  • qeternity 5y ago
    > Maybe your answer is micro transactions Micro transactions have never and will never work and the reason has nothing to do with technology. There is a mental cost to assessing a purchase value, and that cost is relatively fixed. People don’t want to go around having to think “oh should I pay 25 cents for this? how many other 25 cent transactions have I made this month and what is my budget?” They would rather make one decision to pay $10/mo and consume as much as they want.
    • haxiomic 5y ago
      Not arguing for or against but micro transactions absolutely work precisely because people can be more happy to spend $1 ten times in a month than $10 in one go because the $1 is a less scary transaction than $10 a month, which if you’re not wealthy, can be a significant choice to make [0] Plenty of data around how successful this model can be (at least for the company) [1] [0] https://www.tuw.edu/psychology/psychology-behind-microtransactions/ https://www.tuw.edu/psychology/psychology-behind-microtransa... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtransaction#Impact https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtransaction#Impact
• larodi 5y ago
  It misses that Tim Berners-Lee and early internet architects perhaps were thinking of decentralised and also peer-to-peer in the same way that web3/crypto guys do. What TBL had no interest in was the container (DB or server, whatever). Some 20 years later Tor people got interested in the decentralised and redundant storage for HTML and IPfS for files. So this is kind of… already invented. But not anywhere near to mass adoption. While I agree that FB, twitter and alike are just big content holders and providers, I cannot agree that vast majority (of users) even understand the implications or care to go decentralised and redundant (in respect to content). So it seems the appeal of the so called web3 is still very weak. And btw It’s not even a web, really. It seems to me rather an extremely bloated approach to ‘torrenting’ assets. And extremely energy-pricey.
• mwattsun 5y ago
  It's a rule of mine to avoid any financial area that looks, acts, and talks like a mania after reading Charles Mackay's "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)," which I discovered at random in a strip mall bookstore in Rhode Island. Reading it saved me over $300,000 dollars before the dotcom crash because I sold everything and got out (my timing was very lucky.) Crypto, NFT's, blockchain & web3 are currently in a mania phase so my 2022 resolution is to aggressively ignore them so I don't get sucked in before the inevitable correction. I can't afford to be stuck with a pile of tulip bulbs.
  • MuffinFlavored 5y ago
    > Reading it saved me over $300,000 dollars before the dotcom crash because I sold everything and got out (my timing was very lucky.) Are there not other books that you could also read that would tell you to buy mutual funds tracking a broad market index, hold, never sell, no matter what? aka don't time the market
    • mwattsun 5y ago
      Buy and hold is a good strategy if you never need to touch the money. However, life happens and I got divorced, so I had to hold on to my profits or be left with nothing. It's yet to be determined if a buy and hold strategy is a good one for crypto. I am aware of the price rise since 2012 but as the old adage goes "trees don't grow to the sky." Trees built on wild expectations and promises of glory, like were made before the dotcom crash (the internet has rewritten the rules of the economy!) seem to me to be more likely to topple over than keep growing taller.
• mizzao 5y ago
  This article does a decent job at casting the decentralized database argument as disruptive innovation without resorting to hype. But I wonder about the other fundamental drawbacks of blockchain for developing new applications: - Immutability: building any software requires iteration, and therefore mutability. How do you build a startup if you can't ALTER TABLE on your database (or it requires a new database)? - Irreversibility: if there are any bugs, or mistakes in the code, you can't fix it later (and in fact, someone may be able to steal a lot of your tokens) - Dependency on real-world data sources: even if smart contracts are ironclad, they can dependent on potentially erroneous or manipulable data sources - Off-chain centralization: many of these blockchain apps such as the play-to-earn games have a lot of centralized control that is not on the blockchain and under the discretion of the developer. Probably because of the reasons above At a meta level, the hardest problems are people problems and not solvable by technology. Trying to solve people problems with ironclad code seems like a fool's errand. If there was a killer app that wasn't handicapped by the issues above, that would make me a believer.
