16 ms·

Guido van Rossum: Let Web3 die in a flaming ball of fire

343 points by donsupreme 5y ago

louwrentius 5y ago
I think Guido would enjoy this site then: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
- gsliepen 5y ago
  That site is great, it even supports Web 1.0 while still looking good! https://web3isgoinggreat.com/web1 https://web3isgoinggreat.com/web1
paxys 5y ago
I've reached a point where I'm tired of discussing the possibilities/potential/revolution of crypto and blockchain. Is there anything I can use today, or must I keep waiting for this hypothetical future?
- ilaksh 5y ago
  I'm using it (ALGO) for micro transactions and for my clients' art and gaming projects that require the smart contract and NFT features. Such as artwork that transforms or digital fighting cards that get upgrades.
- searchableguy 5y ago
  Try headline https://viaheadline.xyz/ https://viaheadline.xyz/ which uses ceramic for storage, unlock for payment and membership, ipfs for pinning, and a bunch of other protocols for decentralisation. I can walk you through some of the useful stuff going on if you want to have a chat. Offer valid for anyone else.
  - chrononaut 5y ago
    > HEADLINE is a decentralized publishing platform where a creator’s content is always their own. There’s no service fee, no long form privacy agreement and your unpublished and token gated content is encrypted, enabling access control. > Publish web content and send out newsletters. Build meaningful connections with your community and followers. Feel confident that the publishing platform you’re using respects what you create and who you create it for. Our excellence is in our collaborations. > Powered by Unlock Protocol and built by Raid Guild, with integrations of Ceramic, Lit Protocol & IPFS, HEADLINE is truly multi-player, built and maintained by collaboration. > HEADLINE operates as a DAO, decentralized autonomous organization. That means that we are run by collective efforts and innovation. Join us as we build together. Who exactly is this being positioned to? If I passed this along to the marketing team at my job they will probably just reply back with a bunch of question marks attempting to understand that language. Is that even the right audience?
  - stiltzkin 5y ago
    Also mirror.xyz
- maccolgan 5y ago
  Use Monero today.
papito 5y ago
It's funny how the simplest of the questions about this "Web 3" throws off the evangelists. They don't have answers for anything. Good scammers can sort of BS for a bit. - Decentralized! No government control! 100% freedom of speech! - What if someone posts a video of child rape, with no moderation or ways to take it down - ...
flatearth22 5y ago
dekhn 5y ago
My question is why Y Combinator funded anything related to web3 and why it seems to defend these ideas when they are attacked on HN.
- inapis 5y ago
  No one can say for sure how the entire thing is going to turn out. As investors, there's no harm in placing multiple bets as long as a small number of those bets end up giving an outsized return.
- etchalon 5y ago
  Well, money.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - dekhn 5y ago
    Very early in bitcoin I had the opportunity to mine, but I didn't do it, because while I felt it would make money, it would be a net-negative for the world (IE, I'd get richer but the world on a whole would be poorer). Some VCs don't invest in things they think are net-negative even if there would be a big profit.
    - etchalon 5y ago
      Some, sure.
- throwaway82652 5y ago
  Because investors as a whole cannot know more about a product than the people who have to build and use that thing every day. Being financially invested in it requires them to have a certain level of optimism about it even in the face of reasonable doubt.
- blahblah123456 5y ago
  Fear of missing out. A lot of people are very confident that it will blow up.
TimPC 5y ago
For those who don't know web3 is the idea of building a web on a decentralized blockchain. I think more specifically the idea is to replace the need for name servers with a blockchain protocol. Like anything blockchain there is no real solution for how to handle records becoming stale over time without a central authority that manages disputes. I find it ridiculous that this idea even got to occupy the name as I think we'd want to reserve it for the next generational change in web technology and not half-baked bs.
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  > there is no real solution for how to handle records becoming stale over time What do you mean? Record expiry can easily be incorporated into the smart contract protocol. ENS already does that. When you register an ENS domain, you can pre-pay for up to 10 years, after which you have to renew the domain. Same as web2 domain name registry.
- mediocregopher 5y ago
  I don't think that's what web3 is, that's just one direction some are taking it. Web3 is a move away from centralized platforms to ones which are either decentralized or more directly controlled by users (self-hosted, federated). > Like anything blockchain there is no real solution for how to handle records becoming stale over time without a central authority that manages disputes. I don't understand this part. In pretty much every decentralized name system I've seen a user pays to own a name for a period of time, there's no stale records.
  - andybak 5y ago
    "Web3" has been fully co-opted to be blockchain related. Any former meaning is now drowned out by that definition, whether you like it or not.
    - BeetleB 5y ago
      > Any former meaning is now drowned out by that definition, whether you like it or not. Random pronouncements on HN don't make it true. If you want to restrict your understanding of the term, by all means do so. But don't expect others to follow suit.
sprague 5y ago
The interesting thing about crypto to me is how there seems to be a deep divide among very smart people, some who think it's the greatest thing ever and some who think it's a fraud. I can't remember when there's ever been such a Bigendian-scale dispute in technology before. Can you?
- metadat 5y ago
  Where is the divide? Crypto is 99% full of hucksters, and the remaining 1% are the sorry saps. The intelligent people I know want nothing to do with it. Folks I've met IRL who are into it usually aren't all that bright. The traits they do have are affinity for risk taking, and being somewhat technical but not too much so, just enough to be dangerous. They certainly won't be opening any PRs to fix Ethereum bugs. In other words, they are perfectly ripened marks for the hucksters.
  - seany 5y ago
    There is a real cohort of libertarian folks who really do want digital anonymous cash replacement.
    - throwaway82652 5y ago
      Cryptocurrency is not that, because it is not anonymous nor is it a cash replacement. I have sympathy for those folks who were led to believe those things, it's not their fault.
      - gotaquestion 5y ago
        Small correction: some cryptos are anonymous, Zcash and monero for example. Bitcoin and ether are not, and once those have been rolled into something like the Winklevoss's Gemini, it is harder to follow them publicly.
        throwaway82652 5y ago
        But that's not true, even those privacycoins are still technically pseudonymous because transactions are still done by wallet ID. This fundamentally can't be fixed because otherwise you can't have something like a wallet that stores a balance which is assigned to you and only you. Also I would like to point out that the idea you can ever be fully anonymous on the internet is a lot of bunk. Regardless of what kind of cryptography you use or how many obfuscation layers you put things through you're still generating a great deal of identifying data just by accessing other servers. This is a problem I have with most of the marketing behind any privacy technology, it's not just these privacycoins that are making false promises.
vmception 5y ago
