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A not so gentle intro to web3

criddell 5y ago
Who came up with the name “web3”? It sounds aspirational and not at all a reflection of wider trends.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
  The name is as ridiculous as the concept itself. Besides, after the so-called Web 2.0, there were many pretenders to the name of "Web3", such as the semantic web[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
  - criddell 5y ago
    Yeah, it feels like wishful thinking to me. If you build it, they will come? Semantic web is a great example of something that had great potential (I still think in subject-object-predicate triples when solving problems) but never really went anywhere big.
- capableweb 5y ago
  As to actually answer the question, since the sibling comment ignores the question you make: Web3 was/is the name of Ethereum client API SDKs, so was used by the Ethereum group. As for who coined it, I think it was Gavin Wood.
wellokpetejr 5y ago
I work in the web3/blockchain world. And I don’t really care if any of it takes off. I have no interest in crypto or the politics surrounding all of this. For me, it’s something new and interesting. It’s like the Wild West. It has some energy behind it. Is most of it a scam? Sure. But will we learn anything from it? Hopefully. I think of it like Product Hunt. 99% of the projects will fail, but 100% of the people probably learned something useful.
- wedn3sday 5y ago
  It would be nice if it didnt have the carbon footprint of Argentina to produce something of no value.
  - plebianRube 5y ago
  - cslarson 5y ago
    Researchers and devs have been and continue to work incredibly hard to ensure this stops being the case some time mid year 2022.
    - politelemon 5y ago
      Could you explain or link to what you mean? What's happening in mid 22, and are all crypto currencies involved?
      - kristofferR 5y ago
        Ethereum is moving to proof of stake instead of mining, that will remove all superfluous carbon emissions. When we're talking about web3, we're generally talking about Ethereum: https://web3js.readthedocs.io https://web3js.readthedocs.io
      - paulgb 5y ago
        Probably referring to Ethereum moving to proof-of-stake, which is set to happen in June https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/08/ethereum-is-slated-for-another-upgrade-this-week-heres-what-to-know.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/08/ethereum-is-slated-for-anoth... It's been delayed before, but hopefully it happens this time. I don't own any, but it would be nice for GPU prices to normalize and the environmental cost would go down substantially.
      - DennisP 5y ago
        Ethereum is switching off its mining in favor of another consensus system called "proof-of-stake." Basically the mining hardware and electricity are replaced by the currency itself. There's a consensus protocol that works if people don't cheat in certain ways, it's provable if someone cheats, and the "miners" lock some ETH into the system as a security bond. If someone submits a proof that you cheated then you lose your bond. Energy consumption will drop by an estimated 99.95%. Most web3 stuff runs on Ethereum, which is the second-biggest energy consumer in crypto. Bitcoin is the biggest and has no plans to move to proof-of-stake, but isn't really involved in web3. Ethereum's proof-of-stake protocol has been running in parallel for a year with billions of dollars in real ETH deposited, and for the merged system there's a multi-client testnet running.
dvh 5y ago
The best thing about web3 is that it is a new word, not reused old word, and thus it can be efficiently filtered out from the news in rss readers.
- robin_reala 5y ago
  Unfortunately it is a reused old word: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
  - capableweb 5y ago
    Not really, if you're being pedantic. Web 3.0 was used by Tim-Berners Lee to describe Semantic Web as it was meant to be "Web 2.0 + Semantic Web = Web 3.0", while Web3 (notice lack of space + lack of ".0") was coined by Ethereum (and Gavin Wood if I'm not mistaken) to describe it's client SDK/API for it's users. Web 3.0 didn't go anywhere, and Web3 has now seemingly changed meaning from Ethereum API to whatever the word means now (which seems to be different depending on who you ask)
    - mdaniel 5y ago
      > Web 3.0 didn't go anywhere "Anywhere" is a bit harsh; Google (and seemingly other indexers) honor semantic markup in several contexts via https://schema.org/ https://schema.org/ -- I would bet that's a large contributor to the "Rich Result" cards that show up in the SERP for sites with such markup. Separate from other "generic" semantic data markup concepts, JSON-LD[1] is also still making a showing, most commonly (in my experience) as `<script type="application/json+ld">` So I guess it depends on whether "go anywhere" means "Amazon.com is fully HATEOAS serving RDF, or GTFO" but I would think the actual situation is that it just is taking a while for pointy-haired types to see market value in adopting those concepts, and not so much "what a failure" 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON-LD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON-LD
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kristianpaul 5y ago
“having stuff distributed is the whole basis of internet technology since the very beginnning.”
- hestefisk 5y ago
  Hello TCP/IP :)
cslarson 5y ago
Nothing really has surprised me more than how difficult it had been for a lot of you to understand what the value is here. It is a database with a new property: data and rules for manipulating data can be fixed. Yes inefficient in iops but who cares - it allows a whole new class of activity.
- kranke155 5y ago
  Here's a good article about web3 that no one here will read - https://continuations.com/post/671863718643105792/web3crypto-why-bother https://continuations.com/post/671863718643105792/web3crypto...
  - tedeh 5y ago
    230 points by fandorin 3 days ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 545 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29746046 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29746046
    - kranke155 5y ago
      yep, and every nonsense criticism of blockchain is repeated in that thread ad nauseam.
  - cslarson 5y ago
    Agreed, this article highlights the important property (decentralized state) that programmable blockchain (web3/ethereum) provide and why that's needed to change the current power dynamics governing web activity.
- brandonmenc 5y ago
  We understand it. We just find the claims dubious and the side effects horrible. Also, like, prove that it's useful. We're still waiting.
  - cslarson 5y ago
    The side effects may be horrible but almost certainly not in the naive way you imagine.
