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I'm increasingly seeing "web 3.0" as basically a two headed beast: 1) a way to part greater fools from their money until the hype has died out 2) a hot topic

I'm increasingly seeing "web 3.0" as basically a two headed beast: 1) a way to part greater fools from their money until the hype has died out 2) a hot topic to drive clicks and discussions for nerds and, increasingly, the tech press, from other more pressing issues that exist in terms of tech and culture and finance In other words, its a bullshit scam, can we please move on already?

freemanon 5y ago
i suggest learning it properly before jumping to conclusions. everything has pros and cons. e.g. cars pollute but would you want to go back to riding horses? judge less, learn more
- ryandamm 5y ago
  I've yet to see a "pro" for blockchain or NFTs that doesn't conform to the characterization you're trying to dispute. Care to offer one? I'm eager to learn.
  - magicjosh 5y ago
    I also want a writeup covering some examples of Bitcoin or Ethereum use that are relatable. This recent NYTimes piece takes that approach, though none of the examples are that impressive: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/style/what-can-you-actually-buy-with-bitcoin.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/style/what-can-you-actual... (Disclosure I own Bitcoin and Ethereum)
    - freemanon 5y ago
      Blockchain and crypto are related yet distinct concepts. I was lining up for a PCR test in Thailand the other day, and it was a huge mess. The lack of streamlined systems between invoicing, identity verification, etc means very long queues, people running back and forth to get their documents printed. The testing scheme is private run but I assume it needs to interface with governmental departments (i.e. Immigration and the police) to initiate quarantine in case i'm positive, and change my eligibility status for travel outside the sandbox area if i'm negative, or to arrest me if i fail to take the test within the specified time. I thought about why so many centralizsed systems failed, or failed to be built, for streamlining processes in the real world. I think that it's because typically such systems would be built on SQL databases and backend servers that are prone to hacks and downtimes, and the APIs built by different developers often cannot integrate with one another. What if, instead of databases and custom APIs, a blockchain with smart contracts is used? What if we can also sign documents such as receipts with hashes that can be verified off-chain and off-line? We'd have a fault-tolerant, always-available systems, and also a "unified" protocol in which other systems can interface to. Instead of having different databases and APIs that are hard to integrate with one another, a blockchain could be the central storage and transactions handler that different systems interface to. The PCR test system would be something along the line of: - Booking through a smart contract, paying the PCR test fee, and obtaining a receipt signed by the contract in the form of a hash - Upon arrival in the test center, they check the validity of this signature offline by using a public key to verify your payment. - An identification service can keep a hashed version of your personal data on-chain. You can provide your name, DOB, place of birth etc, and this can be checked against the identification service by decoding the hashed data with a one-time key you generated There's no DB that can be hacked or go corrupt, no BE servers that can be DDOS'd. There are of course questions to be answered. But I see many use cases in my everyday life.
      - mohanmcgeek 5y ago
        Or, the provider, namely the government, can write the code to orchestrate these API calls even if these APIs are managed by disparate entities. It's not pretend like it's not a solved problem. It's just that you're trying to eliminate the central provider in this case and you want to replace that with a blockchain which is excruciatingly slow
        freemanon 5y ago
        A colleague of mine once disagreed to use git because it was easier for him to copy paste the project's folder every now and then to keep "versions" of his work. There are trade offs, but having data and core business logic in an open and transparent network would allow for better interoperability imo. Not saying there aren't fundamental issues to be solved with using blockchains, but it's a new path to be explored. The speed of the blockchain doesn't necessarily have to be slow. It depends on how decentralised and safe it needs to be. It's possible to create a "private" blockchain for some use cases. I don't see web3 as open in the sense of open to the whole world, but open to whoever the stakeholders are.
      - hiq 5y ago