The original tweet was asking for "any future of python in web3 domain? specific in @ethereum @solana" Web3.js - the 7 year old library for communicating with any EVM has an actively maintained and fully featured python version. Solana.py is available for the Solana ecosystem These libraries typically make it very easy to connect to the nearest node, which you can treat as pay-once-read-forever compute instances. Where reading and and all bandwidth is free. You can completely ignore the cringy ideology if you prefer to and just accept that people are willing to store your crap for free forever. You can build lucrative businesses around the observation that long winded web 2.0 funnels have been shorted down to a single call to action that in itself is a payment, while again completely ignoring the ethos and ideology of the users and enthusiasts. This kind of question doesn't need input or gracing from a web 1.0 developer that people respect. when people say decentralization they mean "no opinion of any individual or entity matters" (of course many conflate permissionless with decentralization, but the degree of permissionlessness is derived from the degree of decentralization.) Individuals are free to respect or assign more weight to the opinion of someone they like, when that opinion matches what they want to hear, its just not necessary for an outcome.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Pay once read forever is the latest scam. Pay once read until it stops working.
  - vmception 5y ago
    Can you elaborate? None of these Virtual Machines go away because so many people run them and can run them, including yourself. You can branch off the current state or any prior state and run/execute it locally at any point in time, without needing the resources to run the whole blockchain. This is enough for you and your community/clients to have the data to move it all somewhere else, if necessary. If you need all the prior states for some reason, someone will have it for you to bootstrap from. What would stop working? and when you mean latest scam ... how? all - or all major - blockchains have had this feature since day 1. reading is free, writing is not. now all the nodes in most networks can function as event-driven compute services, similar to aws lambda and other products, except reading and bandwidth is free.
Glyptodon 5y ago
Let us replace the abundance of the near infinite with the eternal dedication of resources to the enforcement of artificial scarcity that some copies might be more real and unique than others. For such is the power of crypto eternal. Amine.
- dqpb 5y ago
  Proof of stake leverages the abundance of the near infinite
dqpb 5y ago
He said the same thing about type systems.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  Python has been strongly-typed since its inception.
  - dqpb 5y ago
    And 20 years later added only informal type declarations.
sydthrowaway 5y ago
Get ready for a cavalcade of desperate bored ape bagholders in the replies.
pwdisswordfish9 5y ago
As opposed to a freezing ball of fire?
jrockway 5y ago
Web3 makes a lot of sense to me. The people that got into Bitcoin early are now out and ridiculously rich. Other people also wanted to get rich, but that exact opportunity feels like it passed (still holding out for my $80 invested in Bitcoin to be worth >$100,000, but I got in kind of late), so people started making their own coins in the hopes of repeating the process. That had mixed success, Etherium (and maybe Dogecoin) did pretty well, but most didn't. The SEC even started cracking down on ICOs. So, there is a legitimate need for some new business model where you print money and keep most of it for yourself. Web3! I guarantee you someone will get rich from it. That means it worked. (I'm being a little tongue-in-cheek here. I get the actual idea for cryptocurrency and even NFTs if I squint a little bit, I just think that the hype is from people that think they're going to get rich without doing any actual work. It does happen, but at the end of the day, doing actual work is probably going to be more profitable on average. You're probably too late to the game if you start now intending to be a Web3 trillionaire, anyway. The hype is to get you to buy some of the money you're printing with money that can actually be used to buy mansions. So they can buy some mansions.)
- slowmovintarget 5y ago
  Making a Ponzi scheme digital doesn't make it better, it just makes it faster.
  - koolba 5y ago
    The faster Ponzi schemes run on the newer L2 chains.
- nathias 5y ago
  are you implying people get rich from doing actual work?
  - mmmpop 5y ago
    Maybe. If the OP were implying that, what would you say to that?
fourstar 5y ago
Web3 = term created by VCs and the like to commandeer the crypto landscape in their favor ($$$).
mattwilsonn888 5y ago
Isn't a brutish tweet still a brutish tweet no matter who its from? There have been infinitely more interesting crypto conversation starters on this board than this - I don't care who the author is - I care about the content, of which this has none.
- hackmiester 5y ago
  yes. I retweeted this, but am surprised to see it on HN.
- yumraj 5y ago
  You mean like most of Musk's tweets, which are almost always brutish, have no content, yet make news.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- cableshaft 5y ago
  Nope, prepare to see the exact same comments as the other two anti-crypto threads posted today and pretty much every day. I clicked it curious to see what his reasoning was, but nope, the HN headline is all there is.
- debacle 5y ago
  Guido is not a controversial figure in the industry. This isn't an Elon or Linus tweet. This is a well-respected individual poo pooing pretty directly on the "web3" scene.
  - mattwilsonn888 5y ago
    As I said, reputation is not relevant over content.
  - ozim 5y ago
    Notice that this is reply to some kind of "pushy person" that did @ to Guido without being any kind of acquittance of his. It would be maybe OK if that guy would @ him and said "look this is cool, what do you think of that" - but guy made specific question to Guido. This is not some rant thrown into the net "just because" like Elon does.
labrador 5y ago
I just created the worlds slowest database. People will have to pay many dollars to specialists called "miners" to update it. For design reasons, no one can delete anything from it. It's going to change the world.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- influx 5y ago
  You don't think there's any value in an open source system that proves scarcity in a digital universe?
  - pwinnski 5y ago
    Absolutely not. Most of the appeal of digital comes from the lack of scarcity. Artificially introducing faux-scarcity is asinine.
    - vmception 5y ago
      the market has chosen faux-scarcity many many many times over (at least) hundreds of years. we live in a market based economy, the market doesn't care that your MySQL database can do it, the market is saying "I'll pay you to write to a public access database you set up, so quit with this Betamax technical superiority stuff, we don't care."
      - gffrd 5y ago
        It's not about technical superiority … I think it's more about morality/ethics: is it _right_ that we should introduce scarcity artificially when it doesn't exist naturally, with the primary outcome being that a small group will exploit it at the cost of many who can't? Is that healthy? Yes, it is a free market issue, and people will choose what they know, and will choose based on their fears.
        5y ago
Pmop 5y ago
Works for me. We enjoy the same benefits high capital enjoys when investing on crypto. Saves lots on paperwork and taxes. Plus, now I can save my wealth from being stolen by the govt when it decides to print it's way into our 6th currency.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  I'm not sure what country you're in, but in the US at least, BTC is taxable. The fact it's somewhat simpler to hide from the IRS doesn't mean you're safe when they audit you and ask about the movement of cash to / from exchanges.
  - paxys 5y ago
    You also aren't hiding anything from the IRS considering every crypto exchange is reporting all your transactions to them.
