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> 'Some people use the term "Web 3.0" to refer only to decentralized blockchain-based networks without considering that all personal websites have essentially t

by pavlov 5y ago

> 'Some people use the term "Web 3.0" to refer only to decentralized blockchain-based networks without considering that all personal websites have essentially the same goals, be they on the regular Internet or on the new blockchain networks. Those who use the term "web 3.0" seem to have forgotten that self-hosted personal websites that run on home servers and are accessible over the regular Internet are inherently decentralized. Unfortunately, despite common goals, some on today's old Internet are hostile to blockchain technology. I am not sure why.' What goals does today's crypto-token-powered "web 3" vision share with the old Internet? It's not enough to say "well it's decentralized" and do a handwave. Consider the NFT exploration Moxie Marlinspike did recently: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html This is essentially a system that lets you buy DRM'd metadata that points to servers owned by a corporation funded by billions of VC dollars, and transactions are recorded on a ledger that spends more power than the entire country of Finland. The only purpose of these activities is to speculate on prices of these make-believe digital assets. None of these things have anything to with the old Internet: cargo cult DRM, billion-dollar VC funding, enormous energy waste, artificial scarcity where none is needed. That website on dial-up was slow because of real physical constraints, not artificial constraints erected to make VCs richer at the expense of the planet's ecosystem.

