9 ms·

Are we wrong about Web3?

50 points by LukeEF 5y ago

jrm4 5y ago
Genuine question: How stoppable is "Web3?" Which may be to say -- what is more likely: All the big money idiots come to their senses, or "Web3" definitely happens in some form that has some, but not all, of the stupid weeded out of it? This is probably a million dollar question, no?
- kyle-rb 5y ago
  Eventually the big money idiots find a new flavor of the month, probably after a few more web3 projects get hacked for $600,000,000.
- cuteboy19 5y ago
  Big money will probably at least break even. It's your average person throwing their money at the shitcoin of the week who will be left holding the bag. There is no hope for those people unfortunately
PaulHoule 5y ago
If you are expecting your business to be around in 2023 you should shut up about "Web3". If you want to have good people for customers, if you want to hire good employees, if you want to have good vendors, shut up about "Web3". Don't take good free software like "Git" and slander it by associating it with platforms that charge fees on top of fees on top of fees; platforms that charge you fees to pay your fees that make rent-seekers like Visa and Mastercard blush. It looks like terminusdb is a good product that somebody can use without paying money to grifters. Why slander it? Why put up a big sign on your web site that says "Nothing more to see here move on" to the good people in the world but that will attract evil people, scammers and clueless people blinded by FOMO who will bleed your company dry and leave it a rotten husk? Terminusdb should fire the person who made this blog post and make a press release about it immediately to protect your investors, your employees and your customers.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- NationalPark 5y ago
  It looks like the same internal conflict I've seen elsewhere: Non-technical marketing or exec people demand "web3" and "NFTs" and the engineers tell them it's silly and why does our in-memory json database need blockchain anyway? There's a lot of time wasted, everyone learns something about carbon offsets, and either the project gets dropped or the senior engineers quit and the juniors are bullied into line behind the "vision" (or promised tokens of some kind).
- danielvaughn 5y ago
  Yep. My first job in tech was with a platform that promised a "Web 2.0" experience that was centered around drag-and-drop. Take a wild guess as to whether they're still around...
  - mcdonje 5y ago
    There was a lot of web 2.0 hype around the late 90s / early aughts. Lots of companies that tried to cash in on a trend without a solid business model. That said, the situation was appreciably different to now. Web 2.0, as I understand it, was about increasing interactivity so websites aren't all static, which has the possibility of being beneficial to end users. Web 3.0, as I understand it, is crypto-nonsense.
    - post_below 5y ago
      I agree, and also it's easy to forget how silly "Web 2.0" was Not the technology itself, that was great, and was already named. When Web 2.0 arrived as a buzzword the web was already an interactive, dynamic platform with databases, server and client side scripting, user generated content and social networking. All of the technologies involved were in fairly widespread use. For a minute the term Web 2.0 might have been a way to recognize how cool the natural evolution of the web was, but it was quickly co-opted for use as cutting edge sounding investor bait. Same general principle as Web 3.0, but with useful technology. Side note: The Web 2.0 hype was mostly a 2000's thing.
eatonphil 5y ago
This is a very oddly formatted post coming from a company. It's pretty hard to read or follow, with lots of memes and screenshots interspersed. I'm not exactly sure what they're saying at all.
- suprfsat 5y ago
  They said "Communism is clearly the future." but left their peril-sensitive sunglasses on so it didn't stick.
- lkjaelkj 5y ago
  They just want some of the sweet web VC money. I mean, when you have federal prosecutors turned 'web3 investor' why not? Total shit show.
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    Note the "Are we wrong..." kind of phrasing and use of unspecific hypnotic language right out of Milton Ericson. This is aimed to provoke FOMO in the clueless; people like us will read this and realize the author is clueless but the clueless will struggle to find the wisdom here and assume they aren't getting it because they don't understand the text, not that the text is meaningless. It's like that puff piece on crypto that was in the NYT last week.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- chomp 5y ago
  I can only guess, but it looks like they want to ride (and got VC funding to ride) the Web3 hype wave, but they don't want to be lumped in with "the other Web3 people".
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    It's consistent with what you see in other insider communication about "Web3" in that words and symbols are used in isolation from each other and without any attempt at weaving them into a narrative. For instance the official site for Bored Ape Yacht Club shows a bar with a neon sign that says "FOMO". Near the entrance in Decentraland there are pictures of the Doge and other internet memes. It is not about communicating a message in the conventional sense but rather like plucking a string and having it vibrate another string of the same length by resonance.
cmckn 5y ago
This is poorly written; words and punctuation are missing all over the place. I don’t understand the git analogy at all. > If we’re extending the definition of web3 to include decentralized software systems We certainly aren’t. Web3 is defined by “trustless” decentralized systems (which usually aren’t actually decentralized, in practice). Branding a database as “Web3” is terrible PR, given web3’s reputation for obscene inefficiency and high latency. The marketing team should reconsider this post.
