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So far I've yet to see a convincing argument for what "Web 3" is and can offer that we can't currently do without the use of a Blockchain. It all seems to boil

So far I've yet to see a convincing argument for what "Web 3" is and can offer that we can't currently do without the use of a Blockchain. It all seems to boil down to "it'll cost something to do something", which isn't exactly a convincing argument on its own. The responses to this story read rather like Facebook comments on controversial news articles - there's a bunch of comments claiming the website is a bunch of nonsense without actually articulating why that is the case, presumably by people who believe (or are invested in) crypto or "Web 3". Can anyone give a reasoned argument to the actual benefits of Web 3, in contrast to what is currently not possible without the use of a Blockchain?

MaxKK 5y ago
Crypto makes it possible to own something digitally. Web3 incorporates this ownership. While Web 2.0 was about writing something to the internet and the World Wide Web was about reading something on the internet. It's a further iteration which just makes sense.
- lpcvoid 5y ago
  Why the hell do I need to "own" something online? Whatever I publish, people can do whatever the hell they want with it. I don't want DRM incorporated into the internet. Blockchain is a scam and anybody parroting its supposed advantages is either invested or naive.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    I mean, if you don't want to "own" something online, then don't? Nobody is telling you what to or not to do. Don't get angry at another person's preferences. I think a much more cogent criticism is that it's very difficult for Web3/on-chain ownership to correspond to any form of meaningful ownership for the user. "Yeah I own digital <thing>, so what?" I only really see a use when mapping to an actually digitally scare good, say an IPv4 block or a domain name. But that's it really. Maybe some gacha/collectible games, but that's iffy.
    - Jcowell 5y ago
      One thing I don’t understand is how does this migrate away from things such as copyright licenses ? Even if you “buy” a digital good What stops a license from being applied to it?
- goosedragons 5y ago
  You could own something digitally before crypto. I've got some pretty sweet digital 7th Edition Magic cards I've had for about 2 decades. I traded away some of them and sold others.
  - PretzelPirate 5y ago
    If those are on Magic the Gathering Online, do you really own them? What happens when that shuts down in favor of Magic Arena?
    - jiggawatts 5y ago
      The same thing that happens if you have an NFT that's just a URL. If the URL target goes down, the NFT is broken.
      - piva00 5y ago
        Or if the game that accepted those NFT as in-game items shuts down, then these items cease to exist as well in any meaningful way, at least for the reasons it might be valuable in the beginning when I purchased it (stats in game, rarity, etc.). If the game ceases to exist then the NFT is just, what, a trading card that shows some scarcity/rarity? I really don't get this argument at all. I bought an in-game mount for World of Warcraft as a NFT, WoW shuts down, where the hell am I going to use the in-game mount again? A shitty game that tells me "your WoW mount works here as well!"? It really feels it's all a preparation for the "metaverse" bullshit.
        ryanbrunner 5y ago
        No game is going to do the "your X game items work here", since it cuts off any revenue stream they have, and the NFT itself is almost definitely not going to include a functioning asset, just a token that you own mount with an ID of XYZ. It would be on the game developers to create art and code for every single NFT they want to support.
- hijodelsol 5y ago
  It does NOT make it possible to own something in any meaningful way. (Intellectual) property rights already take care of ownership. Ofc, there are illegal ways of just taking what you want, but that is a crime like under all other circumstances. The only thing crypto enables is to have a ecologically destructive, slow, redundant database that says “X belongs to Y”. The thing is though, you could just create a different database. And having your entry in that database does not legally equal ownership. So it doesn’t solve anything but now there’s money involved so people try to scam you.
- jug 5y ago
  I'd like to be more precise in this case and say that an NFT is an ability to prove original ownership. We have of course been able to buy and own more or less exlusive licenses to digital goods for a long time now. The video game market is now larger than the music and film industries combined and quickly becoming entirely digital. And if it's own work and the more literal form of ownership rather than just a license to it, these rights are well protected in law and don't really use to become a problem? Unless you live in a state with state-sponsored copyright infringement, but these would absolutely not respect NFT's and proofs of ownership either. But if you for some reason need to support the specific case of proving original ownership, NFT is a technology that can help although I think this is becoming a too niche use for a widespread internet-wide revolution. It's still digital which can be made into perfect copies and I think this alone reduces the appeal even if it would come with a sticker that validates the product. At least it does so for me. Sure it's "useful" kind of like how an MD5 sum is, and now we get even further along the way than that but... it's still digital goods with everything that implies...
