8 ms·

My 1996 self feels very seen. I think a lot about the way the web was back in the mid 90s, compared to the bleeding-edge technologies of today, particularly bl

My 1996 self feels very seen. I think a lot about the way the web was back in the mid 90s, compared to the bleeding-edge technologies of today, particularly blockchain and cryptocurrency. And one major aspect I keep coming back to is that web technologies in the 90s, and even their descendent technologies now, are simple enough for most technology-literate people to understand, and that carried with it a lot of comfort and trust. For anyone who had been using desktop computers and office software in the early 90s, which was basically everyone who was a student or an office worker, the web was just files on a computer, served over a network, which we already had plenty of experience using. And I think that's why my father, who was only a little older than I am now when I first showed him the web, grasped it straight away and was supportive of me building a website for his business. These days I'm not spending much time writing HTML files in a text editor and uploading them via FTP; rather I'm writing programmatic code that talks to a database (A database! Just like MS Access or FileMaker Pro), does some processing, and displays the result on the screen with some elaborate JavaScript to make it look and function how I want (I’m happily a heavy user of React for building rich web apps), but it's still fundamentally the same concepts. Files on servers, accessed over a network and delivering useful information to my browser or app. The beautiful simplicity is still there, and it still doesn't feel like a big leap from the kind of computing we were doing 1993. The world of blockchains and cryptocurrencies and "web3" feels vastly more opaque and esoteric by comparison and therefore untrustworthy to many of us, which I think is a significant answer to the question that was asked here in the past couple of days: "Why is Hacker News so anti-crypto?" [1]. I can't quite accept that it's just that I'm "old"; firstly because first heard about Bitcoin soon after it appeared and was excited by its potential, but also because I remember how people older than me reacted when the web arrived, and there was much more rapid acceptance and embrace than there I currently see for cryptocurrency, outside of those who are just chasing quick riches. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31302494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31302494