- spicybright 5y ago
  I still don't really get what web3 actually means. It seems like the new "cloud" when describing software.
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    As far as I can tell, it answers the question "What if corporations re-invented the Internet in their own image?"
  - golgappi 5y ago
    It's basically a decentralized, censorship-resistant P2P internet. The philosophy has merit, but the performance sucks and it is currently mostly a venture capitalist funded scam.
onion2k 5y ago
web3 definitely could be as successful as git if you remove the payments side of it. Without payments web3 starts to look like an interesting and useful idea. Ownership of content, federation between platforms, trustless publishing, etc are concepts the web lacks, and that could definitely be interesting to layer on top of the web. Adding payments into the mix kills it like every other microtransaction protocol though. git would have been significantly less successful if it cost you a small amount of money to merge a PR, or to fork a repo, or to push something.
- shafyy 5y ago
  Trustless blockchain doesn't work without payments though. You need an incentive for people to verify transactions.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  The payments are fundamental to it. Ted Nelson described the Xanadu system in the 1970s which anticipated the web, he recognized a need for creators to get paid and planned to have a micropayments system built in. Practically the web got advertising instead and then the patron and subscription models but somebody could make the case we need something better. Web3 has the particular horror that simple calculations that could be done on 1% of a cheap VPS instead get replicated across 100,000 nodes. It not only fries the planet but it is fantastically expensive and somebody has to pay for it… and they wish it was you!
  - eterm 5y ago
    The horrible reality is that even if the web had effective and popular micropayments infrastructure it would have micropayments and adverts on top. Just look at how advertising is creeping into premium streaming services.
    - bwbuhse 5y ago
      Or the fact that (nearly) every premium TV channel still has ads, when the original point of paying for cable was no ads.
kerblang 5y ago
I like how the author repeatedly pointed out how much HN hates web3, and the postings herein reinforce that with hilarious intensity. I mean, hey, guys, I think everybody knows you hate web3. But thanks for the reminder anyhow. ps For the record I also hate web3 pss Feel free to remind me you hate web3 too
- Loughla 5y ago
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  Posting about Web3 on HN is like driving around with a tank with a ‘Z’ painted on it in Ukraine.
- paganel 5y ago
  For what it’s worth even people on /r/soccer hate all this web3/crypto thing, I didn’t expect this discussion to show up in there.
  - AmbassadorNo1 5y ago
    That's because football clubs and players are clambering on the Crypto/NFT bandwagon as a way to fleece supporters of more money. Things like crypto for having your say and voting on club matters. This is ultimately an example of the crux of the argument in the article - the grifters are diverting the possibility of any real constructive discussion so that all that is left is pretty crass comments like comparing HN and Ukraine. Unless that was Boris Johnson who left that comment, then it's standard behaviour.
CloudDeltaNine 5y ago
Web3 is a Pyramid scheme for people who get hyped from just hearing the word 'blockchain' but who don't have any technical understanding of how one computer actually communicates to another computer. Web3 scammers insert meaningless hand-wavy-techno-babble homophone phrases like 'Layer 1', 'off-chain', and 'decentralized' to hook FOMO VC into buying into vaporware. Web3 is literally not a real thing. If you want real talk about empowering the users to own the network infrastructure then you better be talking about publicly owned ISPs and data centers; not about bullshit 'smart contract' VMs deployed into the proprietary Cloud environment of one Global monopoly or Another.
- srhngpr 5y ago
  Couldn't have said this any better. >to hook FOMO VC into buying into vaporware. I would just add that it is not just VCs but also everyday people expecting to get "rich" overnight that buy into the FOMO.
- Apofis 5y ago
  Honestly, until any of this 'Web3' malarky has even a chance in hell of being superior to AWS or Azure I think most of it is worthless. None of it has a trajectory of becoming superior so far and most of it is incredibly slow, expensive, and wasteful (as far as electricity goes).
  - aaaaaaaaata 5y ago
    Filecoin and similar are doing great...
    - Apofis 5y ago
      How's filecoin better than Dropbox or Google Drive?
egypturnash 5y ago
There may be a place for some of the ideas lumped in under the term "Web3". But the term, as currently defined, is heavily associated with cryptocurrency and blockchains. Which are mostly associated with scams in the minds of people who are aware of them, but did not buy in early enough to have a ton of formerly-worthless cryptocoins become worth absurd amounts of money. If you want to try and redefine this term to not be about cryptocurrency and blockchains, then good luck with that. Realistically I think it would be better to try and make a coordinated push to make some other term a thing, because right now the instant response to "web3" among the non-believers is, at best, an eyeroll, a sigh, and closing the tab. I mean, the current top story on HN while this is on the front page? "$625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network". That's Web3. Right there.
agentdrtran 5y ago
Remove the bad stuff and only keep the good stuff of something? Why haven't we thought of this before, it's genius!
- teucris 5y ago
