16 ms·

On Web3 Infrastructure

134 points by cdata 5y ago

dsnr 5y ago
Let‘s hope web4 is around the corner with some real and useful innovation, so we can all stop taking about Ponzi schemes. I thought web3 was about to be about AI running the world, 5G mind control and IoT everywhere, now I hear it‘s about blockchain. Blockchain supporters stole a word once (crypto), now they’re trying to steal web3. I am disappointed.
- dystopiabreaker 5y ago
  You're doing the thing I wrote about in the first few paragraphs of the article. By the way, the largest academic cryptography group, IACR, was founded by people who were working on cryptocurrency before they founded it.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    And if modern web3 had even half the level of innovation as the 80's digicash stuff, people would probably object to it a lot less.
    - dystopiabreaker 5y ago
      yeah because then it wouldn't actually be doing anything
    - somebodythere 5y ago
      When people say stuff like this, I wonder what they think the state of the art in web3 innovation is. Do people just see the monkey JPGs and write off the whole technology?
      - egeozcan 5y ago
        Technology means nothing without a use case.
      - chimen 5y ago
        What do you see? I've just had a 2 hour conversation with someone trying to get me into this "business" without being able to articulate a single use case where NFTs actually make my day better in a way that is not currently possible with other tech so, yeah...what do you see? I see a whole new wave of fouls about to lose their money to ponzi schemes and over-hyped "investments", much like it happened with the bitcoin/crypto train. Just write NFT or crypto in Youtube and you immediately see all the sharks promising you millions in their videos, trying to manipulate you into investing - don't read the comments though, it's even worse. I see a lot of red flags and trouble for nothing. I hold crypto assets so I'm not talking out of my but here - I must confess; I've had no real benefits yet from this new tech. The crypto I hold is because one of my products has crypto as a payment method so I decided to just hold a piece of it and try to make use of "new tech".
        somebodythere 5y ago
        In the crypto space I'm most excited about the ability to have open projects where anyone who contributes can have a stake in the financial rewards of the project, and there are no barriers to becoming a contributor. A lot of the time the financial benefits of open-source contributors are fully captured by a "host" corporation, and open collaboration platforms for non-software projects like textbooks and IRL shared spaces are almost nonexistent. Proof-of-personhood a la BrightID is something that governments could theoretically provide, but most don't, and even if they did, there are serious privacy and interoperability concerns. SaaS companies trying to provide a free trial can prevent abuse by verifying unique personhood using web3 tech without needing to ask for any more information about the user. I'm sure you can think of other applications for that tech. Even if every government in the world provided this service, everyone who wants to use it either has to implement 195 different APIs or fork over money to a cottage industry whose sole job it is to unify those APIs. Finance and commerce on blockchains has a lot of real-world benefits that traditional finance can't or refuses to provide. You can't easily set up a 3-of-5 multisig for your photography club in traditional finance. A lot of normal people have their payments blocked or funds frozen in TradFi for arbitrary reasons. Sex workers get kicked off of platforms all the time, and a friend recently had their PayPal frozen while raising funds for a school reunion party. I'm not super into NFTs personally, but I can see them having a use case as a more consumer-friendly business model for gacha games and games with similar mechanics. There are probably other promising applications that I just don't know about because I don't follow that space very closely.
      - Zandikar 5y ago
        Pretty much actually. Most layman regard Web3 as a joke at best, and more often a scam. Most of those same people know little, if anything, about Web3 beyond a general association with crypto, regardless of whether that association is merited.
      - rezonant 5y ago
        When the advocates seem to focus on the monkey JPGs, it's not surprising. What do you think the state of the art in web3 innovation is?
      - bawolff 5y ago
        While personally i think the original satoshi paper was interesting, and some of the proof of stake stuff. If i'm being generous, some zero knowledge proof stuff. Its not really cryptocurrency,but cryptocurrency has caused attention to be drawn to it. Beyond that its all minor fixes and applications that are mildly interesting at best. So yeah, very little innovation, but please enlighten me if i missed something.
    - Ar-Curunir 5y ago
      Er blockchains are the largest deployments of non-trivial zero knowledge proofs, which are more advanced cryptography than anything used in traditional WebPKI crypto. This deployment has required tons of novel peer-reviewed (academic and industrial) research as well as massive engineering efforts to bring the tech to production. The result of these efforts is that ZKPs have gone from a academic curiosity to widely productionized tech. this stuff is beyond the wildest dreams of people like David Chaum.
      - betterunix2 5y ago
        Except that ZKPs had already seen real-world use before Satoshi's whitepaper was circulated; in fact, there was an already-defunct startup that was selling ZKP-driven authentication tech. Secure multiparty computation is even more advanced than ZKPs, was already deployed in several real-world applications prior to Bitcoin, and has probably driven more research on ZKPs (as a building block in MPC protocols) than anything in the blockchain space thus far. As for how widely productionized the technology is, while I am not sure how you define "non-trivial" ZKPs, U2F was almost certainly a more widely used ZKP application than any blockchain tech, and there are plenty more real-world ZKP applications having nothing to do with blockchains that we could list. David Chaum dreamed about a world where electronic payments could be anonymous and secure, but the demand was not there and his startup never took off. "Blockchain" sucked most of the oxygen out of the room when it comes to further work on ecash, which is unfortunate given that even the most technically complex ecash proposals were overwhelmingly more efficient than any blockchain-based payment tech ever could be. For what it's worth, the most recent ecash proposals also advanced the research on NIZKs and ZKPs more generally (it is actually hard to avoid some kind of NIZK in a system that supports offline payments) and had ecash been deployed more widely we probably would have seen at least as much research and productionization activity as we see in the blockchain space. On the other hand, blockchain research has struggled with a foundational question that does not present a problem for any of the technology I mentioned above: how to properly define security. Especially in the permissionless setting the effort on defining security has been unconvincing so far, requiring a very stretched approach to formalizing computational resources that is hard to actually map onto a real-world application. Satoshi did not start with a well-defined problem he was trying to solve with Bitcoin, and such an approach -- clearly identifying the problem you are actually trying to solve and verifying that the definition is logically consistent and realistic -- is exceedingly rare in the blockchain space, while in mainstream cryptography research it is a de facto requirement. So while blockchain tech has not experienced a spectacular failure due to some theoretical shortcomings, the theory itself is not well developed compared to the theory of cryptography in general (including ecash, which can be rigorously defined and proposed systems can be proved to satisfy the definition).
  - clippablematt 5y ago
    I’m glad to see pushback on the “crypto means cryptography” meme, which is really just an indicator they aren’t interested in the leading cryptographic research.
    - betterunix2 5y ago
      Well, let's see, the technical program for this year's RealWorldCrypto conference includes...side channel attacks, symmetric cryptography, privacy, attacks on privacy, cryptography for the ads industry, messaging, post-quantum crypto, threshold crypto, and zero knowledge proofs. Funny how Blockchain did not make the cut for a popular conference on practical applications of advanced cryptography. Looking through the CRYPTO'21 and EUROCRYPT'21 conferences, there is only one session between them involving "blockchain" and it is not even dedicated to the topic (it also includes papers related to law enforcement and privacy). This may be hard for blockchain enthusiasts to hear, but it is not really a hot topic among cryptographers. There was a bit of interest a few years ago as people tried to figure out if any good security definitions can be developed, and the results were not very convincing. Beyond that almost all the academic interest in block chains has focused on the "permissioned" setting where security can be defined in a meaningful and useful way. So, yes, "crypto means cryptography" and "blockchain" should refer to block cipher chaining modes.
  - betterunix2 5y ago
    "IACR, was founded by people who were working on cryptocurrency" This is extremely misleading. IACR was proposed by David Chaum in 1982, a year before his first paper on ecash, and its first board members in 1983 included Whitfield Diffie (who had not done any work on payments) among others. Chaum's ecash ideas look nothing like "cryptocurrency" as it exists today, nor do any of the ideas presented in subsequent research on the topic. The person you replied to correctly pointed out that "crypto" was coopted by the blockchain space and is now being used to mean any number of distributed systems technologies. I have seen people wearing t-shirts saying things like "crypto means cryptography" and making jokes about reclaiming "blockchain" to refer to block chaining modes at various cryptography conferences (many organized by IACR) over the past decade. Moxie was right when he quipped that the "crypto" spaec involves very limited use of actual cryptography.