kristofferR 5y ago
miracle2k 5y ago
A lot of the web3 critiques make much the same points, but the writing style of this one (as if addressing a child) combined with the arrogance ("the cognitive dissonance will be too much") makes this one stand out. If I may add some notes for future authors: - You can be certain that the vast majority of web3 "thought leaders" you will argue with online have done quite well for themselves. Far from being prisoners in a pyramid scheme, they have cashed out more than they put in, and if they wanted to, they could cash out entirely, being unequivocally in the black. Frankly, it makes more sense to impugn the objectivity of the people who must feel they missed out. Just focus on your arguments. - Maybe critics could approach the subject of decentralization with a little more depth than "someone is using a Discord so it's not decentralized so why do we need a blockchain". If you take NFTs specifically, I find it really surprising that it is hard to understand that trusting an artist when she says she created an NFT is not the same thing as having the database of NFTs managed by Artnet.
- kristofferR 5y ago
  Yeah, the best way to get upvoted on Hacker News is to write a negative post about the future of crypto, it doesn't even have to be a good post, a badly written one like this will suffice.
- Juliate 5y ago
  > You can be certain that the vast majority of [citation needed]. Plus, this wouldn't even make their argument any more valid: there are, sadly, today, still plenty of well-off big co's owners/shareholders that will tout capitalism in its current form is perfectly fine and the world is going fine and their strategy is making them richer, so why wouldn't anyone else join?
  - miracle2k 5y ago
    > Plus, this wouldn't even make their argument any more valid I am saying don't declare that anyone who holds crypto must be dismissed.
- beej71 5y ago
  All we want to know is, where's the beef? Don't forget there are a lot of well-to-do devs here who just want to know what the technical details are. A lot of us are no longer in it for the money. The author is basically calling out the proponents of "web3" to define it with RFC-level detail, something that I think would be tremendously beneficial to everyone in this debate.
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ChicagoBoy11 5y ago
I find it so difficult to understand why there isn't a greater focus on first-principle approach to the web3 discussion, and wonder if perhaps the reason is that few people can make a cogent argument for their pet project/coin/DAO/etc. on those principles. All the inefficiencies aside (for now, although ultimately they'd need to be addressed), the notion that you can create a public ledger that can be trusted without a single centralized authority DOES seem like a really interesting innovation. Just go ask some of my family members who lived overseas under regimes of hyperinflation just how valuable the idea that you could have a currency that no one controls is. But NBA TopShot? CNN clip ownerships? It seems to boggle my mind how that is related... AT ALL... to this potentially new property afforded by blockchains. Over centuries it seems we have evolved institutions, laws, etc., PRIMARILY to address this issue of trust. But rather than seeing web3 projects that seem to tackle issues where does institutions have failed, it seems everywhere I turn is just someone doing something that can be accomplished the good ol' fashion way but adding a crypto element to it because of the hype/FOMO/etc. I mean, take the topshop example... could the NBA really not have done that with just.... yknow... a database?!?!?
- liotier 5y ago
  > Just go ask some of my family members who lived overseas under regimes of hyperinflation just how valuable the idea that you could have a currency that no one controls is. They buy USD or EUR on the grey market. Buying BTC doesn't satisfy this use-case any better - except for remote transactions, for which only hawala is more efficient.
  - RestlessMind 5y ago
    BTC allows their families overseas to easily transfer funds which is not that easy with USD or EUR. > for which only hawala is more efficient Hawala + bitcoin is as much or more efficient than Hawala + USD.
- leppr 5y ago
  There's crypto and then there's crypto grifters. Most of these projects have a crypto "theme", they're not "crypto" themselves. The central bank monetary policies of the past years have favored mindless investment, which allowed a flurry of projects to get outsized funding by sprinkling crypto pixie dust to get investments (just like so many did previously with "ML"). These 9-10 figure valuations don't bring them actual legitimacy from crypto people. This doesn't make them "crypto". A custodian exchange trading cryptocoins is not crypto, a custodian wallet helping celebrities buy NFTs is not crypto, a seller of collectible cards on a centralized DB like Flow that you can eventually maybe transfer to an actual decentralized network is not crypto. (same comment with "web3" instead of "crypto")
marc_io 5y ago
I found really amusing to see people posting quite strong and definitive opinions about something that is still very vague and, for all intents and purposes, not set in stone. It could be all of that, of course— until is not. It's a good example of pareidolia. Like seeing an elephant in a cloud. The moment you stop to comment on its features, it turns into a giraffe.
- deleted 5y ago
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louwrentius 5y ago
Bedankt voor dit artikel Koos, een tegengeluid tegen Web3 en crypto is altijd welkom.
aronpye 5y ago
Git is essentially web3 technology and was meant to be decentralized however, it all ended up being pretty centralized by a few players like GitHub. I envisage the same happening to ‘crypto’ type stuff like the use of exchanges, etc.
EGreg 5y ago