  - anhner 5y ago
    > I'd like to be more precise in this case and say that an NFT is an ability to prove original ownership. It doesn't even do that. See: all artists whose work was stolen and sold as NFTs
- slightwinder 5y ago
  Everything you own with crypto, is some data inside this crypto's world. Without any connection to other worlds, those data have no value in itself. And the moment you connect it, laws come into play and your crypto is just a tool to manage this ownership. But for this, crypto has no real benefit so far. And it's questionable whether it ever will have. We get the same practical benefits without all the expensive crypto-bells&whistles.
can16358p 5y ago
Sure. A "free" internet. Not in terms of money, but in terms of freedom of speech without censorship and a controlling authority. With no authority that decides whether I can send money to/receive from someone. Especially living in a corrupt authoratarian system, even only those two outweight all the bad sides (tx fees, scalability, PoW environmental effects) for me. It does more good than it harms in the big picture.
- samsonradu 5y ago
  > With no authority that decides whether I can send money to/receive from someone. That’s actually a good point and Bitcoin/crypto solves this. Why doesn’t it stop there though, what does web3 solve?
  - rich_sasha 5y ago
    Only somewhat I think; miners actually do have such control, and could be coerced into sanctions; it's just that no one has successfully done that (or kept quiet about it). You can imagine outlawing processing some crypto transactions in some area. Miners have no choice but to comply, leading to at least a fork and massive confusion, at most to actual enforcement of the rule. Blockchains may be censorship-resistant, but humans are not rubber hose resistant.
    - miracle2k 5y ago
      > You can imagine outlawing processing some crypto transactions in some area. Miners have no choice but to comply, leading to at least a fork and massive confusion, at most to actual enforcement of the rule. It is not a geo-location issue. The enforcement measures in question either manage to control 50% of the hashrate or they don't. If they don't, the protocol will ignore their censorship. Yes, they could continue mining a minority fork chain, but you would need to convince Bitcoin-users and services to use the fork instead of the uncensored version. You could imagine this being done by force: ISPs block the download of the software, exchanges no longer trade it etc. The point is merely: <50%, the power is not with the miners at all; it is the users that need to be controlled.
kgraves 5y ago
Isn't IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) considered web3? can't you use IFPS without cryptocurrencies? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System
- Ygg2 5y ago
  Well kinda. It's complicated. > can't you use IFPS without cryptocurrencies? You can. And you should. Cryptocurrency is a solution in search of a problem. Problem it purports to solve isn't something you can solve via software.
  - krageon 5y ago
    > Problem it purports to solve isn't something you can solve via software. That problem being sending money wherever you want, which is eminently solvable with software (mostly because it is almost all software everywhere).
- Double_a_92 5y ago
  IPFS is basically torrenting, and doesn't even use a Blockchain. And of top of that people are not even using it properly, because centralized nodes seem to be the main wait to get access to the files.
  - lapinot 5y ago
    > And of top of that people are not even using it properly, because centralized nodes seem to be the main wait to get access to the files. That's because last i checked (admittedly a couple years ago) their software was slow and ressource intensive. Which is quite the opposite of what you want for real-life network transfer software. Meanwhile stuff like syncthing seem to get bittorrent-like transfer just fine. Dat/hypercore seamed less bloaty (again a while ago), i wonder what the solid projects in this area are currently.. (torrent-based network filesystems)
- detaro 5y ago
  There's been kind of two waves of "This is web3". The first was primarily about protocols like IPFS, dat/hyper, ... (2018/19?) and then at some point it got used more and more by blockchain folks, and they kind of dominate the conversation now. What it "actually" is is up in the air and not really defined. (But the blockchain scenario still often involves things like IPFS as underlying components)
max_ 5y ago
Web3 is dead on arrival. As it does not solve any of the problems Web 2.0 has (corporate/government censorship, abuse of user data, geolocking etc) The what would hold some value would be a combination of self sovereign financial services & Tim's "Social Linked Data"/SOLID. The current Web3 wave just seems like a legal marketing scam (scam as in legal but zero ethics). It's just about pumping price's and intellectual masterbation (talking about things they never do) It is however true that you cannot separate economic incentives from a platform where we want to see economic activity.
andrewingram 5y ago