    - dystopiabreaker 5y ago
      crypto was not co-opted. FAANGies just got stuck on a WebPKI side quest. leading research in the field is being done by blockchain companies. you don't have to believe me, try reading ePrint. cryptocurrency people lead the research in zk proof systems and more. the idea that the crypto space doesn't use cryptography is absolutely laughable
      - betterunix2 5y ago
        Some interesting research is being done by some cryptocurrency companies like ZCash and Algorand. Their work on ZKPs and SNARKs has been interesting, but it is worth pointing out that they are not the only people working on this. Moreover, the serious cryptographers working on anything related to blockchains have more or less stopped talking about the permissionless setting (where Bitcoin, Ethereum, and basically all of the popular blockchains in use are) because security is too hard to define in a meaningful way. In the "permissioned" setting where parties have well-known identities there has been a bit of interesting research on maintaining a shared cryptographic data structure. Meanwhile, academic and (non-blockchain) industry researchers have been pushing the state of the art in every subfield within cryptography, ZKPs included. Big companies have been deploying MPC as a means of addressing privacy concerns and regulation, and the cryptographers working on that (full disclosure: I am one of them) have been pretty active in publishing their work. Academic researchers have further advanced the results and addressed the problems raised by industry researchers, sometimes breathing new life into almost-forgotten lines of research (like set intersection protocols). So sure, I can grant you that there has been some interesting work on cryptography within the blockchain space, but it is not nearly as exciting and significant as you suggest. I actually have a lot of respect for the ZCash team, whose work really is top-notch and who I see (or saw pre-COVID) at high-quality conferences like CRYPTO and RWC. On the other hand they are a small and very unique team within both the blockchain ecosystem and the cryptography research community, and their research work is only nominally related to blockchains (it is inspired by an application that did not even require a blockchain in the first place). Beyond the ZCash and a few other groups with serious cryptographers the blockchain space is a desert in terms of interesting cryptography.
- mads 5y ago
  Did you just coin the term web4?
  - dsnr 5y ago
    I take no credit for it.
- paraknight 5y ago
  Web3 (or rather Web 3.0) used to mean Tim Berner-Lee's semantic web (RDF etc).
somebodythere 5y ago
"Man, Mozilla Persona was cool, shame it got shut down. Wish someone would bring it back." > cryptographic identity layer emerges with good UX and application support, and an optional economic layer and users aren't screwed when Mozilla inevitably drops support "wait no not like that"
magicjosh 5y ago
"Light clients" is a term I've learned of recently. In the article, what are the specifics around "storage, bandwidth, and computation costs" for such a client? Is the idea we could all just have light clients running in the background on our phones with near zero impact?
- dystopiabreaker 5y ago
  for proof of stake, the cost is roughly: - download a hash-sized state root every block - download the set of validator signatures over that hash and verify each signature against the hash. if using aggregation-friendly curve, download the aggregate signature and verify it against the root. - for each state fragment, download the merkle uncles and compute the root hash and verify that it is the same as that signed off by the validator set. so yes, easily within resource limits for having them running all the time with near zero impact. Find My has comparable impact.
  - magicjosh 5y ago
    fascinating thank you. The Find My analogy is thought provoking - a background service that creates a useful network. What does the light client world look like once complete, I wonder
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    That would be the full process but once you've done this once couldn't you just pickup where you left off and just update new entries?
- threeseed 5y ago
  > Is the idea we could all just have light clients running in the background on our phones with near zero impact? That's the idea. The reality however is that will never happen unless both Apple and Google are fully signed up to Web3 and incorporate the clients as part of the OS. And I don't see a single reason why they would do that when it would compromise their billion dollar payment revenue streams.
rhynlee 5y ago
I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed reading this since I read the post that it's responding to earlier this week. Found it really refreshing to see this discussion develop that way, and in plain english. I was indeed left wondering if there was a solution to the lazy user aspect for widespread adoption of crypto/web3, since it did seem to be a complete blocker for widespread practical adoption. Neat to learn about light clients and zk-SNARKs!
- magicjosh 5y ago
  agreed the author has a great way of making complex topics more approachable. I wonder if there's a good/simple explanation of zkSnarks out there, I don't have any idea what they are despite seeing the term often.
  - somebodythere 5y ago
    https://medium.com/@imolfar/why-and-how-zk-snark-works-1-introduction-the-medium-of-a-proof-d946e931160 https://medium.com/@imolfar/why-and-how-zk-snark-works-1-int... this resource helped me a lot, it is somewhat technical but should be accessible to someone reading HN
    - magicjosh 5y ago
      Thank you! The introduction section got me super excited in the application of zk-snarks. Any other articles more like the intro section? The rest of the article lost me quickly, not beyond my ability but would take me 10x reading through and multiple days. Re-posting the part I loved here in case others want to read: Zero-knowledge proofs are advantageous in a myriad of application, including: 1) Proving statement on private data: Person A has more than X in his bank account In the last year, a bank did not transact with an entity Y Matching DNA without revealing full DNA One has a credit score higher than Z 2) Anonymous authorization: Proving that requester R has right to access web-site’s restricted area without revealing its identity (e.g., login, password) Prove that one is from the list of allowed countries/states without revealing from which one exactly Prove that one owns a monthly pass to a subway/metro without revealing card’s id 3) Anonymous payments: Payment with full detachment from any kind of identity [Ben+14] Paying taxes without revealing one’s earnings 4) Outsourcing computation: Outsource an expensive computation and validate that the result is correct without redoing the execution; it opens up a category of trustless computing Changing a blockchain model from everyone computes the same to one party computes and everyone verifies
threeseed 5y ago
> Infrastructure providers can lie to the user about blockchain state Lying implies wilful deception. Instead what ALL providers will eventually do is implement moderation. And they will do so because (a) they will be legally required to and (b) it makes users happy. And unless the spec can address this requirement Web3 isn't really going to scale. And we've already seen such moderation with OpenSea so this isn't some contrived situation.
- dystopiabreaker 5y ago
  this is like saying that TLS won't work because of moderation
  - threeseed 5y ago
    TLS is simply about securing the transport between two parties: a client and a server. It isn't trying to force all servers to return an identical response like Web3 is.
    - dystopiabreaker 5y ago
      i have worked on both TLS and blockchain tech for years. my point is that the purpose of the security architecture proposed in the article is to authenticate data from the chain. this is a protocol-level detail: like TLS secures transport between a client and a server, light clients authenticate data between a validator set and a user. whether a particular person or group decides to use such a protocol, or if they decide to censor data, is a separate concern.
- Ar-Curunir 5y ago
  The proposed light client stuff solves exactly this; they can’t lie about inclusion of a piece of data.
root_axis 5y ago
I'm dismissively cynical with respect to the future of "web3", but for the most part I can appreciate the tone taken by this article; no defensiveness, no condescending suggestions that the critics "just don't get it", but most importantly, acknowledgement that these are real problems and a willingness to engage with the specifics of the criticisms outlined, without hedging. I remain unconvinced, but I think the discussion around blockchains would be a lot less heated if the rhetoric from the enthusiasts was typically this measured. Yes, I recognize I'm putting the onus on the enthusiasts and letting the cynics off the hook, but the enthusiasts are the ones claiming to herald the next iteration of the web, that's a haughty claim for an already controversial technology.
- vmception 5y ago
  The builders talk this measured way. Hang out with more of them, while they’re building and where they build. Join discussions where draft standards are being ratified or tabled. There isn't really a world where any of this goes away, so the voyeuristic and quizzical approach doesn't work, there is a world where updates push it in a more relatable direction. That might be the biggest pill for cynics to swallow, that there is no convincing them thats going to happen and they’ll wind up contributing to its resiliency anyway.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    > There isn't really a world where any of this goes away Why not? Technologies rise and fall in unpredictable ways. I'll admit that there is a lot of energy to web3 - its not a minor passing fad. However that's still a long way from being inevitable. Honestly, whole thing reminds me of how communism is going to "bury us".
