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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 anothe

• 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.
      • Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
        That depends on drugs. If you hook people on highly addictive expensive drug with severe withdrawal symptoms, like heroin, it naturally spawns more crime, because addicts would resort to anything to get the next doze: theft, robbery, prostitution, murder, etc.
        • jakupovic 5y ago
          People hook themselves up, not other people, who may help do so, but the person taking drugs is the one responsible.
          • Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
            I think you misunderstand how this works in reality. Nobody walks to a shady oerson standing near the corner and says, "hi, I'm joe, today i want to try this meth stuff I've been hearing about, how much for a dose?" When a person is in a vulnerable state, there is always a 'friend' who offers first dose for free, and says, that it is ok and totally safe to try a few times. Consequences come later when it is too late.
            • waffle_maniac 5y ago
              Opioids are added to less addictive drugs to make the customer more regular and thus drive more profit. It's never smart business to kill your customer but it's also not smart business to have a customer that only texts once every few months.
    • almost 5y ago
      Of those three things “crypto” is ok for trading drugs, not very good for murdering people (not for lack of people trying but luckily it seems like death prediction markets and dark web assassins aren’t really a thing), and not at all useful for overthrowing dictators. It’s absolutely fantastic for dictators who want evade sanctions and continue enriching themselves.
      • Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
        It is absolutely critically useful for overthrowing dictators. Currently that's the only sure way for Russian citizens to fund anti-Putin opposition without immediate consequences. Source: I'm from Russia.
        • lottin 5y ago
          How many dictators have been overthrown thanks to bitcoin? I guess none.
          • Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
            Dictators are overthrown at a rate of fewer than one in three years (maybe even lower), and Bitcoin has entered the public consciousness no earlier than in 2017. Give it some time.
        • almost 5y ago
          I’m absolutely sure that Putin and his cronies will find enough use for crypto (avoiding sanctions, carrying out criminal enterprise) that they’ll be more than happy about this minor inconvenience.
          • Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
            You are missing the point. Putin and his cronies will find ways to do their criminal business with or without cryptocurrencies. His opponents have little other choice BUT cryptocurrencies to fund their operations.
  • Thlom 5y ago
    When I studied at University 15 years ago web 2.0 was in full swing and the academics where busy talking about web 3.0 which was at the time understood as "the semantic web".
    • almost 5y ago
      Web 2.0 was never a thing. It was just a vague term some people came up with so they’d have something to say in their magazine articles/blog posts. There is no Web 2.0 or in fact web2. Web 3.0 I have a soft spot for. It was a stupid name and the ideas didn’t really work but the semantic web people had their hearts in the right place.
      • PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
        BS. Web 2.0 was the conjunction, refinement and broader availability of several different web-related technologies, notably JavaScript and AJAX, among other things. They enabled an interaction model for web stuff that was impossible with earlier versions of the web. Nobody said "web2", indeed, but that doesn't invalidate that Web 2.0 described a very distinct and substantial evolution of what is possible in the browser.
        • almost 5y ago
          I though Web 2.0 was all about missing vowels in names.
          • zaphod12 5y ago
            Rounded corners actually
            • papertokyo 5y ago
              Don't forget the 3D glossy buttons...
  • yazaddaruvala 5y ago
    Wikipedia, OpenStreetMaps, DuckDuckGo would all be great examples of self-financing unstoppable web resources with no central authority distributed across a peer-peer mesh network. Unclear if the value prop is large enough to overcome the activation energy of such an endeavor.
    • avrionov 5y ago
      DuckDuckGo - is a private company. The other 2 are non profits.
    • betwixthewires 5y ago
      When you use one too many buzzwords you let on that you don't know what they mean. None of those resources operate peer to peer, none of them operate in anything resembling a mesh network. DDG is absolutely stoppable and centralized. Not that I don't love all those projects and all of those qualities.
      • yazaddaruvala 5y ago
        • betwixthewires 5y ago
          The comment I replied to literally said that the referenced services have these cited attributes and features, and they don't.
    • SahAssar 5y ago
      Wikipedia and OpenStreetMaps absolutely have central authorities and are not peer-to-peer or distributed on a mesh network. If they shut down you could probably access their data from an archive, but that does not mean that they are decentralized. DuckDuckGo is even more centralized since it uses the index of one of the largest search engines (bing), is not at all self-financing, is not at all unstoppable (if the central authority was shut down any replacement would need to access bing's result) and is not at all peer-to-peer. Either you don't actually know what those terms mean or you don't know how those websites function.
• qaq 5y ago
  on top of that decentralized part is already the web itself is pretty much it
  • whywhywhywhy 5y ago
    No. If you read up on how the web works at its base, it’s highly centralized. If you look how people interact with the web, it’s highly centralized to a handful of apps by a handful of companies.
