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Is Web3 a Scam?
- pintxo 5y agoCould someone try to explain to me what "keep our digital identities sealed" even means?
- Kovah 5y agoCan anybody tell me why so many people think that Web 3 = NFTs + crypto currencies? NFTs and crypto currencies are a part of what people think the Web 3.0 will be, but they are definitely not synonyms. The author, however, seem to have did that.
- omgtehlion 5y agoBecause this is how "web3" is marketed (pushed) to masses...
- da-x 5y agoFor what I gather, Web3 is marketed as a 'generic ownership' ledger, i.e. not just for 'a replacement for money', which was the purpose for which cryptocurrencies were so far perceived in the mainstream public eye. How it connects to NFTs - investors putting real money into Web3 would want to hike on the supposed ability to invent assets out of thin air and sell supposed ownership on them for real money at a profit. There are many people wanting to own NFTs right now (even if many people equals to just %1 of all people and never about it). As for the legality of it, maybe we can think of it as being a scam as much as companies selling tamagotchis [1] in the 90's are or were a scam. It was somewhat in fashion to own one back then. At one point it was quite profitable to manufacture and sell them. However, now and possibly forever the volumes at the peak of the fad would never be restored. At least right now, in 2022, perhaps the current trend of owning an NFT collection and presenting it to others is somewhat driven by vanity in a similar way. Perhaps it's the future with NFTs. Can't say I agree with the present situation, and I'm kinda hoping people will find better things to do with their hard-owned money. [1] - A Brief History of Tamagotchi | Innovation | Smithsonian Magazine - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/keeping-tamagotchi-alive-180979264/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/keeping-tamagotchi...
- paganel 5y agoNot the author, but an article on web3 from earlier today that was shared in here was almost only focusing on NFTs + money (I guess crypto). I haven't followed the subject all that close but I can't say that I have read other descriptions of it, i.e. something that wasn't focused on how to make money.
- mypastself 5y agoYeah, the other article critical of Web3 currently on the frontpage (written by Moxie) tries to understand the technology and develop an actual thesis. This one is comparatively extremely shallow, and the author seems proud of his ignorance of the topic.
- stephen_g 5y agoBecause cryptocurrency and NFT people are the ones who came up with the current "web3" concept and are the ones pushing the whole thing. Personally, I expect the real "next-generation" of the web will turn out to be something different (who knows exactly what at this point though!), but this small set of people are trying to tie cryptocurrency and NFTs into the very definition of next-generation web.
- AniseAbyss 5y agoDesperate for a practical application of cryptocurrency. It's been what, 15 years? I'm still using € and $.
- beebmam 5y agoWhy be desperate? Cryptocurrencies are the dream of scammers and money launderers and criminals in general. Let them burn in hell
- toastal 5y agoThen someone drops in to remind this comment that USD and other paper is still preferred and less traceable. These arguments are always the same on both sides.
- xiphias2 5y agoI hear this all the time on HN, but when I meet people in real life who own cryptocurrencies, they are educated people with real jobs and too many things going on well for going into prison for crimes. Why is HN so different than my experience? Have you met a lot of criminals who own BTC?
- AniseAbyss 5y agoIt's not scamming. Was what Soros did with the British pound in the early 90s scamming? There are a lot of people who think they can swim with the sharks. Good luck with that.
- grey-area 5y agoCan you tell me what you think web3 is in concrete terms? What problems does it solve?
- Kovah 5y ago"The third Web" by Tante is a really great write-up: https://tante.cc/2021/12/17/the-third-web/ https://tante.cc/2021/12/17/the-third-web/
- alpha_squared 5y ago> One could write whole encyclopedias on the many different stacks of technologies that have been built on top of one another under the Web3 umbrella. Some Web3 people probably have. But for this piece we’ll focus on three technologies: First blockchain data structures, second a very specific artifact on blockchains called a non-fungible token (NFT) and third an organizational structure called a DAO. We’ll limit ourselves to this in order to keep this text somewhat brief and somewhat comprehensible for everyone. Does that mean web3 isn't "just blockchains and NFTs" but also DAOs? That doesn't seem all that different from the initial assumption of it broadly being about cryptocurrencies and NFTs.