Almost everything web3-related is a grift based on getting people to buy crypto. Is this grift-based? https://qbix.com/token https://qbix.com/token You might think it is, after all it says “token” in it. But you’ll find, if you actually read it, that there is no token to buy, and it’s mostly about how to get the Web out from digitalism feudalism and to a free market. It discusses in detail the mechanisms by which digital content creators like video producers, artists, open source software developers (many of whom disrupted by the web, such as journalists) can monetize their work without using the government to go after copyright infringers. You think Web 2.0 wasn’t based on grift? It was based on WORSE than grift: VCs bought SHARES in the companies, then sold them to the public (sometimes after propping up bad unit economics and money-losing business models for years). The public (wall street investors) proceeded to demand that company management extract rents forever. Web 2.0 has led to some of the most centralized sites, we all have our public forums on privately owned sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, while our shopping and transactions are done on privately owned sites too. Actually they’re owned by “the public”, but they can’t vote Zuck out (they try every year) and anyway, Wall Street earnings demand that these sites NEVER give away their back end, NEVER decentralize it. At least with Web3, the code is open source and everything is decentralized. Compare Vitalik and Zuck. Vitalik doesnt need bodyguards, he isn’t essential to Ethereum’s operation. Is Ethereum dog-slow and expensive because it is built on blockchain? You betcha. Is blockchain a bad backend for most “web scale” things? YES. But crytocurrency and other types distributed systems (involving DHTs) are not. Look at BitTorrent, or FileCoin, or Holochain… but these are just babysteps. MaidSAFE is the next generation for files, and hopefully what we’re building at Intercoin is next-gen for actual transactions. Now that I have established that selling tokens may be better than shares (because founders only make money on the first sale and then the network should belong to the participants) I am wondering if it’s okay to post this for more information on what is ACTUALLY wrong with Web3: https://intercoin.org/presentation.pdf https://intercoin.org/presentation.pdf Again, I ask, where is the grift? We spent four years on this project so far. We barely raised any money (certainly compared to Telegram and Kik Messenger or EOS, but even compared to your average Web2 centralized web app startup.) We worked our butts off because we are passionate about a world where any community, github, website ir other project can release and manage their own cryptocurrency. We not only built the tech and user interfaces, but we met all the top people in the distributed space (including TimBL, Leslie Lamport) and made a forum and youtube channel where we explain smart contracts, interview people like Noam Chomsky, regulators, community currency economists. What more can we do with the tiny budget we have? So if we were to fund this project adequately, how would you recommend doing it? The VC + Web2 way of closed source backends and extreme centralization? We all see how well that turned out… Perhaps one day, we can live in a world where people have UBI and contribute to projects because they choose to, not because they are forced to survive and feed their family with no safety net. At Intercoin we are looking to build that world. But the only way UBI can be phased in everywhere, is if the communities pay it in their own currency. Hence the project.
blitz_skull 5y ago
Not related to the article itself, but would it kill the author’s site to have normal HTML scrolling and/or reader support? That was painful to scroll through.
- KoosL 5y ago
  There’s no scroll jacking whatsoever and I tested reader modes on several browsers. Could you tell me a bit more about the issues?
janci 5y ago
The usefulness of web3/crypto/blockchain is said to be in decentralization. However it is not the blockchain and crypto algorithm that enable decentralization. It is not even the distributed ledger. We do not need these things to be able to make distributed services. What we need is standard public interfaces. Take an example of NFTs. They are increasingly popular, even if they are meaningless tokens not representing ownership of physical item nor protecting against digital copies and distribution. What makes NFTs useful is that any token can be manipulated by any wallet/marketplace/exchange. This is enabled by using a standard ERC-721 interface. The interface is simple and well-designed. The adoption of the interface is high in crypto-software. Imagine all e-shops would implement the same public API for querying products, creating orders, calculating discounts and shipping prices and making payments. We would need no Amazon to be the largest e-commerce website. We would need no e-bay. Anyone would be able to make a product-selling website or one-off auction on they own or using a 3rd party service/hosting. And everyone would be able to use their preferred front-end. Aggregators and price comparators would be created, with no need for web scraping. The orders do not need to be on public immutable ledger, nor the payments. Every entity can implement the API on its own, host is on its own, but is not required to. Every entity can decide to use 3rd party implementation and/or hosting of the API. The same as with crypto tokens and smart contracts.
- mdaniel 5y ago
  > Imagine all e-shops would implement the same public API Very idealistic, but if you have ever heard the acronym "EDI" then it will become quickly apparent how incredibly fraught it is to try and map ones "local" taxonomy onto a "global standard" taxonomy. Let's just take https://schema.org/brand https://schema.org/brand -- should this property be the legal brand (Sony Interactive Entertainment Inc.), the marketing brand (Sony), some URI that everyone agrees upon and can readily look up from their desktop? What is the verification process a fivrr contractor can use at the end of their php work for Middleville Cakes and Cookies to know that the result conforms to the global taxonomy and thus will be consumed correctly by the aggregators and price comparison engines mentioned? I do recognize this may have a tone of "pfft, what a terrible idea" but I promise I don't mean it in such a dismissive way. I was similarly thrilled back when I learned about the semantic web, too. But having been down in the muck for as long as I have, trying to implement loosey-goosey specifications, has made me realize it's not the idea that's flawed, it's the assumption that all actors have good intentions, perfect knowledge, and infinite time to conform to perfect standards. And don't even get me wound up about the semantic law markup / legislation as code ... > with no need for web scraping. That will only ever be true in some mythical future where the HTML contains only presentation structure and is populated by the aforementioned public API. There are countless examples of some parts of the data being statically embedded in the HTML that are not part of the API response
EGreg 5y ago
