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Serious question: What problem does web3 or decentralization fix? - Oligopoly of the hyperscalers -> rent server from small provider like ovh/hetzner/netcup (t

Serious question: What problem does web3 or decentralization fix? - Oligopoly of the hyperscalers -> rent server from small provider like ovh/hetzner/netcup (there is plenty). The reason AWS, Azure and GCP are so popular is because people don't care. - Privavy intrusions -> Adblocker/DNS Blocker/Turn off JS/Use browser settings This won't be fixed by web3, ad monetization and tracking won't magically stop. They exist because there is a demand. So what is being fixed?

yawnxyz 5y ago
I don't think the point is to fix anything; it's to have remixes/alternatives to what's already out there. However, using AWS for some things and pinning stuff to IPFS and blockchain for others does prove convenient (I don't have to worry about egress costs w/ IPFS for example)
- acdha 5y ago
  > I don't have to worry about egress costs w/ IPFS for example IPFS isn’t magic: you have to pay for hosting somewhere - you can use it like a CDN to pick cheaper networks but that’s maintenance optimization.
  - withinboredom 5y ago
    Also moving bits is free. Just throw your static content on a non-greedy host.
    - acdha 5y ago
      It's only free for a small amount of content or when you're ad supported. If you get significant traffic or care about performance, someone needs to pay for it.
      - withinboredom 5y ago
        No one pays for bits moving around on the internet, for the most part. See “peering internet.” Big companies just charge you for it to prevent it from being abused.
        acdha 5y ago
        You might want to learn a bit more about how peering works. It's definitely not free even if the major players have reciprocal agreements — just ask Netflix how free that was when Comcast wanted to double-charge them.
        withinboredom 5y ago
        My (poorly made) point was that at normal (not-unicorn) scale, bandwidth is practically free, or should be.
gspencley 5y ago
The thing that bugs me is that 25 years in the tech industry and I never heard a single person, engineer or business person, ever use the term "web 3." Then one day a few months ago it seemed like a ton of news outlets dropped articles on the exact same day which started using the term. It smells like a made up buzz word that did not originate organically. Someone coined this termed and released a bunch of press releases to get it to catch on. I don't even know why people are giving it the time of day. It's someone's marketing speak and it smells awful. And furthermore, decentralization is not new nor is it unique to the web, nor does this "web 3" garbage have anything to do with the web either. Web 2.0 was also buzzwordish but at least it was referring to a genuine paradigm shift in the way that websites work. The inclusion of the XHR request API in browsers and the birth of publicly available RESTful APIs that web-sites could consume which helped lead to the split between frontend and backend development as specialties that we see today (whether that's a good thing or not is another discussion). "web 3" is just marketing PR garbage for "crypto is the next big thing ... somehow."
- bondarchuk 5y ago
  Maybe it's just me but the only time I see "web 3" is when people/articles on HN are complaining about it.
  - exdsq 5y ago
    Yeah 100% this. I've worked on various blockchain projects since 2018 and have never written nor seen it written in any internal slack/discord.
  - KineticLensman 5y ago
    > the only time I see "web 3" is when people/articles on HN are complaining about it. Counterexample: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/14/exclusive-clubs-called-daos-are-popping-up-online-whats-it-all-about https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/14/exclus...
  - Qub3d 5y ago
    You might want to consider sampling a broader source of news or discussion. HN is prone to insulation and echo chambers like any other social media. I can tell you that there is a large contingent of Twitter, for example, fully on board with "Web 3" -- generally in the context of NFTs and the latest coin offering.
thebean11 5y ago
The core of it is moving money around without a payment processor. Sending money person-to-person is part of this, the other part is software than can move money natively (and more importantly, atomically with state updates in the software which isn't possible with eg Stripe API calls).
Tenoke 5y ago
>What problem does web3 or decentralization fix? In some cases you can align incentives differently than with traditional solutions. For example with DEXs you can spread the profit and work (such as providing liquidity) to participants rather than a central operator. It's also easier to prove what mechanism of the operation can and cannot be changed as the code is right there and if you are trading you only have to trust them for just the one function call rather than for holding your funds in their hands longer like with traditional exchanges.