        > Instead of having different databases and APIs that are hard to integrate with one another, a blockchain could be the central storage and transactions handler that different systems interface to. That's a common refrain that seems to associate blockchains with standards and common APIs, it doesn't resist closer inspection. To take your example, I can easily design two PCR test systems completely incompatible with each other, and leaving no way for anyone else to implement a compatibility layer between these two, even if they both use the same blockchain. There are various ERC20 tokens that should in theory implement the same interface, but turn out to be subtly incompatible with each other because of how imprecise the specification is. Standardization is hard, even when people try, and blockchain doesn't even enforce a modicum of effort in this direction. Another way to see it: as a software development constraint, "the system has to live in a blockchain" is akin to "it has to be written in C" or "it has to use functional programming": maybe the end result will be more alike, maybe it'll be easier for a dev to understand one system based on the knowledge of the other, but that's pretty much it. > There's no DB that can be hacked or go corrupt, no BE servers that can be DDOS'd. Smart contracts can be vulnerable (and ensuring they are not is very expensive, if possible at all), private keys get lost and some external system has to update the smart contract (you can never really get rid of all external systems, something lives outside the blockchain, if only the human operators), transaction fees are high enough that getting protection from a DDOS mitigation service would be cheaper than using a blockchain in the first place.
- mikeg8 5y ago
  This is always the defense: “you obviously don’t understand it”. Or, maybe there is a good reason this type of article pops to the top of HN every other day. The skeptics have good reason to doubt the viability of all the hype.
  - freemanon 5y ago
    is calling out oversimplifcation is also oversimplifying? i'm not arguing that there is no good reason to be sceptic, i'm calling out against forming a strong opinion strongly held on little understanding
    - kentm 5y ago
      But you haven’t verified little understanding and crypto proponents never do. It’s always “skeptic of crypto = little understanding”. You’re doing that exact thing here.
      - freemanon 5y ago
        I build dApps and solidity contracts with hundreds of millions of USD in TVL. But that's besides the point. It's not a contest of who's more knowledgeable, I'm arguing against ignorance through quick judgements and assumptions
        CRConrad 5y ago
        > I'm arguing against ignorance through quick judgements and assumptions Yes, but you're arguing that against someone -- someone whom you haven't shown is making "quick judgements and assumptions". You're just assuming that. That is the problem GP was pointing out: Crypto-"currency" proponents always jump to that conclusion. Stop doing that.
        freemanon 5y ago
        "In other words it's a bullshit scam" isn't jumping to conclusions? I don't think telling someone to not jump to conclusions is itself jumping to conclusions. Otherwise we'd have infinite loops in every discussion
- mohanmcgeek 5y ago
  I see more and more of this attitude these days: "Stop spreading disinformation. Educate yourself" A useful contribution would be to point out how exactly the GP is wrong. I can imagine the current international banking system get upgraded with a blockchain like technology such that you don't need a central bank of central banks. But the web3 guys simply want to compare detractors to luddites
  - freemanon 5y ago
    my argument isn't that the GP's information is wrong per se, but that gross oversimplification through slapping labels like "scam" and "bullshit" against the merits of a technology is blind, just as blind as people who worship the blockchain. my argument is for us to make our cases in an enlightened and civilised way instead of calling out names
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      And still, you have utterly failed to tell -- either in an "enlightened and civilised" or in any other way -- why and how this whole "Crypto" fad isn't scam and bullshit. Until somebody does, the null hypothesis remains that it is. (Use some cuter name if that makes you feel better, but it is what it is.)
      - freemanon 5y ago
        The fallacy of false dichotomies. Things aren't either totally useful or totally a scam. That's what I'm trying to say, we shouldn't jump into quick conclusions one way or the other, especially without trying to really understand first. I have my views on positive use cases for the blockchain and/or cryptocurrencies, and I got that by learning and building stuff with it. On whether the technology is a net good or bad to society, I don't know. One can refuse to participate in anything without completely dismissing its merit. But that's the polarised world we live in :/
        CRConrad 5y ago
- dmingod666 5y ago
  Read the article by moxie on NFTs. It is so poorly designed that a jr JavaScript developer with 6 months experience would be ashamed of it. Don't "Go-and-lean" us. We are technology people here not your non-tech crowd that'll get scared and silenced by "go and learn"
  - freemanon 5y ago
    there is no arguing that the world of crypto is full of scams. just like the internet. we can learn and adopt new technologies while keeping down its externalities by understanding the pros and cons, not by slapping overgeneralised labels of "good" or "bad" on everything to cover for the lack of rounded understanding
- rsanheim 5y ago