The reason that so many people use the same websites (like Google’s, Facebook’s, etc) is mainly because of the convenience these sites offer and the reach they can provide. If this is a problem, it’s not a technical problem, but an economic one. The big companies have more design and programming capacity to offer online services than individuals and non-profit open source projects do right now. Is a lack of viable open source alternatives to Big Tech an economic problem only? Consider how quickly the Web itself disrupted the centralized networks of the day: AOL, MSN, CompuServe, Prodigy, … Consider how quickly VOIP collapsed the cost of telecommunications what the government for 50 years — with its regulations and breaking up monopolies — did not. Today we all take that for granted. Yes, tech that eliminates gatekeepers (switchboard operators, anyone? magazines, newspapers, radio…) brings costs toward zero and enables far more wealth creation than “privately owned” networks and infra. It creates far more of a free market, too, for those who like free markets. Web3 is far better than Web2 for all this. Does Blockchain suck for web scale things? Yes. But there are many other distributed systems. To me, “blockchain” isn’t essential to Web3. What is essential is “smart contracts” — or more generally — code that for the first time you can trust to do what it says. And who can vet it? A free market of worldwide experts that you can collectively trust. Just as Web 2 allowed anyone to deploy an HTTP website and anyome in the world could interact with it, similarly Web 3 allows doing that with growing numbers of real world applications like this: https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications
helen___keller 5y ago
I'm in that slice of the population that is captivated by the potential of crypto while disgusted by everything that it currently is. I would like to see more discussions around the theoretical limits of the value of web3 with regards to computing efficiency. Even the world's most efficient public blockchain would see a huge replication factor if it saw widespread adoption. The problem is, the larger the replication factor, the larger the inherent cost of compute, as limited by the energy it costs to replicate that compute. In other words, if AWS Lambda is priced at X% premium over the electricity consumed executing code, even the world's most efficient blockchain would be priced hundreds of times that premium if the blockchain is widely adopted/replicated; there is no free lunch, so if you have a distributed system replicating data across thousands of machines, then the people bidding to put data on those machines are paying for that replication. In other words, the pricing of running your application backend on a popular blockchain (say, Ethereum) will never ever be as cheap as running your application backend on a public cloud. In a broader sense, this means that the only data that shows up on a public chain is data considered "valuable", such as recording the transactions of cryptocurrency or NFTs or other pyramidal investments; never something silly and worthless, like a system for recording nontradable in-game achievement system. On the other hand, not every blockchain is popular. My belief is that IF web3 has a future, it will involve inter-chain protocols between many cooperative blockchains, and that compute will go into a chain that fits the value of the compute. For example, suppose I want to make an app that uses a microtransaction scheme on the order of pennies, e.g. you can tip 1 penny to an author or something like that. I'm obviously not using Ethereum because a transaction on Ethereum costs vastly more than 1 penny to record. However, a smaller chain with a replication factor of say 10 machines can probably handle 1 penny transactions with far less than a penny fee. Right now, there's no good way to treat blockchains themselves as fungible compute objects that are secured & priced based on their replication factor. Just as you wouldn't move a single penny on Ethereum, you also wouldn't move a million dollars in tokenized assets on a chain with only a few machines replicating. I think making an ecosystem of fungible blockchains, with the ability to easily transfer funds inter-chain[0], is going to be the next evolution of web3 that actually enables real consumer application backends to be hosted on the crypto universe. [0] This is something that's being worked on in a limited sense, e.g. the "Wormhole" project that allows you to tokenize and move assets between Ethereum and Solana and a few others
motohagiography 5y ago
These arguments aren't very good. While I'm not interested in Web3 outside a couple of use cases, the arguments against in the article make it more appealing because now I want to find how to take a bet that the author is wrong. The argument that blockchains and the associated protocols aren't decentralized reduces to anything happening between more than one counterparty is now defined as centralized, and that the correlation from co-ordinating their activities via a blockchain protocol means it's centralized. These are circular definitions. The climate argument against proof of work using electricity ignores how demand for electricity creates the economics for green tech innovation that actually solve the carbon problem. The article is another example of rhetorically exploiting basic human energy needs as a crisis narrative in support of levering in more centralized governance. As soon as we have viable geothermal and nuclear solutions, I'm pretty sure the climate people are going to move on from carbon and start militating against heat and entropy next. They don't want solutions, they just need an infinite conflict that they can be the managers of and gatekeepers to. Conflict is energy in politics, and so permanent revolution against some basic unresolvable conflict is a source of political justification to organize people against something. The nebulous, unsolvable crisis is the perpetual motion machine of political organizing, and it is as much of a fraud as a purported physical one. If you think cryptocurrency people are cynical grifters, may I introduce you to political activists. Their "narrative" is just a fancy euphemism for conspiring to lie. Whether it's useful to point this out or not, the quiet part of Web3 is it is clearly an "exit" from the hegemonic internet (hegemonet?), and they're inventing peaceful technological alternatives to what was essentially a managerialist putsch, co-opting, and occupation of the internet. The criticism in the article seems like just another vehicle for standard complaints and ingroup concern signalling. >Blockchains don’t solve the problems they’re supposed to solve. They do cause new problems though. There’s a huge negative climate impact associated with it. The miners buy so much hardware that it’s been affecting the availability of graphics cards for years now. It makes grifters rich. Just to name a few. The real objection to web3 reduces to the same old tropes about the wrong kind of people becoming financially independent and not having to be accountable to the narratives of political hucksters. Web3 is at the peak of it's hype cycle, so there isn't much to defend about it, but arguments like these against it seem like a straw man for the same old tropes.