  And yet, we keep forgetting to do it and instead denigrate the people who remind us that this could be an approach to a divisive new technology.
na85 5y ago
I have a new personal policy: I don't read anything that refers to "blockchain" the way Apple refers to "iPhone". I don't know what the term for it is but they always do it. "With iPhone, you can enjoy being smug and superior in 8K!" Anyways as soon as I see that sort of corporate newspeak I immediately close the tab. It makes me a lot happier.
- babyshake 5y ago
  "With very slow database, you can...."
bobulous 5y ago
Cool to see terminusdb is majority written in Prolog (Have fond memories of writing Prolog in Uni). Is this the most prominent open source Prolog project
- LukeEF 5y ago
  I think so!
root_axis 5y ago
I'm going to reprise a comment of mine that I posted on a similar HN article some time ago. Over the years I've witnessed a lot of heated debates on HN... Is the JS ecosystem actually too complex? Is PHP really a fractal of bad design? Is learning vim worth the effort or is it all hype? Is golang fundamentally broken because it lacks(lacked) generics? Does anyone ever actually need k8s? Is nosql always the wrong choice? Is the linux desktop experience truly productive or should you just use a mac? Types or no types? 100% test coverage or overkill? X or Wayland? Gnome2 or Unity? Android or iPhone etc... Yet, only in the cryptocurrency debate do defenders have to offer up a disclaimer about all the scams, hype, vaporware, fraud, waste, hacks, speculation, crime and other insanity before proceeding to make an appeal to the nebulous hope of future possibilities, as if cryptocurrency isn't older than instagram....
- newbamboo 5y ago
  And completely ignore increasing talk of official state backed digital currencies which will be the Orwellian horror that results from all this crypto froth.
- mountainofdeath 5y ago
  Part of what makes cryptocurrency so alluring is its (current) Wild West, little to no rules, nature. Those very things will scare aware the masses until things stabilize at which point we return to the current state of things perhaps with some modest differences. People forget that the current financial system is a product of thousands of years of evolution and many hard lessons learned. Web 3.0 (as VCs see it) is a solution looking for a problem. I get a late-90s dotcom-era feeling from it. People saying what it takes to raise money and throwing a technical solution at what often isn't one.
- cableshaft 5y ago
  To be fair, none of those other debates have anything to do with finances and wealth tools or vehicles. There's inherently less incentive to scam people with those things because it won't make someone rich to do so (at least nowhere near the extent that other options, like stealing digital financial assets, would). Email and websites in general have tons of scams associated with it, to the point where I'm required for whatever company or client I work for to take phishing/security awareness lectures every single year, yet those things don't "need to be defended".
speedgoose 5y ago
I’m happy that the author starts to have doubts and consider being wrong. I hope that in a few moons they can write a blog post titled “we were wrong about Web3” and focus on their main product that sounds promising.
jollybean 5y ago
Git is a Web3 tech like a disk drive, the IP stack, or an 'App' is a Web3 tech. Which is to say, it's Web 1 tech, if it's a Web 'N' tech at all.
- JohnFen 5y ago
  Honestly, I found much about the essay fairly incomprehensible, but the mention of git was particularly baffling. Git has nothing to do with the web whatsoever. I suspect that the author may be confusing git itself with git "service providers" such as github.
  - jollybean 5y ago
    I think they mean Git is Web3 in that is inherently designed to be a decentralized system where 'no specific repo is authoritative'. That 'philosophy' definitely has Web3 'resonance'. It could be used as an example of 'decentralization', surely, but it's hard top put anything in the context of Web3 given how vague it is.
godelski 5y ago
I just don't get web3 and what problems it solves. People say it solves centralization but I see no means of accomplishing this. I can't see how it doesn't end up like email. Sure, you can host your own email, but the service is very centralized. Yeah, gmail, yahoo, and hotmail might only host 51% of emails, but how many of those other email addresses are fake, temporary, or for bots? If you sample from people around you it is hard to find an address outside these domains and so the sampling likelihood doesn't match the model's probabilities. Email is highly centralized. We can similarly see high centralization in browsers. Functionally there isn't much difference between Chrome and FireFox yet people will promote one over the other with such religious fervor that you'd think they offer different functionalities. Web3 has no mechanism to prevent centralization. There are such things as natural monopolies, and these typically happen through network effects. This network effect is so powerful that everyone uses Google Maps. Web3 does nothing to prevent this (we even have to ask if we want to prevent this). So what is it solving? Hosting monopolies? If that's what it is solving then it seems like there are likely better ways and no need for the blockchain. I even say this as someone that thinks there's value in cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Yeah, a lot of scammers in the area, but I can see some utility in the ideas (but huge noise to signal ratio). I just can't see any signal in web3.
hitekker 5y ago
Looking at the author's LinkedIn, I see Luke has no engineering background, and no STEM experience. His expertise before becoming cofounder of Terminus is in diplomacy and marketing. It's weird to be write articles on Git and Terminus being Web3 without a clear understanding of either. I can only imagine the DMs flying around in their company's slack after this post went out.