mattwilsonn888 5y ago
Everyone here debating this is ignorant. Everyone here is using a different definition of Web3 and pretending they can brute force the meaning on to the other side's definition. Its pathetic.
ericls 5y ago
The problem with web2 is not from the technology
blenderdt 5y ago
Yes, crypto is (if the implementation is good) a way to make sure transactions are valid. But I think there is too little discussion about the transactions that go in and out the network. Those transactions are still about trust. So crypto doesn't solve any trust issues. And since not a lot of people have the resources to host crypto it will become less decentralized over time. So in the end it also doesn't fix centralization. To me it's just a gold rush. Some people will get very wealthy from it, most wont.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dredmorbius 5y ago
https://nitter.kavin.rocks/gvanrossum/status/1508959260905918465 https://nitter.kavin.rocks/gvanrossum/status/150895926090591...
therealmarv 5y ago
I don't get the extreme positions on that. There will be some sort of web3 and will be really relevant for some bigger groups of people. Saying that it should die and (the other extreme) saying "it's the solution for everything" is just ignorant.
- ivarv 5y ago
  The "it should die" camp take their view literally. At issue for many of us is the rampant consumption of resources to keep web3/cryptomining going. The ends() do not justify the means. () for any variation of "ends" people have come up with so far.
  - JshWright 5y ago
    "The ends don't justify the means" is a very generous framing, since the "ends" are just scams in the first place.
- tacker2000 5y ago
  This is the most sensible answer. There is probably no black and white outcome here, the web3 stuff will stick around for those who want it and who want to keep it alive. If you don’t understand or need it, just ignore it. This is just the usual “twitter bait” thats going on now. People are promoting this and then other people feel “threatened” and feel the need to take a position. Same with the whole Metaverse discussion going on now. Next year it will be something else, ad nauseam.
  - polemic 5y ago
    A lot of us don't feel it appropriate to "just ignore" technologies with massively negative externalities. We are effected whether we like it or not.
platz 5y ago
1) The governance problems of private money are incompatible with democracy and the rule of law. 2) There are irremovable privacy, scalability, and recentralization contradictions at the core of any and all permissionless blockchain solutions. 3) There are vast negative externalities that every blockchain-based investment inevitably entails.
awr 5y ago
I'm skeptical about the ecosystem as a whole, despite running a project myself, but a distinction needs to be made between web3 as a technology and web3 in its current iteration. I do believe there's something there around business model innovations (e.g. near fee-less micro-transactions tied to a crypto identity as a low impedance alternative to SSO). Concretely, if I can jump onto a website and consume content without having to go through the hassle of signing up to a monthly subscription and entering my credit card details, that's a step change improvement in my enjoyment of the web. Want to read a particularly interesting paywalled news article? Sure, pay 25c via crypto wallet (2 clicks), read article, move on. The other interesting application are the technological innovations brought on by smart contracts. Blockchain-based serverless compute powering dApps. Instead of having to write a lambda on AWS, I can just submit a smart contract to the blockchain. Provided it's a read only use case, I pay once and can freely call the contract for as long as the network exists. This might seem uninteresting but as the contract gives access to the current state of the blockchain, there are interesting applications that you can build on top of this [1], particularly if you combine it with oracles that give access to real world data. Crypto as a financial revolution seems incredibly contrived but web3 as a tool has potential merit. Whether web3 is the best solution to such problems is a question worth exploring. [1]. I use it to determine whether crypto tokens are honeypots or not by simulating a buy and sell.
- Loughla 5y ago
  >Sure, pay 25c via crypto wallet (2 clicks), read article, move on. 1. Couldn't this be done with just a credit card if companies took micro payments? My browser will save my cc details, so if they accepted micro payments, I could just click one button to get it. 2. Why would companies, who do not accept micropayments now, suddenly accept them just because crypto? 3. Wouldn't I still have to enter information into the system (more than 2 clicks)? Or would everyone just have access to my information all the time? I don't get why crypto needs to be involved here, or how it forces companies to accept micro-payments.
  - awr 5y ago
    Probably not today but there's a future where this could be done without crypto (hence my comment re whether web3 is the right tech). 1. Fixed payment processing fees make it unfeasible. Minimum credit card fees are 10s of cents, so anything sub a dollar becomes unpractical. 2. Viability of micropayments is proportional to the fees charged by the payment processor. If the processor charges 1c, then 10c micropayments are feasible. If they charge 30c, it makes much more economic sense to charge larger amounts in bulk (as a business, a 40c microtransaction means I'm giving up 75% revenue to the payment processor). Sure, you could always charge in aggregate at the end of the month but the experience to me as a user is worse. 3. What information? If I'm reading an article on a news website, what more information do they need then my wallet address to identify me (if that)? If they require name, that can be linked my wallet address and I can decide whether I give access to that information (no different to SSO today or app store permissions). Can it be done without crypto? Absolutely, but it requires a lot of change to make it feasible. It's one application that does seem ideally suited to crypto and web3.
gojomo 5y ago
I love Python, but any definition of 'web3' broad enough to include the things GvR despises also includes many foundational things likely to outlive Python, with greater influence on human welfare, like: * cryptographically-anchored decentralized identities * content-addressed publishing * natively-software-accessible incentive systems engineered with the same rigor, & productivity-multiple upside, as our personal-computers/mobile-devices, world-wide-web, & ecommerce/industrial automation systems 'web3' may even give a new life to the semantic-web vision TbL had under the name "Web 3.0", which "died in a flaming ball of fire" via the dominance of the Web 2.0 platform monopolies.
nightski 5y ago
Meanwhile the world still deals with the Python 2 vs. 3 debacle lol. But glad he was able to clear up Web3.
exdsq 5y ago
Guido is obviously a talented PL designer but I’d wager he knows very little about the crypto space. Not sure how this is interesting enough for front page HN but I guess it’s fun to see how emotional people are about this topic.
TeeWEE 5y ago
Web3 is a big fluff hype of slow tech with a lot of inflated expectations. Btw, web3 is an old term, back in the days the semantic web was seen as web3.0 Failed, just like the "new" web3.0 will... Crypto/blockchain will still exists, web3 will have some use-fullness.. But no, it wont change the world. Centralised systems work quite well in a capitalist system.
Animats 5y ago
Is he just mad because Python is too slow for 3D work?
- ozim 5y ago
  Nah, he is mad because some crypto asshole is calling him out directly. Notice that this tweet is a reply.
jdrc 5y ago
wasnt very alive anyway
pmurt7 5y ago
[flagged]
- JshWright 5y ago
  Yes, these (along with the quoted tweet) are consistent with a worldview that considers the impact of his choices on others.
Sharlin 5y ago