• kkielhofner 5y ago
  What I'm trying to figure out about blockchain in general is how people think it will avoid the inevitable consolidation that efficient economies drive towards. A few examples: - In the early days of the automobile there were hundreds of car companies. Now there are essentially what, 10 worldwide? - In the early days of personal computing there were hundreds of competing platforms, PC brands, etc. Now there are essentially what, 10 worldwide? - In the early days of the internet there were hundreds (thousands?) of dial-up and last mile internet providers (sometimes literally some person in your neighborhood with a T1 and modems in a garage). Now there are what, 10 in the US? - In the early days of the internet there were hundreds of web hosting companies, e-mail providers, etc. Now almost all of the internet runs on what, three? These examples go on and on (mobile devices, cell providers, pretty much anything and everything). Point being it's extremely unlikely (to me) that as the immutable blockchain ledgers all of this is built on grow endlessly (storage, compute, bandwidth, etc) and attempt to scale to any meaningful application, transaction rate, etc beyond the toy level it's at now "decentralized" will almost certainly turn into a handful of power players that can bring the advantages offered by massive economies of scale.
  • _8j50 5y ago
    I don't agree with some of your examples but setting that aside, all of what you mentioned are economic products and services. Crypto is neither. Without crypto you have cash, credit card, debit card, prepaid card, gift card, paypal, ecash, applepay, western union, money gram, epay and a myriad of other non-crypto payment methods that are based on central bank currency. They did not consolidate. Or look at currencies in general, every country has one by design. Also decentralized does not mean that there are no hubs where decisins and power is concentrated, it simply means there is no one center. Much like how people say the US is democratic because you have two parties to choose from instead of just one like China. I do think perect decentalization is egalitarian in that all important decisions are 51% majority consensus with every vote having equal weight. However most practical decentralized systems are distributed with the capacity to be fully decentralized. Crypto currencies that will last long term will reflect a demand for specific payment needs. To use your example, we have lesser number of PC makers because they all make similar varieties of PCs. With payment systems you have ACH,SWIFT,card payment (instant), cash (anonymous),etc... there will be cryptocurrencies that will reflect popular payment and speculative investment needs for the long term. Heck, I would even speculate in a crypto lottery!
• stevebmark 5y ago
  I don't agree with this perspective. Crypto is designed to be a poor technology, the slowness, waste and scarcity are part of what lead to increasing prices, which is the only reason people have interest in it. If PCs were traded like beanie babies, with less regulation and bigger asset bubbles, then maybe this analogy would make sense. But PCs are designed to be useful, not only traded like commodities to increase fiat. If this take, "crypto is bad technology but we're at the very start of it, it will get faster and more efficient," shouldn't Bitcoin Cash have won a long time ago? Few seem to care about actually using cyrpto for anything other than increasing fiat. It's 90% wash trading.
  • redanddead 5y ago
    I think we're doing a lot of speculating while most data on blockchain technology would suggest growth... I think this community could actually have a heavy weight on the future of the world, and to do well we need to go beyond black and white arguments/absolutiste (which never actually happens in real life btw). When has anything ever truly replaced anything? Telegrams have had their most successful year ever, 17 million of them sent last year. Things tend to coexist, in the same way that you have some that say "bitcoin will replace the dollar!", and those that say "bitcoin is stupid, and will never be used as currency". The future lay in the middle
    • ForHackernews 5y ago
      > most data on blockchain technology would suggest growth... What data would those be? Besides price increasing? We're more than 10 years into the "blockchain revolution" and I still don't see a single meaningful problem solved by this technology (it makes ransomware and selling drugs online easier, I guess). Compare other recent technologies: the web, mobile phones, electric cars... where were they after 12 years of development?
      • thebean11 5y ago
        The same properties that make it useful for ransomware make it useful for other things as well. Irreversible transactions lower transaction costs, it reduces the risk you’ll need to go to court basically.