    - vmception 5y ago
      I’m not familiar with how your last line applies. The main answer is that these concepts dont go away and will continue even in a world without ubiquitous internet as making a couple computers communicate doesnt go away.
alexjurkiewicz 5y ago
But I think this article missed the major concern Moxie raised about "blockchain API platforms". They will out innovate their base protocols and deliver a better UX. Light clients are a great example. They are only efficient compared to running a full node yourself. The computation and time is still far below relying on a platform to do it for you.
- dystopiabreaker 5y ago
  people said the same thing about TLS
  - duskwuff 5y ago
    No, they didn't.
    - dystopiabreaker 5y ago
      I'm pretty sure that you can pop down to the search bar and type "TLS too inefficient" and see that, in fact, they did. there was a large period of time where TLS was not widely deployed and where it was viewed as not likely to be deployed, due to marginal performance reasons
      - MattPalmer1086 5y ago
        True, the overhead of TLS is relatively much lower than it was. It turned out we all really need the greater security. So we got hardware AES acceleration for example. But this example misses the more general point that protocols always evolve more slowly than platforms. It's not really a good example. Platforms aren't in competition with layer 3 network protocols. The examples Moxie gave were layer 7 application protocols.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
egeozcan 5y ago
> if your only answer is dismissal and anger, you’re actually just ceding the power to decide what these technologies will look like in our world I mean, if I'm dismissing it, it means that I don't believe that anything meaningful could come out of it, doesn't it? At that point, why "power to decide what these technologies will look like in our world" should have any role in my decision process? > these technologies are not going to go away There are a lot of harmful, useless, irrelevant, etc. technologies which won't go away. So this wouldn't be surprising. But if someone is trying to articulate that these technologies will create a revolution of some sorts, most people will need better convincing. Show me the value, where's the ??? value!
- Xyit 5y ago
  I think the tone of the author is that distributed ledger/blockchain/crypto/web3/monke ponzi- however any individual chooses to interpret this “cultural and monetary shift”- is in reality the future. And those who respond with indifference and denial of that reality, much like a person in your position, will have no say or power within the new system. That’s the voice of the author I believe. Not mine. As to the value, well I’d say you can only change when you’re ready to change. This applies to vision of value as well.
  - dystopiabreaker 5y ago
    >And those who respond with indifference and denial of that reality, much like a person in your position, will have no say or power within the new system. that wasn't my point. my point is that this technology shows no sign of slowing down, so by just angrily and reflexively dismissing it critics are throwing away an opportunity to make real, constructive criticism like Moxie did here at a time when it could make the most impact.
    - magicjosh 5y ago
      Save your words for people who want to hear it! The people like me who really need your communications are starving for it. People who are already bought in and want quality content aren't getting much. This is a risk to the long term adoption of crypto. My sources are few. I get a few crumbs on /ethfinance, and some nice nuggets from this thread, but there's just so much crap and snark to wade through it's almost not worth it.
ur-whale 5y ago
Slightly OT, but - aside from a couple of outlier commenters - THANK YOU to both the OP for bringing the conversation around "web3" (not a fan of the term myself) back to a level where actual information is exchanged and proper discourse, for and against, seems to happen. This is really refreshing.
janimo 5y ago
Much more thoughtful than yesterday's blog post addressing Moxie's concerns. I wonder if the quality of conversations around this subject were improved if similarly to conflicts of interest declared by scientific paper authors, each public critic or supporter of web3 would disclose whether they are currently financially invested in 'crypto'. For outsiders it's harder to tell apart hacker/geek types from speculators and lurkers (not that there couldn't be an overlap). The fact that this article mentions there exist much fewer Ethereum nodes than "Ethereum nerds" may suggest that the non-technical group controls the public discourse and expectations.
- Ar-Curunir 5y ago
  It depends on who you’re reading: people building actual products and protocols will usually provide measured responses and be able to engage properly with good-faith criticism. See also Vitalik’s Reddit post responding to Moxie’s article. On the other hand, if you encounter primarily spammers, speculators, and scammers, you’ll just get garbage (similar to anti-blockchain grifters that repeat the same “blockchain is a ponzi pyramid earth-burning scam” garbage repeatedly)
  - magicjosh 5y ago
    An inverse relationship here. The builders are busy building stuff and don't spend much time on communications. Whereas speculators, all they have is communications, and there are many more speculators than builders, so the incentives look like 99% crap, 1% useful communications. Props to builders like the OP, Moxie, and Vitalik for building and sharing. And to podcasts like Bankless for creating venues for communication from builders. I'd love to find a "Builders" cryptocurrency podcast.
    - Ar-Curunir 5y ago
      Look at the ZeroKnowledge podcast; it’s fantastic and has no scammy bullshit
      - 5y ago
raytube 5y ago
About running your own servers. I would happily do this, if... , security concerns were less of a worry. Ideas like Opera's inbuilt web server and other peer to peer technologies are appealing, Alongside nearside hosting. But it all comes down to simplicity of use. And how easy it is to setup. Grid computing makes a lot of sense but you need a simple framework, with safeguards.
- jonnycomputer 5y ago
  By running own servers, do you mean the hardware, or would using something like a linode count? So I use linode to host a mattermost instance, and its been mostly a trouble free experience, and I enjoy tinkering around in linux anyway. But most people aren't like that, I admit. And I don't even own the hardware; that's a whole other level of responsibility that I don't particularly want. And the $7/mo I spend on my linode is basically two cups of Pike's. Windows is a powerful operating system; but my experience has been that non tech-saavy people repeatedly run into obstacles using it, or end up with malware installed, etc. That's why the walled gardens of iOS and Android have been so successful. Relatively safe (yes, I know, but still), and largely intuitive. Grandpa can use it. So, if we want wide adoption of people "running their own servers", then it needs to follow the UX and security-managed approach of mobile OSs. Walled garden server software; limited options, user-friendly UX for non-professionals. Well, in some ways, the SaaS cloud approach solves this, right? You just need user-friendly apps--probably mobile first--to interface them, and designed with the non-tech savvy consumer in mind.
  - raytube 5y ago
    Yeah that's what I am getting at. If it was user friendly without risk you might. I could put a pi on my home connection, but don't want that as an attack vector to my network. That's a flaw. But much like web coding, there are vulnerabilities whatever you do and however much time you spend securing it. Redhat had a cartridge deploy system. A good attempt at appyfying the server space. The one click installs. Plesk has one click installs for a wealth of software, but I never use these, why? Email is a good example. In our organisation we originally ran out own SMTP server. These days would I? And if not why not? I used to sit next to the mail server in the late 90s and read the logs. For very personal email I could host my own, and that's very tempting. But the other half of the conversation might well be eavesdropped. Then there is backup mitigation. And multi endpoint. I still haven't worked out the multi device thing for something like signal. With email I can have multi clients access my server. But again backup mitigation issues and privacy. And hassle. Strip out the hassle and I would like easy cloud deployables given secure trust. I don't want a host trading personal messaging. Of course there is so much current friction, I just trade it all in for convenience.
qaq 5y ago
I think the biggest problem that is never addressed has little to do with tech. There has being numerous pushes before to go decentralized and privacy focused but general public never cared.
imiric 5y ago
I think the focus on specific technologies and buzzwords is the wrong approach to drive the web forward. Instead, we should focus on specific problems we want to solve for users of the current iteration. A non-exhaustive list in no specific order: - Users should be in control of the data they produce and consume. No single centralized entity should have this right over its users, and regulations like the GDPR and cookie consent forms shouldn't exist. - Advertisements and adtech is hostile to the user experience. The web should have alternative monetization options that are easy to integrate for web developers, and establish a direct market between content consumers and content producers, with no middlemen. - Web services should be versioned and users should have the choice of which version they want to use. Companies shouldn't be given the freedom to e.g. change feed algorithms on a whim based on some obscure A/B test. Users shouldn't be forced to use the latest version of applications, and it should be easy for web developers to support several active versions in production. Opera made a step in the right direction by bundling a web server many years ago with Opera Unite, but that went nowhere and was quickly abandoned. BitTorrent, WebTorrent and WebRTC sort of feel like building blocks towards empowering the user, but despite of the prevalence and stability of the technologies, no big user friendly app is built on top of them. Brave Inc.'s Basic Attention Token is probably the best effort towards fixing the monetization aspect, but is tied to one specific browser, one specific currency, and built by a company that's done several missteps and has lost the trust of many users along the way. Then, of course, is the blockchain, the distributed utopia, and hype around "crypto" everyone seems to be discussing. There are good ideas here as well, muddled by many issues specific to these technologies that should be addressed. IMO, web3 should be some combination of all of these and new technologies that empower the user, and make the web friendlier for the current user base and welcoming to the other 40% of the world which is still not online. Otherwise corporations will continue to rule the web while people who can improve it are stuck in perpetual analysis paralysis.