Honestly the older I get, the more absurd the world seems to become. Things like NFTs, an utter and total April's Fools joke of a concept that nevertheless people are now building six-figure careers on top of. Was it like this during the first dotcom bubble? I was a highschooler back then, so not yet totally "in" in the scene. Surely the current bubble must burst at some point as well?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  Was it like this during the first dotcom bubble? I was a highschooler back then. No, because the internet had obvious practical potential to pretty much anybody who'd ever used a computer before. And if somebody didn't get it yet you could show them a webpage or something. You could pull up a news site - "see, it's like your regular newspaper, except on the computer... plus a zillion other online newspapers, and weather, and shopping" etc. Very few people would fail to get the general concept (even if they had no interest in it) after a few minutes of that. Ordering things from a catalog over the phone (Sears, etc) had existed for a century already, and online shopping was a fairly obvious extension of that. The internet was also an idea that all manner of media had primed us for. Since, what, the 1950s? 1960s? movies and television and World's Fairs had all been promising us that someday we'd be able to do actual useful shit through our TV screens and that computers were "the future." So once that all arrived it all felt pretty obvious. Both to tech-savvy types, and the general populace. But... Web3? There's nothing simple you can show an Average Joe. Even most tech-savvy people I know fall somewhere between thinking it's utter garbage and having no clue what it is on any kind of practical level. That's something you absolutely did not hear from tech-savvy folks in the 90s.
  - Sharlin 5y ago
    Yeah, I mean I guess back the there was the actually gonna-change-the-world part of the internet, and then there was the hyperinflated hype train that made millionaires out of twenty-plus people who had nothing but a catchy domain name and some rudimentary marketing skills, no business model, never mind anything resembling a real product. Then they'd spend the money on cocaine and Lamborghinis. This time, there doesn't even seem to be the former part.
eternityforest 5y ago
Down with web3, up with web4!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
TedShiller 5y ago
It already is. ‘Jack Dorsey’s First Tweet’ NFT Went on Sale for $48M. It Ended With a Top Bid of Just $280. I'm actually shocked someone would pay $280 for it. https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/04/13/jack-dorseys-first-tweet-nft-went-on-sale-for-48m-it-ended-with-a-top-bid-of-just-280/ https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/04/13/jack-dorseys-fi...
- boringg 5y ago
  This is beautiful.
  - dropnerd 5y ago
    its the web3 equivalent of an antique that failed to sell on ebay. interesting, but it's easy to draw wrong conclusions like "nfts are dead". market size and volume tell a different story.
    - boringg 5y ago
      Oh I'm very aware that it doesn't tell the whole story. I think that some guy who thought he would strike it huge by buying Jack Dorsay's tweet in NFT form then resell it multifold while donate half the profits to a charity then realizing he way overpaid for it feels like a good story to me on it's own. It's a great analogy for the market but probably not accurate on the whole.
      - dropnerd 5y ago
        right, can't imagine whats going through their mind right now. he could have gotten a reasonable price (though perhaps still a loss) if he tried to list with sotheby. curation matters.
    - TedShiller 5y ago
      The most shocking part is that there is someone who was willing to pay $280 for it.
camdenlock 5y ago
Isn’t Guido actually making a political gesture here? There is no technical argument. One side signals their allegiance to centralization as a philosophy of government; the other side signals their allegiance to decentralization. It’s similar to the recent dust-up over masking: one side craves centralized, top-down, totalizing governance by experts; the other side craves decentralized power, maximizing individual liberty. Both sides loudly advertise their allegiances.
motohagiography 5y ago
The quality of arguments against web3 seem related to a trend where smart people indulge in acting dumb on twitter because it feels powerful. It's just an off the cuff tweet by a giant of our age, not some ex cathedra papal bull. The basic innovation of proof of work is that it sidesteps the need to solve hard economic problems of energy storage and transmission and lets you turn energy where you find it into fungible, valuable compute and transmit it back as information. Economically, this means if you can find power, you can refine and sell it in the form of mining compute, which means I can make money that enables a supply line to wherever I can harvest an energy source. Once we figure out solar efficiency and more efficient processors, it's how we can fund colonies on the moon, develop remote regions, and decouple some of our economic activity from geography. It's the most fundamental and pure form of value added manufacturing. When you view miners as electricity refineries, it's pretty simple. Maybe I'm being dumb and web3 dies in a fire, but if it sucks that badly, maybe I just don't see how its critics are taking the other side of that bet. Even though I like who web3 annoys and why, seeing them at less than their best is unsatisfying.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > Once we figure out solar efficiency and more efficient processors, it's how we can fund colonies on the moon, develop remote regions, and decouple some of our economic activity from geography. It's the most fundamental and pure form of value added manufacturing. No, we can't. Becuse all energy is going towards bitcoin mining. > maybe I just don't see how its critics are taking the other side of that bet. There is no "other side".
- hbosch 5y ago
  I had a friend in college say to me, Web 2.0 is "more than rounded buttons". But, if you looked around in 2009, 2010... well, Web 2.0 was mainly crapware covered in rounded buttons. I guess we got... Farmville? Similarly, if Web3 wants to be taken seriously it has to provide more than access to private Discords. NFTs are basically a digital lanyard, they get you in and around some niche areas of the web's convention center but once the big show comes and goes what's left? Web3's value prop needs to be greater than "we can see your coins".
- 5y ago
ilaksh 5y ago
Web3 is such a vague concept, it seems to serve as a type of stand-in for technological worldview here.
glerk 5y ago
Ok who is Guido van Rossum and why should I care? There is no argument here, it’s just a link to a tweet with the exact same content as the title.
- _joel 5y ago
  The creator of Python and I don't know why you should care, that's your call.
yonrg 5y ago
Do they read the web3isgoingwell site? https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/wikis/display/EBSI/Home https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/wikis/display/E...
joeman1000 5y ago
I’m seriously sick of the dogmatism from both sides of the crypto discussion. It has good and bad aspects, good and bad projects etc. Think for yourself and evaluate things on your own for goodness sake! Just because the NY Post or whatever influencer hates NFTs and things they’re a scourge, doesn’t mean you have to fall in lockstep like a lobotomy patient. If you hate NFTs, and their use of energy, I implore you to stop buying funko pops, which have more embodied energy and are just waste plastic.
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
This is from almost a month ago. Good for him.
nunez 5y ago
Is it possible to be in the middle? I LOVE the idea of cryptocurrency, Web3 and DeFi. I HATE that a ton of activity in the space is scammy.
pkrumins 5y ago
Don’t feed the boomers. They don’t like anything new.
xtat 5y ago
Wow, the old guard of technology are going out hard.