Who came up with the name “web3”? It sounds aspirational and not at all a reflection of wider trends.

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
The name is as ridiculous as the concept itself. Besides, after the so-called Web 2.0, there were many pretenders to the name of "Web3", such as the semantic web[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
- criddell 5y ago
  Yeah, it feels like wishful thinking to me. If you build it, they will come? Semantic web is a great example of something that had great potential (I still think in subject-object-predicate triples when solving problems) but never really went anywhere big.
capableweb 5y ago
As to actually answer the question, since the sibling comment ignores the question you make: Web3 was/is the name of Ethereum client API SDKs, so was used by the Ethereum group. As for who coined it, I think it was Gavin Wood.

I work in the web3/blockchain world. And I don’t really care if any of it takes off. I have no interest in crypto or the politics surrounding all of this. For me, it’s something new and interesting. It’s like the Wild West. It has some energy behind it. Is most of it a scam? Sure. But will we learn anything from it? Hopefully. I think of it like Product Hunt. 99% of the projects will fail, but 100% of the people probably learned something useful.

wedn3sday 5y ago
It would be nice if it didnt have the carbon footprint of Argentina to produce something of no value.
- plebianRube 5y ago
- cslarson 5y ago
  Researchers and devs have been and continue to work incredibly hard to ensure this stops being the case some time mid year 2022.
  - politelemon 5y ago
    Could you explain or link to what you mean? What's happening in mid 22, and are all crypto currencies involved?
    - kristofferR 5y ago
      Ethereum is moving to proof of stake instead of mining, that will remove all superfluous carbon emissions. When we're talking about web3, we're generally talking about Ethereum: https://web3js.readthedocs.io https://web3js.readthedocs.io
    - paulgb 5y ago
      Probably referring to Ethereum moving to proof-of-stake, which is set to happen in June https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/08/ethereum-is-slated-for-another-upgrade-this-week-heres-what-to-know.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/08/ethereum-is-slated-for-anoth... It's been delayed before, but hopefully it happens this time. I don't own any, but it would be nice for GPU prices to normalize and the environmental cost would go down substantially.
    - DennisP 5y ago
      Ethereum is switching off its mining in favor of another consensus system called "proof-of-stake." Basically the mining hardware and electricity are replaced by the currency itself. There's a consensus protocol that works if people don't cheat in certain ways, it's provable if someone cheats, and the "miners" lock some ETH into the system as a security bond. If someone submits a proof that you cheated then you lose your bond. Energy consumption will drop by an estimated 99.95%. Most web3 stuff runs on Ethereum, which is the second-biggest energy consumer in crypto. Bitcoin is the biggest and has no plans to move to proof-of-stake, but isn't really involved in web3. Ethereum's proof-of-stake protocol has been running in parallel for a year with billions of dollars in real ETH deposited, and for the merged system there's a multi-client testnet running.

dvh 5y ago

The best thing about web3 is that it is a new word, not reused old word, and thus it can be efficiently filtered out from the news in rss readers.

robin_reala 5y ago
Unfortunately it is a reused old word: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
- capableweb 5y ago
  Not really, if you're being pedantic. Web 3.0 was used by Tim-Berners Lee to describe Semantic Web as it was meant to be "Web 2.0 + Semantic Web = Web 3.0", while Web3 (notice lack of space + lack of ".0") was coined by Ethereum (and Gavin Wood if I'm not mistaken) to describe it's client SDK/API for it's users. Web 3.0 didn't go anywhere, and Web3 has now seemingly changed meaning from Ethereum API to whatever the word means now (which seems to be different depending on who you ask)
  - mdaniel 5y ago
    > Web 3.0 didn't go anywhere "Anywhere" is a bit harsh; Google (and seemingly other indexers) honor semantic markup in several contexts via https://schema.org/ https://schema.org/ -- I would bet that's a large contributor to the "Rich Result" cards that show up in the SERP for sites with such markup. Separate from other "generic" semantic data markup concepts, JSON-LD[1] is also still making a showing, most commonly (in my experience) as `<script type="application/json+ld">` So I guess it depends on whether "go anywhere" means "Amazon.com is fully HATEOAS serving RDF, or GTFO" but I would think the actual situation is that it just is taking a while for pointy-haired types to see market value in adopting those concepts, and not so much "what a failure" 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON-LD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON-LD
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kristianpaul 5y ago

“having stuff distributed is the whole basis of internet technology since the very beginnning.”

hestefisk 5y ago
Hello TCP/IP :)

cslarson 5y ago

Nothing really has surprised me more than how difficult it had been for a lot of you to understand what the value is here. It is a database with a new property: data and rules for manipulating data can be fixed. Yes inefficient in iops but who cares - it allows a whole new class of activity.

kranke155 5y ago
Here's a good article about web3 that no one here will read - https://continuations.com/post/671863718643105792/web3crypto-why-bother https://continuations.com/post/671863718643105792/web3crypto...
- tedeh 5y ago
  230 points by fandorin 3 days ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 545 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29746046 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29746046
  - kranke155 5y ago
    yep, and every nonsense criticism of blockchain is repeated in that thread ad nauseam.
- cslarson 5y ago
  Agreed, this article highlights the important property (decentralized state) that programmable blockchain (web3/ethereum) provide and why that's needed to change the current power dynamics governing web activity.
brandonmenc 5y ago
We understand it. We just find the claims dubious and the side effects horrible. Also, like, prove that it's useful. We're still waiting.
- cslarson 5y ago
  The side effects may be horrible but almost certainly not in the naive way you imagine.