• godelski 5y ago
  I still don't understand how Web3 doesn't become centralized like Web2 did. While services like email are technically decentralized we see that they are highly centralized on Web2 because almost everyone uses GMail. We see similar centralization with other types of services. I understand Web3 is also trying to decentralize not only the services, but the hosting. I still don't see why the big main players like AWS wouldn't just continue to host the majority of the servers. I feel like a lot of Web3 evangelists are asserting decentralization but not explaining a good mechanism for it to be so. Web2 has clearly shown us (as most of history) that momentum is powerful and that there is a positive feedback loop in systems like these. That power begets more power. So what's the mechanism for maintaining decentralization? As for the crypto parts, I'm all for making everything possible cryptographically secure by default and E2EE.
• satisfice 5y ago
  I am astonished at the adolescent boy level of gee whiz rationalization, here. The damning aspects of Web3 are barely being mentioned because of the emotive appeal to scary corporations controlling you. Web3 does not solve the problem of being bullied or controlled. It makes it worse. You can dislike Facebook, but it is a legal entity that the state can hold accountable. Who is held accountable in Web3? What recourse does anyone have if things are published about them that harm them in Web3? Russia created a well-funded agency to troll the web and manipulate public opinion. It seems to me they will love Web3. Entities that will vie to control Web3 will be rich, powerful, and better protected from legal moves against them. We already have a decentralized web. It called the Web. Anyone can connect a server to it.
• rsynnott 5y ago
  A constant crypto-person refrain seems to be, essentially, “technology X was quite bad, yet hyped, at first (there is a tendency to overstate the badness), and then took over the world, therefore crypto-stuff, which is quite bad, yet hyped, will naturally also take over the world.” Counterpoint: remember 3D TVs? Or those chatbot things that briefly received all the VC money a few years back?
• leifg 5y ago
  > Ok, so how is this remotely the same as PCs being cheaper? Well because to some people this matters a great deal. Why? Because much of the power held by large companies (and by governments) comes from the fact that they operate and control databases. The key point here is "Some People". But to make meaningful change a majority of people have to switch to a new system. The sad truth is: 90% of people do not care. The best example for this is podcasts. They started out as a decentralized utopia. Self hosted files, self hosted feeds, multiple apps to listen to them, improvements of existing formats (mp3 chapters were not really a thing before podcasts), there were even talks about enabling BitTorrent distribution. Fast forward a few years, now Spotify seems to accumulate most of the podcast universe and a lot of the existing podcast use them as a distribution platform. And their exclusive content is drawing in more and more users. So my question here is: if we have a decentralized system that works but people willingly use a centralized alternative of that, how can you claim that decentralization is remotely popular? You need to address this social issue before coming up with any kind of technology to solve it.
• vorhemus 5y ago
  Decentralization and taking power out of the hands of large corporations is no guarantee of success - otherwise Napster would have to dominate the music streaming market today and not Spotify. > prior to the Bitcoin Paper we literally didn't know how to have permissionless Simply not true. Torrents allow you to store and retrieve objects from a decentralized object "database" without an individual having control over it.
• ricardobeat 5y ago
  > Facebook is a database of people’s profiles, their friend graphs and their status updates. Paypal is a database of people’s account balances. Amazon is a database of SKUs, payment credentials and purchase histories. Google is a database of web pages and query histories. This is painfully wrong. Almost true for Facebook, but in general these companies most valued assets are their systems and operations, not the data itself. Also I’m pretty sure the first PCs weren’t cheaper at all.
  • jakear 5y ago
    Paypal's might be the closest. If FB, Amazon, or Google woke up and saw that all their data was gone, it'd be extremely annoying but recoverable by just having users recreate accounts (or re-scraping). If they woke up and saw that all their ops & systems were gone, it'd be the end of the company. If PayPal lost either it'd be the end of the company.