jackson1442 5y ago
I got bored the other day and thought it would be funny to make a copy of the most expensive NFT and set that as my Twitter profile picture because they added that silly feature. So I downloaded MetaMask, got everything set up, and went to one of the NFT marketplaces to try to make one. Uploaded the image and got a big scary warning: > (paraphrased; I don't have a screenshot) This image was found too many times on the internet. If this image is not yours, this is ILLEGAL AND A VIOLATION OF COPYRIGHT LAW, and may result in your NFT being removed from the marketplace. How on earth is this decentralized? Like yeah, I get wanting to protect your "asset" from "theft," but what central authority gets to decide what copyright law we abide by- further, what happens when an NFT marketplace removes your NFT? Does it get removed from the blockchain? I legitimately don't know how this works. The user experience is also TERRIBLE. I am rather technical (hell, I used to do Bitcoin back in like 2015, or whenever it was about $4k/coin) and still don't really know how the hell MetaMask works. I imported the wallet on my phone... maybe? The randomart image it showed initially was different, but apparently the iOS app just defaults to a different kind of randomart. You also have to use the MetaMask browser on iOS. It sucks. Also the MetaMask connect buttons barely work across different sites. It had a _really_ hard time telling if I had a wallet. Not sure if this is an implementation issue on the dev end but as a user it was super confusing. Using crypto to sign transactions to verify my identity is actually a very interesting idea, I like it a lot. Much easier than creating a user/pass for every site- just click Sign and go. That's basically the only good UX of web3 as it stands.
- gitfan86 5y ago
  This is Moxie's point. Web 1.0 is actually decentralized and permissionless. You can actually host that image on your own Web 1.0 without any gatekeepers being involved.
  - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
    Not strictly speaking true. Your local government can raid your servers for serving content that violates local laws, or in cooperation with a foreign one.
- a_t48 5y ago
  > Using crypto to sign transactions to verify my identity is actually a very interesting idea, I like it a lot. Much easier than creating a user/pass for every site- just click Sign and go. That's basically the only good UX of web3 as it stands. We already have this with SSO though - what would be the difference? Decentralization? Though it should be possible to host your own SSO.
  - tialaramex 5y ago
    Right, and if you don't want a single trackable identity, which lots of people don't, a nice modern phone can also WebAuthn using say a fingerprint reader† and so you can have one step sign in (tap sensor, sign in) that way with the resulting "identity" living only on that one site. † You might be thinking wait, we don't want to be trackable. WebAuthn doesn't have any way of sending fingerprints to anywhere, the phone is using the biometrics to make this not work for bag snatcher, or for the guy snooping your desk while you go get a coffee.
- Melatonic 5y ago
  I think NFT's are just the equivelent of those that use the fine art world for tax avoidance. Web 3.1 is probably coming but it is going to be something we have not fully figured out yet
  - deleted 5y ago
idiotsecant 5y ago
It's worth noting that there is a core of people doing real work in crypto who are not trying to peddle NFTs or other sleight of hand rungpulls designed to separate the gullible from their money. Ethereum, for example, is full of people building interesting things like off-chain low-cost trading using non-interactive zero knowledge proofs and actively working to make crypto less energy intensive and more useful. They don't want to sell you an NFT and it's not part of some elaborate rugpull- There are plenty of examples of people doing this important work because they legitimately believe that a world where fiat control is divorced from the levers of governmental power is a positive change. There are also, of course, people trying to use those achievements as part of a weird shell game where the end result is giving gullible strangers nothing in exchange for something. That's sort of the human condition.
- gitfan86 5y ago
  Yes there are people with 100% good intentions working in this space. There were also people with 100% good intentions working at Theranos.
  - tata71 5y ago
    With the obvious exception that...it's impossible to fork an entity like Theranos when they become sufficiently evil such that the community no longer believes in their direction.
    - IncRnd 5y ago
      Well, Theranos was a fork of existing, well-understood blood testing methodology. It was a house of cards built out of lies and falsehoods in order to enrich the founder and associates. Exactly like crypto often is.
      - tata71 5y ago
        "www companies are just a way for VCs to make money faster. "
willhinsa 5y ago
And! The ledger isn't used by the main marketplaces or wallets (eg OpenSea & MetaMask) when you're trying to look at your assets. You can be deplatformed from those places, unable to trade your assets with anyone on those sites/using those wallets. From that Moxie Marlinspike article: > A crypto wallet like MetaMask, Rainbow, etc is “non-custodial” (the keys are kept client side), but it has the same problem as my dApps above: a wallet has to run on a mobile device or in your browser. Meanwhile, ethereum and other blockchains have been designed with the idea that it’s a network of peers, but not designed such that it’s really possible for your mobile device or your browser to be one of those peers. > A wallet like MetaMask needs to do basic things like display your balance, your recent transactions, and your NFTs, as well as more complex things like constructing transactions, interacting with smart contracts, etc. In short, MetaMask needs to interact with the blockchain, but the blockchain has been built such that clients like MetaMask can’t interact with it. So like my dApp, MetaMask accomplishes this by making API calls to three companies that have consolidated in this space. > For instance, MetaMask displays your recent transactions by making an API call to etherscan > …displays your account balance by making an API call to Infura > …displays your NFTs by making an API call to OpenSea > Again, like with my dApp, these responses are not authenticated in some way. They’re not even signed so that you could later prove they were lying. It reuses the same connections, TLS session tickets, etc for all the accounts in your wallet, so if you’re managing multiple accounts in your wallet to maintain some identity separation, these companies know they’re linked. > MetaMask doesn’t actually do much, it’s just a view onto data provided by these centralized APIs. This isn’t a problem specific to MetaMask – what other option do they have? Rainbow, etc are set up in exactly the same way. (Interestingly, Rainbow has their own data for the social features they’re building into their wallet – social graph, showcases, etc – and have chosen to build all of that on top of Firebase instead of the blockchain.) > All this means that if your NFT is removed from OpenSea, it also disappears from your wallet. It doesn’t functionally matter that my NFT is indelibly on the blockchain somewhere, because the wallet (and increasingly everything else in the ecosystem) is just using the OpenSea API to display NFTs, which began returning 304 No Content for the query of NFTs owned by my address!
steelstraw 5y ago
Vitalik's response to Moxie is worth a read: https://np.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/ryk3it/my_first_impressions_of_web3/hrrz15r/ https://np.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/ryk3it/my_first_im...
- Animats 5y ago
  Buterin: "Moxie's critiques in the second half of the post strike me as having a correct criticism of the current state of the ecosystem (where (1), (2), (7) and (8) are the only things that we have working code for), but they are missing where the blockchain ecosystem is going." Right. In other words, what we have now sucks, but you shouldn't criticize it because we have this proposed scheme which might be better.
Melatonic 5y ago
The thing that is telling to me about all of these "revolutions" is WHO is doing the hype and to what end. Web 1.0 it was the nerds saying it was going to change the world and the people with no knowledge of how the internet worked saying it was BS. Web 2.0 for the most part just seemed to naturally happen without a ton of specific hype and was what finally got all the naysayers of Web 1.0 on board. Web 3.0 is all the OG naysayers saying it is going to change the world while the nerds roll their eyes. Personally I am looking forward to Web 3.1 :-D
- zozbot234 5y ago
  I'm waiting for Web 3.11 for Workgroups. At least it will be useful for something.
Animats 5y ago
I follow the NFT thing, at least in its metaverse incarnation, and it looks like it's about over. None of the 3D worlds that have NFTs have significant usage. The reaction of game companies is mostly "do not need or want". The reaction of gamers is "hell, no". Nobody is doing much with their overpriced "virtual land". Where it even exists. There are many wannabe virtual worlds that never actually launched a 3D world. There isn't much of an NFT resale market. There are minters, and there are suckers. Any chance to make money flipping NFTs was used up last year. NFTs may stay around as collectables, but to make money that way, you must have fans who buy your merch. You need to own an NBA franchise, be a famous performer, or have a major collectable brand. NFT sentiment on Reddit has gone from positive to very negative in the last three months. The hype isn't working any more. Without hype, it dies. Then there's enforcement. About twice a month, the US SEC brings the hammer down on some crypto-related crook.[1] They're still working through the Initial Coin Offering scam backlog. They'll get to NFTs as the complaints start coming in. [1] https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-actions https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-acti...
tata71 5y ago
> spends more power than the entire country of Finland. The only purpose of these activities is to speculate on prices of these make-believe digital assets This'll get almost as much traction as activists decrying HTTPS/SSL because it took more compute, and therefore obviously more pollution!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
graycat 5y ago
I'm no fan of NFT (non-fungible tokens) crypto and do not now, never have, never intend to own any, but, and maybe part of Web3, am guessing at some useful purpose -- a convenient, low overhead, way to move many small amounts of money to pay for Internet usage. E.g., Sam runs a Web site and wants to charge each user some small amount, say, $0.001 up to $0.10, including users in foreign countries, for each visit. Sam is eager to let his users pay with some major NFT. Joe wants to use Sam's site and other sites with such a charging technique so buys in whatever fiat currency his country uses, say, $10.00 worth of some NFT. Then Joe uses Sam's site and pays with some NFT money. That NFT tokens can be divided into many parts is crucial here. Once a day Sam converts all his NFT revenue to dollars (or whatever fiat currency is used in his country). So, net, the money flow is from Joe's fiat money to $10.00 WORTH of some NFT to Sam's revenue in NFT to Sam's revenue in his fiat money. Point 1: The NFT is held by Joe and Sam for only a short time and is used only as a convenient way to move many small amounts of money. Point 2: Neither Joe nor Sam cares what each whole token of the NFT is worth. Point 3: Investors who want to speculate on the long term value of a NFT tokens have risks from "unknown unknowns". Point 4: If each of 1 billion people do what Joe does, hold nearly all that NFT, and on average hold only $10.00 worth, then we have an estimate of the maximum the investors can make.
- drdeca 5y ago
  This seems to be, disregarding the entire meaning of "non-fungible" ? NFT doesn't mean "token". If you just mean "token", say "token"? Unless you mean like, "tokens which represent a fractional share of a particular NFT" ? But why would you use this as the thing to denominate payment in? If Joe has $5 worth of something, and Carl has another $5 worth of the same thing, and outcomes are equivalent if they swap what they have, then, the thing they have is fungible.
  - graycat 5y ago
    Thanks for the lessons! I'm a total novice in the world of NFT (Google says that abbreviates "non-fungible token"). You are way ahead of me. I'm such a novice that I don't yet even know how to use the words! I don't yet fully understand your lessons! Maybe roughly I have the scenario of Joe, Sam, and the long term investors correct.