I haven't bought into crypto/web3, so take this with a pinch of salt. I currently think of the role of crypto in "web3" as a bit like dark matter in the universe, something that causes the web (universe) as a whole to resist centralisation -- by means of financial incentives. It doesn't have to be everywhere, but it has to be in enough places to resist the pull towards building megaservices like Facebook. I'm very skeptical as to whether it's actually going to play out that way though.
- jdrc 5y ago
  i think cryptochains and web3 should not be confused. one of them will survive
audunw 5y ago
With NFT, blockchain proponents have argued that ticket trading is a really good usecase, and could maybe lessen the grip of the likes of Ticketmaster I think the last episode of Last Week Tonight really shed light on why Blockchain can't really solve real-world problems like that. The problem isn't a technical problem. It'd be easy to solve the problem of ticked distribution/resale without blockchain if the concert vendors actually wanted. But now Ticketmaster owns most of those, so you can't solve it easily even if blockchains would help anyway. And you really can't solve the problem of scalping without tying tickets/accounts to a verified national ID, which is a political problem. I think blockchain is potentially a huge detriment to solving real-world problems.. because it tricks smart people into thinking "you apply blockchain, and then all these problems are magically solved", rather than actually working with other people on the actual social, economic and political problems we need to solve to make real progress.
- IanCal 5y ago
  > And you really can't solve the problem of scalping without tying tickets/accounts to a verified national ID, which is a political problem. I'm not sure I understand that. You could tie it to something within a smaller group (e.g. tickets can only be transferred to people who have bought the bands album, or only to verified accounts that the vendor approves). I would also be surprised if there wasn't a ZK way of doing some kind of KYC like check that you are able to prove you have ID and tie that to an account _without_ making the link between the two public.
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    This feels like a worse thing to me. “You can sell this thing to people, but only people who have done some other sort of on chain transaction” opens the door for a huge mess. “You can sell to people who aren’t a member of a union.” “You can sell to people who never donated money to the ACLU.” “You can sell to people who don’t own a gun.” Is that the direction we really want?
  - acdha 5y ago
    The problem is that you need to link what's checked at the door with the online trail. If you only allowed people holding the band's CD to enter, that'd definitely work but it's just turning a different physical object into the ticket. You could try to have a trusted third party verify ID and only allow registered accounts to participate in the resale market (Ticketmaster sells this service) but at that point the blockchain is, as usual, not adding anything other than overhead because the trust depends on that third-party and the venue's staff checking ID at the door (otherwise you'd find people on Craigslist paying people to register, get their ID checked, and letting the scalpers use their account).
rvz 5y ago
> Can anyone give a reasoned argument to the actual benefits of Web 3, in contrast to what is currently not possible without the use of a Blockchain? Yeah. Why not try donating to NGOs through a bank account if your friend or penpal happens to be stuck in a sanctioned country? [0] I also don't think merchants and businesses would like to tolerate the knowingly abused chargeback system which friendly fraud hurts both the customer and the merchants. Cryptocurrencies completely eliminate that abuse. The user can contact the merchant for a refund instead of filing a costly dispute which the final decision always sides with the banks, who doesn't even know if it is friendly fraud or not, but takes the money anyway. I can see them using it for Stripe or Coinbase Commerce. [0] https://theintercept.com/2022/01/19/crypto-afghanistan-sanctions-taliban/ https://theintercept.com/2022/01/19/crypto-afghanistan-sanct...
- dagw 5y ago
  I can do all those things with Web 2.0 (or even 1.0).
  - rvz 5y ago
    Are you (really) sure? The article that I linked says otherwise. So for a merchant, there are absolutely no problems in friendly fraud, failing cards in other countries, etc in Web 2 then? Especially sending money to people in sanctioned countries using bank accounts?
    - dagw 5y ago
      My point is that it is not hard to pay with cryptocurrency using "Web 2.0" technology (or at least any problems you run into aren't directly 'Web' related).
      - rvz 5y ago
        Well I'm arguing as to why exactly one would use cryptocurrencies for payments "Web 3" over using "Web 2.0" payment companies and I just explained that and its use cases. Of course one can use cryptocurrencies with Web 2. But try doing the above with the banks, PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, etc. It seems that this is proof that cryptocurrencies not only can work together with Web 2 websites but they are also here to stay.
IanCal 5y ago