• skywhopper 5y ago
  This author fundamentally misunderstands PCs and HTTP, and then goes on to make bogus claims about what can be done on a blockchain. “Permissionless” is wildly misleading description of the blockchain. You can’t change anything in the ledger besides things you already own. There’s also the implicit lie that blockchain means everyone is on equal footing. If that were true, VCs would not be racing to pour billions into Coinbase, et al. If anything, blockchain makes you more reliant on the intermediaries, and everything that web3 promoters resent about web2 will return, only worse.
• freediver 5y ago
  > A blockchain is a worse database. It is slower, requires way more storage and compute, doesn’t have customer support, etc. And yet it has one dimension along which it is radically different. No single entity or small group of entities controls it – something people try to convey, albeit poorly, by saying it is “decentralized.” Is it true that major blockchains out there are really not controlled/controllable by a small number of people? I read that top 10,000 account holders hold over a third of all bitcoin [1] Assuming same thing happens with other blockchains, isn't that the same problem as top 10,000 Facebook shareholders owning a third of its shares? Basically the system is decentralized on paper, but in reality massive centralization happens driven by economic incentives, same as in non-blockchain world. [1] https://time.com/6110392/bitcoin-ownership/ https://time.com/6110392/bitcoin-ownership/
• asdev 5y ago
  You need to separate web3 and cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies are necessary. A parallel monetary system secured by cryptography and codified by algorithms, is highly necessary for nations with corrupt regimes. Being able to move fiat money into stablecoins and get a loan against it within seconds is necessary and has real utility. Web3 does not really have utility. It's all driven by token price speculation right now. The big thing is if you think about the general population, nobody really cares about decentralization. They just want a good user experience. A centralized but good user experience is good enough for 99% of the population.
• miles7 5y ago
  I have a dumb question that keeps nagging me, and wonder if someone here has a good answer. What does Web3 necessarily have to do with the web? Couldn't an iOS app which uses blockchain technology as a decentralized database be just as good an example of what Web3 is trying to achieve? Or a technically oriented command line app for finance using a blockchain which does not involve a web browser? Are Web3 people just using "web" as a stand-in for the internet?
  • acdha 5y ago
    Cryptocurrency has no value beyond what someone is currently willing to pay you for it and blockchain networks are expensive always-on distributed systems which require payment in other currencies. That requires a constant stream of new buyers, and the combination of limited usefulness and mounting bad reputation was starting to cut into it. “web3” is the rebranding campaign which the large holders came up with to try to drive demand.
  • waffle_maniac 5y ago
    > Couldn't an iOS app which uses blockchain technology as a decentralized database be just as good an example of what Web3 is trying to achieve? Until Tim decides to wave his hand and shut it down. Same thing with a hosted website. But developers could distribute the web app as html and then users run it locally. It connects to the blockchain and submits transactions. > Or a technically oriented command line app for finance using a blockchain which does not involve a web browser? Interacting with smart contracts does not require a web browser.
• enisdenjo 5y ago
  I think people don't care enough about "I am the true origin" internet. Web3 is, IMHO, a waste of time. At the end of the day, an internet server will (and should) be managed by a single entity (person or corporation). Why? Well, why not? Why should _I_ host _your_ website (IPFS)? Just so that some granny with a laptop can cryptographically prove it's yours as originally intended? For example, I personally don't care what FB (now Meta) does with my data - my likes aid in teaching an algorithm to understand humanity better than humans themselves? That's fucking awesome! How would Web3 change this even? There'll always be a need in understanding people in ways no one can imagine yet, and to do so, someone has to leverage your data in ways you might not like (mostly because you don't understand the need, or you're just a sheep in a herd screaming "that's mine!"). This is inevitable. P.S. I am still struggling to understand Web3, please bear with me and my rant.
• kangnkodos 5y ago
  The author implies the assumption that over time, distributed data will get quicker and cheaper, like the CPU and memory on a PC. It won't. It can't. The problem is that validating transactions on a blockchain must be expensive. If they were cheap, then I could spend a few bucks, take over a blockchain, and say that my transactions are the valid ones. There's no way around this issue.