- JaimeThompson 5y ago
  >It's also easier to prove what mechanism of the operation can and cannot be changed as the code is right there. Prove might be too strong a word to use in this instance.
rabuse 5y ago
I believe crypto is a great way to decentralize fundraising for startups/growing companies. Removes the middleman's cut from the equation, and you have no terms to agree to.
- romeros 5y ago
  The problem with this approach is that the founders can inadvertently start a pump and dump scheme that crypto comes with. You want to organize the worlds information and build a search engine. Okay, you create a google coin. You issue 21 Million coins. As soon as you announce it people are going to buy in and you will in a period of a few months become a billionaire. With no product. Just an idea. And then you get to dump your shares on the "investors" and you get to be a billionaire. There is no incentive to further develop your idea. Look at what happened to ICP. The VCs got in at 3 cents a coin. Each coin shot up to $750 per coin. Then the VCs dumped it on the retail noobs making a lot of money with absolutely no working product.
  - rabuse 5y ago
    I understand the argument there, but this happens in the stock market as well, which is heavily regulated already. There will never be a perfect system, but at least crypto levels the playing field a bit more for less fortunate who want to make something and need capital, and don't have the social connections/wealth most founders today have.
hemloc_io 5y ago
I think the steelman arg I've found for crypto as a general social media replacement is based on three pillars. 1. Ownership by default. NFTs are kinda a silly example, but since your wallet ("You") own your the token that represent your assets being able to transfer them around with you whenever you go somewhere new is cool. 2. Authentication with your wallet makes things much better. SSO for the whole web. 3. Alignment of incentives for users + service providers. (DAOs, traditional corps, etc.). So with a concrete example. In Web2 social network, the social graph is closed off along with all your account info. If you want to move to a different social media website, you have to reenter all your info and re-friend everyone etc. The corporation chose to ban people, and the only way you can in theory get a vote is through owning a share. In (the ideal) Web3 social network, the social graph is open b/c all your friends are attached to your wallet. If you want to move websites you can take them with you, or even have you be on multiple front ends. Even better you might get tokens to vote for certain proposals in the DAO, for example such as banning people off the site etc. Decentralization is valuable b/c it allows the above to happen, not because it's valuable in it of itself. Without a decentralized network there wouldn't be enough trust in the network for anyone to use it (long term). After all blockchains are basically one giant shared database, if someone thought you can modify it, it loses all value (Similar to fiat money in a way ;) )
- jboy55 5y ago
  One of the biggest issues I have with this is, I don't want you to see my friend list. I don't want you to see my wall, I don't want you to glean my interests by reading the public ledger. If you say, well, all of that is stored locally, or can be imported and exported to any 'front end' such as facebook/twitter. There's another big issue, what if your friends don't want to exist on that front end? Either events/posts are private, or they're on the public ledger and distributed. There's no way to keep interactions private. In the end, if we think of having these messages sent to clients directly and stored locally, have the clients being able to subscribe to groups, have the clients maintain the friend list, and people being able to post to sets within that list. We have this already. Its called email.
  - hemloc_io 5y ago
foxfluff 5y ago
> What problem does web3 or decentralization fix? > rent server from small provider If everyone rents a server and we make these servers talk to each other, that is what I would call decentralization. If you rely on a server operated and rented by someone else, you are subject to their whims: arbitrary bans, censorship, bait & switch, security issues, downtime, etcetra. I don't believe web3 fixes this but in I don't think decentralization is in principle a useless concept.. It's just hard to do right and harder than that to get enough people on board. And now with cryptocurrency, it's harder than ever to get people on board who aren't just looking to profit off of their buttcoin investment.
yrral 5y ago