  I actually would prefer riding horses if it were feasible and safe in my community, thank you very much =). I've learned enough at this point to know a scam when I see one, and I definitely don't need to go thru my history w/ software and tech bubbles and cryptocurrencies to explain why web 3.0 is full-on bullshit.
  - rambambram 5y ago
    I like your reasoning here and in other comments. Please consider adding an RSS feed to your blog, I want to subscribe to it in Web 1.1 style.
  - freemanon 5y ago
    well i guess it's simpler to live with fast and decisive conclusions to new information. personally i try to manage my prejudice and keep giving chances for someone or a new piece of information to change my mind, in case i have the wrong understanding
  - jakupovic 5y ago
    Oh wise one can you tell us more? We're dying to learn from the smart ones who can tell based on their past what the future holds. Or maybe you don't know, which is true, since none can predict future. Therefore you're talking out of your ... and not contributing to the conversation. Now you can say that I'm not contributing either, but it has the same place as your statement...
heurist 5y ago
It's a way to authenticate yourself without a centralized authority. So right now it's being used to create exclusive communities, access to which theoretically has some value. In the future, there may be application ecosystems which operate solely against your wallet information, no need for registration. Maybe that has some value too - time will tell. I don't follow the details of the web3 market closely, so not speaking in support or against here.
- Shish2k 5y ago
  > It's a way to authenticate yourself without a centralized authority PGP did that 31 years ago though, faster and more efficient and without all the downsides?
  - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
    inefficiency here can actually be useful, it's similar to password stretching. If you know someone had to burn $10 of electricity to make an authentication, it hurts more to get banned.
    - usrbinbash 5y ago
      > inefficiency here can actually be useful Except for the tons of CO2 that get pumped into the atmosphere in the process, or the blackouts its causes, or the fact that there are tons of more useful applications for that energy, like heating homes, running air conditioning, charging electric vehicles ...
      - tata71 5y ago
        Fine when MasterCard and Visa do it (poorly) though!
    - lawtalkinghuman 5y ago
      > If you know someone had to burn $10 of electricity to make an authentication, it hurts more to get banned. Metafilter charges $5 to get an account. If you can't afford the $5, you can email the mods to join for free. SomethingAwful charges $10 (and offers a platinum account, and a paid add-on to view old threads). Both of these payments are done through PayPal, and both exist as a way to filter spammers and trolls. I thought the whole point of decentralisation was that you couldn't be banned though.
laurent92 5y ago
When I was a young engineer in 2006, the marketing about Web 2.0 was in every tender for IT projects, so much that my boss created the “Web 4.3 dev community” in my city to point out the ridiculousness of it. Every versioning of that idea is marketing speech.
- zwkrt 5y ago
  Web 2.0 and 3.0 are not directly comparable just because they have similar names, a fallacy of equivocation. Web2.0 might have had a silly name, but the idea of the web as something that the average user and company could contribute back to and use to communicate with in real time provided explicit value and convenience over existing alternatives (letter writing, door-to-door sales, in-person self-promotion, calling a pizza parlor, renting a physical video, long distance phone calls, physical plane tickets mailed to your house…) I don’t see that with web3.0.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    > Web2.0 might have had a silly name … > I don’t see that with web3.0. I do.
    - pyhtel 5y ago
      Care to elaborate?
      - CRConrad 5y ago
        Oh, sorry, I was actually agreeing with most of your points. The strategic quoting was supposed to show that the only thing I disagreed with was that I find the name "Web 3.0" about as silly as its predecessor.
koonsolo 5y ago
It's funny how HN is negative towards crypto and web3 (see all upvoted articles on the topic, and related comments). Yet can't seem to stop talking about it. I get it, you don't like it. So I agree with your last point: let's all please move on.
- krapp 5y ago
  >let's all please move on. We don't do that here.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  I’m pretty much convinced that crypto stuff is a scam. Still, I want to question the mob. We only get better understanding, doesn’t take anything away. I like hashing things out but whenever there is a huge bandwagon effect, I am increasingly getting more skeptical. Happy to be wrong but we need skeptics that question mob mentality. There are several recent examples of this: 1) Inflation 2) COVID origins (Lab leak) 3) Zero-COVID policies and lockdowns. I always question these things - what if we are wrong?
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Well as long as there is a lot of tech hype about it we will continue attempting to cut through the bullshit buzz words and point out the good and the bad and the worse.