> can offer that we can't currently do without the use of a Blockchain. The real issue with responses like this is that you can do anything with computers anyway. The blockchain basically gives you a * Globally writable database * With stored procedures * And row level security Now, you can always swap out that with a centralised service. Turing machines can do stuff and machines can talk to each other. Whether it's possible to build a technically equivalent thing is not really the important question. What tends to happen though is that the underlying infrastructure if supported by a profit-making company is that it has its own agenda and desire to control access. There's no real desire for the base layer to be open, it's not profitable in itself. One of the more appealing things to me in the area is that there's a lot of work with shared interfaces. Working with the ERC721 spec I can easily make a non-fungible token that refers to a ticket at a conference, or right to claim a financial security, or game item, or has a link to a wiggly line or whatever I want. Someone else can build an auction contract, and my nft will automatically work in it, as will anyone elses. If you have control of the NFT you can pick which auction type/contract/service you want to use. I don't (and shouldn't) care, that's not the part I build or manage. Finally, "but can't you do it with postgres and ..." is true but there's a huge shift that's happened. Before, sure, I'd have to have built all this stuff on chain and have all of the complete pain-in-the-arse stuff to deal with that comes with crypto. But now that all exists. So to make, say, an in game item that people can re-sell, swap, etc, instead of * Make a website * Setup the DB * Manage user accounts * Manage payment information * Code the sales, auctions, etc * Build the integration with my game & my API * Manage and maintain the server to do it the traditional way. To do it on chain I * Create a trivial NFT contract * Build the integration with my game & a generic API That's it. All the other work, auctions, etc. has been solved and built already. User accounts are already managed. You can always solve it another way. The more interesting question is in which cases should you solve a problem in certain ways? Not everything makes sense on chain, the database is slow and public (and even for very cheap chains comparatively expensive), and the stored procedures are extremely limited. However some things can fit well - do you need to create some kind of economic incentive & want to let market forces control things (for example, filecoin and paying people for storage)? Maybe just creating a token on existing infrastructure will fit your needs. If it does, does it make sense to build even more things yourself? Disclaimers - I am currently doing contract engineering in this area but am not looking for work, have only small holdings and am not here to shill for anything.
sergiosgc 5y ago
The idea of a public ledger, where any public record can be kept without the need of a central authority certainly has value. The fact that current tech solutions are not efficient, and thus expensive, should not hide that value. Instead of going through offshoots trying to find the killer app, I'd much prefer to see cryptocurrency tech evolve in order to bring costs down. Take the base use case of keeping "bank account" records and run with it until it works (as of now, it does not). Out of the viable -- for my definition of viable -- cryptocurrencies out there, the only one I see moving in the right direction is Ethereum. They are taking their sweet time, though. If a killer use case is needed, think micropayments: The ability to pay 0.1¢ to listen to a song, paying directly to the artist.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  Micropayments have been available in various forms well before BTC was a thing and they never took off. Micropayments also necessitate L2 solutions more than almost any other feature using blockchains since fees are nontrivial at that level even on rarely used chains.
- simonw 5y ago
  > The idea of a public ledger, where any public record can be kept without the need of a central authority certainly has value. Based on what we've learned over the past few years, I'm not sure I believe that any more. Without a central authority, there's no way to be confident that anything is "true". Partly because it's impossible to correct mistakes. So you get NFTs of stolen art, because there's no authority to verify it. You get ideas to "put real estate deeds on the blockchain" with no answer to the question "what if someone loses their private key?" The only information that can reliably be handheld by such a blockchain is information that entirely exists within that blockchain - so account balances, but effectively nothing else.
  - malermeister 5y ago
    This! The lack of a central authority to fix things is an anti-feature sold as a feature to libertarian-minded folks. Even account balances are a bad idea to do on the block chain. Ever had to dispute a credit card charge when you dealt with a sketchy vendor? Well too bad, all sales are final now in this new immutable world.
3np 5y ago
With the risk of spamming this, but since the confusion keeps being repeated in this thread: This submission is a presentation that captures the intention quite well, with a linked post by the person who brought the term to the blockchain community: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30683038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30683038 Both predate the recent hype-wave.