Your data being locked up by companies and not to be able to be used by others. Web3 is less centralized in that the user data is exposed and freely available to be composed upon. For example, when someone makes a deposit (say of ERC20 USDC to earn interest, around 3.0% currently) on https://compound.finance https://compound.finance, that data is freely available and the "receipt" becomes another token (the ERC20 USDC cToken). [1] This token can now be used for other things, on any other protocol, without the involvement of compound itself. For example, there is a "compound" pool on https://curve.fi https://curve.fi that allows users to deposit cTokens so that they can earn interest on their stablecoins while also providing liquidity for stablecoin swaps and earning swap fees as well on top. [2] In fact, with this pool, the user can deposit/withdrawal just pure ERC20 USDC instead and curve will deposit/withdrawal that into/from compound on behalf of the user, again, with no involvement of compound at all. (other than interacting with its "immutable" smart contract) This deposit then gives the user back another ERC20 token "cCrv" that can then be used in other DeFi protocols without the involvement or authorization of curve. In contrast, in traditional web2, companies gatekeep this information so hard that there are 10B+ companies such as plaid that mostly just scrape user bank account data. Just recently AA is suing The Points Guy for scraping their website. [3] I recall there's even a comment in this thread about someone getting their own scraper banned because they were trying to scrape their own data. [1] https://compound.finance/docs/ctokens https://compound.finance/docs/ctokens [2] https://curve.fi/compound https://curve.fi/compound [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30013100 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30013100
- trenchgun 5y ago
  Reading this felt like having a stroke.
bodge5000 5y ago
I'm no expert, but to me it feels like if it weren't for all the hype which promised they'd be the second coming, they could have had their genuine use cases. In many cases they'd be small and you probably wouldnt have even noticed they were in use, and maybe a few larger issues could've been solved as well. But right now, we're at a point where a use case seemingly isn't required for there to be hype around it. Maybe all these things will fade into obscurity and come back one day and "fulfill their true purpose". If all goes well, barely any of us will care about the underlying technology of the problems they solve.
micromacrofoot 5y ago
So far the biggest "feature" of crypto seems to be the lack of regulation that more easily enables scams. This appears to be more appealing than any other feature, to the point where well-natured crypto projects spend a considerable amount of time educating people on how to avoid scams.
thjkgfgrrioppo 5y ago
Censorship and centralized control, hopefully. People owning their own content.
- schleck8 5y ago
  People already own their content if they buy it physically. And everyone else prefers the convenience of streaming. Also there is already multiple platforms with little to no regulation/'censorship' (namely onion service, telegram, kiwi farms, the chan boards, gab, parler...) and we all know how that worked out
agentultra 5y ago
Nothing. The entire infrastructure this system runs on is... the Internet. It doesn't work without TCP/IP, TLS/SSL, HTTP, etc. It's not fixing anything. It's only adding a way to force people to pay ETH gas fees to like posts and add comments. It's probably most useful for early crypto adopters to keep growing their pyramid with a captive audience and for criminals who want to hide more identities, launder money, and obscure illegal transactions from law enforcement. "But it can run without crypto," sure and why would anyone want that? You still need the Internet. Now you want to make it slower and burn more of the worlds energy so that we can independently audit who "liked" which post? So that you can "hypothetically" own your profile pic? Give me a break. I'm tired of the centralized services as anyone but there are ways we can solve this without the foregone conclusion that blockchains are the only viable way. They're not technologically sufficient, they're terrible for privacy, etc, etc. If you want to fundamentally improve the Internet you're going to have a better time improving things that already exist. Find more energy efficient transport layer protocols for modern usage patterns. Make it more secure. Improve privacy. There's a huge demand for this really unsexy, unhyped work that needs to be done. Heck, if you're interested in improving payment systems in the US there's a fair bit of catching up to do to reach par with some of the international systems.
lui8906 5y ago
> This won't be fixed by web3, ad monetization and tracking won't magically stop. They exist because there is a demand. Saying it is this way because this is the way people want it strikes me as a bit fatalist. Is it this way because it's what "people" want or because there is no viable alternative? Nothing is being "fixed" per se, an alternative vision of how things could be is being experimented with. Key tenets of this are trying to better align user and creator / provider incentives.
ploppyploppy 5y ago
Decentralised finance fixes a masive disparity in power. A global blockchain enables millions of people to access banking services -- globally -- that they are currently shut out of.