freemanon 5y ago

i suggest learning it properly before jumping to conclusions. everything has pros and cons. e.g. cars pollute but would you want to go back to riding horses? judge less, learn more

ryandamm 5y ago
I've yet to see a "pro" for blockchain or NFTs that doesn't conform to the characterization you're trying to dispute. Care to offer one? I'm eager to learn.
- magicjosh 5y ago
  I also want a writeup covering some examples of Bitcoin or Ethereum use that are relatable. This recent NYTimes piece takes that approach, though none of the examples are that impressive: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/style/what-can-you-actually-buy-with-bitcoin.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/style/what-can-you-actual... (Disclosure I own Bitcoin and Ethereum)
  - freemanon 5y ago
    Blockchain and crypto are related yet distinct concepts. I was lining up for a PCR test in Thailand the other day, and it was a huge mess. The lack of streamlined systems between invoicing, identity verification, etc means very long queues, people running back and forth to get their documents printed. The testing scheme is private run but I assume it needs to interface with governmental departments (i.e. Immigration and the police) to initiate quarantine in case i'm positive, and change my eligibility status for travel outside the sandbox area if i'm negative, or to arrest me if i fail to take the test within the specified time. I thought about why so many centralizsed systems failed, or failed to be built, for streamlining processes in the real world. I think that it's because typically such systems would be built on SQL databases and backend servers that are prone to hacks and downtimes, and the APIs built by different developers often cannot integrate with one another. What if, instead of databases and custom APIs, a blockchain with smart contracts is used? What if we can also sign documents such as receipts with hashes that can be verified off-chain and off-line? We'd have a fault-tolerant, always-available systems, and also a "unified" protocol in which other systems can interface to. Instead of having different databases and APIs that are hard to integrate with one another, a blockchain could be the central storage and transactions handler that different systems interface to. The PCR test system would be something along the line of: - Booking through a smart contract, paying the PCR test fee, and obtaining a receipt signed by the contract in the form of a hash - Upon arrival in the test center, they check the validity of this signature offline by using a public key to verify your payment. - An identification service can keep a hashed version of your personal data on-chain. You can provide your name, DOB, place of birth etc, and this can be checked against the identification service by decoding the hashed data with a one-time key you generated There's no DB that can be hacked or go corrupt, no BE servers that can be DDOS'd. There are of course questions to be answered. But I see many use cases in my everyday life.
    - mohanmcgeek 5y ago
      Or, the provider, namely the government, can write the code to orchestrate these API calls even if these APIs are managed by disparate entities. It's not pretend like it's not a solved problem. It's just that you're trying to eliminate the central provider in this case and you want to replace that with a blockchain which is excruciatingly slow
      - freemanon 5y ago
        A colleague of mine once disagreed to use git because it was easier for him to copy paste the project's folder every now and then to keep "versions" of his work. There are trade offs, but having data and core business logic in an open and transparent network would allow for better interoperability imo. Not saying there aren't fundamental issues to be solved with using blockchains, but it's a new path to be explored. The speed of the blockchain doesn't necessarily have to be slow. It depends on how decentralised and safe it needs to be. It's possible to create a "private" blockchain for some use cases. I don't see web3 as open in the sense of open to the whole world, but open to whoever the stakeholders are.
    - hiq 5y ago
      > Instead of having different databases and APIs that are hard to integrate with one another, a blockchain could be the central storage and transactions handler that different systems interface to. That's a common refrain that seems to associate blockchains with standards and common APIs, it doesn't resist closer inspection. To take your example, I can easily design two PCR test systems completely incompatible with each other, and leaving no way for anyone else to implement a compatibility layer between these two, even if they both use the same blockchain. There are various ERC20 tokens that should in theory implement the same interface, but turn out to be subtly incompatible with each other because of how imprecise the specification is. Standardization is hard, even when people try, and blockchain doesn't even enforce a modicum of effort in this direction. Another way to see it: as a software development constraint, "the system has to live in a blockchain" is akin to "it has to be written in C" or "it has to use functional programming": maybe the end result will be more alike, maybe it'll be easier for a dev to understand one system based on the knowledge of the other, but that's pretty much it. > There's no DB that can be hacked or go corrupt, no BE servers that can be DDOS'd. Smart contracts can be vulnerable (and ensuring they are not is very expensive, if possible at all), private keys get lost and some external system has to update the smart contract (you can never really get rid of all external systems, something lives outside the blockchain, if only the human operators), transaction fees are high enough that getting protection from a DDOS mitigation service would be cheaper than using a blockchain in the first place.