MaxKK 5y ago

Crypto makes it possible to own something digitally. Web3 incorporates this ownership. While Web 2.0 was about writing something to the internet and the World Wide Web was about reading something on the internet. It's a further iteration which just makes sense.

lpcvoid 5y ago
Why the hell do I need to "own" something online? Whatever I publish, people can do whatever the hell they want with it. I don't want DRM incorporated into the internet. Blockchain is a scam and anybody parroting its supposed advantages is either invested or naive.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  I mean, if you don't want to "own" something online, then don't? Nobody is telling you what to or not to do. Don't get angry at another person's preferences. I think a much more cogent criticism is that it's very difficult for Web3/on-chain ownership to correspond to any form of meaningful ownership for the user. "Yeah I own digital <thing>, so what?" I only really see a use when mapping to an actually digitally scare good, say an IPv4 block or a domain name. But that's it really. Maybe some gacha/collectible games, but that's iffy.
  - Jcowell 5y ago
    One thing I don’t understand is how does this migrate away from things such as copyright licenses ? Even if you “buy” a digital good What stops a license from being applied to it?
goosedragons 5y ago
You could own something digitally before crypto. I've got some pretty sweet digital 7th Edition Magic cards I've had for about 2 decades. I traded away some of them and sold others.
- PretzelPirate 5y ago
  If those are on Magic the Gathering Online, do you really own them? What happens when that shuts down in favor of Magic Arena?
  - jiggawatts 5y ago
    The same thing that happens if you have an NFT that's just a URL. If the URL target goes down, the NFT is broken.
    - piva00 5y ago
      Or if the game that accepted those NFT as in-game items shuts down, then these items cease to exist as well in any meaningful way, at least for the reasons it might be valuable in the beginning when I purchased it (stats in game, rarity, etc.). If the game ceases to exist then the NFT is just, what, a trading card that shows some scarcity/rarity? I really don't get this argument at all. I bought an in-game mount for World of Warcraft as a NFT, WoW shuts down, where the hell am I going to use the in-game mount again? A shitty game that tells me "your WoW mount works here as well!"? It really feels it's all a preparation for the "metaverse" bullshit.
      - ryanbrunner 5y ago
        No game is going to do the "your X game items work here", since it cuts off any revenue stream they have, and the NFT itself is almost definitely not going to include a functioning asset, just a token that you own mount with an ID of XYZ. It would be on the game developers to create art and code for every single NFT they want to support.
hijodelsol 5y ago
It does NOT make it possible to own something in any meaningful way. (Intellectual) property rights already take care of ownership. Ofc, there are illegal ways of just taking what you want, but that is a crime like under all other circumstances. The only thing crypto enables is to have a ecologically destructive, slow, redundant database that says “X belongs to Y”. The thing is though, you could just create a different database. And having your entry in that database does not legally equal ownership. So it doesn’t solve anything but now there’s money involved so people try to scam you.
jug 5y ago
I'd like to be more precise in this case and say that an NFT is an ability to prove original ownership. We have of course been able to buy and own more or less exlusive licenses to digital goods for a long time now. The video game market is now larger than the music and film industries combined and quickly becoming entirely digital. And if it's own work and the more literal form of ownership rather than just a license to it, these rights are well protected in law and don't really use to become a problem? Unless you live in a state with state-sponsored copyright infringement, but these would absolutely not respect NFT's and proofs of ownership either. But if you for some reason need to support the specific case of proving original ownership, NFT is a technology that can help although I think this is becoming a too niche use for a widespread internet-wide revolution. It's still digital which can be made into perfect copies and I think this alone reduces the appeal even if it would come with a sticker that validates the product. At least it does so for me. Sure it's "useful" kind of like how an MD5 sum is, and now we get even further along the way than that but... it's still digital goods with everything that implies...
- anhner 5y ago
  > I'd like to be more precise in this case and say that an NFT is an ability to prove original ownership. It doesn't even do that. See: all artists whose work was stolen and sold as NFTs
slightwinder 5y ago
Everything you own with crypto, is some data inside this crypto's world. Without any connection to other worlds, those data have no value in itself. And the moment you connect it, laws come into play and your crypto is just a tool to manage this ownership. But for this, crypto has no real benefit so far. And it's questionable whether it ever will have. We get the same practical benefits without all the expensive crypto-bells&whistles.

