14 ms·

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 y

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/
  - aardvarkr 5y ago
    Strongly agree :)
- icambron 5y ago
  Why does play2earn require (or is made much easier by) crypto? I'm missing a step in the logic
  - yucky 5y ago
    I'm not an expert on it, but I think this refers to the various "things" that can be bought/owned on various metaverse type environments. People from first world countries are able to buy these things since it's easier than "earning" them. People from developing countries can then do the earning part for them, and sell what they've got on various NFT marketplaces, for desperately needed money. Why crypto is needed is because that is the tech that makes it possible for Player A to actually own Thing X, when Player A sends money to Player B who actually spent 8 hours playing or doing in order to earn Thing X. There are a few of these examples starting to gain steam like Axie Infinity[1] for instance. Although I suspect FB & Roblox are going to really go all in on this soon, if they haven't already. And their user bases are enormous. [1] https://axieinfinity.com/ https://axieinfinity.com/ (click on their marketplace link to see for yourself, the prices are crazy)
    - icambron 5y ago
      You can build a marketplace without crypto, though. The question is why crypto is an important enabling feature. E.g. would Axie Infinity be as successful if it simply let you buy/sell assets directly? (Putting aside any of the surrounding discussion of pyramid schemes; I'm not really interested in Axie in particular, more how the concept is supposed to work)
      - gilleain 5y ago
        I am also unsure as to how crypto benefits ownership of assets (eg "Axies"). I looked into NFTs recently, and (to my very simplified understanding) there seems to be: Asset <-> Token <-> Blockchain where the <-> are links of some kind. I understand that the T-B link on the right is secure and uses all the fancy crypto stuff (smart contracts, whatever) . However, the A-T link is less clear to me. Concretely, if you 'own' a Pokeman/Axie then that is the T-B link, but what links the Axie to the token? A URL/URI? So where is that stored - in a database somewhere? It all seems very suspect, but maybe I'm missing something.
- lalaland1125 5y ago
  Play2earn gaming is just a disguised ponzi scheme 99% of the time. It's a closed loop system so the only way for people to earn money is to get it from other gamers. And gamers aren't going to throw money at these games when they could play a better "centralized" alternative. And the reason why non-pay2earn alternatives will always be better is because non-pay2earn games are much cheaper because they only need to pay the game devs while pay2earn games need to pay both the game devs and the freeloading "earners".
  - pengwing 5y ago
    I always like to imagine how we will look back onto subjects 5 years from now, which helps to come up with more precise terminology and potential perspectives: "Generation 1 of play2earn gaming popularized in 2021/2022 was based on an ongoing influx of capital and generated profits only in the form of its redistribution. This changed when ... "
- thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
  >> For low-wage workers in developing countries the killer app is play2earn gaming. Farming resources in MMORPGs was happening before cryptocurrency became popular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_farming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_farming The killer app is illegal markets, malware / ransomware payments, and money laundering.
- s-lambert 5y ago
  The killer app sounds like a dystopian hell to me, wow work that is the epitome of pointlessness.
tim333 5y ago
Maybe spreadsheets and email for business use but that's not why I and people I know got them - more to play around on. The killer app for crypto / web whatever in reality is speculation. From recent US research "43% of men ages 18 to 29 say they have invested in, traded or used a cryptocurrency." Maybe it's not the sort of adoption you approve of but it's still adoption.
- __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
  Speculation is training wheels for scalable direct democracy, and that'll be the killer app of crypto / web whatever.
  - coolspot 5y ago
    No government would allow that. Crypto will be illigal due to terrorism/CSAM/gambling/etc long before it starts threating ruling establishment.
    - __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
      That's true, but I don't think it being illegal will have any bearing on whether it later becomes a threat to the ruling establishment.
ramijames 5y ago
Disclaimer: I work in the web3 (crypto) space and have for a long time already. I think the killer app for web3 is going to be a decentralized, open identity/auth solution. The idea that we use our email accounts, attached to huge corporations which siphon every detail about us for their advertising engines is absolutely absurd. I just want to be able to log in to applications and carry some of the simple data like my identity and what assets I have available with me, without having to pay for it by losing my privacy and autonomy. Nothing in the web2 tech stack currently allows this. Imagine being able to log in, securely, to HN, Twitter, your bank, et al., and with you comes basic data about how to contact you, how you pay, what assets you're holding, etc. You get to choose what you share, and you get to authenticate each transaction discretely. It's powerful and it puts that power in your hands, not in those of large corporate entities. That's what I'm interested in, and that's what I work on. We should all want some form of that. -- edit: glad the response to this was by people interested and curious. my usual feeling on HN is that people are hyper-negative about web3 tech. It's ok to be curious about new, cutting edge technology. That's what we're all here for, I think. Maybe the decentralized trend won't pan out. Maybe it is all a giant scam. Doesn't mean it isn't interesting and it doesn't mean that the people working in that space aren't legitimately trying to innovate.