    • almost 5y ago
      People choose to do that because it’s convenient. There’s nothing in any of the nebulous ideas around “web3” that would change that. You can use a federated social network RIGHT NOW. Or you can just make your own website TODAY. No permission needed, you get complete ownership. It’s the amazing decentralised dream that was (and is) the internet. Only thing it won’t do is potentially make you rich (at the expense of others) just for getting in (and out!) at the right time.
      • qorrect 5y ago
        Very good points. I can't see Joe the Plumber using or caring about web3 if it requires any more effort then the current internet ( which is arguably already decentralized ... )
      • jimmydorry 5y ago
        - You need permission from the central root certifying authorities (aka. getting a domain) for people to be able to find your site. - You need to remain out of the shitlist of a handful of “spam and anti-evil” authorities (getting on a list means your site gets blocked by all the big browsers and can be permanent or take a long time to resolve) - You need permission to host your content from the: hardware / cloud provider, the datacentre if you self-host, and / or intermediary ISPs for peering (if no-one will peer, your site may as well not exists) There are some other parties you need permission or blessing from that don’t come immediately to mind.
• i_hate_pigeons 5y ago
  I don't really know much about web3 or what it will happen in the future, but these same debates happened ith other techs before which are now mainstream in a similar fashion as this here. People like pointing out echo chambers all around while they are also in one. Remember all the feathers ruffled with cloud computing? It just servers in a data center! Serverless? There are still servers! web2.0 s just ajax requests! If people dump money into it, then something is likely to come out whether is better or not than what it was before. Maybe is worse, or maybe something will be built on top of it that will be better or some othere political event might make it relevant. Who knows
  • simonw 5y ago
    "but these same debates happened ith other techs before which are now mainstream in a similar fashion as this here" They really didn't. In my 20+ year tech career I have never seen any new technology prove anywhere near as divisive as web3/crypto.
    • almost 5y ago
      Before we mostly had to deal with people emotionally invested in a new thing, now they’re all financially invested as well. It makes for a different conversation.
      • acdha 5y ago
        Yes: the financial aspect definitely seems to have changed this — I share Simon's impression, and what this reminds me most of wasn't tech but the adjacent stock market circa late 1999/2000. If you knew a day trader at the time, they would be hyping up random stocks talking about how it was a sure thing to be the next Pets.com but if you asked them any questions at all it immediately became apparent that they had no idea about how that company worked, what the competitive environment was like, or how they could possibly become profitable. Some of them made fairly large amounts of money talking things up and selling before the inevitable drop but quite a few others were left holding the bag. That level of confident ignorance is the prevailing tone of the cryptocurrency world: everyone talks about changing the world but it's extremely hard to find someone who actually understands the details of the business they're trying to get into or why it works the way it currently does, but they don't let that stop them because they've already bought in they stand to lose potentially quite large sums of money if they can't find buyers.
• jakupovic 5y ago
  Maybe the onus is on the skeptics to conclusively prove that web3 is BS? Since none can effectively prove so, then maybe it is not BS? The skeptics are always inventing new reasons why it will fail, and yet it's still here and bigger than ever, day after day, making the skeptics seems crazy at this point, pointlessly arguing for lack of use for something that is clearly useful, judging by the sheer amount of capital and development resources used, if nothing else.
  • simonw 5y ago
    Is your argument here that web3 isn't bullshit as long as the number keeps going up? What will your opinion be of web3 should the number start to continually go down?
    • jakupovic 5y ago
      As long as it is above 0 it has value and skeptics have to admit so. Anything else is ludicrous, to me.
      • svantana 5y ago
        There is obviously monetary value, but us skeptics see that it is driven by illicit trade, money laundering, tax evasion, pump & dump schemes, ponzi schemes, wash trading scams, etc. All things that are a net negative for society.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  • almost 5y ago
    Yes it’s totally normal to take a word with no real definition (or at best a definition that shifts depending on what’s needed) and have to “prove” it’s BS. If I tell you that web4 is all about complete freedom and an end to world hunger and it’s based on cow farts is it up to you to prove that it’s BS? (It’s early days for cow farts, you can’t judge them o what they can do right now)
• sbazerque 5y ago
  I think the PC analogy is solid. I think the observation that we need a way to permissionly interact with data is spot-on, and I agree that that could bring a second wave of value creation and innovation. Think of having a Facebook-like social graph, not controlled by Facebook. Or a merchant aggregation system like Amazon's without Amazon. A system not driven by maximizing exposure monetization (via ads, paid placement, etc.) but by something like a Nash equilibrium that maximizes value creation for participants. This is what I work on, and I think it can be done.
  • qeternity 5y ago
    > I think the observation that we need a way to permissionly interact with data is spot-on The entire argument rests upon this premise and the author doesn’t explain it one bit.