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A simple overview of current technical trends in web3. 1. Identity Wallets are required to interact with chain. This means every user has one which is great b

A simple overview of current technical trends in web3. 1. Identity Wallets are required to interact with chain. This means every user has one which is great because you can use wallets to sign message and authenticate people. People's transaction history are public so you can fetch that and do authenticate on a micro level. Say, you want to authenticate people who have a particular nft or spent money somewhere specific. 2. Tokenomics Encourage contribution and investing by providing financial motivation in the form of tokens through technical means. Take example of torrent protocol. A big problem with torrent is there are not enough seeders because there is no incentive to seed which means many useful torrents go down. 3. Public ledger This one doesn't need much explanation. Use cases like DNS or voting fits the area where every record needs to be publicly available and verified. 4. Financial & payments Prediction markets, Programmable finance, cross bridges, AMMs, lending, yield farming, etc. Some are cool, some are almost scam but there are some novel ideas tested in practice here. AMMs are one successful example. 5. Collectibles and scarcity This one is controversial. If you know the traditional gacha and pay to play industry is huge, then you understand the applications where trading and uniqueness is built in. The items can be made unique and be used outside the game which increases their value.

leifg 5y ago
How does any of that sound appealing to anyone? Especially for the first two points, how do you not see the absolute dystopian downsides?
- searchableguy 5y ago
  > how do you not see the absolute dystopian downsides? Sorry, I'm not commenting on the good or bad. I wanted to provide a dense technical overview of what web3 is being used for since it's HN.
  - leifg 5y ago
    OK fair point. If you want a concise definition of web3 the website provides this as well: https://web3.lifeitself.us/concepts/web3 https://web3.lifeitself.us/concepts/web3
- razzio 5y ago
  LOL reading pt 1 and 2 I had a similar reaction. The first thought that came after the feeling of horror subsided, is that you can simply create a new wallet for each transaction, or maybe a new one once a day. I felt better after that.
  - mattlondon 5y ago
    That won't work for web3, since your identities are tied to wallets, as is any user-generated-content is tied to the wallet. So it would be like creating a new user account for HN/Facebook/Gmail/etc every day. You'd not be able to move your content away to another site, which is one of the main selling points of web3 Vs web2
    - oldgregg 5y ago
      No you will still have a copy of all your content-- you can just move it to a different service or even republish it under a different key.
      - mattlondon 5y ago
        If you republish it, how can someone know it is you and not me? It undermines the entire point about "ownership" in web3. If wallets are disposable (i.e. you throw them away after a while to avoid tracking etc) then by definition you are throwing away ownership of your content too. They'll be locked away forever like all of satoshi's BTC. As soon as you try to move content between wallets, you've immediately and irreversibly "linked" those wallets so you may as well have not bothered and just accept that every tiny iota of your online life is publicly open for anyone to track and monitor from your first ever website you viewed as a child right through to signing the contract on your funeral plans before dying of old age - linking wallets and identities will be cryptographically/mathematically bullet-proof (not to mention trivial) and so they'll be able to easily tie together your entire life via your wallets (unless you totally separate you wallets and so have multiple totally separate identities with zero overlap ... won't be easy for "real life" stuff like work or banking etc). Have fun.
  - 5y ago
- burnished 5y ago
  I would recommend reading TFA to you, because its contents are pertinent and also describe this interaction. Specifically, the polarization of the topic such that a neutral and high level description is being knee-jerked as an approval.
dmitriid 5y ago
> The items can be made unique and be used outside the game which increases their value. They can't be used outside the game [1] The only thing that "increases their value" is speculation (and scams). [1] One person's game engine isn't another person's game engine. One game's items are not other game's items. Even displaying and interacting with items in the game that has the mechanisms to display and interact with those items cannot be translated to the world outside the game.
- searchableguy 5y ago
  For basic sprites and characters, you absolutely can. There are companies using it to show ads in decentralized way in the metaverse right now. I don't understand it like you but I can reason about it looking at similar patterns in gacha and game skins. They are a digit in a database but sold for huge money and have a big secondary market. The value of it comes from the association and possibility than immediate practical use.
  - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
    > For basic sprites and characters, you absolutely can. Or just offer an image upload feature in their own app and/or website?
    - searchableguy 5y ago
      I think the second part of my comment answers it. The value comes from the association. A baseball hat worn by a famous person is worth more than if it is worn by a normal person even if the hat is the same physically. If you directly use nft from the chain in some big project, the value of that particular receipt will go up because the association can be made. This cannot be done if it was simply a digital image copied over.
      - dmitriid 5y ago
        > If you directly use nft from the chain You can't "use nft". Nft is a crappy recipt that tells you that you spent some money. That is it. In the absolute vast majority of cases the actual asset is some blob of data stored on a company's server somewhere. Since we're in a subthread about using game items outside the game for which these items were specifically designed, good luck using your "nft" in "some big project".
razzio 5y ago
Thanks for the summary. Granted I feel a bit sleepy after lunch but the article doesn't have a TL&DR and after skimming I still felt clueless on problems web 3 is supposed to solve. I guess its one of those cases where time will show what sticks and what people find acceptable. To me they are all controversial.
- burnished 5y ago
  I don't think the purpose of the article is to convince you about the merits of web3, so you probably aren't missing anything there. My reading of it is that the authors don't want to lose our ability to have a constructive conversation where people can be mutually intelligible and clearly understand what they disagree on.
mattlondon 5y ago
RE identity & Auth tied to wallets (and therefore purchases), this is going to be a huge wild-west of privacy invasion and intrusive advertising. It is like a persistent super cookie that exists online and off, that anyone can access, and that can never be deleted. People think it is bad now with Google and Facebook - web3 is going to be way worse, with every shady operation under the sun doing all sorts of questionable targeting, combining, profiling, mining, and selling of your publicly accessible data openly stored on the block chain (forever) for everyone to see and use for whatever unsavoury things they can conjure up.
- pedalpete 5y ago
  I was thinking similar, the way it was phrased is as if you go into a store and when you go to pay you open your entire wallet and show everybody everything you have in there, rather than just displaying the card which you are using to pay. At the same time, I think this is a poor wording choice, rather than an actual issue.
- thinkmassive 5y ago
  DIDs don’t need to be associated with a wallet, or directly linkable to any blockchain for that matter. This is just a stupid decision that a bunch of ethereum projects use because they don’t know any better. Christopher Allen has been publishing research on the topic for many years before “web3” was used at all, let alone the recent hype cycle. A good thread with links to various articles: https://twitter.com/ChristopherA/status/1386715286913486857 https://twitter.com/ChristopherA/status/1386715286913486857