yawnxyz 5y ago

I don't think the point is to fix anything; it's to have remixes/alternatives to what's already out there. However, using AWS for some things and pinning stuff to IPFS and blockchain for others does prove convenient (I don't have to worry about egress costs w/ IPFS for example)

acdha 5y ago
> I don't have to worry about egress costs w/ IPFS for example IPFS isn’t magic: you have to pay for hosting somewhere - you can use it like a CDN to pick cheaper networks but that’s maintenance optimization.
- withinboredom 5y ago
  Also moving bits is free. Just throw your static content on a non-greedy host.
  - acdha 5y ago
    It's only free for a small amount of content or when you're ad supported. If you get significant traffic or care about performance, someone needs to pay for it.
    - withinboredom 5y ago
      No one pays for bits moving around on the internet, for the most part. See “peering internet.” Big companies just charge you for it to prevent it from being abused.
      - acdha 5y ago
        You might want to learn a bit more about how peering works. It's definitely not free even if the major players have reciprocal agreements — just ask Netflix how free that was when Comcast wanted to double-charge them.
        withinboredom 5y ago
        My (poorly made) point was that at normal (not-unicorn) scale, bandwidth is practically free, or should be.

gspencley 5y ago

The thing that bugs me is that 25 years in the tech industry and I never heard a single person, engineer or business person, ever use the term "web 3." Then one day a few months ago it seemed like a ton of news outlets dropped articles on the exact same day which started using the term. It smells like a made up buzz word that did not originate organically. Someone coined this termed and released a bunch of press releases to get it to catch on. I don't even know why people are giving it the time of day. It's someone's marketing speak and it smells awful. And furthermore, decentralization is not new nor is it unique to the web, nor does this "web 3" garbage have anything to do with the web either. Web 2.0 was also buzzwordish but at least it was referring to a genuine paradigm shift in the way that websites work. The inclusion of the XHR request API in browsers and the birth of publicly available RESTful APIs that web-sites could consume which helped lead to the split between frontend and backend development as specialties that we see today (whether that's a good thing or not is another discussion). "web 3" is just marketing PR garbage for "crypto is the next big thing ... somehow."

bondarchuk 5y ago
Maybe it's just me but the only time I see "web 3" is when people/articles on HN are complaining about it.
- exdsq 5y ago
  Yeah 100% this. I've worked on various blockchain projects since 2018 and have never written nor seen it written in any internal slack/discord.
- KineticLensman 5y ago
  > the only time I see "web 3" is when people/articles on HN are complaining about it. Counterexample: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/14/exclusive-clubs-called-daos-are-popping-up-online-whats-it-all-about https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/14/exclus...
- Qub3d 5y ago
  You might want to consider sampling a broader source of news or discussion. HN is prone to insulation and echo chambers like any other social media. I can tell you that there is a large contingent of Twitter, for example, fully on board with "Web 3" -- generally in the context of NFTs and the latest coin offering.

thebean11 5y ago

The core of it is moving money around without a payment processor. Sending money person-to-person is part of this, the other part is software than can move money natively (and more importantly, atomically with state updates in the software which isn't possible with eg Stripe API calls).

Tenoke 5y ago

>What problem does web3 or decentralization fix? In some cases you can align incentives differently than with traditional solutions. For example with DEXs you can spread the profit and work (such as providing liquidity) to participants rather than a central operator. It's also easier to prove what mechanism of the operation can and cannot be changed as the code is right there and if you are trading you only have to trust them for just the one function call rather than for holding your funds in their hands longer like with traditional exchanges.