343 points by donsupreme 5y ago

louwrentius 5y ago

I think Guido would enjoy this site then: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web3isgoinggreat.com/

gsliepen 5y ago
That site is great, it even supports Web 1.0 while still looking good! https://web3isgoinggreat.com/web1 https://web3isgoinggreat.com/web1

paxys 5y ago

I've reached a point where I'm tired of discussing the possibilities/potential/revolution of crypto and blockchain. Is there anything I can use today, or must I keep waiting for this hypothetical future?

ilaksh 5y ago
I'm using it (ALGO) for micro transactions and for my clients' art and gaming projects that require the smart contract and NFT features. Such as artwork that transforms or digital fighting cards that get upgrades.
searchableguy 5y ago
Try headline https://viaheadline.xyz/ https://viaheadline.xyz/ which uses ceramic for storage, unlock for payment and membership, ipfs for pinning, and a bunch of other protocols for decentralisation. I can walk you through some of the useful stuff going on if you want to have a chat. Offer valid for anyone else.
- chrononaut 5y ago
  > HEADLINE is a decentralized publishing platform where a creator’s content is always their own. There’s no service fee, no long form privacy agreement and your unpublished and token gated content is encrypted, enabling access control. > Publish web content and send out newsletters. Build meaningful connections with your community and followers. Feel confident that the publishing platform you’re using respects what you create and who you create it for. Our excellence is in our collaborations. > Powered by Unlock Protocol and built by Raid Guild, with integrations of Ceramic, Lit Protocol & IPFS, HEADLINE is truly multi-player, built and maintained by collaboration. > HEADLINE operates as a DAO, decentralized autonomous organization. That means that we are run by collective efforts and innovation. Join us as we build together. Who exactly is this being positioned to? If I passed this along to the marketing team at my job they will probably just reply back with a bunch of question marks attempting to understand that language. Is that even the right audience?
- stiltzkin 5y ago
  Also mirror.xyz
maccolgan 5y ago
Use Monero today.

papito 5y ago

It's funny how the simplest of the questions about this "Web 3" throws off the evangelists. They don't have answers for anything. Good scammers can sort of BS for a bit. - Decentralized! No government control! 100% freedom of speech! - What if someone posts a video of child rape, with no moderation or ways to take it down - ...

flatearth22 5y ago

dekhn 5y ago

My question is why Y Combinator funded anything related to web3 and why it seems to defend these ideas when they are attacked on HN.

inapis 5y ago
No one can say for sure how the entire thing is going to turn out. As investors, there's no harm in placing multiple bets as long as a small number of those bets end up giving an outsized return.
etchalon 5y ago
Well, money.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dekhn 5y ago
  Very early in bitcoin I had the opportunity to mine, but I didn't do it, because while I felt it would make money, it would be a net-negative for the world (IE, I'd get richer but the world on a whole would be poorer). Some VCs don't invest in things they think are net-negative even if there would be a big profit.
  - etchalon 5y ago
    Some, sure.
throwaway82652 5y ago
Because investors as a whole cannot know more about a product than the people who have to build and use that thing every day. Being financially invested in it requires them to have a certain level of optimism about it even in the face of reasonable doubt.
blahblah123456 5y ago
Fear of missing out. A lot of people are very confident that it will blow up.

TimPC 5y ago

For those who don't know web3 is the idea of building a web on a decentralized blockchain. I think more specifically the idea is to replace the need for name servers with a blockchain protocol. Like anything blockchain there is no real solution for how to handle records becoming stale over time without a central authority that manages disputes. I find it ridiculous that this idea even got to occupy the name as I think we'd want to reserve it for the next generational change in web technology and not half-baked bs.

dcolkitt 5y ago
> there is no real solution for how to handle records becoming stale over time What do you mean? Record expiry can easily be incorporated into the smart contract protocol. ENS already does that. When you register an ENS domain, you can pre-pay for up to 10 years, after which you have to renew the domain. Same as web2 domain name registry.
mediocregopher 5y ago
I don't think that's what web3 is, that's just one direction some are taking it. Web3 is a move away from centralized platforms to ones which are either decentralized or more directly controlled by users (self-hosted, federated). > Like anything blockchain there is no real solution for how to handle records becoming stale over time without a central authority that manages disputes. I don't understand this part. In pretty much every decentralized name system I've seen a user pays to own a name for a period of time, there's no stale records.
- andybak 5y ago
  "Web3" has been fully co-opted to be blockchain related. Any former meaning is now drowned out by that definition, whether you like it or not.
  - BeetleB 5y ago
    > Any former meaning is now drowned out by that definition, whether you like it or not. Random pronouncements on HN don't make it true. If you want to restrict your understanding of the term, by all means do so. But don't expect others to follow suit.

sprague 5y ago

The interesting thing about crypto to me is how there seems to be a deep divide among very smart people, some who think it's the greatest thing ever and some who think it's a fraud. I can't remember when there's ever been such a Bigendian-scale dispute in technology before. Can you?

metadat 5y ago
Where is the divide? Crypto is 99% full of hucksters, and the remaining 1% are the sorry saps. The intelligent people I know want nothing to do with it. Folks I've met IRL who are into it usually aren't all that bright. The traits they do have are affinity for risk taking, and being somewhat technical but not too much so, just enough to be dangerous. They certainly won't be opening any PRs to fix Ethereum bugs. In other words, they are perfectly ripened marks for the hucksters.
- seany 5y ago
  There is a real cohort of libertarian folks who really do want digital anonymous cash replacement.
  - throwaway82652 5y ago
    Cryptocurrency is not that, because it is not anonymous nor is it a cash replacement. I have sympathy for those folks who were led to believe those things, it's not their fault.
    - gotaquestion 5y ago
      Small correction: some cryptos are anonymous, Zcash and monero for example. Bitcoin and ether are not, and once those have been rolled into something like the Winklevoss's Gemini, it is harder to follow them publicly.
      - throwaway82652 5y ago
        But that's not true, even those privacycoins are still technically pseudonymous because transactions are still done by wallet ID. This fundamentally can't be fixed because otherwise you can't have something like a wallet that stores a balance which is assigned to you and only you. Also I would like to point out that the idea you can ever be fully anonymous on the internet is a lot of bunk. Regardless of what kind of cryptography you use or how many obfuscation layers you put things through you're still generating a great deal of identifying data just by accessing other servers. This is a problem I have with most of the marketing behind any privacy technology, it's not just these privacycoins that are making false promises.