mikeg8 5y ago
This is always the defense: “you obviously don’t understand it”. Or, maybe there is a good reason this type of article pops to the top of HN every other day. The skeptics have good reason to doubt the viability of all the hype.
- freemanon 5y ago
  is calling out oversimplifcation is also oversimplifying? i'm not arguing that there is no good reason to be sceptic, i'm calling out against forming a strong opinion strongly held on little understanding
  - kentm 5y ago
    But you haven’t verified little understanding and crypto proponents never do. It’s always “skeptic of crypto = little understanding”. You’re doing that exact thing here.
    - freemanon 5y ago
      I build dApps and solidity contracts with hundreds of millions of USD in TVL. But that's besides the point. It's not a contest of who's more knowledgeable, I'm arguing against ignorance through quick judgements and assumptions
      - CRConrad 5y ago
        > I'm arguing against ignorance through quick judgements and assumptions Yes, but you're arguing that against someone -- someone whom you haven't shown is making "quick judgements and assumptions". You're just assuming that. That is the problem GP was pointing out: Crypto-"currency" proponents always jump to that conclusion. Stop doing that.
        freemanon 5y ago
        "In other words it's a bullshit scam" isn't jumping to conclusions? I don't think telling someone to not jump to conclusions is itself jumping to conclusions. Otherwise we'd have infinite loops in every discussion
mohanmcgeek 5y ago
I see more and more of this attitude these days: "Stop spreading disinformation. Educate yourself" A useful contribution would be to point out how exactly the GP is wrong. I can imagine the current international banking system get upgraded with a blockchain like technology such that you don't need a central bank of central banks. But the web3 guys simply want to compare detractors to luddites
- freemanon 5y ago
  my argument isn't that the GP's information is wrong per se, but that gross oversimplification through slapping labels like "scam" and "bullshit" against the merits of a technology is blind, just as blind as people who worship the blockchain. my argument is for us to make our cases in an enlightened and civilised way instead of calling out names
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    And still, you have utterly failed to tell -- either in an "enlightened and civilised" or in any other way -- why and how this whole "Crypto" fad isn't scam and bullshit. Until somebody does, the null hypothesis remains that it is. (Use some cuter name if that makes you feel better, but it is what it is.)
    - freemanon 5y ago
      The fallacy of false dichotomies. Things aren't either totally useful or totally a scam. That's what I'm trying to say, we shouldn't jump into quick conclusions one way or the other, especially without trying to really understand first. I have my views on positive use cases for the blockchain and/or cryptocurrencies, and I got that by learning and building stuff with it. On whether the technology is a net good or bad to society, I don't know. One can refuse to participate in anything without completely dismissing its merit. But that's the polarised world we live in :/
      - CRConrad 5y ago
dmingod666 5y ago
Read the article by moxie on NFTs. It is so poorly designed that a jr JavaScript developer with 6 months experience would be ashamed of it. Don't "Go-and-lean" us. We are technology people here not your non-tech crowd that'll get scared and silenced by "go and learn"
- freemanon 5y ago
  there is no arguing that the world of crypto is full of scams. just like the internet. we can learn and adopt new technologies while keeping down its externalities by understanding the pros and cons, not by slapping overgeneralised labels of "good" or "bad" on everything to cover for the lack of rounded understanding
rsanheim 5y ago
I actually would prefer riding horses if it were feasible and safe in my community, thank you very much =). I've learned enough at this point to know a scam when I see one, and I definitely don't need to go thru my history w/ software and tech bubbles and cryptocurrencies to explain why web 3.0 is full-on bullshit.
- rambambram 5y ago
  I like your reasoning here and in other comments. Please consider adding an RSS feed to your blog, I want to subscribe to it in Web 1.1 style.
- freemanon 5y ago
  well i guess it's simpler to live with fast and decisive conclusions to new information. personally i try to manage my prejudice and keep giving chances for someone or a new piece of information to change my mind, in case i have the wrong understanding
- jakupovic 5y ago
  Oh wise one can you tell us more? We're dying to learn from the smart ones who can tell based on their past what the future holds. Or maybe you don't know, which is true, since none can predict future. Therefore you're talking out of your ... and not contributing to the conversation. Now you can say that I'm not contributing either, but it has the same place as your statement...