kristofferR 5y ago

miracle2k 5y ago

A lot of the web3 critiques make much the same points, but the writing style of this one (as if addressing a child) combined with the arrogance ("the cognitive dissonance will be too much") makes this one stand out. If I may add some notes for future authors: - You can be certain that the vast majority of web3 "thought leaders" you will argue with online have done quite well for themselves. Far from being prisoners in a pyramid scheme, they have cashed out more than they put in, and if they wanted to, they could cash out entirely, being unequivocally in the black. Frankly, it makes more sense to impugn the objectivity of the people who must feel they missed out. Just focus on your arguments. - Maybe critics could approach the subject of decentralization with a little more depth than "someone is using a Discord so it's not decentralized so why do we need a blockchain". If you take NFTs specifically, I find it really surprising that it is hard to understand that trusting an artist when she says she created an NFT is not the same thing as having the database of NFTs managed by Artnet.

kristofferR 5y ago
Yeah, the best way to get upvoted on Hacker News is to write a negative post about the future of crypto, it doesn't even have to be a good post, a badly written one like this will suffice.
Juliate 5y ago
> You can be certain that the vast majority of [citation needed]. Plus, this wouldn't even make their argument any more valid: there are, sadly, today, still plenty of well-off big co's owners/shareholders that will tout capitalism in its current form is perfectly fine and the world is going fine and their strategy is making them richer, so why wouldn't anyone else join?
- miracle2k 5y ago
  > Plus, this wouldn't even make their argument any more valid I am saying don't declare that anyone who holds crypto must be dismissed.
beej71 5y ago
All we want to know is, where's the beef? Don't forget there are a lot of well-to-do devs here who just want to know what the technical details are. A lot of us are no longer in it for the money. The author is basically calling out the proponents of "web3" to define it with RFC-level detail, something that I think would be tremendously beneficial to everyone in this debate.

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ChicagoBoy11 5y ago

I find it so difficult to understand why there isn't a greater focus on first-principle approach to the web3 discussion, and wonder if perhaps the reason is that few people can make a cogent argument for their pet project/coin/DAO/etc. on those principles. All the inefficiencies aside (for now, although ultimately they'd need to be addressed), the notion that you can create a public ledger that can be trusted without a single centralized authority DOES seem like a really interesting innovation. Just go ask some of my family members who lived overseas under regimes of hyperinflation just how valuable the idea that you could have a currency that no one controls is. But NBA TopShot? CNN clip ownerships? It seems to boggle my mind how that is related... AT ALL... to this potentially new property afforded by blockchains. Over centuries it seems we have evolved institutions, laws, etc., PRIMARILY to address this issue of trust. But rather than seeing web3 projects that seem to tackle issues where does institutions have failed, it seems everywhere I turn is just someone doing something that can be accomplished the good ol' fashion way but adding a crypto element to it because of the hype/FOMO/etc. I mean, take the topshop example... could the NBA really not have done that with just.... yknow... a database?!?!?

liotier 5y ago
> Just go ask some of my family members who lived overseas under regimes of hyperinflation just how valuable the idea that you could have a currency that no one controls is. They buy USD or EUR on the grey market. Buying BTC doesn't satisfy this use-case any better - except for remote transactions, for which only hawala is more efficient.
- RestlessMind 5y ago
  BTC allows their families overseas to easily transfer funds which is not that easy with USD or EUR. > for which only hawala is more efficient Hawala + bitcoin is as much or more efficient than Hawala + USD.
leppr 5y ago
There's crypto and then there's crypto grifters. Most of these projects have a crypto "theme", they're not "crypto" themselves. The central bank monetary policies of the past years have favored mindless investment, which allowed a flurry of projects to get outsized funding by sprinkling crypto pixie dust to get investments (just like so many did previously with "ML"). These 9-10 figure valuations don't bring them actual legitimacy from crypto people. This doesn't make them "crypto". A custodian exchange trading cryptocoins is not crypto, a custodian wallet helping celebrities buy NFTs is not crypto, a seller of collectible cards on a centralized DB like Flow that you can eventually maybe transfer to an actual decentralized network is not crypto. (same comment with "web3" instead of "crypto")

marc_io 5y ago

I found really amusing to see people posting quite strong and definitive opinions about something that is still very vague and, for all intents and purposes, not set in stone. It could be all of that, of course— until is not. It's a good example of pareidolia. Like seeing an elephant in a cloud. The moment you stop to comment on its features, it turns into a giraffe.

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louwrentius 5y ago

Bedankt voor dit artikel Koos, een tegengeluid tegen Web3 en crypto is altijd welkom.

aronpye 5y ago

Git is essentially web3 technology and was meant to be decentralized however, it all ended up being pretty centralized by a few players like GitHub. I envisage the same happening to ‘crypto’ type stuff like the use of exchanges, etc.