by pavlov 5y ago

jackson1442 5y ago

I got bored the other day and thought it would be funny to make a copy of the most expensive NFT and set that as my Twitter profile picture because they added that silly feature. So I downloaded MetaMask, got everything set up, and went to one of the NFT marketplaces to try to make one. Uploaded the image and got a big scary warning: > (paraphrased; I don't have a screenshot) This image was found too many times on the internet. If this image is not yours, this is ILLEGAL AND A VIOLATION OF COPYRIGHT LAW, and may result in your NFT being removed from the marketplace. How on earth is this decentralized? Like yeah, I get wanting to protect your "asset" from "theft," but what central authority gets to decide what copyright law we abide by- further, what happens when an NFT marketplace removes your NFT? Does it get removed from the blockchain? I legitimately don't know how this works. The user experience is also TERRIBLE. I am rather technical (hell, I used to do Bitcoin back in like 2015, or whenever it was about $4k/coin) and still don't really know how the hell MetaMask works. I imported the wallet on my phone... maybe? The randomart image it showed initially was different, but apparently the iOS app just defaults to a different kind of randomart. You also have to use the MetaMask browser on iOS. It sucks. Also the MetaMask connect buttons barely work across different sites. It had a _really_ hard time telling if I had a wallet. Not sure if this is an implementation issue on the dev end but as a user it was super confusing. Using crypto to sign transactions to verify my identity is actually a very interesting idea, I like it a lot. Much easier than creating a user/pass for every site- just click Sign and go. That's basically the only good UX of web3 as it stands.