can16358p 5y ago

Sure. A "free" internet. Not in terms of money, but in terms of freedom of speech without censorship and a controlling authority. With no authority that decides whether I can send money to/receive from someone. Especially living in a corrupt authoratarian system, even only those two outweight all the bad sides (tx fees, scalability, PoW environmental effects) for me. It does more good than it harms in the big picture.

samsonradu 5y ago
> With no authority that decides whether I can send money to/receive from someone. That’s actually a good point and Bitcoin/crypto solves this. Why doesn’t it stop there though, what does web3 solve?
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  Only somewhat I think; miners actually do have such control, and could be coerced into sanctions; it's just that no one has successfully done that (or kept quiet about it). You can imagine outlawing processing some crypto transactions in some area. Miners have no choice but to comply, leading to at least a fork and massive confusion, at most to actual enforcement of the rule. Blockchains may be censorship-resistant, but humans are not rubber hose resistant.
  - miracle2k 5y ago
    > You can imagine outlawing processing some crypto transactions in some area. Miners have no choice but to comply, leading to at least a fork and massive confusion, at most to actual enforcement of the rule. It is not a geo-location issue. The enforcement measures in question either manage to control 50% of the hashrate or they don't. If they don't, the protocol will ignore their censorship. Yes, they could continue mining a minority fork chain, but you would need to convince Bitcoin-users and services to use the fork instead of the uncensored version. You could imagine this being done by force: ISPs block the download of the software, exchanges no longer trade it etc. The point is merely: <50%, the power is not with the miners at all; it is the users that need to be controlled.

kgraves 5y ago

Isn't IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) considered web3? can't you use IFPS without cryptocurrencies? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System

Ygg2 5y ago
Well kinda. It's complicated. > can't you use IFPS without cryptocurrencies? You can. And you should. Cryptocurrency is a solution in search of a problem. Problem it purports to solve isn't something you can solve via software.
- krageon 5y ago
  > Problem it purports to solve isn't something you can solve via software. That problem being sending money wherever you want, which is eminently solvable with software (mostly because it is almost all software everywhere).
Double_a_92 5y ago
IPFS is basically torrenting, and doesn't even use a Blockchain. And of top of that people are not even using it properly, because centralized nodes seem to be the main wait to get access to the files.
- lapinot 5y ago
  > And of top of that people are not even using it properly, because centralized nodes seem to be the main wait to get access to the files. That's because last i checked (admittedly a couple years ago) their software was slow and ressource intensive. Which is quite the opposite of what you want for real-life network transfer software. Meanwhile stuff like syncthing seem to get bittorrent-like transfer just fine. Dat/hypercore seamed less bloaty (again a while ago), i wonder what the solid projects in this area are currently.. (torrent-based network filesystems)
detaro 5y ago
There's been kind of two waves of "This is web3". The first was primarily about protocols like IPFS, dat/hyper, ... (2018/19?) and then at some point it got used more and more by blockchain folks, and they kind of dominate the conversation now. What it "actually" is is up in the air and not really defined. (But the blockchain scenario still often involves things like IPFS as underlying components)

max_ 5y ago

Web3 is dead on arrival. As it does not solve any of the problems Web 2.0 has (corporate/government censorship, abuse of user data, geolocking etc) The what would hold some value would be a combination of self sovereign financial services & Tim's "Social Linked Data"/SOLID. The current Web3 wave just seems like a legal marketing scam (scam as in legal but zero ethics). It's just about pumping price's and intellectual masterbation (talking about things they never do) It is however true that you cannot separate economic incentives from a platform where we want to see economic activity.