EGreg 5y ago

Almost everything web3-related is a grift based on getting people to buy crypto. Is this grift-based? https://qbix.com/token https://qbix.com/token You might think it is, after all it says “token” in it. But you’ll find, if you actually read it, that there is no token to buy, and it’s mostly about how to get the Web out from digitalism feudalism and to a free market. It discusses in detail the mechanisms by which digital content creators like video producers, artists, open source software developers (many of whom disrupted by the web, such as journalists) can monetize their work without using the government to go after copyright infringers. You think Web 2.0 wasn’t based on grift? It was based on WORSE than grift: VCs bought SHARES in the companies, then sold them to the public (sometimes after propping up bad unit economics and money-losing business models for years). The public (wall street investors) proceeded to demand that company management extract rents forever. Web 2.0 has led to some of the most centralized sites, we all have our public forums on privately owned sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, while our shopping and transactions are done on privately owned sites too. Actually they’re owned by “the public”, but they can’t vote Zuck out (they try every year) and anyway, Wall Street earnings demand that these sites NEVER give away their back end, NEVER decentralize it. At least with Web3, the code is open source and everything is decentralized. Compare Vitalik and Zuck. Vitalik doesnt need bodyguards, he isn’t essential to Ethereum’s operation. Is Ethereum dog-slow and expensive because it is built on blockchain? You betcha. Is blockchain a bad backend for most “web scale” things? YES. But crytocurrency and other types distributed systems (involving DHTs) are not. Look at BitTorrent, or FileCoin, or Holochain… but these are just babysteps. MaidSAFE is the next generation for files, and hopefully what we’re building at Intercoin is next-gen for actual transactions. Now that I have established that selling tokens may be better than shares (because founders only make money on the first sale and then the network should belong to the participants) I am wondering if it’s okay to post this for more information on what is ACTUALLY wrong with Web3: https://intercoin.org/presentation.pdf https://intercoin.org/presentation.pdf Again, I ask, where is the grift? We spent four years on this project so far. We barely raised any money (certainly compared to Telegram and Kik Messenger or EOS, but even compared to your average Web2 centralized web app startup.) We worked our butts off because we are passionate about a world where any community, github, website ir other project can release and manage their own cryptocurrency. We not only built the tech and user interfaces, but we met all the top people in the distributed space (including TimBL, Leslie Lamport) and made a forum and youtube channel where we explain smart contracts, interview people like Noam Chomsky, regulators, community currency economists. What more can we do with the tiny budget we have? So if we were to fund this project adequately, how would you recommend doing it? The VC + Web2 way of closed source backends and extreme centralization? We all see how well that turned out… Perhaps one day, we can live in a world where people have UBI and contribute to projects because they choose to, not because they are forced to survive and feed their family with no safety net. At Intercoin we are looking to build that world. But the only way UBI can be phased in everywhere, is if the communities pay it in their own currency. Hence the project.

blitz_skull 5y ago

Not related to the article itself, but would it kill the author’s site to have normal HTML scrolling and/or reader support? That was painful to scroll through.

KoosL 5y ago
There’s no scroll jacking whatsoever and I tested reader modes on several browsers. Could you tell me a bit more about the issues?

janci 5y ago

The usefulness of web3/crypto/blockchain is said to be in decentralization. However it is not the blockchain and crypto algorithm that enable decentralization. It is not even the distributed ledger. We do not need these things to be able to make distributed services. What we need is standard public interfaces. Take an example of NFTs. They are increasingly popular, even if they are meaningless tokens not representing ownership of physical item nor protecting against digital copies and distribution. What makes NFTs useful is that any token can be manipulated by any wallet/marketplace/exchange. This is enabled by using a standard ERC-721 interface. The interface is simple and well-designed. The adoption of the interface is high in crypto-software. Imagine all e-shops would implement the same public API for querying products, creating orders, calculating discounts and shipping prices and making payments. We would need no Amazon to be the largest e-commerce website. We would need no e-bay. Anyone would be able to make a product-selling website or one-off auction on they own or using a 3rd party service/hosting. And everyone would be able to use their preferred front-end. Aggregators and price comparators would be created, with no need for web scraping. The orders do not need to be on public immutable ledger, nor the payments. Every entity can implement the API on its own, host is on its own, but is not required to. Every entity can decide to use 3rd party implementation and/or hosting of the API. The same as with crypto tokens and smart contracts.

mdaniel 5y ago
> Imagine all e-shops would implement the same public API Very idealistic, but if you have ever heard the acronym "EDI" then it will become quickly apparent how incredibly fraught it is to try and map ones "local" taxonomy onto a "global standard" taxonomy. Let's just take https://schema.org/brand https://schema.org/brand -- should this property be the legal brand (Sony Interactive Entertainment Inc.), the marketing brand (Sony), some URI that everyone agrees upon and can readily look up from their desktop? What is the verification process a fivrr contractor can use at the end of their php work for Middleville Cakes and Cookies to know that the result conforms to the global taxonomy and thus will be consumed correctly by the aggregators and price comparison engines mentioned? I do recognize this may have a tone of "pfft, what a terrible idea" but I promise I don't mean it in such a dismissive way. I was similarly thrilled back when I learned about the semantic web, too. But having been down in the muck for as long as I have, trying to implement loosey-goosey specifications, has made me realize it's not the idea that's flawed, it's the assumption that all actors have good intentions, perfect knowledge, and infinite time to conform to perfect standards. And don't even get me wound up about the semantic law markup / legislation as code ... > with no need for web scraping. That will only ever be true in some mythical future where the HTML contains only presentation structure and is populated by the aforementioned public API. There are countless examples of some parts of the data being statically embedded in the HTML that are not part of the API response