50 points by LukeEF 5y ago

jrm4 5y ago

Genuine question: How stoppable is "Web3?" Which may be to say -- what is more likely: All the big money idiots come to their senses, or "Web3" definitely happens in some form that has some, but not all, of the stupid weeded out of it? This is probably a million dollar question, no?

kyle-rb 5y ago
Eventually the big money idiots find a new flavor of the month, probably after a few more web3 projects get hacked for $600,000,000.
cuteboy19 5y ago
Big money will probably at least break even. It's your average person throwing their money at the shitcoin of the week who will be left holding the bag. There is no hope for those people unfortunately

PaulHoule 5y ago

If you are expecting your business to be around in 2023 you should shut up about "Web3". If you want to have good people for customers, if you want to hire good employees, if you want to have good vendors, shut up about "Web3". Don't take good free software like "Git" and slander it by associating it with platforms that charge fees on top of fees on top of fees; platforms that charge you fees to pay your fees that make rent-seekers like Visa and Mastercard blush. It looks like terminusdb is a good product that somebody can use without paying money to grifters. Why slander it? Why put up a big sign on your web site that says "Nothing more to see here move on" to the good people in the world but that will attract evil people, scammers and clueless people blinded by FOMO who will bleed your company dry and leave it a rotten husk? Terminusdb should fire the person who made this blog post and make a press release about it immediately to protect your investors, your employees and your customers.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
NationalPark 5y ago
It looks like the same internal conflict I've seen elsewhere: Non-technical marketing or exec people demand "web3" and "NFTs" and the engineers tell them it's silly and why does our in-memory json database need blockchain anyway? There's a lot of time wasted, everyone learns something about carbon offsets, and either the project gets dropped or the senior engineers quit and the juniors are bullied into line behind the "vision" (or promised tokens of some kind).
danielvaughn 5y ago
Yep. My first job in tech was with a platform that promised a "Web 2.0" experience that was centered around drag-and-drop. Take a wild guess as to whether they're still around...
- mcdonje 5y ago
  There was a lot of web 2.0 hype around the late 90s / early aughts. Lots of companies that tried to cash in on a trend without a solid business model. That said, the situation was appreciably different to now. Web 2.0, as I understand it, was about increasing interactivity so websites aren't all static, which has the possibility of being beneficial to end users. Web 3.0, as I understand it, is crypto-nonsense.
  - post_below 5y ago
    I agree, and also it's easy to forget how silly "Web 2.0" was Not the technology itself, that was great, and was already named. When Web 2.0 arrived as a buzzword the web was already an interactive, dynamic platform with databases, server and client side scripting, user generated content and social networking. All of the technologies involved were in fairly widespread use. For a minute the term Web 2.0 might have been a way to recognize how cool the natural evolution of the web was, but it was quickly co-opted for use as cutting edge sounding investor bait. Same general principle as Web 3.0, but with useful technology. Side note: The Web 2.0 hype was mostly a 2000's thing.