andrewingram 5y ago

I haven't bought into crypto/web3, so take this with a pinch of salt. I currently think of the role of crypto in "web3" as a bit like dark matter in the universe, something that causes the web (universe) as a whole to resist centralisation -- by means of financial incentives. It doesn't have to be everywhere, but it has to be in enough places to resist the pull towards building megaservices like Facebook. I'm very skeptical as to whether it's actually going to play out that way though.

jdrc 5y ago
i think cryptochains and web3 should not be confused. one of them will survive

audunw 5y ago

With NFT, blockchain proponents have argued that ticket trading is a really good usecase, and could maybe lessen the grip of the likes of Ticketmaster I think the last episode of Last Week Tonight really shed light on why Blockchain can't really solve real-world problems like that. The problem isn't a technical problem. It'd be easy to solve the problem of ticked distribution/resale without blockchain if the concert vendors actually wanted. But now Ticketmaster owns most of those, so you can't solve it easily even if blockchains would help anyway. And you really can't solve the problem of scalping without tying tickets/accounts to a verified national ID, which is a political problem. I think blockchain is potentially a huge detriment to solving real-world problems.. because it tricks smart people into thinking "you apply blockchain, and then all these problems are magically solved", rather than actually working with other people on the actual social, economic and political problems we need to solve to make real progress.

IanCal 5y ago
> And you really can't solve the problem of scalping without tying tickets/accounts to a verified national ID, which is a political problem. I'm not sure I understand that. You could tie it to something within a smaller group (e.g. tickets can only be transferred to people who have bought the bands album, or only to verified accounts that the vendor approves). I would also be surprised if there wasn't a ZK way of doing some kind of KYC like check that you are able to prove you have ID and tie that to an account _without_ making the link between the two public.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  This feels like a worse thing to me. “You can sell this thing to people, but only people who have done some other sort of on chain transaction” opens the door for a huge mess. “You can sell to people who aren’t a member of a union.” “You can sell to people who never donated money to the ACLU.” “You can sell to people who don’t own a gun.” Is that the direction we really want?
- acdha 5y ago
  The problem is that you need to link what's checked at the door with the online trail. If you only allowed people holding the band's CD to enter, that'd definitely work but it's just turning a different physical object into the ticket. You could try to have a trusted third party verify ID and only allow registered accounts to participate in the resale market (Ticketmaster sells this service) but at that point the blockchain is, as usual, not adding anything other than overhead because the trust depends on that third-party and the venue's staff checking ID at the door (otherwise you'd find people on Craigslist paying people to register, get their ID checked, and letting the scalpers use their account).

rvz 5y ago

> Can anyone give a reasoned argument to the actual benefits of Web 3, in contrast to what is currently not possible without the use of a Blockchain? Yeah. Why not try donating to NGOs through a bank account if your friend or penpal happens to be stuck in a sanctioned country? [0] I also don't think merchants and businesses would like to tolerate the knowingly abused chargeback system which friendly fraud hurts both the customer and the merchants. Cryptocurrencies completely eliminate that abuse. The user can contact the merchant for a refund instead of filing a costly dispute which the final decision always sides with the banks, who doesn't even know if it is friendly fraud or not, but takes the money anyway. I can see them using it for Stripe or Coinbase Commerce. [0] https://theintercept.com/2022/01/19/crypto-afghanistan-sanctions-taliban/ https://theintercept.com/2022/01/19/crypto-afghanistan-sanct...

dagw 5y ago
I can do all those things with Web 2.0 (or even 1.0).
- rvz 5y ago
  Are you (really) sure? The article that I linked says otherwise. So for a merchant, there are absolutely no problems in friendly fraud, failing cards in other countries, etc in Web 2 then? Especially sending money to people in sanctioned countries using bank accounts?
  - dagw 5y ago
    My point is that it is not hard to pay with cryptocurrency using "Web 2.0" technology (or at least any problems you run into aren't directly 'Web' related).
    - rvz 5y ago
      Well I'm arguing as to why exactly one would use cryptocurrencies for payments "Web 3" over using "Web 2.0" payment companies and I just explained that and its use cases. Of course one can use cryptocurrencies with Web 2. But try doing the above with the banks, PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, etc. It seems that this is proof that cryptocurrencies not only can work together with Web 2 websites but they are also here to stay.