JaimeThompson 5y ago
>It's also easier to prove what mechanism of the operation can and cannot be changed as the code is right there. Prove might be too strong a word to use in this instance.

rabuse 5y ago

I believe crypto is a great way to decentralize fundraising for startups/growing companies. Removes the middleman's cut from the equation, and you have no terms to agree to.

romeros 5y ago
The problem with this approach is that the founders can inadvertently start a pump and dump scheme that crypto comes with. You want to organize the worlds information and build a search engine. Okay, you create a google coin. You issue 21 Million coins. As soon as you announce it people are going to buy in and you will in a period of a few months become a billionaire. With no product. Just an idea. And then you get to dump your shares on the "investors" and you get to be a billionaire. There is no incentive to further develop your idea. Look at what happened to ICP. The VCs got in at 3 cents a coin. Each coin shot up to $750 per coin. Then the VCs dumped it on the retail noobs making a lot of money with absolutely no working product.
- rabuse 5y ago
  I understand the argument there, but this happens in the stock market as well, which is heavily regulated already. There will never be a perfect system, but at least crypto levels the playing field a bit more for less fortunate who want to make something and need capital, and don't have the social connections/wealth most founders today have.

hemloc_io 5y ago

I think the steelman arg I've found for crypto as a general social media replacement is based on three pillars. 1. Ownership by default. NFTs are kinda a silly example, but since your wallet ("You") own your the token that represent your assets being able to transfer them around with you whenever you go somewhere new is cool. 2. Authentication with your wallet makes things much better. SSO for the whole web. 3. Alignment of incentives for users + service providers. (DAOs, traditional corps, etc.). So with a concrete example. In Web2 social network, the social graph is closed off along with all your account info. If you want to move to a different social media website, you have to reenter all your info and re-friend everyone etc. The corporation chose to ban people, and the only way you can in theory get a vote is through owning a share. In (the ideal) Web3 social network, the social graph is open b/c all your friends are attached to your wallet. If you want to move websites you can take them with you, or even have you be on multiple front ends. Even better you might get tokens to vote for certain proposals in the DAO, for example such as banning people off the site etc. Decentralization is valuable b/c it allows the above to happen, not because it's valuable in it of itself. Without a decentralized network there wouldn't be enough trust in the network for anyone to use it (long term). After all blockchains are basically one giant shared database, if someone thought you can modify it, it loses all value (Similar to fiat money in a way ;) )

jboy55 5y ago
One of the biggest issues I have with this is, I don't want you to see my friend list. I don't want you to see my wall, I don't want you to glean my interests by reading the public ledger. If you say, well, all of that is stored locally, or can be imported and exported to any 'front end' such as facebook/twitter. There's another big issue, what if your friends don't want to exist on that front end? Either events/posts are private, or they're on the public ledger and distributed. There's no way to keep interactions private. In the end, if we think of having these messages sent to clients directly and stored locally, have the clients being able to subscribe to groups, have the clients maintain the friend list, and people being able to post to sets within that list. We have this already. Its called email.
- hemloc_io 5y ago

foxfluff 5y ago

> What problem does web3 or decentralization fix? > rent server from small provider If everyone rents a server and we make these servers talk to each other, that is what I would call decentralization. If you rely on a server operated and rented by someone else, you are subject to their whims: arbitrary bans, censorship, bait & switch, security issues, downtime, etcetra. I don't believe web3 fixes this but in I don't think decentralization is in principle a useless concept.. It's just hard to do right and harder than that to get enough people on board. And now with cryptocurrency, it's harder than ever to get people on board who aren't just looking to profit off of their buttcoin investment.