- elevader 5y ago
  Wouldn't that be just as bad (if not worse) than the current situation? Those huge corporations could just read everything from the blockchain. At least in the current situation companies need to provide some sort of service to get to your data.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Web3 people need to talk about this more instead of all the FOMO scam bullshit they currently hype and which is tainting every reasonable human being against their ideas. Because right now, given how long the community has had to work on the problem and we still haven't seen anything like what you're describing, I'm still inclined to believe that Web3 is all a bunch of bullshit.
  - 5y ago
tshaddox 5y ago
It’s true that a killer app is probably necessary, but isn’t that what Web3 developers are currently trying to develop? It’s kinda weird to say “there’s no point in developing Web3 because there’s no killer app for Web3.”
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  I didn't say there was no point developing it. I said that the author missed the point of why PC's (and the internet) were adopted. There's been hundreds of technologies developed because they were interesting to the developer, and then failed to find a market (or found a niche market and stayed there). Web3 currently looks to be one of those. But who knows? If a killer app emerges, a reason for the average person to use it, then it'll succeed. Trying to predict this in advance is notoriously difficult.
- c-cube 5y ago
  Right, it's only been 10 years after all!
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
acdha 5y ago
> 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. Your comment about spreadsheets matches my experience but this does not unless “mid 90s” really means “1995 at the very latest”. I was seeing a ton of interest in web projects by then from normal companies who wanted to replace catalog ordering, put product and support information online, etc. – and normal people were starting to use it for all kinds of non-web things by then. I strongly agree with your main point: I’ve never heard someone ask about cryptocurrency or NFTs except in that they heard someone on CNBC saying the prices were booming & were wondering whether it was a good bet.
yazaddaruvala 5y ago
Disclaimer: I don’t own any crypto, even though I can tell it’s the future because I don’t know which ones will win. Web3s “killer app” is government services. Crypto in general is a pseudonym for open source rewrites of developed countries’ legacy government infrastructure for developing countries. Eventually it’ll be so good it’ll replace the legacy variants that exist today.
- dangoor 5y ago
  > Web3s “killer app” is government services. I don't understand. Can you give an example? A government is already a central entity. If you have some service controlled by a central entity, why not build it in the standard database-on-a-server approach which is much easier?
  - thepasswordis 5y ago
    Because whoever controls that database can change the data in it.
    - gitfan86 5y ago
      This was the crypto pitch for several years except it was for supply chain. "You can't hack the database!!" that didn't work out either because it doesn't stop someone from putting incorrect data into a database regardless of how easy it is to hack the database. Same thing here. There is nothing to stop the government employee from putting incorrect data in the database. This is why people see Crypto/Web3 as a solution looking for a problem. The complaint people have about the DMV isn't that their database gets hacked. The complaint is that the government workers do not care about doing a good or quick job.
    - paulryanrogers 5y ago
      Blockchain seems like a very costly way to add transparency and auditing. Especially if the chain will be controlled by one or only a few stakeholders.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
What I remember is different. People bought a PC to play games. And they connected to internet to download porn.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  That might be the reason that you, a private individual, bought a PC. But there had to be enough PC's out there already to make it worthwhile making games for that market. That bulk market was created by spreadsheets. And same for pron - there had to be enough people connecting to the internet to make it worthwhile making the pron available. That bulk market was created by email. I'd agree that pron was a major early adopter for the web - the experience of piecing together pictures of naked ladies from hundreds of usenet posts was decidedly lacking.
bsenftner 5y ago
The Web3 killer app is here and everyone pretends it is not here. That killer app is Gambling, Speculation, and Hope of No-Work Instant Wealth. Until this killer app is tamed, it will overwhelm the web3 movement until it dies the death of a failed gambler.
dpweb 5y ago
I've no doubt when they get VR sex with robots incredibly realistic, it will be a huge business.
austincheney 5y ago
After working on a decentralized side project the only projection I can promise you is that nothing you imagine is correct until you are heavily using decentralization. Decentralization enables basic necessities that would you never before attempt, which means you are likely already engaging with killer ideas and dismissing them outright. That which is current boring and/or common can suddenly become sexy and powerful in ways that are unexpected or unplanned. It also means that which you imagine as being the next hot thing most likely isn’t. The more time you spend working with decentralization the more true this becomes. Think of decentralization as a steroid. It makes you (your technology) more of what you already are, an amplifier, not something new. New things will ride on the success of a successful application. The challenge there is if an application is actually fully decentralized how will you determine success.