eatonphil 5y ago

This is a very oddly formatted post coming from a company. It's pretty hard to read or follow, with lots of memes and screenshots interspersed. I'm not exactly sure what they're saying at all.

suprfsat 5y ago
They said "Communism is clearly the future." but left their peril-sensitive sunglasses on so it didn't stick.
lkjaelkj 5y ago
They just want some of the sweet web VC money. I mean, when you have federal prosecutors turned 'web3 investor' why not? Total shit show.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  Note the "Are we wrong..." kind of phrasing and use of unspecific hypnotic language right out of Milton Ericson. This is aimed to provoke FOMO in the clueless; people like us will read this and realize the author is clueless but the clueless will struggle to find the wisdom here and assume they aren't getting it because they don't understand the text, not that the text is meaningless. It's like that puff piece on crypto that was in the NYT last week.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
chomp 5y ago
I can only guess, but it looks like they want to ride (and got VC funding to ride) the Web3 hype wave, but they don't want to be lumped in with "the other Web3 people".
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  It's consistent with what you see in other insider communication about "Web3" in that words and symbols are used in isolation from each other and without any attempt at weaving them into a narrative. For instance the official site for Bored Ape Yacht Club shows a bar with a neon sign that says "FOMO". Near the entrance in Decentraland there are pictures of the Doge and other internet memes. It is not about communicating a message in the conventional sense but rather like plucking a string and having it vibrate another string of the same length by resonance.

cmckn 5y ago

This is poorly written; words and punctuation are missing all over the place. I don’t understand the git analogy at all. > If we’re extending the definition of web3 to include decentralized software systems We certainly aren’t. Web3 is defined by “trustless” decentralized systems (which usually aren’t actually decentralized, in practice). Branding a database as “Web3” is terrible PR, given web3’s reputation for obscene inefficiency and high latency. The marketing team should reconsider this post.

spicybright 5y ago
I still don't really get what web3 actually means. It seems like the new "cloud" when describing software.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  As far as I can tell, it answers the question "What if corporations re-invented the Internet in their own image?"
- golgappi 5y ago
  It's basically a decentralized, censorship-resistant P2P internet. The philosophy has merit, but the performance sucks and it is currently mostly a venture capitalist funded scam.

onion2k 5y ago

web3 definitely could be as successful as git if you remove the payments side of it. Without payments web3 starts to look like an interesting and useful idea. Ownership of content, federation between platforms, trustless publishing, etc are concepts the web lacks, and that could definitely be interesting to layer on top of the web. Adding payments into the mix kills it like every other microtransaction protocol though. git would have been significantly less successful if it cost you a small amount of money to merge a PR, or to fork a repo, or to push something.

shafyy 5y ago
Trustless blockchain doesn't work without payments though. You need an incentive for people to verify transactions.
PaulHoule 5y ago
The payments are fundamental to it. Ted Nelson described the Xanadu system in the 1970s which anticipated the web, he recognized a need for creators to get paid and planned to have a micropayments system built in. Practically the web got advertising instead and then the patron and subscription models but somebody could make the case we need something better. Web3 has the particular horror that simple calculations that could be done on 1% of a cheap VPS instead get replicated across 100,000 nodes. It not only fries the planet but it is fantastically expensive and somebody has to pay for it… and they wish it was you!
- eterm 5y ago
  The horrible reality is that even if the web had effective and popular micropayments infrastructure it would have micropayments and adverts on top. Just look at how advertising is creeping into premium streaming services.
  - bwbuhse 5y ago
    Or the fact that (nearly) every premium TV channel still has ads, when the original point of paying for cable was no ads.