- badestrand 5y ago
  > Users should be in control of the data they produce and consume. For me this is the most exciting promise of web3. But do blockchains really solve this? Where will user data be stored? Say, the comments we write here on HN, will they be stored on-chain? Or all things I publish on CryptoFacebook, are they all on-chain? Would be great to have that answered because I was not able to figure it out so far. Then I don't see the privacy problematic solved. As everything is tied to my wallet, this means that all my data is public. So after I send a friend a bit of lunch money he can see my wallet address and thus can check my subscriptions on CryptoOnlyFans, can see which words I am learning on CryptoDuoLingo and at which times of the day I am learning etc etc. Obviously this is horrific from a privacy aspect so how do we keep data private while it still being public?
rezonant 5y ago
> you’re actually just ceding the power to decide what these technologies will look like in our world I ceded the power to decide what AMP would look like, as did a lot of others. Thankfully enough others joined me, and AMP is more or less irrelevant now, and I'm happy for it.
rambambram 5y ago
> These critiques are usually unmoored to anything actually happening in the blockchain space Then call it just that: blockchain space. Why web3? I think because the 'web' part of web3 needs to be attached to this idea of blockchain and distributed ledger to give it a sense of fairness and legitimacy. I'm not saying blockchain or distributed ledgers are bad, I know way too little about that to judge it accurately. It's just that the name 'web3' irks me a lot. Maybe it has something to do with the 'web 2.0' that promised golden mountains, but eventually just F'd everybody in the A. Just add another number to the name and all the sh1t is forgotten, it seems. Here's a blank screen for you all, please start painting the same pictures.
- bidder33 5y ago
  as the article mentioned, web3 was a term coined back in 2014. It was very much a reaction to "web2.0" silicon valley years which was probably felt a lot stronger back then. the term flew under the radar for a while, but the past six months people suddenly got annoyed by it.
- rezonant 5y ago
  What's frustrating for me is that there is clearly a place for a new vision for the web beyond what the "Web 2.0" vision provided: client-first rich web applications that offered desktop-like capabilities. Along with that are the social/centralization/managed "pros/cons" that a lot of commenters decry. But this was the economic model, not the technical one. "Web 3.0" should be indeed be about decentralization-- but more in the sense of building applications that take advantage of the enhanced client abilities and de-emphasize central control. The colloqiual term is the "Fediverse". The modern web has brought about offline support (ServiceWorker), multi-processing (Web Workers), local capabilities (Filesystem API, local/DB storage, peripheral APIs) interprocess communication (Broadcast Channels), peer to peer (via disinterested party HTTP/WebSockets coordination), verifiable privacy via encryption, backend server federation (see Mastodon, Matrix, diaspora, PeerTube, etc). Web 3.0 already exists, we just hadn't named it yet, but there's so much more there to be built.
  - qwertyforce 5y ago
bawolff 5y ago
Most of this article is about the same solutions that are always proposed (wake me up when people actually use them and they actually solve the problem at hand.) To me the most damning part of the article is: > These critiques are usually unmoored to anything actually happening in the blockchain space, and unaware of the technological development and cultural vision. This bifurcation is extremely harmful for the health of the emerging technologies: these technologies are not going to go away, so if your only answer is dismissal and anger, you’re actually just ceding the power to decide what these technologies will look like in our world. This pattern of discourse creates a negative-sum feedback loop that does a disservice to all. Quite frankly, if web3 really was all its cracked up to be, enthusiasists wouldn't be so offended anytime someone "didn't get it". After all, if it really was gold, they would be too busy making cool things and the results would speak for themselves. As the author says, those who ignore something ceede power to those who show up. But why would the people who show up be so offended that people are giving them power? If it was actually valuable wouldn't they want it for themselves? Every time someone criticizes cryptocurrency, its always the same refrain: people are wrong to be negative. All the bad vibes will turn your heart black, etc. That's what cults say, not what people with viable tech say.
- rezonant 5y ago
  > Every time someone criticizes cryptocurrency, its always the same refrain: people are wrong to be negative. All the bad vibes will turn your heart black, etc. That's what cults say, not what people with viable tech say. True. In reality the "bad vibes" are just folks trying to find a consensus on where this technology belongs- if you can't communicate the benefits of the tech in a convincing way, it's not everyone else's fault.
  - mwattsun 5y ago
    "If something is too early to criticize it's also too early to evangelize" Kelsey Hightower @kelseyhightower, Jan 2, 2022
- telxosser 5y ago
  Spot on. Build Web3 and if it is great as you say it is I will use it. What else is there to discuss?
thinkingemote 5y ago
It's just money and the market, it's not about decentralisation as a good thing for people, it's about making money. That's why people will split hairs about the infrastructure and technology and miss the forest which is about selling stuff.
gandutraveler 5y ago
Can we just call this "Web3Candidate" & stop allowing few groups to hijack the term 'web3' before there is consensus and wide adoption. Because when this craze dies and a real replacement of web2 arrives we will have to skip to web4 and I'll have to explain to my future kids what a wasteful hustle web3 was.
agentultra 5y ago
> These critiques are usually unmoored to anything actually happening in the blockchain space Critics are unmoored? This technology is inevitable? I don't believe that's true. It seems to me that it might find a niche in the corner of the Internet and eventually be forgotten by all but the most ardent followers. Many countries are banning cryptocurrencies for many of the reasons critics have been rightfully skeptical. I can't imagine why that trend will stop.
- dadoge 5y ago
  Which countries are banning crypto? China Guess what else they banned: Google Twitter Facebook …
- dylkil 5y ago
  >Many countries are banning cryptocurrencies How many times has china banned bitcoin now, 20?
sbacha 5y ago
For what it's worth, sushiswap isn't using Infura or AlchemyAPI, rather its own api.sushirelay.com to serve mainnet RPC requests. Also, a large number of projects utilize TheGraph (GraphQL indexer for specific protocol/DApps). These are run by teams or out-sourced to the lowest cost service provider (staking pools, etc). re: https://thegraph.com/hosted-service/subgraph https://thegraph.com/hosted-service/subgraph If you are interested in using/rolling your own RPC infrastructure, here are the minimal JSON RPC methods required to support most DApps: https://github.com/sambacha/minimal-jsonrpc-dapp-methods https://github.com/sambacha/minimal-jsonrpc-dapp-methods The real bottleneck is reliance on web browser extensions (namely Chrome's V2, which this January is depreciated and no longer accepting new submissions.) for providing safe key management. Another example is having to poll for RPC updates.
127 5y ago
Is it just me or is any and all "Web3" "blockchains" just regulatory arbitrage to fly under the radar of the local government to enable more innovation?
- dylkil 5y ago
  From a first principles perspective what they really do and do well is remove trust from the equation. Regulations are setup mainly in situations where a central party has wholly control over something and we cant trust to not fuck us over.
  - 127 5y ago
    But Web3 is very much centralized, and increasingly going into that direction.
    - dylkil 5y ago
      How are you measuring that
cbtacy 5y ago
A serious question which I hope people will truly consider and not just downvote me for asking.... What is the Venn overlap between web3 promoters and techno-libertarians? In other words, is web3 first and foremost a political movement driven by political beliefs and values?
heckerhut 5y ago
It’s so easy to fix. Clients can verify signed content delivered by servers. It will be implemented by any application where users care enough. From then on it will be standardized and become abundant. The criticism is justified but beside the point.
kybernetikos 5y ago
I'm not expert here, but it only took me a fairly short amount of time to find out how to do geth --syncmode light --http --ws See it sync and set metamask to talk to it. Sure, the UX isn't ideal, but the claim that it's impossible seems unfair. Maybe there are cryptographic concerns I'm missing?