heurist 5y ago

It's a way to authenticate yourself without a centralized authority. So right now it's being used to create exclusive communities, access to which theoretically has some value. In the future, there may be application ecosystems which operate solely against your wallet information, no need for registration. Maybe that has some value too - time will tell. I don't follow the details of the web3 market closely, so not speaking in support or against here.

Shish2k 5y ago
> It's a way to authenticate yourself without a centralized authority PGP did that 31 years ago though, faster and more efficient and without all the downsides?
- adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
  inefficiency here can actually be useful, it's similar to password stretching. If you know someone had to burn $10 of electricity to make an authentication, it hurts more to get banned.
  - usrbinbash 5y ago
    > inefficiency here can actually be useful Except for the tons of CO2 that get pumped into the atmosphere in the process, or the blackouts its causes, or the fact that there are tons of more useful applications for that energy, like heating homes, running air conditioning, charging electric vehicles ...
    - tata71 5y ago
      Fine when MasterCard and Visa do it (poorly) though!
  - lawtalkinghuman 5y ago
    > If you know someone had to burn $10 of electricity to make an authentication, it hurts more to get banned. Metafilter charges $5 to get an account. If you can't afford the $5, you can email the mods to join for free. SomethingAwful charges $10 (and offers a platinum account, and a paid add-on to view old threads). Both of these payments are done through PayPal, and both exist as a way to filter spammers and trolls. I thought the whole point of decentralisation was that you couldn't be banned though.

laurent92 5y ago

When I was a young engineer in 2006, the marketing about Web 2.0 was in every tender for IT projects, so much that my boss created the “Web 4.3 dev community” in my city to point out the ridiculousness of it. Every versioning of that idea is marketing speech.

zwkrt 5y ago
Web 2.0 and 3.0 are not directly comparable just because they have similar names, a fallacy of equivocation. Web2.0 might have had a silly name, but the idea of the web as something that the average user and company could contribute back to and use to communicate with in real time provided explicit value and convenience over existing alternatives (letter writing, door-to-door sales, in-person self-promotion, calling a pizza parlor, renting a physical video, long distance phone calls, physical plane tickets mailed to your house…) I don’t see that with web3.0.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > Web2.0 might have had a silly name … > I don’t see that with web3.0. I do.
  - pyhtel 5y ago
    Care to elaborate?
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      Oh, sorry, I was actually agreeing with most of your points. The strategic quoting was supposed to show that the only thing I disagreed with was that I find the name "Web 3.0" about as silly as its predecessor.

koonsolo 5y ago

It's funny how HN is negative towards crypto and web3 (see all upvoted articles on the topic, and related comments). Yet can't seem to stop talking about it. I get it, you don't like it. So I agree with your last point: let's all please move on.

krapp 5y ago
>let's all please move on. We don't do that here.
systemvoltage 5y ago
I’m pretty much convinced that crypto stuff is a scam. Still, I want to question the mob. We only get better understanding, doesn’t take anything away. I like hashing things out but whenever there is a huge bandwagon effect, I am increasingly getting more skeptical. Happy to be wrong but we need skeptics that question mob mentality. There are several recent examples of this: 1) Inflation 2) COVID origins (Lab leak) 3) Zero-COVID policies and lockdowns. I always question these things - what if we are wrong?
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Well as long as there is a lot of tech hype about it we will continue attempting to cut through the bullshit buzz words and point out the good and the bad and the worse.