leifg 5y ago

How does any of that sound appealing to anyone? Especially for the first two points, how do you not see the absolute dystopian downsides?

searchableguy 5y ago
> how do you not see the absolute dystopian downsides? Sorry, I'm not commenting on the good or bad. I wanted to provide a dense technical overview of what web3 is being used for since it's HN.
- leifg 5y ago
  OK fair point. If you want a concise definition of web3 the website provides this as well: https://web3.lifeitself.us/concepts/web3 https://web3.lifeitself.us/concepts/web3
razzio 5y ago
LOL reading pt 1 and 2 I had a similar reaction. The first thought that came after the feeling of horror subsided, is that you can simply create a new wallet for each transaction, or maybe a new one once a day. I felt better after that.
- mattlondon 5y ago
  That won't work for web3, since your identities are tied to wallets, as is any user-generated-content is tied to the wallet. So it would be like creating a new user account for HN/Facebook/Gmail/etc every day. You'd not be able to move your content away to another site, which is one of the main selling points of web3 Vs web2
  - oldgregg 5y ago
    No you will still have a copy of all your content-- you can just move it to a different service or even republish it under a different key.
    - mattlondon 5y ago
      If you republish it, how can someone know it is you and not me? It undermines the entire point about "ownership" in web3. If wallets are disposable (i.e. you throw them away after a while to avoid tracking etc) then by definition you are throwing away ownership of your content too. They'll be locked away forever like all of satoshi's BTC. As soon as you try to move content between wallets, you've immediately and irreversibly "linked" those wallets so you may as well have not bothered and just accept that every tiny iota of your online life is publicly open for anyone to track and monitor from your first ever website you viewed as a child right through to signing the contract on your funeral plans before dying of old age - linking wallets and identities will be cryptographically/mathematically bullet-proof (not to mention trivial) and so they'll be able to easily tie together your entire life via your wallets (unless you totally separate you wallets and so have multiple totally separate identities with zero overlap ... won't be easy for "real life" stuff like work or banking etc). Have fun.
- 5y ago
burnished 5y ago
I would recommend reading TFA to you, because its contents are pertinent and also describe this interaction. Specifically, the polarization of the topic such that a neutral and high level description is being knee-jerked as an approval.