134 points by cdata 5y ago

dsnr 5y ago

Let‘s hope web4 is around the corner with some real and useful innovation, so we can all stop taking about Ponzi schemes. I thought web3 was about to be about AI running the world, 5G mind control and IoT everywhere, now I hear it‘s about blockchain. Blockchain supporters stole a word once (crypto), now they’re trying to steal web3. I am disappointed.

dystopiabreaker 5y ago
You're doing the thing I wrote about in the first few paragraphs of the article. By the way, the largest academic cryptography group, IACR, was founded by people who were working on cryptocurrency before they founded it.
- bawolff 5y ago
  And if modern web3 had even half the level of innovation as the 80's digicash stuff, people would probably object to it a lot less.
  - dystopiabreaker 5y ago
    yeah because then it wouldn't actually be doing anything
  - somebodythere 5y ago
    When people say stuff like this, I wonder what they think the state of the art in web3 innovation is. Do people just see the monkey JPGs and write off the whole technology?
    - egeozcan 5y ago
      Technology means nothing without a use case.
    - chimen 5y ago
      What do you see? I've just had a 2 hour conversation with someone trying to get me into this "business" without being able to articulate a single use case where NFTs actually make my day better in a way that is not currently possible with other tech so, yeah...what do you see? I see a whole new wave of fouls about to lose their money to ponzi schemes and over-hyped "investments", much like it happened with the bitcoin/crypto train. Just write NFT or crypto in Youtube and you immediately see all the sharks promising you millions in their videos, trying to manipulate you into investing - don't read the comments though, it's even worse. I see a lot of red flags and trouble for nothing. I hold crypto assets so I'm not talking out of my but here - I must confess; I've had no real benefits yet from this new tech. The crypto I hold is because one of my products has crypto as a payment method so I decided to just hold a piece of it and try to make use of "new tech".
      - somebodythere 5y ago
        In the crypto space I'm most excited about the ability to have open projects where anyone who contributes can have a stake in the financial rewards of the project, and there are no barriers to becoming a contributor. A lot of the time the financial benefits of open-source contributors are fully captured by a "host" corporation, and open collaboration platforms for non-software projects like textbooks and IRL shared spaces are almost nonexistent. Proof-of-personhood a la BrightID is something that governments could theoretically provide, but most don't, and even if they did, there are serious privacy and interoperability concerns. SaaS companies trying to provide a free trial can prevent abuse by verifying unique personhood using web3 tech without needing to ask for any more information about the user. I'm sure you can think of other applications for that tech. Even if every government in the world provided this service, everyone who wants to use it either has to implement 195 different APIs or fork over money to a cottage industry whose sole job it is to unify those APIs. Finance and commerce on blockchains has a lot of real-world benefits that traditional finance can't or refuses to provide. You can't easily set up a 3-of-5 multisig for your photography club in traditional finance. A lot of normal people have their payments blocked or funds frozen in TradFi for arbitrary reasons. Sex workers get kicked off of platforms all the time, and a friend recently had their PayPal frozen while raising funds for a school reunion party. I'm not super into NFTs personally, but I can see them having a use case as a more consumer-friendly business model for gacha games and games with similar mechanics. There are probably other promising applications that I just don't know about because I don't follow that space very closely.
    - Zandikar 5y ago
      Pretty much actually. Most layman regard Web3 as a joke at best, and more often a scam. Most of those same people know little, if anything, about Web3 beyond a general association with crypto, regardless of whether that association is merited.
    - rezonant 5y ago
      When the advocates seem to focus on the monkey JPGs, it's not surprising. What do you think the state of the art in web3 innovation is?
    - bawolff 5y ago
      While personally i think the original satoshi paper was interesting, and some of the proof of stake stuff. If i'm being generous, some zero knowledge proof stuff. Its not really cryptocurrency,but cryptocurrency has caused attention to be drawn to it. Beyond that its all minor fixes and applications that are mildly interesting at best. So yeah, very little innovation, but please enlighten me if i missed something.
  - Ar-Curunir 5y ago
    Er blockchains are the largest deployments of non-trivial zero knowledge proofs, which are more advanced cryptography than anything used in traditional WebPKI crypto. This deployment has required tons of novel peer-reviewed (academic and industrial) research as well as massive engineering efforts to bring the tech to production. The result of these efforts is that ZKPs have gone from a academic curiosity to widely productionized tech. this stuff is beyond the wildest dreams of people like David Chaum.
    - betterunix2 5y ago
      Except that ZKPs had already seen real-world use before Satoshi's whitepaper was circulated; in fact, there was an already-defunct startup that was selling ZKP-driven authentication tech. Secure multiparty computation is even more advanced than ZKPs, was already deployed in several real-world applications prior to Bitcoin, and has probably driven more research on ZKPs (as a building block in MPC protocols) than anything in the blockchain space thus far. As for how widely productionized the technology is, while I am not sure how you define "non-trivial" ZKPs, U2F was almost certainly a more widely used ZKP application than any blockchain tech, and there are plenty more real-world ZKP applications having nothing to do with blockchains that we could list. David Chaum dreamed about a world where electronic payments could be anonymous and secure, but the demand was not there and his startup never took off. "Blockchain" sucked most of the oxygen out of the room when it comes to further work on ecash, which is unfortunate given that even the most technically complex ecash proposals were overwhelmingly more efficient than any blockchain-based payment tech ever could be. For what it's worth, the most recent ecash proposals also advanced the research on NIZKs and ZKPs more generally (it is actually hard to avoid some kind of NIZK in a system that supports offline payments) and had ecash been deployed more widely we probably would have seen at least as much research and productionization activity as we see in the blockchain space. On the other hand, blockchain research has struggled with a foundational question that does not present a problem for any of the technology I mentioned above: how to properly define security. Especially in the permissionless setting the effort on defining security has been unconvincing so far, requiring a very stretched approach to formalizing computational resources that is hard to actually map onto a real-world application. Satoshi did not start with a well-defined problem he was trying to solve with Bitcoin, and such an approach -- clearly identifying the problem you are actually trying to solve and verifying that the definition is logically consistent and realistic -- is exceedingly rare in the blockchain space, while in mainstream cryptography research it is a de facto requirement. So while blockchain tech has not experienced a spectacular failure due to some theoretical shortcomings, the theory itself is not well developed compared to the theory of cryptography in general (including ecash, which can be rigorously defined and proposed systems can be proved to satisfy the definition).
- clippablematt 5y ago
  I’m glad to see pushback on the “crypto means cryptography” meme, which is really just an indicator they aren’t interested in the leading cryptographic research.
  - betterunix2 5y ago
    Well, let's see, the technical program for this year's RealWorldCrypto conference includes...side channel attacks, symmetric cryptography, privacy, attacks on privacy, cryptography for the ads industry, messaging, post-quantum crypto, threshold crypto, and zero knowledge proofs. Funny how Blockchain did not make the cut for a popular conference on practical applications of advanced cryptography. Looking through the CRYPTO'21 and EUROCRYPT'21 conferences, there is only one session between them involving "blockchain" and it is not even dedicated to the topic (it also includes papers related to law enforcement and privacy). This may be hard for blockchain enthusiasts to hear, but it is not really a hot topic among cryptographers. There was a bit of interest a few years ago as people tried to figure out if any good security definitions can be developed, and the results were not very convincing. Beyond that almost all the academic interest in block chains has focused on the "permissioned" setting where security can be defined in a meaningful and useful way. So, yes, "crypto means cryptography" and "blockchain" should refer to block cipher chaining modes.
- betterunix2 5y ago
  "IACR, was founded by people who were working on cryptocurrency" This is extremely misleading. IACR was proposed by David Chaum in 1982, a year before his first paper on ecash, and its first board members in 1983 included Whitfield Diffie (who had not done any work on payments) among others. Chaum's ecash ideas look nothing like "cryptocurrency" as it exists today, nor do any of the ideas presented in subsequent research on the topic. The person you replied to correctly pointed out that "crypto" was coopted by the blockchain space and is now being used to mean any number of distributed systems technologies. I have seen people wearing t-shirts saying things like "crypto means cryptography" and making jokes about reclaiming "blockchain" to refer to block chaining modes at various cryptography conferences (many organized by IACR) over the past decade. Moxie was right when he quipped that the "crypto" spaec involves very limited use of actual cryptography.
  - dystopiabreaker 5y ago
    crypto was not co-opted. FAANGies just got stuck on a WebPKI side quest. leading research in the field is being done by blockchain companies. you don't have to believe me, try reading ePrint. cryptocurrency people lead the research in zk proof systems and more. the idea that the crypto space doesn't use cryptography is absolutely laughable
    - betterunix2 5y ago
      Some interesting research is being done by some cryptocurrency companies like ZCash and Algorand. Their work on ZKPs and SNARKs has been interesting, but it is worth pointing out that they are not the only people working on this. Moreover, the serious cryptographers working on anything related to blockchains have more or less stopped talking about the permissionless setting (where Bitcoin, Ethereum, and basically all of the popular blockchains in use are) because security is too hard to define in a meaningful way. In the "permissioned" setting where parties have well-known identities there has been a bit of interesting research on maintaining a shared cryptographic data structure. Meanwhile, academic and (non-blockchain) industry researchers have been pushing the state of the art in every subfield within cryptography, ZKPs included. Big companies have been deploying MPC as a means of addressing privacy concerns and regulation, and the cryptographers working on that (full disclosure: I am one of them) have been pretty active in publishing their work. Academic researchers have further advanced the results and addressed the problems raised by industry researchers, sometimes breathing new life into almost-forgotten lines of research (like set intersection protocols). So sure, I can grant you that there has been some interesting work on cryptography within the blockchain space, but it is not nearly as exciting and significant as you suggest. I actually have a lot of respect for the ZCash team, whose work really is top-notch and who I see (or saw pre-COVID) at high-quality conferences like CRYPTO and RWC. On the other hand they are a small and very unique team within both the blockchain ecosystem and the cryptography research community, and their research work is only nominally related to blockchains (it is inspired by an application that did not even require a blockchain in the first place). Beyond the ZCash and a few other groups with serious cryptographers the blockchain space is a desert in terms of interesting cryptography.
mads 5y ago
Did you just coin the term web4?
- dsnr 5y ago
  I take no credit for it.
paraknight 5y ago
Web3 (or rather Web 3.0) used to mean Tim Berner-Lee's semantic web (RDF etc).