gitfan86 5y ago
This is Moxie's point. Web 1.0 is actually decentralized and permissionless. You can actually host that image on your own Web 1.0 without any gatekeepers being involved.
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago
  Not strictly speaking true. Your local government can raid your servers for serving content that violates local laws, or in cooperation with a foreign one.
a_t48 5y ago
> Using crypto to sign transactions to verify my identity is actually a very interesting idea, I like it a lot. Much easier than creating a user/pass for every site- just click Sign and go. That's basically the only good UX of web3 as it stands. We already have this with SSO though - what would be the difference? Decentralization? Though it should be possible to host your own SSO.
- tialaramex 5y ago
  Right, and if you don't want a single trackable identity, which lots of people don't, a nice modern phone can also WebAuthn using say a fingerprint reader† and so you can have one step sign in (tap sensor, sign in) that way with the resulting "identity" living only on that one site. † You might be thinking wait, we don't want to be trackable. WebAuthn doesn't have any way of sending fingerprints to anywhere, the phone is using the biometrics to make this not work for bag snatcher, or for the guy snooping your desk while you go get a coffee.
Melatonic 5y ago
I think NFT's are just the equivelent of those that use the fine art world for tax avoidance. Web 3.1 is probably coming but it is going to be something we have not fully figured out yet
- deleted 5y ago

idiotsecant 5y ago

It's worth noting that there is a core of people doing real work in crypto who are not trying to peddle NFTs or other sleight of hand rungpulls designed to separate the gullible from their money. Ethereum, for example, is full of people building interesting things like off-chain low-cost trading using non-interactive zero knowledge proofs and actively working to make crypto less energy intensive and more useful. They don't want to sell you an NFT and it's not part of some elaborate rugpull- There are plenty of examples of people doing this important work because they legitimately believe that a world where fiat control is divorced from the levers of governmental power is a positive change. There are also, of course, people trying to use those achievements as part of a weird shell game where the end result is giving gullible strangers nothing in exchange for something. That's sort of the human condition.

gitfan86 5y ago
Yes there are people with 100% good intentions working in this space. There were also people with 100% good intentions working at Theranos.
- tata71 5y ago
  With the obvious exception that...it's impossible to fork an entity like Theranos when they become sufficiently evil such that the community no longer believes in their direction.
  - IncRnd 5y ago
    Well, Theranos was a fork of existing, well-understood blood testing methodology. It was a house of cards built out of lies and falsehoods in order to enrich the founder and associates. Exactly like crypto often is.
    - tata71 5y ago
      "www companies are just a way for VCs to make money faster. "

willhinsa 5y ago

And! The ledger isn't used by the main marketplaces or wallets (eg OpenSea & MetaMask) when you're trying to look at your assets. You can be deplatformed from those places, unable to trade your assets with anyone on those sites/using those wallets. From that Moxie Marlinspike article: > A crypto wallet like MetaMask, Rainbow, etc is “non-custodial” (the keys are kept client side), but it has the same problem as my dApps above: a wallet has to run on a mobile device or in your browser. Meanwhile, ethereum and other blockchains have been designed with the idea that it’s a network of peers, but not designed such that it’s really possible for your mobile device or your browser to be one of those peers. > A wallet like MetaMask needs to do basic things like display your balance, your recent transactions, and your NFTs, as well as more complex things like constructing transactions, interacting with smart contracts, etc. In short, MetaMask needs to interact with the blockchain, but the blockchain has been built such that clients like MetaMask can’t interact with it. So like my dApp, MetaMask accomplishes this by making API calls to three companies that have consolidated in this space. > For instance, MetaMask displays your recent transactions by making an API call to etherscan > …displays your account balance by making an API call to Infura > …displays your NFTs by making an API call to OpenSea > Again, like with my dApp, these responses are not authenticated in some way. They’re not even signed so that you could later prove they were lying. It reuses the same connections, TLS session tickets, etc for all the accounts in your wallet, so if you’re managing multiple accounts in your wallet to maintain some identity separation, these companies know they’re linked. > MetaMask doesn’t actually do much, it’s just a view onto data provided by these centralized APIs. This isn’t a problem specific to MetaMask – what other option do they have? Rainbow, etc are set up in exactly the same way. (Interestingly, Rainbow has their own data for the social features they’re building into their wallet – social graph, showcases, etc – and have chosen to build all of that on top of Firebase instead of the blockchain.) > All this means that if your NFT is removed from OpenSea, it also disappears from your wallet. It doesn’t functionally matter that my NFT is indelibly on the blockchain somewhere, because the wallet (and increasingly everything else in the ecosystem) is just using the OpenSea API to display NFTs, which began returning 304 No Content for the query of NFTs owned by my address!

steelstraw 5y ago

Vitalik's response to Moxie is worth a read: https://np.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/ryk3it/my_first_impressions_of_web3/hrrz15r/ https://np.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/ryk3it/my_first_im...