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/
- aardvarkr 5y ago
  Strongly agree :)
icambron 5y ago
Why does play2earn require (or is made much easier by) crypto? I'm missing a step in the logic
- yucky 5y ago
  I'm not an expert on it, but I think this refers to the various "things" that can be bought/owned on various metaverse type environments. People from first world countries are able to buy these things since it's easier than "earning" them. People from developing countries can then do the earning part for them, and sell what they've got on various NFT marketplaces, for desperately needed money. Why crypto is needed is because that is the tech that makes it possible for Player A to actually own Thing X, when Player A sends money to Player B who actually spent 8 hours playing or doing in order to earn Thing X. There are a few of these examples starting to gain steam like Axie Infinity[1] for instance. Although I suspect FB & Roblox are going to really go all in on this soon, if they haven't already. And their user bases are enormous. [1] https://axieinfinity.com/ https://axieinfinity.com/ (click on their marketplace link to see for yourself, the prices are crazy)
  - icambron 5y ago
    You can build a marketplace without crypto, though. The question is why crypto is an important enabling feature. E.g. would Axie Infinity be as successful if it simply let you buy/sell assets directly? (Putting aside any of the surrounding discussion of pyramid schemes; I'm not really interested in Axie in particular, more how the concept is supposed to work)
    - gilleain 5y ago
      I am also unsure as to how crypto benefits ownership of assets (eg "Axies"). I looked into NFTs recently, and (to my very simplified understanding) there seems to be: Asset <-> Token <-> Blockchain where the <-> are links of some kind. I understand that the T-B link on the right is secure and uses all the fancy crypto stuff (smart contracts, whatever) . However, the A-T link is less clear to me. Concretely, if you 'own' a Pokeman/Axie then that is the T-B link, but what links the Axie to the token? A URL/URI? So where is that stored - in a database somewhere? It all seems very suspect, but maybe I'm missing something.
lalaland1125 5y ago
Play2earn gaming is just a disguised ponzi scheme 99% of the time. It's a closed loop system so the only way for people to earn money is to get it from other gamers. And gamers aren't going to throw money at these games when they could play a better "centralized" alternative. And the reason why non-pay2earn alternatives will always be better is because non-pay2earn games are much cheaper because they only need to pay the game devs while pay2earn games need to pay both the game devs and the freeloading "earners".
- pengwing 5y ago
  I always like to imagine how we will look back onto subjects 5 years from now, which helps to come up with more precise terminology and potential perspectives: "Generation 1 of play2earn gaming popularized in 2021/2022 was based on an ongoing influx of capital and generated profits only in the form of its redistribution. This changed when ... "
thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
>> For low-wage workers in developing countries the killer app is play2earn gaming. Farming resources in MMORPGs was happening before cryptocurrency became popular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_farming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_farming The killer app is illegal markets, malware / ransomware payments, and money laundering.
s-lambert 5y ago
The killer app sounds like a dystopian hell to me, wow work that is the epitome of pointlessness.

tim333 5y ago

Maybe spreadsheets and email for business use but that's not why I and people I know got them - more to play around on. The killer app for crypto / web whatever in reality is speculation. From recent US research "43% of men ages 18 to 29 say they have invested in, traded or used a cryptocurrency." Maybe it's not the sort of adoption you approve of but it's still adoption.

__MatrixMan__ 5y ago
Speculation is training wheels for scalable direct democracy, and that'll be the killer app of crypto / web whatever.
- coolspot 5y ago
  No government would allow that. Crypto will be illigal due to terrorism/CSAM/gambling/etc long before it starts threating ruling establishment.
  - __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
    That's true, but I don't think it being illegal will have any bearing on whether it later becomes a threat to the ruling establishment.

ramijames 5y ago

Disclaimer: I work in the web3 (crypto) space and have for a long time already. I think the killer app for web3 is going to be a decentralized, open identity/auth solution. The idea that we use our email accounts, attached to huge corporations which siphon every detail about us for their advertising engines is absolutely absurd. I just want to be able to log in to applications and carry some of the simple data like my identity and what assets I have available with me, without having to pay for it by losing my privacy and autonomy. Nothing in the web2 tech stack currently allows this. Imagine being able to log in, securely, to HN, Twitter, your bank, et al., and with you comes basic data about how to contact you, how you pay, what assets you're holding, etc. You get to choose what you share, and you get to authenticate each transaction discretely. It's powerful and it puts that power in your hands, not in those of large corporate entities. That's what I'm interested in, and that's what I work on. We should all want some form of that. -- edit: glad the response to this was by people interested and curious. my usual feeling on HN is that people are hyper-negative about web3 tech. It's ok to be curious about new, cutting edge technology. That's what we're all here for, I think. Maybe the decentralized trend won't pan out. Maybe it is all a giant scam. Doesn't mean it isn't interesting and it doesn't mean that the people working in that space aren't legitimately trying to innovate.