yrral 5y ago

Your data being locked up by companies and not to be able to be used by others. Web3 is less centralized in that the user data is exposed and freely available to be composed upon. For example, when someone makes a deposit (say of ERC20 USDC to earn interest, around 3.0% currently) on https://compound.finance https://compound.finance, that data is freely available and the "receipt" becomes another token (the ERC20 USDC cToken). [1] This token can now be used for other things, on any other protocol, without the involvement of compound itself. For example, there is a "compound" pool on https://curve.fi https://curve.fi that allows users to deposit cTokens so that they can earn interest on their stablecoins while also providing liquidity for stablecoin swaps and earning swap fees as well on top. [2] In fact, with this pool, the user can deposit/withdrawal just pure ERC20 USDC instead and curve will deposit/withdrawal that into/from compound on behalf of the user, again, with no involvement of compound at all. (other than interacting with its "immutable" smart contract) This deposit then gives the user back another ERC20 token "cCrv" that can then be used in other DeFi protocols without the involvement or authorization of curve. In contrast, in traditional web2, companies gatekeep this information so hard that there are 10B+ companies such as plaid that mostly just scrape user bank account data. Just recently AA is suing The Points Guy for scraping their website. [3] I recall there's even a comment in this thread about someone getting their own scraper banned because they were trying to scrape their own data. [1] https://compound.finance/docs/ctokens https://compound.finance/docs/ctokens [2] https://curve.fi/compound https://curve.fi/compound [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30013100 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30013100

trenchgun 5y ago
Reading this felt like having a stroke.

bodge5000 5y ago

I'm no expert, but to me it feels like if it weren't for all the hype which promised they'd be the second coming, they could have had their genuine use cases. In many cases they'd be small and you probably wouldnt have even noticed they were in use, and maybe a few larger issues could've been solved as well. But right now, we're at a point where a use case seemingly isn't required for there to be hype around it. Maybe all these things will fade into obscurity and come back one day and "fulfill their true purpose". If all goes well, barely any of us will care about the underlying technology of the problems they solve.

micromacrofoot 5y ago

So far the biggest "feature" of crypto seems to be the lack of regulation that more easily enables scams. This appears to be more appealing than any other feature, to the point where well-natured crypto projects spend a considerable amount of time educating people on how to avoid scams.

thjkgfgrrioppo 5y ago

Censorship and centralized control, hopefully. People owning their own content.

schleck8 5y ago
People already own their content if they buy it physically. And everyone else prefers the convenience of streaming. Also there is already multiple platforms with little to no regulation/'censorship' (namely onion service, telegram, kiwi farms, the chan boards, gab, parler...) and we all know how that worked out

agentultra 5y ago

Nothing. The entire infrastructure this system runs on is... the Internet. It doesn't work without TCP/IP, TLS/SSL, HTTP, etc. It's not fixing anything. It's only adding a way to force people to pay ETH gas fees to like posts and add comments. It's probably most useful for early crypto adopters to keep growing their pyramid with a captive audience and for criminals who want to hide more identities, launder money, and obscure illegal transactions from law enforcement. "But it can run without crypto," sure and why would anyone want that? You still need the Internet. Now you want to make it slower and burn more of the worlds energy so that we can independently audit who "liked" which post? So that you can "hypothetically" own your profile pic? Give me a break. I'm tired of the centralized services as anyone but there are ways we can solve this without the foregone conclusion that blockchains are the only viable way. They're not technologically sufficient, they're terrible for privacy, etc, etc. If you want to fundamentally improve the Internet you're going to have a better time improving things that already exist. Find more energy efficient transport layer protocols for modern usage patterns. Make it more secure. Improve privacy. There's a huge demand for this really unsexy, unhyped work that needs to be done. Heck, if you're interested in improving payment systems in the US there's a fair bit of catching up to do to reach par with some of the international systems.

lui8906 5y ago

> This won't be fixed by web3, ad monetization and tracking won't magically stop. They exist because there is a demand. Saying it is this way because this is the way people want it strikes me as a bit fatalist. Is it this way because it's what "people" want or because there is no viable alternative? Nothing is being "fixed" per se, an alternative vision of how things could be is being experimented with. Key tenets of this are trying to better align user and creator / provider incentives.

ploppyploppy 5y ago

Decentralised finance fixes a masive disparity in power. A global blockchain enables millions of people to access banking services -- globally -- that they are currently shut out of.