kerblang 5y ago

I like how the author repeatedly pointed out how much HN hates web3, and the postings herein reinforce that with hilarious intensity. I mean, hey, guys, I think everybody knows you hate web3. But thanks for the reminder anyhow. ps For the record I also hate web3 pss Feel free to remind me you hate web3 too

Loughla 5y ago
PaulHoule 5y ago
Posting about Web3 on HN is like driving around with a tank with a ‘Z’ painted on it in Ukraine.
paganel 5y ago
For what it’s worth even people on /r/soccer hate all this web3/crypto thing, I didn’t expect this discussion to show up in there.
- AmbassadorNo1 5y ago
  That's because football clubs and players are clambering on the Crypto/NFT bandwagon as a way to fleece supporters of more money. Things like crypto for having your say and voting on club matters. This is ultimately an example of the crux of the argument in the article - the grifters are diverting the possibility of any real constructive discussion so that all that is left is pretty crass comments like comparing HN and Ukraine. Unless that was Boris Johnson who left that comment, then it's standard behaviour.

CloudDeltaNine 5y ago

Web3 is a Pyramid scheme for people who get hyped from just hearing the word 'blockchain' but who don't have any technical understanding of how one computer actually communicates to another computer. Web3 scammers insert meaningless hand-wavy-techno-babble homophone phrases like 'Layer 1', 'off-chain', and 'decentralized' to hook FOMO VC into buying into vaporware. Web3 is literally not a real thing. If you want real talk about empowering the users to own the network infrastructure then you better be talking about publicly owned ISPs and data centers; not about bullshit 'smart contract' VMs deployed into the proprietary Cloud environment of one Global monopoly or Another.

srhngpr 5y ago
Couldn't have said this any better. >to hook FOMO VC into buying into vaporware. I would just add that it is not just VCs but also everyday people expecting to get "rich" overnight that buy into the FOMO.
Apofis 5y ago
Honestly, until any of this 'Web3' malarky has even a chance in hell of being superior to AWS or Azure I think most of it is worthless. None of it has a trajectory of becoming superior so far and most of it is incredibly slow, expensive, and wasteful (as far as electricity goes).
- aaaaaaaaata 5y ago
  Filecoin and similar are doing great...
  - Apofis 5y ago
    How's filecoin better than Dropbox or Google Drive?

egypturnash 5y ago

There may be a place for some of the ideas lumped in under the term "Web3". But the term, as currently defined, is heavily associated with cryptocurrency and blockchains. Which are mostly associated with scams in the minds of people who are aware of them, but did not buy in early enough to have a ton of formerly-worthless cryptocoins become worth absurd amounts of money. If you want to try and redefine this term to not be about cryptocurrency and blockchains, then good luck with that. Realistically I think it would be better to try and make a coordinated push to make some other term a thing, because right now the instant response to "web3" among the non-believers is, at best, an eyeroll, a sigh, and closing the tab. I mean, the current top story on HN while this is on the front page? "$625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network". That's Web3. Right there.

agentdrtran 5y ago

Remove the bad stuff and only keep the good stuff of something? Why haven't we thought of this before, it's genius!

teucris 5y ago
And yet, we keep forgetting to do it and instead denigrate the people who remind us that this could be an approach to a divisive new technology.

na85 5y ago

I have a new personal policy: I don't read anything that refers to "blockchain" the way Apple refers to "iPhone". I don't know what the term for it is but they always do it. "With iPhone, you can enjoy being smug and superior in 8K!" Anyways as soon as I see that sort of corporate newspeak I immediately close the tab. It makes me a lot happier.

babyshake 5y ago
"With very slow database, you can...."

bobulous 5y ago

Cool to see terminusdb is majority written in Prolog (Have fond memories of writing Prolog in Uni). Is this the most prominent open source Prolog project

LukeEF 5y ago
I think so!