- newacc9 5y agoI think the most charitable interpretation is a future where you don't have to "export your data" from facebook or google or fortnight, because your data is encrypted on the blockchain: your emails, your social graph, your avatar, your virtual real estate. fwiw I don't think you can provide enough bandwidth, disk space and computes to achieve this, but good luck. "85 terabytes per year is totally fine" -vitalik https://twitter.com/zndtoshi/status/1478387674335559681 https://twitter.com/zndtoshi/status/1478387674335559681
- cblconfederate 5y agoweb3 is a marketing term, and this is absolutely how it is marketed. TBH i think it is a good thing. Web3 and the finance bros that popularize it should die with it, and we should keep working with the truly decentralized fundamentals, not with intermediaries.
- chrisco255 5y agoThe term Web3 was coined by Gavin Wood, Co-founder of Ethereum and Polkadot as well as the Web3 Foundation (https://web3.foundation/about/ https://web3.foundation/about/). The crypto community is the biggest part of the push for it, so it's natural that people would make that connection. However, I consider any web tech that has user ownership or decentralization as a principle to be Web3. Some non-crypto examples would be Mastadon, Matrix, GunDB, and IPFS (although IPFS does have crypto-backed pinning services, such as Filecoin and Arweave, IPFS itself is agnostic to crypto).
- jasode 5y ago>NFTs and crypto currencies are a part of what people think the Web 3.0 will be, but they are definitely not synonyms. The author, however, seem to have did that. Regardless of the original or intended definitions of "Web3", it will end up being whatever the masses think it is. To recap some history: - "web3" circa ~2014 when coined by Gavin Wood covered 3 concepts without mentioning NFTs : (1) hash-ids of static content instead of urls (2) p2p encrypted messaging (3) consensus engine. (One of the earlier essays from 2014: https://gavwood.com/web3lt.html https://gavwood.com/web3lt.html) - "web3" circa ~2021 emphasizing the "token economy" (e.g. NFTs) popularized by Chris Dixon (a16z VC): this is the current news mania with celebrities selling jpgs, etc Therefore "web3==NFTs" narrative has overtaken the original Gavin Wood narrative. Analogous situation of evolution of terms was the "internet". In the 1980s, "internet" included Gopher, telnet, USENET, ftp. (E.g. I used to be able to telnet into public computers before all firewalls and Linux configs shut off telnet access.) But Gopher/USENET/etc faded and HTTP became the dominant idea of what "internet" is. NFTs now have constant press coverage of eye-popping sale amounts from celebrities and OpenSea founders are now paper billionaires. Therefore, NFTs dominate the meaning of "web3" because getting rich is more sexy to talk about than encrypted-p2p-communications-based-on-hash-identities.
- w_TF 5y agoalso the definition of an NFT becoming an ugly tradeable jpeg
- nudpiedo 5y agoHere is the why: At the moment NFTs + crypto cover up to 95% of web3’s marketing visible functionalities. Additionally no killer “app” has been shown to the public where it demonstrate an intangible value over previous technology, at least that the public understands it.
- amelius 5y agoLet's skip to Web4, where power consumption reduction and overconsumption reduction are the main drivers, not money.
- i386 5y agoIf you have to ask, then it is a scam.
- capableweb 5y agoThis seems incorrect very quickly. When the internet and the web was first encountered, lots of people asked themselves that question. Turns out, protocols and concepts aren't scams, it's people who do the scamming.
- IshKebab 5y agoI don't think anyone thought the internet was a scam. Some people thought it was useless, but that's different.
- wruza 5y agoI second this. Can't remember when anyone said that internet is a scam. Some people said "it's only usable as an electronic business card", meaning only the html/browser part of it.
- capableweb 5y agoNo, I remember clearly people in my environment claiming that the web was just to fool people for their money, spending it on things that are worth nothing in real life, like domains for example. Many claimed only criminals would use the internet, or "weird" people, because the rest of us are "normal" hard-working people that can use paper and documents just fine already.