Animats 5y ago
Buterin: "Moxie's critiques in the second half of the post strike me as having a correct criticism of the current state of the ecosystem (where (1), (2), (7) and (8) are the only things that we have working code for), but they are missing where the blockchain ecosystem is going." Right. In other words, what we have now sucks, but you shouldn't criticize it because we have this proposed scheme which might be better.

Melatonic 5y ago

The thing that is telling to me about all of these "revolutions" is WHO is doing the hype and to what end. Web 1.0 it was the nerds saying it was going to change the world and the people with no knowledge of how the internet worked saying it was BS. Web 2.0 for the most part just seemed to naturally happen without a ton of specific hype and was what finally got all the naysayers of Web 1.0 on board. Web 3.0 is all the OG naysayers saying it is going to change the world while the nerds roll their eyes. Personally I am looking forward to Web 3.1 :-D

zozbot234 5y ago
I'm waiting for Web 3.11 for Workgroups. At least it will be useful for something.

Animats 5y ago

I follow the NFT thing, at least in its metaverse incarnation, and it looks like it's about over. None of the 3D worlds that have NFTs have significant usage. The reaction of game companies is mostly "do not need or want". The reaction of gamers is "hell, no". Nobody is doing much with their overpriced "virtual land". Where it even exists. There are many wannabe virtual worlds that never actually launched a 3D world. There isn't much of an NFT resale market. There are minters, and there are suckers. Any chance to make money flipping NFTs was used up last year. NFTs may stay around as collectables, but to make money that way, you must have fans who buy your merch. You need to own an NBA franchise, be a famous performer, or have a major collectable brand. NFT sentiment on Reddit has gone from positive to very negative in the last three months. The hype isn't working any more. Without hype, it dies. Then there's enforcement. About twice a month, the US SEC brings the hammer down on some crypto-related crook.[1] They're still working through the Initial Coin Offering scam backlog. They'll get to NFTs as the complaints start coming in. [1] https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-actions https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-acti...

tata71 5y ago

> spends more power than the entire country of Finland. The only purpose of these activities is to speculate on prices of these make-believe digital assets This'll get almost as much traction as activists decrying HTTPS/SSL because it took more compute, and therefore obviously more pollution!

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

graycat 5y ago

I'm no fan of NFT (non-fungible tokens) crypto and do not now, never have, never intend to own any, but, and maybe part of Web3, am guessing at some useful purpose -- a convenient, low overhead, way to move many small amounts of money to pay for Internet usage. E.g., Sam runs a Web site and wants to charge each user some small amount, say, $0.001 up to $0.10, including users in foreign countries, for each visit. Sam is eager to let his users pay with some major NFT. Joe wants to use Sam's site and other sites with such a charging technique so buys in whatever fiat currency his country uses, say, $10.00 worth of some NFT. Then Joe uses Sam's site and pays with some NFT money. That NFT tokens can be divided into many parts is crucial here. Once a day Sam converts all his NFT revenue to dollars (or whatever fiat currency is used in his country). So, net, the money flow is from Joe's fiat money to $10.00 WORTH of some NFT to Sam's revenue in NFT to Sam's revenue in his fiat money. Point 1: The NFT is held by Joe and Sam for only a short time and is used only as a convenient way to move many small amounts of money. Point 2: Neither Joe nor Sam cares what each whole token of the NFT is worth. Point 3: Investors who want to speculate on the long term value of a NFT tokens have risks from "unknown unknowns". Point 4: If each of 1 billion people do what Joe does, hold nearly all that NFT, and on average hold only $10.00 worth, then we have an estimate of the maximum the investors can make.

drdeca 5y ago
This seems to be, disregarding the entire meaning of "non-fungible" ? NFT doesn't mean "token". If you just mean "token", say "token"? Unless you mean like, "tokens which represent a fractional share of a particular NFT" ? But why would you use this as the thing to denominate payment in? If Joe has $5 worth of something, and Carl has another $5 worth of the same thing, and outcomes are equivalent if they swap what they have, then, the thing they have is fungible.
- graycat 5y ago
  Thanks for the lessons! I'm a total novice in the world of NFT (Google says that abbreviates "non-fungible token"). You are way ahead of me. I'm such a novice that I don't yet even know how to use the words! I don't yet fully understand your lessons! Maybe roughly I have the scenario of Joe, Sam, and the long term investors correct.