dmitriid 5y ago

> The items can be made unique and be used outside the game which increases their value. They can't be used outside the game [1] The only thing that "increases their value" is speculation (and scams). [1] One person's game engine isn't another person's game engine. One game's items are not other game's items. Even displaying and interacting with items in the game that has the mechanisms to display and interact with those items cannot be translated to the world outside the game.

searchableguy 5y ago
For basic sprites and characters, you absolutely can. There are companies using it to show ads in decentralized way in the metaverse right now. I don't understand it like you but I can reason about it looking at similar patterns in gacha and game skins. They are a digit in a database but sold for huge money and have a big secondary market. The value of it comes from the association and possibility than immediate practical use.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  > For basic sprites and characters, you absolutely can. Or just offer an image upload feature in their own app and/or website?
  - searchableguy 5y ago
    I think the second part of my comment answers it. The value comes from the association. A baseball hat worn by a famous person is worth more than if it is worn by a normal person even if the hat is the same physically. If you directly use nft from the chain in some big project, the value of that particular receipt will go up because the association can be made. This cannot be done if it was simply a digital image copied over.
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      > If you directly use nft from the chain You can't "use nft". Nft is a crappy recipt that tells you that you spent some money. That is it. In the absolute vast majority of cases the actual asset is some blob of data stored on a company's server somewhere. Since we're in a subthread about using game items outside the game for which these items were specifically designed, good luck using your "nft" in "some big project".

razzio 5y ago

Thanks for the summary. Granted I feel a bit sleepy after lunch but the article doesn't have a TL&DR and after skimming I still felt clueless on problems web 3 is supposed to solve. I guess its one of those cases where time will show what sticks and what people find acceptable. To me they are all controversial.

burnished 5y ago
I don't think the purpose of the article is to convince you about the merits of web3, so you probably aren't missing anything there. My reading of it is that the authors don't want to lose our ability to have a constructive conversation where people can be mutually intelligible and clearly understand what they disagree on.

mattlondon 5y ago

RE identity & Auth tied to wallets (and therefore purchases), this is going to be a huge wild-west of privacy invasion and intrusive advertising. It is like a persistent super cookie that exists online and off, that anyone can access, and that can never be deleted. People think it is bad now with Google and Facebook - web3 is going to be way worse, with every shady operation under the sun doing all sorts of questionable targeting, combining, profiling, mining, and selling of your publicly accessible data openly stored on the block chain (forever) for everyone to see and use for whatever unsavoury things they can conjure up.

pedalpete 5y ago
I was thinking similar, the way it was phrased is as if you go into a store and when you go to pay you open your entire wallet and show everybody everything you have in there, rather than just displaying the card which you are using to pay. At the same time, I think this is a poor wording choice, rather than an actual issue.
thinkmassive 5y ago
DIDs don’t need to be associated with a wallet, or directly linkable to any blockchain for that matter. This is just a stupid decision that a bunch of ethereum projects use because they don’t know any better. Christopher Allen has been publishing research on the topic for many years before “web3” was used at all, let alone the recent hype cycle. A good thread with links to various articles: https://twitter.com/ChristopherA/status/1386715286913486857 https://twitter.com/ChristopherA/status/1386715286913486857