- thinkingemote 5y agoThis is partly correct. Many people indeed thought that buying stuff on the internet was a scam. It was a common joke on TV and on newspapers. Why its partly correct is that the internet back then was almost entirely not about buying and selling things at all. It was information. Web3 seems today to be entirely about buying and selling. It seems to have none of the original web ideas about it but has the market at it's very centre. Where are the people on web3? Where are the forums, comments, discussions on the network? They are consumers, participants in a market. That is why it may not be a scam, but it is un-human.
- quickthrower2 5y agoWhy web3 not Web 3.0?
- egeozcan 5y agoBecause we never used the minor version and it doesn't have any practical value? I mean I dislike the giant ponzi scheme but they do have a cool name, I'll give them that.
- IshKebab 5y agoWhy `web` at all? As far as I can tell it has nothing to do with the web. Has anyone made a "dApp" that actually lets you run websites?
- wruza 5y agoWait, web is a form of networking, not "websites". This word got it's meaning from that word. "Web" means spider's web around the globe-like, not html page-like.
- IshKebab 5y agoIt's clearly refering to the same thing as web 1 and web 2.0 otherwise why the 3? Maybe they're trying to say "this is a better thing than the web"? But that doesn't make sense either because none of the applications can replace any aspect of the web as far as I can tell.
- tudorw 5y agoPersonally I like WW3 :)
- thinkingemote 5y agoWeb 2.0 was the crowd - all about people contributing and talking together online. Web3 is all about people buying and selling things. The bad smell is strong.
- fivefifty 5y ago
- kburman 5y agoWhen did web3 became cryto? I have seen a recent push on us about web3 being crypto. Is this some kind of propaganda?
- heckerhut 5y agoIt’s a rebranding that’s underway mostly driven by US actors having decided to make this mainstream in the next 3-5yrs. It’s pretty well executed, look at eg recent senate hearing with crypto high rollers
- factorialboy 5y agoWhere may I see the source code for the "Web3" TODO app? How complex is that source code? Are centralized APIs used in order to access the "decentralized" Ethereum blockchain?
- jstanley 5y ago> Are centralized APIs used in order to access the "decentralized" Ethereum blockchain? (I was looking at this stuff a few years ago, it may be different now). "web3" is an object provided to JavaScript by either the browser (e.g. Brave[0]) or a browser extension (e.g. MetaMask[1]). In the case of Brave it uses a local ethereum client to access the ethereum blockchain. In the case of MetaMask it uses MetaMask's centralised servers, but the API presented to the web page is the same in either case. Re the complexity of the TODO app: I don't know that a TODO app is particularly a good use case. But for comparison, I once wrote a toy Dapp that would handle escrow (i.e. person A makes a payment to person B, but it only goes through when person C allows it, alternatively person C can send it back to person A). It was maybe 20 lines of code for the smart contract and a similar amount for the user interface. [0] https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/ [1] https://metamask.io/ https://metamask.io/
- galaxyLogic 5y agoWeb3 will be a web where everyone has anonymous identity, meaning they are identified by their crypto-wallets. There is no need to authenticate yourself except once, to your crypto-wallet. You don't have to create accounts anywhere, your crypto-account is all you need. Of course you can have multiple separate identities, meaning multiple separate crypto-wallets, if you wish.
- pintxo 5y agowhats preventing you today to be anonymous on the internet?
- galaxyLogic 5y agoYou can be anonymous but you can't do much without creating accounts all over the place because companies want to know about you and get paid. But if you pay with crypto-currency you are in effect authenticated everywhere where crypto is accepted. Identity is history. You could have multiple separate "anonymous" identities on the web, but that is not the same thing as no identity because associated with each account there is history. Think about credit history. You want good credit history. You don't want anonymity. But banks etc. don't really care who is paying the bills as long as they are being paid on time your credit history gets better.
- adflux 5y agoIs that authentication watertight and if not, who will make sure that I can obtain a new password if I forget or lose the old one?
- wruza 5y agoIs that different from just having a keypair on a stick? I mean without this crypto currency appendix.
- soupshield 5y agoI find it a bit strange that in this system my identity is conflated with my wallet.
- aaccount 5y agoYes! and so is anything based on blockchain