vmception 5y ago

The original tweet was asking for "any future of python in web3 domain? specific in @ethereum @solana" Web3.js - the 7 year old library for communicating with any EVM has an actively maintained and fully featured python version. Solana.py is available for the Solana ecosystem These libraries typically make it very easy to connect to the nearest node, which you can treat as pay-once-read-forever compute instances. Where reading and and all bandwidth is free. You can completely ignore the cringy ideology if you prefer to and just accept that people are willing to store your crap for free forever. You can build lucrative businesses around the observation that long winded web 2.0 funnels have been shorted down to a single call to action that in itself is a payment, while again completely ignoring the ethos and ideology of the users and enthusiasts. This kind of question doesn't need input or gracing from a web 1.0 developer that people respect. when people say decentralization they mean "no opinion of any individual or entity matters" (of course many conflate permissionless with decentralization, but the degree of permissionlessness is derived from the degree of decentralization.) Individuals are free to respect or assign more weight to the opinion of someone they like, when that opinion matches what they want to hear, its just not necessary for an outcome.

ipaddr 5y ago
Pay once read forever is the latest scam. Pay once read until it stops working.
- vmception 5y ago
  Can you elaborate? None of these Virtual Machines go away because so many people run them and can run them, including yourself. You can branch off the current state or any prior state and run/execute it locally at any point in time, without needing the resources to run the whole blockchain. This is enough for you and your community/clients to have the data to move it all somewhere else, if necessary. If you need all the prior states for some reason, someone will have it for you to bootstrap from. What would stop working? and when you mean latest scam ... how? all - or all major - blockchains have had this feature since day 1. reading is free, writing is not. now all the nodes in most networks can function as event-driven compute services, similar to aws lambda and other products, except reading and bandwidth is free.

Glyptodon 5y ago

Let us replace the abundance of the near infinite with the eternal dedication of resources to the enforcement of artificial scarcity that some copies might be more real and unique than others. For such is the power of crypto eternal. Amine.

dqpb 5y ago
Proof of stake leverages the abundance of the near infinite

dqpb 5y ago

He said the same thing about type systems.

heavyset_go 5y ago
Python has been strongly-typed since its inception.
- dqpb 5y ago
  And 20 years later added only informal type declarations.

sydthrowaway 5y ago

Get ready for a cavalcade of desperate bored ape bagholders in the replies.

pwdisswordfish9 5y ago

As opposed to a freezing ball of fire?

jrockway 5y ago

Web3 makes a lot of sense to me. The people that got into Bitcoin early are now out and ridiculously rich. Other people also wanted to get rich, but that exact opportunity feels like it passed (still holding out for my $80 invested in Bitcoin to be worth >$100,000, but I got in kind of late), so people started making their own coins in the hopes of repeating the process. That had mixed success, Etherium (and maybe Dogecoin) did pretty well, but most didn't. The SEC even started cracking down on ICOs. So, there is a legitimate need for some new business model where you print money and keep most of it for yourself. Web3! I guarantee you someone will get rich from it. That means it worked. (I'm being a little tongue-in-cheek here. I get the actual idea for cryptocurrency and even NFTs if I squint a little bit, I just think that the hype is from people that think they're going to get rich without doing any actual work. It does happen, but at the end of the day, doing actual work is probably going to be more profitable on average. You're probably too late to the game if you start now intending to be a Web3 trillionaire, anyway. The hype is to get you to buy some of the money you're printing with money that can actually be used to buy mansions. So they can buy some mansions.)

slowmovintarget 5y ago
Making a Ponzi scheme digital doesn't make it better, it just makes it faster.
- koolba 5y ago
  The faster Ponzi schemes run on the newer L2 chains.
nathias 5y ago
are you implying people get rich from doing actual work?
- mmmpop 5y ago
  Maybe. If the OP were implying that, what would you say to that?

fourstar 5y ago

Web3 = term created by VCs and the like to commandeer the crypto landscape in their favor ($$$).

mattwilsonn888 5y ago

Isn't a brutish tweet still a brutish tweet no matter who its from? There have been infinitely more interesting crypto conversation starters on this board than this - I don't care who the author is - I care about the content, of which this has none.

hackmiester 5y ago
yes. I retweeted this, but am surprised to see it on HN.
yumraj 5y ago
You mean like most of Musk's tweets, which are almost always brutish, have no content, yet make news.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
cableshaft 5y ago
Nope, prepare to see the exact same comments as the other two anti-crypto threads posted today and pretty much every day. I clicked it curious to see what his reasoning was, but nope, the HN headline is all there is.
debacle 5y ago
Guido is not a controversial figure in the industry. This isn't an Elon or Linus tweet. This is a well-respected individual poo pooing pretty directly on the "web3" scene.
- mattwilsonn888 5y ago
  As I said, reputation is not relevant over content.
- ozim 5y ago
  Notice that this is reply to some kind of "pushy person" that did @ to Guido without being any kind of acquittance of his. It would be maybe OK if that guy would @ him and said "look this is cool, what do you think of that" - but guy made specific question to Guido. This is not some rant thrown into the net "just because" like Elon does.

labrador 5y ago

I just created the worlds slowest database. People will have to pay many dollars to specialists called "miners" to update it. For design reasons, no one can delete anything from it. It's going to change the world.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
influx 5y ago
You don't think there's any value in an open source system that proves scarcity in a digital universe?
- pwinnski 5y ago
  Absolutely not. Most of the appeal of digital comes from the lack of scarcity. Artificially introducing faux-scarcity is asinine.
  - vmception 5y ago
    the market has chosen faux-scarcity many many many times over (at least) hundreds of years. we live in a market based economy, the market doesn't care that your MySQL database can do it, the market is saying "I'll pay you to write to a public access database you set up, so quit with this Betamax technical superiority stuff, we don't care."
    - gffrd 5y ago
      It's not about technical superiority … I think it's more about morality/ethics: is it _right_ that we should introduce scarcity artificially when it doesn't exist naturally, with the primary outcome being that a small group will exploit it at the cost of many who can't? Is that healthy? Yes, it is a free market issue, and people will choose what they know, and will choose based on their fears.
      - 5y ago

Pmop 5y ago

Works for me. We enjoy the same benefits high capital enjoys when investing on crypto. Saves lots on paperwork and taxes. Plus, now I can save my wealth from being stolen by the govt when it decides to print it's way into our 6th currency.

shadowgovt 5y ago
I'm not sure what country you're in, but in the US at least, BTC is taxable. The fact it's somewhat simpler to hide from the IRS doesn't mean you're safe when they audit you and ask about the movement of cash to / from exchanges.
- paxys 5y ago
  You also aren't hiding anything from the IRS considering every crypto exchange is reporting all your transactions to them.