somebodythere 5y ago

"Man, Mozilla Persona was cool, shame it got shut down. Wish someone would bring it back." > cryptographic identity layer emerges with good UX and application support, and an optional economic layer and users aren't screwed when Mozilla inevitably drops support "wait no not like that"

magicjosh 5y ago

"Light clients" is a term I've learned of recently. In the article, what are the specifics around "storage, bandwidth, and computation costs" for such a client? Is the idea we could all just have light clients running in the background on our phones with near zero impact?

dystopiabreaker 5y ago
for proof of stake, the cost is roughly: - download a hash-sized state root every block - download the set of validator signatures over that hash and verify each signature against the hash. if using aggregation-friendly curve, download the aggregate signature and verify it against the root. - for each state fragment, download the merkle uncles and compute the root hash and verify that it is the same as that signed off by the validator set. so yes, easily within resource limits for having them running all the time with near zero impact. Find My has comparable impact.
- magicjosh 5y ago
  fascinating thank you. The Find My analogy is thought provoking - a background service that creates a useful network. What does the light client world look like once complete, I wonder
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ipaddr 5y ago
  That would be the full process but once you've done this once couldn't you just pickup where you left off and just update new entries?
threeseed 5y ago
> Is the idea we could all just have light clients running in the background on our phones with near zero impact? That's the idea. The reality however is that will never happen unless both Apple and Google are fully signed up to Web3 and incorporate the clients as part of the OS. And I don't see a single reason why they would do that when it would compromise their billion dollar payment revenue streams.

rhynlee 5y ago

I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed reading this since I read the post that it's responding to earlier this week. Found it really refreshing to see this discussion develop that way, and in plain english. I was indeed left wondering if there was a solution to the lazy user aspect for widespread adoption of crypto/web3, since it did seem to be a complete blocker for widespread practical adoption. Neat to learn about light clients and zk-SNARKs!

magicjosh 5y ago
agreed the author has a great way of making complex topics more approachable. I wonder if there's a good/simple explanation of zkSnarks out there, I don't have any idea what they are despite seeing the term often.
- somebodythere 5y ago
  https://medium.com/@imolfar/why-and-how-zk-snark-works-1-introduction-the-medium-of-a-proof-d946e931160 https://medium.com/@imolfar/why-and-how-zk-snark-works-1-int... this resource helped me a lot, it is somewhat technical but should be accessible to someone reading HN
  - magicjosh 5y ago
    Thank you! The introduction section got me super excited in the application of zk-snarks. Any other articles more like the intro section? The rest of the article lost me quickly, not beyond my ability but would take me 10x reading through and multiple days. Re-posting the part I loved here in case others want to read: Zero-knowledge proofs are advantageous in a myriad of application, including: 1) Proving statement on private data: Person A has more than X in his bank account In the last year, a bank did not transact with an entity Y Matching DNA without revealing full DNA One has a credit score higher than Z 2) Anonymous authorization: Proving that requester R has right to access web-site’s restricted area without revealing its identity (e.g., login, password) Prove that one is from the list of allowed countries/states without revealing from which one exactly Prove that one owns a monthly pass to a subway/metro without revealing card’s id 3) Anonymous payments: Payment with full detachment from any kind of identity [Ben+14] Paying taxes without revealing one’s earnings 4) Outsourcing computation: Outsource an expensive computation and validate that the result is correct without redoing the execution; it opens up a category of trustless computing Changing a blockchain model from everyone computes the same to one party computes and everyone verifies

threeseed 5y ago

> Infrastructure providers can lie to the user about blockchain state Lying implies wilful deception. Instead what ALL providers will eventually do is implement moderation. And they will do so because (a) they will be legally required to and (b) it makes users happy. And unless the spec can address this requirement Web3 isn't really going to scale. And we've already seen such moderation with OpenSea so this isn't some contrived situation.

dystopiabreaker 5y ago
this is like saying that TLS won't work because of moderation
- threeseed 5y ago
  TLS is simply about securing the transport between two parties: a client and a server. It isn't trying to force all servers to return an identical response like Web3 is.
  - dystopiabreaker 5y ago
    i have worked on both TLS and blockchain tech for years. my point is that the purpose of the security architecture proposed in the article is to authenticate data from the chain. this is a protocol-level detail: like TLS secures transport between a client and a server, light clients authenticate data between a validator set and a user. whether a particular person or group decides to use such a protocol, or if they decide to censor data, is a separate concern.
Ar-Curunir 5y ago
The proposed light client stuff solves exactly this; they can’t lie about inclusion of a piece of data.

root_axis 5y ago

I'm dismissively cynical with respect to the future of "web3", but for the most part I can appreciate the tone taken by this article; no defensiveness, no condescending suggestions that the critics "just don't get it", but most importantly, acknowledgement that these are real problems and a willingness to engage with the specifics of the criticisms outlined, without hedging. I remain unconvinced, but I think the discussion around blockchains would be a lot less heated if the rhetoric from the enthusiasts was typically this measured. Yes, I recognize I'm putting the onus on the enthusiasts and letting the cynics off the hook, but the enthusiasts are the ones claiming to herald the next iteration of the web, that's a haughty claim for an already controversial technology.

vmception 5y ago
The builders talk this measured way. Hang out with more of them, while they’re building and where they build. Join discussions where draft standards are being ratified or tabled. There isn't really a world where any of this goes away, so the voyeuristic and quizzical approach doesn't work, there is a world where updates push it in a more relatable direction. That might be the biggest pill for cynics to swallow, that there is no convincing them thats going to happen and they’ll wind up contributing to its resiliency anyway.
- bawolff 5y ago
  > There isn't really a world where any of this goes away Why not? Technologies rise and fall in unpredictable ways. I'll admit that there is a lot of energy to web3 - its not a minor passing fad. However that's still a long way from being inevitable. Honestly, whole thing reminds me of how communism is going to "bury us".
  - vmception 5y ago
    I’m not familiar with how your last line applies. The main answer is that these concepts dont go away and will continue even in a world without ubiquitous internet as making a couple computers communicate doesnt go away.