elevader 5y ago
Wouldn't that be just as bad (if not worse) than the current situation? Those huge corporations could just read everything from the blockchain. At least in the current situation companies need to provide some sort of service to get to your data.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Web3 people need to talk about this more instead of all the FOMO scam bullshit they currently hype and which is tainting every reasonable human being against their ideas. Because right now, given how long the community has had to work on the problem and we still haven't seen anything like what you're describing, I'm still inclined to believe that Web3 is all a bunch of bullshit.
- 5y ago

tshaddox 5y ago

It’s true that a killer app is probably necessary, but isn’t that what Web3 developers are currently trying to develop? It’s kinda weird to say “there’s no point in developing Web3 because there’s no killer app for Web3.”

marcus_holmes 5y ago
I didn't say there was no point developing it. I said that the author missed the point of why PC's (and the internet) were adopted. There's been hundreds of technologies developed because they were interesting to the developer, and then failed to find a market (or found a niche market and stayed there). Web3 currently looks to be one of those. But who knows? If a killer app emerges, a reason for the average person to use it, then it'll succeed. Trying to predict this in advance is notoriously difficult.
c-cube 5y ago
Right, it's only been 10 years after all!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

acdha 5y ago

> 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. Your comment about spreadsheets matches my experience but this does not unless “mid 90s” really means “1995 at the very latest”. I was seeing a ton of interest in web projects by then from normal companies who wanted to replace catalog ordering, put product and support information online, etc. – and normal people were starting to use it for all kinds of non-web things by then. I strongly agree with your main point: I’ve never heard someone ask about cryptocurrency or NFTs except in that they heard someone on CNBC saying the prices were booming & were wondering whether it was a good bet.

yazaddaruvala 5y ago

Disclaimer: I don’t own any crypto, even though I can tell it’s the future because I don’t know which ones will win. Web3s “killer app” is government services. Crypto in general is a pseudonym for open source rewrites of developed countries’ legacy government infrastructure for developing countries. Eventually it’ll be so good it’ll replace the legacy variants that exist today.

dangoor 5y ago
> Web3s “killer app” is government services. I don't understand. Can you give an example? A government is already a central entity. If you have some service controlled by a central entity, why not build it in the standard database-on-a-server approach which is much easier?
- thepasswordis 5y ago
  Because whoever controls that database can change the data in it.
  - gitfan86 5y ago
    This was the crypto pitch for several years except it was for supply chain. "You can't hack the database!!" that didn't work out either because it doesn't stop someone from putting incorrect data into a database regardless of how easy it is to hack the database. Same thing here. There is nothing to stop the government employee from putting incorrect data in the database. This is why people see Crypto/Web3 as a solution looking for a problem. The complaint people have about the DMV isn't that their database gets hacked. The complaint is that the government workers do not care about doing a good or quick job.
  - paulryanrogers 5y ago
    Blockchain seems like a very costly way to add transparency and auditing. Especially if the chain will be controlled by one or only a few stakeholders.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago

What I remember is different. People bought a PC to play games. And they connected to internet to download porn.

marcus_holmes 5y ago
That might be the reason that you, a private individual, bought a PC. But there had to be enough PC's out there already to make it worthwhile making games for that market. That bulk market was created by spreadsheets. And same for pron - there had to be enough people connecting to the internet to make it worthwhile making the pron available. That bulk market was created by email. I'd agree that pron was a major early adopter for the web - the experience of piecing together pictures of naked ladies from hundreds of usenet posts was decidedly lacking.

bsenftner 5y ago

The Web3 killer app is here and everyone pretends it is not here. That killer app is Gambling, Speculation, and Hope of No-Work Instant Wealth. Until this killer app is tamed, it will overwhelm the web3 movement until it dies the death of a failed gambler.

dpweb 5y ago

I've no doubt when they get VR sex with robots incredibly realistic, it will be a huge business.

austincheney 5y ago

After working on a decentralized side project the only projection I can promise you is that nothing you imagine is correct until you are heavily using decentralization. Decentralization enables basic necessities that would you never before attempt, which means you are likely already engaging with killer ideas and dismissing them outright. That which is current boring and/or common can suddenly become sexy and powerful in ways that are unexpected or unplanned. It also means that which you imagine as being the next hot thing most likely isn’t. The more time you spend working with decentralization the more true this becomes. Think of decentralization as a steroid. It makes you (your technology) more of what you already are, an amplifier, not something new. New things will ride on the success of a successful application. The challenge there is if an application is actually fully decentralized how will you determine success.