root_axis 5y ago

I'm going to reprise a comment of mine that I posted on a similar HN article some time ago. Over the years I've witnessed a lot of heated debates on HN... Is the JS ecosystem actually too complex? Is PHP really a fractal of bad design? Is learning vim worth the effort or is it all hype? Is golang fundamentally broken because it lacks(lacked) generics? Does anyone ever actually need k8s? Is nosql always the wrong choice? Is the linux desktop experience truly productive or should you just use a mac? Types or no types? 100% test coverage or overkill? X or Wayland? Gnome2 or Unity? Android or iPhone etc... Yet, only in the cryptocurrency debate do defenders have to offer up a disclaimer about all the scams, hype, vaporware, fraud, waste, hacks, speculation, crime and other insanity before proceeding to make an appeal to the nebulous hope of future possibilities, as if cryptocurrency isn't older than instagram....

newbamboo 5y ago
And completely ignore increasing talk of official state backed digital currencies which will be the Orwellian horror that results from all this crypto froth.
mountainofdeath 5y ago
Part of what makes cryptocurrency so alluring is its (current) Wild West, little to no rules, nature. Those very things will scare aware the masses until things stabilize at which point we return to the current state of things perhaps with some modest differences. People forget that the current financial system is a product of thousands of years of evolution and many hard lessons learned. Web 3.0 (as VCs see it) is a solution looking for a problem. I get a late-90s dotcom-era feeling from it. People saying what it takes to raise money and throwing a technical solution at what often isn't one.
cableshaft 5y ago
To be fair, none of those other debates have anything to do with finances and wealth tools or vehicles. There's inherently less incentive to scam people with those things because it won't make someone rich to do so (at least nowhere near the extent that other options, like stealing digital financial assets, would). Email and websites in general have tons of scams associated with it, to the point where I'm required for whatever company or client I work for to take phishing/security awareness lectures every single year, yet those things don't "need to be defended".

speedgoose 5y ago

I’m happy that the author starts to have doubts and consider being wrong. I hope that in a few moons they can write a blog post titled “we were wrong about Web3” and focus on their main product that sounds promising.

jollybean 5y ago

Git is a Web3 tech like a disk drive, the IP stack, or an 'App' is a Web3 tech. Which is to say, it's Web 1 tech, if it's a Web 'N' tech at all.

JohnFen 5y ago
Honestly, I found much about the essay fairly incomprehensible, but the mention of git was particularly baffling. Git has nothing to do with the web whatsoever. I suspect that the author may be confusing git itself with git "service providers" such as github.
- jollybean 5y ago
  I think they mean Git is Web3 in that is inherently designed to be a decentralized system where 'no specific repo is authoritative'. That 'philosophy' definitely has Web3 'resonance'. It could be used as an example of 'decentralization', surely, but it's hard top put anything in the context of Web3 given how vague it is.

godelski 5y ago

I just don't get web3 and what problems it solves. People say it solves centralization but I see no means of accomplishing this. I can't see how it doesn't end up like email. Sure, you can host your own email, but the service is very centralized. Yeah, gmail, yahoo, and hotmail might only host 51% of emails, but how many of those other email addresses are fake, temporary, or for bots? If you sample from people around you it is hard to find an address outside these domains and so the sampling likelihood doesn't match the model's probabilities. Email is highly centralized. We can similarly see high centralization in browsers. Functionally there isn't much difference between Chrome and FireFox yet people will promote one over the other with such religious fervor that you'd think they offer different functionalities. Web3 has no mechanism to prevent centralization. There are such things as natural monopolies, and these typically happen through network effects. This network effect is so powerful that everyone uses Google Maps. Web3 does nothing to prevent this (we even have to ask if we want to prevent this). So what is it solving? Hosting monopolies? If that's what it is solving then it seems like there are likely better ways and no need for the blockchain. I even say this as someone that thinks there's value in cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Yeah, a lot of scammers in the area, but I can see some utility in the ideas (but huge noise to signal ratio). I just can't see any signal in web3.

hitekker 5y ago

Looking at the author's LinkedIn, I see Luke has no engineering background, and no STEM experience. His expertise before becoming cofounder of Terminus is in diplomacy and marketing. It's weird to be write articles on Git and Terminus being Web3 without a clear understanding of either. I can only imagine the DMs flying around in their company's slack after this post went out.