mattwilsonn888 5y ago

Everyone here debating this is ignorant. Everyone here is using a different definition of Web3 and pretending they can brute force the meaning on to the other side's definition. Its pathetic.

ericls 5y ago

The problem with web2 is not from the technology

blenderdt 5y ago

Yes, crypto is (if the implementation is good) a way to make sure transactions are valid. But I think there is too little discussion about the transactions that go in and out the network. Those transactions are still about trust. So crypto doesn't solve any trust issues. And since not a lot of people have the resources to host crypto it will become less decentralized over time. So in the end it also doesn't fix centralization. To me it's just a gold rush. Some people will get very wealthy from it, most wont.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dredmorbius 5y ago

https://nitter.kavin.rocks/gvanrossum/status/1508959260905918465 https://nitter.kavin.rocks/gvanrossum/status/150895926090591...

therealmarv 5y ago

I don't get the extreme positions on that. There will be some sort of web3 and will be really relevant for some bigger groups of people. Saying that it should die and (the other extreme) saying "it's the solution for everything" is just ignorant.

ivarv 5y ago
The "it should die" camp take their view literally. At issue for many of us is the rampant consumption of resources to keep web3/cryptomining going. The ends() do not justify the means. () for any variation of "ends" people have come up with so far.
- JshWright 5y ago
  "The ends don't justify the means" is a very generous framing, since the "ends" are just scams in the first place.
tacker2000 5y ago
This is the most sensible answer. There is probably no black and white outcome here, the web3 stuff will stick around for those who want it and who want to keep it alive. If you don’t understand or need it, just ignore it. This is just the usual “twitter bait” thats going on now. People are promoting this and then other people feel “threatened” and feel the need to take a position. Same with the whole Metaverse discussion going on now. Next year it will be something else, ad nauseam.
- polemic 5y ago
  A lot of us don't feel it appropriate to "just ignore" technologies with massively negative externalities. We are effected whether we like it or not.

platz 5y ago

1) The governance problems of private money are incompatible with democracy and the rule of law. 2) There are irremovable privacy, scalability, and recentralization contradictions at the core of any and all permissionless blockchain solutions. 3) There are vast negative externalities that every blockchain-based investment inevitably entails.

awr 5y ago

I'm skeptical about the ecosystem as a whole, despite running a project myself, but a distinction needs to be made between web3 as a technology and web3 in its current iteration. I do believe there's something there around business model innovations (e.g. near fee-less micro-transactions tied to a crypto identity as a low impedance alternative to SSO). Concretely, if I can jump onto a website and consume content without having to go through the hassle of signing up to a monthly subscription and entering my credit card details, that's a step change improvement in my enjoyment of the web. Want to read a particularly interesting paywalled news article? Sure, pay 25c via crypto wallet (2 clicks), read article, move on. The other interesting application are the technological innovations brought on by smart contracts. Blockchain-based serverless compute powering dApps. Instead of having to write a lambda on AWS, I can just submit a smart contract to the blockchain. Provided it's a read only use case, I pay once and can freely call the contract for as long as the network exists. This might seem uninteresting but as the contract gives access to the current state of the blockchain, there are interesting applications that you can build on top of this [1], particularly if you combine it with oracles that give access to real world data. Crypto as a financial revolution seems incredibly contrived but web3 as a tool has potential merit. Whether web3 is the best solution to such problems is a question worth exploring. [1]. I use it to determine whether crypto tokens are honeypots or not by simulating a buy and sell.

Loughla 5y ago
>Sure, pay 25c via crypto wallet (2 clicks), read article, move on. 1. Couldn't this be done with just a credit card if companies took micro payments? My browser will save my cc details, so if they accepted micro payments, I could just click one button to get it. 2. Why would companies, who do not accept micropayments now, suddenly accept them just because crypto? 3. Wouldn't I still have to enter information into the system (more than 2 clicks)? Or would everyone just have access to my information all the time? I don't get why crypto needs to be involved here, or how it forces companies to accept micro-payments.
- awr 5y ago
  Probably not today but there's a future where this could be done without crypto (hence my comment re whether web3 is the right tech). 1. Fixed payment processing fees make it unfeasible. Minimum credit card fees are 10s of cents, so anything sub a dollar becomes unpractical. 2. Viability of micropayments is proportional to the fees charged by the payment processor. If the processor charges 1c, then 10c micropayments are feasible. If they charge 30c, it makes much more economic sense to charge larger amounts in bulk (as a business, a 40c microtransaction means I'm giving up 75% revenue to the payment processor). Sure, you could always charge in aggregate at the end of the month but the experience to me as a user is worse. 3. What information? If I'm reading an article on a news website, what more information do they need then my wallet address to identify me (if that)? If they require name, that can be linked my wallet address and I can decide whether I give access to that information (no different to SSO today or app store permissions). Can it be done without crypto? Absolutely, but it requires a lot of change to make it feasible. It's one application that does seem ideally suited to crypto and web3.

gojomo 5y ago

I love Python, but any definition of 'web3' broad enough to include the things GvR despises also includes many foundational things likely to outlive Python, with greater influence on human welfare, like: * cryptographically-anchored decentralized identities * content-addressed publishing * natively-software-accessible incentive systems engineered with the same rigor, & productivity-multiple upside, as our personal-computers/mobile-devices, world-wide-web, & ecommerce/industrial automation systems 'web3' may even give a new life to the semantic-web vision TbL had under the name "Web 3.0", which "died in a flaming ball of fire" via the dominance of the Web 2.0 platform monopolies.

nightski 5y ago

Meanwhile the world still deals with the Python 2 vs. 3 debacle lol. But glad he was able to clear up Web3.

exdsq 5y ago

Guido is obviously a talented PL designer but I’d wager he knows very little about the crypto space. Not sure how this is interesting enough for front page HN but I guess it’s fun to see how emotional people are about this topic.

TeeWEE 5y ago

Web3 is a big fluff hype of slow tech with a lot of inflated expectations. Btw, web3 is an old term, back in the days the semantic web was seen as web3.0 Failed, just like the "new" web3.0 will... Crypto/blockchain will still exists, web3 will have some use-fullness.. But no, it wont change the world. Centralised systems work quite well in a capitalist system.

Animats 5y ago

Is he just mad because Python is too slow for 3D work?

ozim 5y ago
Nah, he is mad because some crypto asshole is calling him out directly. Notice that this tweet is a reply.

jdrc 5y ago

wasnt very alive anyway

pmurt7 5y ago

[flagged]

JshWright 5y ago
Yes, these (along with the quoted tweet) are consistent with a worldview that considers the impact of his choices on others.