alexjurkiewicz 5y ago

But I think this article missed the major concern Moxie raised about "blockchain API platforms". They will out innovate their base protocols and deliver a better UX. Light clients are a great example. They are only efficient compared to running a full node yourself. The computation and time is still far below relying on a platform to do it for you.

dystopiabreaker 5y ago
people said the same thing about TLS
- duskwuff 5y ago
  No, they didn't.
  - dystopiabreaker 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure that you can pop down to the search bar and type "TLS too inefficient" and see that, in fact, they did. there was a large period of time where TLS was not widely deployed and where it was viewed as not likely to be deployed, due to marginal performance reasons
    - MattPalmer1086 5y ago
      True, the overhead of TLS is relatively much lower than it was. It turned out we all really need the greater security. So we got hardware AES acceleration for example. But this example misses the more general point that protocols always evolve more slowly than platforms. It's not really a good example. Platforms aren't in competition with layer 3 network protocols. The examples Moxie gave were layer 7 application protocols.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

egeozcan 5y ago

> if your only answer is dismissal and anger, you’re actually just ceding the power to decide what these technologies will look like in our world I mean, if I'm dismissing it, it means that I don't believe that anything meaningful could come out of it, doesn't it? At that point, why "power to decide what these technologies will look like in our world" should have any role in my decision process? > these technologies are not going to go away There are a lot of harmful, useless, irrelevant, etc. technologies which won't go away. So this wouldn't be surprising. But if someone is trying to articulate that these technologies will create a revolution of some sorts, most people will need better convincing. Show me the value, where's the ??? value!

Xyit 5y ago
I think the tone of the author is that distributed ledger/blockchain/crypto/web3/monke ponzi- however any individual chooses to interpret this “cultural and monetary shift”- is in reality the future. And those who respond with indifference and denial of that reality, much like a person in your position, will have no say or power within the new system. That’s the voice of the author I believe. Not mine. As to the value, well I’d say you can only change when you’re ready to change. This applies to vision of value as well.
- dystopiabreaker 5y ago
  >And those who respond with indifference and denial of that reality, much like a person in your position, will have no say or power within the new system. that wasn't my point. my point is that this technology shows no sign of slowing down, so by just angrily and reflexively dismissing it critics are throwing away an opportunity to make real, constructive criticism like Moxie did here at a time when it could make the most impact.
  - magicjosh 5y ago
    Save your words for people who want to hear it! The people like me who really need your communications are starving for it. People who are already bought in and want quality content aren't getting much. This is a risk to the long term adoption of crypto. My sources are few. I get a few crumbs on /ethfinance, and some nice nuggets from this thread, but there's just so much crap and snark to wade through it's almost not worth it.

ur-whale 5y ago

Slightly OT, but - aside from a couple of outlier commenters - THANK YOU to both the OP for bringing the conversation around "web3" (not a fan of the term myself) back to a level where actual information is exchanged and proper discourse, for and against, seems to happen. This is really refreshing.

janimo 5y ago

Much more thoughtful than yesterday's blog post addressing Moxie's concerns. I wonder if the quality of conversations around this subject were improved if similarly to conflicts of interest declared by scientific paper authors, each public critic or supporter of web3 would disclose whether they are currently financially invested in 'crypto'. For outsiders it's harder to tell apart hacker/geek types from speculators and lurkers (not that there couldn't be an overlap). The fact that this article mentions there exist much fewer Ethereum nodes than "Ethereum nerds" may suggest that the non-technical group controls the public discourse and expectations.

Ar-Curunir 5y ago
It depends on who you’re reading: people building actual products and protocols will usually provide measured responses and be able to engage properly with good-faith criticism. See also Vitalik’s Reddit post responding to Moxie’s article. On the other hand, if you encounter primarily spammers, speculators, and scammers, you’ll just get garbage (similar to anti-blockchain grifters that repeat the same “blockchain is a ponzi pyramid earth-burning scam” garbage repeatedly)
- magicjosh 5y ago
  An inverse relationship here. The builders are busy building stuff and don't spend much time on communications. Whereas speculators, all they have is communications, and there are many more speculators than builders, so the incentives look like 99% crap, 1% useful communications. Props to builders like the OP, Moxie, and Vitalik for building and sharing. And to podcasts like Bankless for creating venues for communication from builders. I'd love to find a "Builders" cryptocurrency podcast.
  - Ar-Curunir 5y ago
    Look at the ZeroKnowledge podcast; it’s fantastic and has no scammy bullshit
    - 5y ago

raytube 5y ago

About running your own servers. I would happily do this, if... , security concerns were less of a worry. Ideas like Opera's inbuilt web server and other peer to peer technologies are appealing, Alongside nearside hosting. But it all comes down to simplicity of use. And how easy it is to setup. Grid computing makes a lot of sense but you need a simple framework, with safeguards.

jonnycomputer 5y ago
By running own servers, do you mean the hardware, or would using something like a linode count? So I use linode to host a mattermost instance, and its been mostly a trouble free experience, and I enjoy tinkering around in linux anyway. But most people aren't like that, I admit. And I don't even own the hardware; that's a whole other level of responsibility that I don't particularly want. And the $7/mo I spend on my linode is basically two cups of Pike's. Windows is a powerful operating system; but my experience has been that non tech-saavy people repeatedly run into obstacles using it, or end up with malware installed, etc. That's why the walled gardens of iOS and Android have been so successful. Relatively safe (yes, I know, but still), and largely intuitive. Grandpa can use it. So, if we want wide adoption of people "running their own servers", then it needs to follow the UX and security-managed approach of mobile OSs. Walled garden server software; limited options, user-friendly UX for non-professionals. Well, in some ways, the SaaS cloud approach solves this, right? You just need user-friendly apps--probably mobile first--to interface them, and designed with the non-tech savvy consumer in mind.
- raytube 5y ago
  Yeah that's what I am getting at. If it was user friendly without risk you might. I could put a pi on my home connection, but don't want that as an attack vector to my network. That's a flaw. But much like web coding, there are vulnerabilities whatever you do and however much time you spend securing it. Redhat had a cartridge deploy system. A good attempt at appyfying the server space. The one click installs. Plesk has one click installs for a wealth of software, but I never use these, why? Email is a good example. In our organisation we originally ran out own SMTP server. These days would I? And if not why not? I used to sit next to the mail server in the late 90s and read the logs. For very personal email I could host my own, and that's very tempting. But the other half of the conversation might well be eavesdropped. Then there is backup mitigation. And multi endpoint. I still haven't worked out the multi device thing for something like signal. With email I can have multi clients access my server. But again backup mitigation issues and privacy. And hassle. Strip out the hassle and I would like easy cloud deployables given secure trust. I don't want a host trading personal messaging. Of course there is so much current friction, I just trade it all in for convenience.

qaq 5y ago

I think the biggest problem that is never addressed has little to do with tech. There has being numerous pushes before to go decentralized and privacy focused but general public never cared.

imiric 5y ago

I think the focus on specific technologies and buzzwords is the wrong approach to drive the web forward. Instead, we should focus on specific problems we want to solve for users of the current iteration. A non-exhaustive list in no specific order: - Users should be in control of the data they produce and consume. No single centralized entity should have this right over its users, and regulations like the GDPR and cookie consent forms shouldn't exist. - Advertisements and adtech is hostile to the user experience. The web should have alternative monetization options that are easy to integrate for web developers, and establish a direct market between content consumers and content producers, with no middlemen. - Web services should be versioned and users should have the choice of which version they want to use. Companies shouldn't be given the freedom to e.g. change feed algorithms on a whim based on some obscure A/B test. Users shouldn't be forced to use the latest version of applications, and it should be easy for web developers to support several active versions in production. Opera made a step in the right direction by bundling a web server many years ago with Opera Unite, but that went nowhere and was quickly abandoned. BitTorrent, WebTorrent and WebRTC sort of feel like building blocks towards empowering the user, but despite of the prevalence and stability of the technologies, no big user friendly app is built on top of them. Brave Inc.'s Basic Attention Token is probably the best effort towards fixing the monetization aspect, but is tied to one specific browser, one specific currency, and built by a company that's done several missteps and has lost the trust of many users along the way. Then, of course, is the blockchain, the distributed utopia, and hype around "crypto" everyone seems to be discussing. There are good ideas here as well, muddled by many issues specific to these technologies that should be addressed. IMO, web3 should be some combination of all of these and new technologies that empower the user, and make the web friendlier for the current user base and welcoming to the other 40% of the world which is still not online. Otherwise corporations will continue to rule the web while people who can improve it are stuck in perpetual analysis paralysis.