IanCal 5y ago

> can offer that we can't currently do without the use of a Blockchain. The real issue with responses like this is that you can do anything with computers anyway. The blockchain basically gives you a * Globally writable database * With stored procedures * And row level security Now, you can always swap out that with a centralised service. Turing machines can do stuff and machines can talk to each other. Whether it's possible to build a technically equivalent thing is not really the important question. What tends to happen though is that the underlying infrastructure if supported by a profit-making company is that it has its own agenda and desire to control access. There's no real desire for the base layer to be open, it's not profitable in itself. One of the more appealing things to me in the area is that there's a lot of work with shared interfaces. Working with the ERC721 spec I can easily make a non-fungible token that refers to a ticket at a conference, or right to claim a financial security, or game item, or has a link to a wiggly line or whatever I want. Someone else can build an auction contract, and my nft will automatically work in it, as will anyone elses. If you have control of the NFT you can pick which auction type/contract/service you want to use. I don't (and shouldn't) care, that's not the part I build or manage. Finally, "but can't you do it with postgres and ..." is true but there's a huge shift that's happened. Before, sure, I'd have to have built all this stuff on chain and have all of the complete pain-in-the-arse stuff to deal with that comes with crypto. But now that all exists. So to make, say, an in game item that people can re-sell, swap, etc, instead of * Make a website * Setup the DB * Manage user accounts * Manage payment information * Code the sales, auctions, etc * Build the integration with my game & my API * Manage and maintain the server to do it the traditional way. To do it on chain I * Create a trivial NFT contract * Build the integration with my game & a generic API That's it. All the other work, auctions, etc. has been solved and built already. User accounts are already managed. You can always solve it another way. The more interesting question is in which cases should you solve a problem in certain ways? Not everything makes sense on chain, the database is slow and public (and even for very cheap chains comparatively expensive), and the stored procedures are extremely limited. However some things can fit well - do you need to create some kind of economic incentive & want to let market forces control things (for example, filecoin and paying people for storage)? Maybe just creating a token on existing infrastructure will fit your needs. If it does, does it make sense to build even more things yourself? Disclaimers - I am currently doing contract engineering in this area but am not looking for work, have only small holdings and am not here to shill for anything.

sergiosgc 5y ago

The idea of a public ledger, where any public record can be kept without the need of a central authority certainly has value. The fact that current tech solutions are not efficient, and thus expensive, should not hide that value. Instead of going through offshoots trying to find the killer app, I'd much prefer to see cryptocurrency tech evolve in order to bring costs down. Take the base use case of keeping "bank account" records and run with it until it works (as of now, it does not). Out of the viable -- for my definition of viable -- cryptocurrencies out there, the only one I see moving in the right direction is Ethereum. They are taking their sweet time, though. If a killer use case is needed, think micropayments: The ability to pay 0.1¢ to listen to a song, paying directly to the artist.

UncleMeat 5y ago
Micropayments have been available in various forms well before BTC was a thing and they never took off. Micropayments also necessitate L2 solutions more than almost any other feature using blockchains since fees are nontrivial at that level even on rarely used chains.
simonw 5y ago
> The idea of a public ledger, where any public record can be kept without the need of a central authority certainly has value. Based on what we've learned over the past few years, I'm not sure I believe that any more. Without a central authority, there's no way to be confident that anything is "true". Partly because it's impossible to correct mistakes. So you get NFTs of stolen art, because there's no authority to verify it. You get ideas to "put real estate deeds on the blockchain" with no answer to the question "what if someone loses their private key?" The only information that can reliably be handheld by such a blockchain is information that entirely exists within that blockchain - so account balances, but effectively nothing else.
- malermeister 5y ago
  This! The lack of a central authority to fix things is an anti-feature sold as a feature to libertarian-minded folks. Even account balances are a bad idea to do on the block chain. Ever had to dispute a credit card charge when you dealt with a sketchy vendor? Well too bad, all sales are final now in this new immutable world.

3np 5y ago

With the risk of spamming this, but since the confusion keeps being repeated in this thread: This submission is a presentation that captures the intention quite well, with a linked post by the person who brought the term to the blockchain community: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30683038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30683038 Both predate the recent hype-wave.