Sharlin 5y ago

Honestly the older I get, the more absurd the world seems to become. Things like NFTs, an utter and total April's Fools joke of a concept that nevertheless people are now building six-figure careers on top of. Was it like this during the first dotcom bubble? I was a highschooler back then, so not yet totally "in" in the scene. Surely the current bubble must burst at some point as well?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
JohnBooty 5y ago
Was it like this during the first dotcom bubble? I was a highschooler back then. No, because the internet had obvious practical potential to pretty much anybody who'd ever used a computer before. And if somebody didn't get it yet you could show them a webpage or something. You could pull up a news site - "see, it's like your regular newspaper, except on the computer... plus a zillion other online newspapers, and weather, and shopping" etc. Very few people would fail to get the general concept (even if they had no interest in it) after a few minutes of that. Ordering things from a catalog over the phone (Sears, etc) had existed for a century already, and online shopping was a fairly obvious extension of that. The internet was also an idea that all manner of media had primed us for. Since, what, the 1950s? 1960s? movies and television and World's Fairs had all been promising us that someday we'd be able to do actual useful shit through our TV screens and that computers were "the future." So once that all arrived it all felt pretty obvious. Both to tech-savvy types, and the general populace. But... Web3? There's nothing simple you can show an Average Joe. Even most tech-savvy people I know fall somewhere between thinking it's utter garbage and having no clue what it is on any kind of practical level. That's something you absolutely did not hear from tech-savvy folks in the 90s.
- Sharlin 5y ago
  Yeah, I mean I guess back the there was the actually gonna-change-the-world part of the internet, and then there was the hyperinflated hype train that made millionaires out of twenty-plus people who had nothing but a catchy domain name and some rudimentary marketing skills, no business model, never mind anything resembling a real product. Then they'd spend the money on cocaine and Lamborghinis. This time, there doesn't even seem to be the former part.

eternityforest 5y ago

Down with web3, up with web4!

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

TedShiller 5y ago

It already is. ‘Jack Dorsey’s First Tweet’ NFT Went on Sale for $48M. It Ended With a Top Bid of Just $280. I'm actually shocked someone would pay $280 for it. https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/04/13/jack-dorseys-first-tweet-nft-went-on-sale-for-48m-it-ended-with-a-top-bid-of-just-280/ https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/04/13/jack-dorseys-fi...

boringg 5y ago
This is beautiful.
- dropnerd 5y ago
  its the web3 equivalent of an antique that failed to sell on ebay. interesting, but it's easy to draw wrong conclusions like "nfts are dead". market size and volume tell a different story.
  - boringg 5y ago
    Oh I'm very aware that it doesn't tell the whole story. I think that some guy who thought he would strike it huge by buying Jack Dorsay's tweet in NFT form then resell it multifold while donate half the profits to a charity then realizing he way overpaid for it feels like a good story to me on it's own. It's a great analogy for the market but probably not accurate on the whole.
    - dropnerd 5y ago
      right, can't imagine whats going through their mind right now. he could have gotten a reasonable price (though perhaps still a loss) if he tried to list with sotheby. curation matters.
  - TedShiller 5y ago
    The most shocking part is that there is someone who was willing to pay $280 for it.

camdenlock 5y ago

Isn’t Guido actually making a political gesture here? There is no technical argument. One side signals their allegiance to centralization as a philosophy of government; the other side signals their allegiance to decentralization. It’s similar to the recent dust-up over masking: one side craves centralized, top-down, totalizing governance by experts; the other side craves decentralized power, maximizing individual liberty. Both sides loudly advertise their allegiances.

motohagiography 5y ago

The quality of arguments against web3 seem related to a trend where smart people indulge in acting dumb on twitter because it feels powerful. It's just an off the cuff tweet by a giant of our age, not some ex cathedra papal bull. The basic innovation of proof of work is that it sidesteps the need to solve hard economic problems of energy storage and transmission and lets you turn energy where you find it into fungible, valuable compute and transmit it back as information. Economically, this means if you can find power, you can refine and sell it in the form of mining compute, which means I can make money that enables a supply line to wherever I can harvest an energy source. Once we figure out solar efficiency and more efficient processors, it's how we can fund colonies on the moon, develop remote regions, and decouple some of our economic activity from geography. It's the most fundamental and pure form of value added manufacturing. When you view miners as electricity refineries, it's pretty simple. Maybe I'm being dumb and web3 dies in a fire, but if it sucks that badly, maybe I just don't see how its critics are taking the other side of that bet. Even though I like who web3 annoys and why, seeing them at less than their best is unsatisfying.

dmitriid 5y ago
> Once we figure out solar efficiency and more efficient processors, it's how we can fund colonies on the moon, develop remote regions, and decouple some of our economic activity from geography. It's the most fundamental and pure form of value added manufacturing. No, we can't. Becuse all energy is going towards bitcoin mining. > maybe I just don't see how its critics are taking the other side of that bet. There is no "other side".
hbosch 5y ago
I had a friend in college say to me, Web 2.0 is "more than rounded buttons". But, if you looked around in 2009, 2010... well, Web 2.0 was mainly crapware covered in rounded buttons. I guess we got... Farmville? Similarly, if Web3 wants to be taken seriously it has to provide more than access to private Discords. NFTs are basically a digital lanyard, they get you in and around some niche areas of the web's convention center but once the big show comes and goes what's left? Web3's value prop needs to be greater than "we can see your coins".
5y ago

ilaksh 5y ago

Web3 is such a vague concept, it seems to serve as a type of stand-in for technological worldview here.

glerk 5y ago

Ok who is Guido van Rossum and why should I care? There is no argument here, it’s just a link to a tweet with the exact same content as the title.

_joel 5y ago
The creator of Python and I don't know why you should care, that's your call.

yonrg 5y ago

Do they read the web3isgoingwell site? https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/wikis/display/EBSI/Home https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/wikis/display/E...

joeman1000 5y ago

I’m seriously sick of the dogmatism from both sides of the crypto discussion. It has good and bad aspects, good and bad projects etc. Think for yourself and evaluate things on your own for goodness sake! Just because the NY Post or whatever influencer hates NFTs and things they’re a scourge, doesn’t mean you have to fall in lockstep like a lobotomy patient. If you hate NFTs, and their use of energy, I implore you to stop buying funko pops, which have more embodied energy and are just waste plastic.

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

This is from almost a month ago. Good for him.

nunez 5y ago

Is it possible to be in the middle? I LOVE the idea of cryptocurrency, Web3 and DeFi. I HATE that a ton of activity in the space is scammy.

pkrumins 5y ago

Don’t feed the boomers. They don’t like anything new.

xtat 5y ago

Wow, the old guard of technology are going out hard.