badestrand 5y ago
> Users should be in control of the data they produce and consume. For me this is the most exciting promise of web3. But do blockchains really solve this? Where will user data be stored? Say, the comments we write here on HN, will they be stored on-chain? Or all things I publish on CryptoFacebook, are they all on-chain? Would be great to have that answered because I was not able to figure it out so far. Then I don't see the privacy problematic solved. As everything is tied to my wallet, this means that all my data is public. So after I send a friend a bit of lunch money he can see my wallet address and thus can check my subscriptions on CryptoOnlyFans, can see which words I am learning on CryptoDuoLingo and at which times of the day I am learning etc etc. Obviously this is horrific from a privacy aspect so how do we keep data private while it still being public?

rezonant 5y ago

> you’re actually just ceding the power to decide what these technologies will look like in our world I ceded the power to decide what AMP would look like, as did a lot of others. Thankfully enough others joined me, and AMP is more or less irrelevant now, and I'm happy for it.

rambambram 5y ago

> These critiques are usually unmoored to anything actually happening in the blockchain space Then call it just that: blockchain space. Why web3? I think because the 'web' part of web3 needs to be attached to this idea of blockchain and distributed ledger to give it a sense of fairness and legitimacy. I'm not saying blockchain or distributed ledgers are bad, I know way too little about that to judge it accurately. It's just that the name 'web3' irks me a lot. Maybe it has something to do with the 'web 2.0' that promised golden mountains, but eventually just F'd everybody in the A. Just add another number to the name and all the sh1t is forgotten, it seems. Here's a blank screen for you all, please start painting the same pictures.

bidder33 5y ago
as the article mentioned, web3 was a term coined back in 2014. It was very much a reaction to "web2.0" silicon valley years which was probably felt a lot stronger back then. the term flew under the radar for a while, but the past six months people suddenly got annoyed by it.
rezonant 5y ago
What's frustrating for me is that there is clearly a place for a new vision for the web beyond what the "Web 2.0" vision provided: client-first rich web applications that offered desktop-like capabilities. Along with that are the social/centralization/managed "pros/cons" that a lot of commenters decry. But this was the economic model, not the technical one. "Web 3.0" should be indeed be about decentralization-- but more in the sense of building applications that take advantage of the enhanced client abilities and de-emphasize central control. The colloqiual term is the "Fediverse". The modern web has brought about offline support (ServiceWorker), multi-processing (Web Workers), local capabilities (Filesystem API, local/DB storage, peripheral APIs) interprocess communication (Broadcast Channels), peer to peer (via disinterested party HTTP/WebSockets coordination), verifiable privacy via encryption, backend server federation (see Mastodon, Matrix, diaspora, PeerTube, etc). Web 3.0 already exists, we just hadn't named it yet, but there's so much more there to be built.
- qwertyforce 5y ago

bawolff 5y ago

Most of this article is about the same solutions that are always proposed (wake me up when people actually use them and they actually solve the problem at hand.) To me the most damning part of the article is: > These critiques are usually unmoored to anything actually happening in the blockchain space, and unaware of the technological development and cultural vision. This bifurcation is extremely harmful for the health of the emerging technologies: these technologies are not going to go away, so if your only answer is dismissal and anger, you’re actually just ceding the power to decide what these technologies will look like in our world. This pattern of discourse creates a negative-sum feedback loop that does a disservice to all. Quite frankly, if web3 really was all its cracked up to be, enthusiasists wouldn't be so offended anytime someone "didn't get it". After all, if it really was gold, they would be too busy making cool things and the results would speak for themselves. As the author says, those who ignore something ceede power to those who show up. But why would the people who show up be so offended that people are giving them power? If it was actually valuable wouldn't they want it for themselves? Every time someone criticizes cryptocurrency, its always the same refrain: people are wrong to be negative. All the bad vibes will turn your heart black, etc. That's what cults say, not what people with viable tech say.

rezonant 5y ago
> Every time someone criticizes cryptocurrency, its always the same refrain: people are wrong to be negative. All the bad vibes will turn your heart black, etc. That's what cults say, not what people with viable tech say. True. In reality the "bad vibes" are just folks trying to find a consensus on where this technology belongs- if you can't communicate the benefits of the tech in a convincing way, it's not everyone else's fault.
- mwattsun 5y ago
  "If something is too early to criticize it's also too early to evangelize" Kelsey Hightower @kelseyhightower, Jan 2, 2022
telxosser 5y ago
Spot on. Build Web3 and if it is great as you say it is I will use it. What else is there to discuss?

thinkingemote 5y ago

It's just money and the market, it's not about decentralisation as a good thing for people, it's about making money. That's why people will split hairs about the infrastructure and technology and miss the forest which is about selling stuff.

gandutraveler 5y ago

Can we just call this "Web3Candidate" & stop allowing few groups to hijack the term 'web3' before there is consensus and wide adoption. Because when this craze dies and a real replacement of web2 arrives we will have to skip to web4 and I'll have to explain to my future kids what a wasteful hustle web3 was.

agentultra 5y ago

> These critiques are usually unmoored to anything actually happening in the blockchain space Critics are unmoored? This technology is inevitable? I don't believe that's true. It seems to me that it might find a niche in the corner of the Internet and eventually be forgotten by all but the most ardent followers. Many countries are banning cryptocurrencies for many of the reasons critics have been rightfully skeptical. I can't imagine why that trend will stop.

dadoge 5y ago
Which countries are banning crypto? China Guess what else they banned: Google Twitter Facebook …
dylkil 5y ago
>Many countries are banning cryptocurrencies How many times has china banned bitcoin now, 20?

sbacha 5y ago

For what it's worth, sushiswap isn't using Infura or AlchemyAPI, rather its own api.sushirelay.com to serve mainnet RPC requests. Also, a large number of projects utilize TheGraph (GraphQL indexer for specific protocol/DApps). These are run by teams or out-sourced to the lowest cost service provider (staking pools, etc). re: https://thegraph.com/hosted-service/subgraph https://thegraph.com/hosted-service/subgraph If you are interested in using/rolling your own RPC infrastructure, here are the minimal JSON RPC methods required to support most DApps: https://github.com/sambacha/minimal-jsonrpc-dapp-methods https://github.com/sambacha/minimal-jsonrpc-dapp-methods The real bottleneck is reliance on web browser extensions (namely Chrome's V2, which this January is depreciated and no longer accepting new submissions.) for providing safe key management. Another example is having to poll for RPC updates.

127 5y ago

Is it just me or is any and all "Web3" "blockchains" just regulatory arbitrage to fly under the radar of the local government to enable more innovation?

dylkil 5y ago
From a first principles perspective what they really do and do well is remove trust from the equation. Regulations are setup mainly in situations where a central party has wholly control over something and we cant trust to not fuck us over.
- 127 5y ago
  But Web3 is very much centralized, and increasingly going into that direction.
  - dylkil 5y ago
    How are you measuring that

cbtacy 5y ago

A serious question which I hope people will truly consider and not just downvote me for asking.... What is the Venn overlap between web3 promoters and techno-libertarians? In other words, is web3 first and foremost a political movement driven by political beliefs and values?

heckerhut 5y ago

It’s so easy to fix. Clients can verify signed content delivered by servers. It will be implemented by any application where users care enough. From then on it will be standardized and become abundant. The criticism is justified but beside the point.

kybernetikos 5y ago

I'm not expert here, but it only took me a fairly short amount of time to find out how to do geth --syncmode light --http --ws See it sync and set metamask to talk to it. Sure, the UX isn't ideal, but the claim that it's impossible seems unfair. Maybe there are cryptographic concerns I'm missing?