EGreg 5y ago

The reason that so many people use the same websites (like Google’s, Facebook’s, etc) is mainly because of the convenience these sites offer and the reach they can provide. If this is a problem, it’s not a technical problem, but an economic one. The big companies have more design and programming capacity to offer online services than individuals and non-profit open source projects do right now. Is a lack of viable open source alternatives to Big Tech an economic problem only? Consider how quickly the Web itself disrupted the centralized networks of the day: AOL, MSN, CompuServe, Prodigy, … Consider how quickly VOIP collapsed the cost of telecommunications what the government for 50 years — with its regulations and breaking up monopolies — did not. Today we all take that for granted. Yes, tech that eliminates gatekeepers (switchboard operators, anyone? magazines, newspapers, radio…) brings costs toward zero and enables far more wealth creation than “privately owned” networks and infra. It creates far more of a free market, too, for those who like free markets. Web3 is far better than Web2 for all this. Does Blockchain suck for web scale things? Yes. But there are many other distributed systems. To me, “blockchain” isn’t essential to Web3. What is essential is “smart contracts” — or more generally — code that for the first time you can trust to do what it says. And who can vet it? A free market of worldwide experts that you can collectively trust. Just as Web 2 allowed anyone to deploy an HTTP website and anyome in the world could interact with it, similarly Web 3 allows doing that with growing numbers of real world applications like this: https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications

helen___keller 5y ago

I'm in that slice of the population that is captivated by the potential of crypto while disgusted by everything that it currently is. I would like to see more discussions around the theoretical limits of the value of web3 with regards to computing efficiency. Even the world's most efficient public blockchain would see a huge replication factor if it saw widespread adoption. The problem is, the larger the replication factor, the larger the inherent cost of compute, as limited by the energy it costs to replicate that compute. In other words, if AWS Lambda is priced at X% premium over the electricity consumed executing code, even the world's most efficient blockchain would be priced hundreds of times that premium if the blockchain is widely adopted/replicated; there is no free lunch, so if you have a distributed system replicating data across thousands of machines, then the people bidding to put data on those machines are paying for that replication. In other words, the pricing of running your application backend on a popular blockchain (say, Ethereum) will never ever be as cheap as running your application backend on a public cloud. In a broader sense, this means that the only data that shows up on a public chain is data considered "valuable", such as recording the transactions of cryptocurrency or NFTs or other pyramidal investments; never something silly and worthless, like a system for recording nontradable in-game achievement system. On the other hand, not every blockchain is popular. My belief is that IF web3 has a future, it will involve inter-chain protocols between many cooperative blockchains, and that compute will go into a chain that fits the value of the compute. For example, suppose I want to make an app that uses a microtransaction scheme on the order of pennies, e.g. you can tip 1 penny to an author or something like that. I'm obviously not using Ethereum because a transaction on Ethereum costs vastly more than 1 penny to record. However, a smaller chain with a replication factor of say 10 machines can probably handle 1 penny transactions with far less than a penny fee. Right now, there's no good way to treat blockchains themselves as fungible compute objects that are secured & priced based on their replication factor. Just as you wouldn't move a single penny on Ethereum, you also wouldn't move a million dollars in tokenized assets on a chain with only a few machines replicating. I think making an ecosystem of fungible blockchains, with the ability to easily transfer funds inter-chain[0], is going to be the next evolution of web3 that actually enables real consumer application backends to be hosted on the crypto universe. [0] This is something that's being worked on in a limited sense, e.g. the "Wormhole" project that allows you to tokenize and move assets between Ethereum and Solana and a few others

motohagiography 5y ago

These arguments aren't very good. While I'm not interested in Web3 outside a couple of use cases, the arguments against in the article make it more appealing because now I want to find how to take a bet that the author is wrong. The argument that blockchains and the associated protocols aren't decentralized reduces to anything happening between more than one counterparty is now defined as centralized, and that the correlation from co-ordinating their activities via a blockchain protocol means it's centralized. These are circular definitions. The climate argument against proof of work using electricity ignores how demand for electricity creates the economics for green tech innovation that actually solve the carbon problem. The article is another example of rhetorically exploiting basic human energy needs as a crisis narrative in support of levering in more centralized governance. As soon as we have viable geothermal and nuclear solutions, I'm pretty sure the climate people are going to move on from carbon and start militating against heat and entropy next. They don't want solutions, they just need an infinite conflict that they can be the managers of and gatekeepers to. Conflict is energy in politics, and so permanent revolution against some basic unresolvable conflict is a source of political justification to organize people against something. The nebulous, unsolvable crisis is the perpetual motion machine of political organizing, and it is as much of a fraud as a purported physical one. If you think cryptocurrency people are cynical grifters, may I introduce you to political activists. Their "narrative" is just a fancy euphemism for conspiring to lie. Whether it's useful to point this out or not, the quiet part of Web3 is it is clearly an "exit" from the hegemonic internet (hegemonet?), and they're inventing peaceful technological alternatives to what was essentially a managerialist putsch, co-opting, and occupation of the internet. The criticism in the article seems like just another vehicle for standard complaints and ingroup concern signalling. >Blockchains don’t solve the problems they’re supposed to solve. They do cause new problems though. There’s a huge negative climate impact associated with it. The miners buy so much hardware that it’s been affecting the availability of graphics cards for years now. It makes grifters rich. Just to name a few. The real objection to web3 reduces to the same old tropes about the wrong kind of people becoming financially independent and not having to be accountable to the narratives of political hucksters. Web3 is at the peak of it's hype cycle, so there isn't much to defend about it, but arguments like these against it seem like a straw man for the same old tropes.