soco 4y ago
Erm, no, many understand very well what blockchain is and it's definitely not opaqueness what they accuse it of. But everybody can choose their own strawman to fight, can't they.
- blueflow 4y ago
  This sort of opaqueness: Many people hail it as the next big thing since sliced bread, but when you actually spend the effort digging in you realize its barely good for anything except money laundering and tax evasion. Give me some bitcoin and i would not know what to do with them except changing them back into money.
  - legutierr 4y ago
    > its barely good for anything except money laundering and tax evasion You can’t think of any situation where you would want to share access to and control of data with multiple untrusted third parties, where you would need to guarantee not only that data modifications are only executed in an authorized fashion, but also that no previous modifications have been reversed? The list of use cases for that capability is not limited to “money laundering and tax evasion.”
    - falcolas 4y ago
      > You can’t think of any situation where you would want to share access and control of data with multiple untrusted third parties, where you would need to guarantee not only that data modifications are only executed in an authorized fasion, but also that no previous modifications have been reversed? Do you mean a cryptographic signature? Been doing those for decades back in email chains and newsgroups. Each message could contain the prior messages and their signatures. What’s new was assigning a currency to it.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - legutierr 4y ago
        What you are describing is something like an informal blockchain. Including prior messages ensures that new messages are presented in the context that their authors want them to be presented in. This approach resembles the back references that bind each block to its predecessors in a blockchain. But you can't rely on this approach to ensure that surreptitious deletion of old messages or threads is impossible. Not every old message in a newsgroup will be duplicated within new messages, and threads will typically not reference each other. If an old message or a separate thread provides necessary context for interpreting a new message, the maintainer of the newsgroup or the email server has the ability to change the meaning of a conversation simply by deleting messages or threads. Or the owner of a relay server can block certain messages from propagating. You still have to trust these people. Email is itself very decentralized, at least in concept, with every new email being copied into multiple accounts on multiple servers, so censorship like this is more difficult. But you can imagine how in a more centralized system (like Facebook or Twitter or HN itself) history can be rewritten by the entity hosting the conversation simply by their deleting messages. If all references to the unwanted messages are also removed, then for all intents and purposes, those messages would never have existed. Gmail is dominant enough that you can imagine Google being able to assert this power over much of the email traffic that currently exists. A blockchain ensures that every modification to the shared state follows rules that all participants in the system agree upon. No modification to that global state can occur unless those rules are strictly followed, and because all participants receive all details of every state modification, the entire history of the global state can be replayed at any time by any participant such that surreptitious deletion is not possible. There is no other technology that I am aware of that is able to systematically prevent surreptitious deletions. Cryptocurrencies are not the only thing that is new, and they are not even the most important feature of blockchains. Cryptocurrencies function as an incentive mechanism to ensure that there are a healthy number participants validating the state transitions. They can improve the reliability and security of a blockchain system, but there are blockchain systems that do not depend upon them.
ransom1538 4y ago
Web3 is cryptocurrencies? Are we sure about this? Just because it was on someones blog?
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  What do you believe web3 is?
  - egeozcan 4y ago
    I believe it's what the spider drawn by David Thorne produces: https://27bslash6.com/overdue.html https://27bslash6.com/overdue.html Ironic that payment via random drawings became a "reality" in this crazy world after all.
    - sph 4y ago
      Jane Gilles should mint an NFT of that spider to get back those $233.95, with interests.
  - andai 4y ago
    I miss the days when Web 3.0 was semantic web!
- Semiapies 4y ago
  You could as usefully rephrase that as: "Web3 is <anything at all>? Are we sure about this? Just because it was on someones blog?" It's an empty marketing phrase that some people have latched onto.
- GuB-42 4y ago
  Web3 as it is known today is a term coined by Gavin Wood, cofounder of Ethereum, and all of his notable work is related to blockchain technology, and that includes web3. Despite all the vague talk about freedom, really, web3 is all about cryptocurrencies. That is, web3 needs cryptocurrencies to work and it has no reason to exist without cryptocurrencies.
golergka 4y ago
> And one major aspect I keep coming back to is that web technologies in the 90s, and even their descendent technologies now, are simple enough for most technology-literate people to understand, and that carried with it a lot of comfort and trust. I was a 9 year old building websites in the 90s, and while I could write HTML and upload files via FTP, I had no clue about TCP/IP stack, socket implementation on the filesystem, how Windows 95 and Windows NT core worked, how my Pentium processor worked, and about a thousand other technologies that I used in the process. I relied on abstractions. > The world of blockchains and cryptocurrencies and "web3" feels vastly more opaque and esoteric by comparison Nobody's stopping you from just as blindly trusting underlying web3 abstractions as you did in the 90s with the web. But we're professionals who learned not to do that and have drastically different approach to technologies that we use. We're not 9 year old kids anymore. We had to learn these things after waking up to an outage, or after our site struggled with 10 requests per second (because we didn't know that database indexes existed), or after any other number of perfectly valid reasons. Now we don't trust tech, we read the whole documentation, and we want to dig in. The world hasn't changed as much. It's us who's changed.
- vaylian 4y ago
  > Nobody's stopping you from just as blindly trusting underlying web3 abstractions as you did in the 90s with the web Except that most web3 technology is property-related. There is no easy undo and try again. And getting off the ground as a minor is probably extra hard with such things.
eimrine 4y ago
> Why is Hacker News so anti-crypto? I have missed the discussion you have mentioned. But I remember 10 years ago HN was opposite to anti-crypto. And the anticryptoness of nowadays for me seems like stupid ppl who don't understand some basic principles and downvote me if attempting to criticize their misunderstanding.
- nxmnxm99 4y ago
  You lost your thread and descended into irony quite quickly there.
  - eimrine 4y ago
    If my English would better I have better quality of discussion, for example better ability to detect not interesting people before talking to them.
- piva00 4y ago
  > And the anticryptoness of nowadays for me seems like stupid ppl who don't understand some basic principles and downvote me if attempting to criticize their misunderstanding. Name-calling and assuming that everyone that "doesn't get it" is stupid is non-conducive to discussions. Worse, it makes your point much weaker because now there are only the "true believers that have seen the truth" and the "stupid sheeple" as opposite groups, which is a very stupid take in itself.
  - eimrine 4y ago
    I have no point now, I just trying to figure out of who the hell might be anti-crypto.
- _Algernon_ 4y ago
  You get downvoted for assuming that people who disagree with you are stupid. Attack the points being made, not the person making them.
  - 4y ago
k__ 4y ago
I'm an educator and right now, I'm evaluating the crypto space. A huge problem here is that it's very fast moving. Take the fast moving Web of the 90s and multiply it by how much more people use the Web today. At Eth Amsterdam I talked to many engineers from that space and didn't get a satisfying answer to many questions devs usually ask about new tech. "Where should you store your data?" - "It depends!" Back in the days, and even today, in Web2, you would spin up a relational DB and it would be good enough for 99% of use cases. I know, that changed with the rise of NoSQL, but in Web3 it's even harder.
- shafyy 4y ago
  The reason the "engineers" at that conference couldn't give you straight answers is because blockchain doesn't have good answers.
- bccdee 4y ago
  No cryptocurrency or Web3 platforms actually store their data on the blockchain. That would be ludicrously expensive; it'd cost tens of thousands per gig at least. Relational databases, cloud object buckets, and CDNs are pretty much all you should need, storage-wise, unless you're solving an especially interesting problem.
  - andai 4y ago
    So... what's the Web3 part for then?
    - bccdee 4y ago
      Branding. I'm not even joking; everything they do with blockchain can be done cheaper, easier, and just as well without it. They do the minimum they need to to hype themselves up as being "Web3" and that's it.
  - pcthrowaway 4y ago
    Isn't the data technically stored on-chain with proof-of-space chains?
corobo 4y ago
> The world of blockchains and cryptocurrencies and "web3" feels vastly more opaque and esoteric by comparison and therefore untrustworthy to many of us For me it's more that we can already do everything web3 does without the blockchain sprinkled all over it The only thing web3 adds to what we are already capable of is a participation fee, which sounds like someone was tasked to implement the worst possible version of the internet
eternityforest 4y ago
I think the difference is cryptocurrency, and the fact that sites are made by programmers, and programmers have a high tolerance for hassles. When there was less distinction between programmers and just everyday people, convenience was a high priority in the authoring tools. Web3 could be amazing. There's no reason it couldn't just be like BitTorrent, but for web pages, with even better performance on mobile. JS frameworks are just files. Nothing really troublesome about that, besides the fact modern expectations demand a backend and CMS, unless you really want the full retro experience. Even then, most of what backends do could be done by some hypothetical extension to WebDAV for search. Or just like, add a SQLite query verb to HTML with a standard permissions file or something. There are ways this could all be easy. SSL is another problem. There used to be one protocol and one thing to set up. HTTP. Now you need certs, and it takes a bit more effort, and it's possible to mess up in a way that takes a half hour to fix. Not quite frictionless. Facebook is free, but personal sites aren't. Web3 could be exactly what saves us, giving us a standard platform to make sites for free, that does the security for us, doesn't need a domain name, and is generally really easy while still following modern standards. We could literally have a browser with a "Make a site" button that works like a file manager, with a "Link to seedbox" button. IPFS and the like are trying, but none quite reach BitTorrent's level of practicality, and they're all weighed down by cryptocurrency. I think we really do need a Web4.

soco 4y ago

Erm, no, many understand very well what blockchain is and it's definitely not opaqueness what they accuse it of. But everybody can choose their own strawman to fight, can't they.

blueflow 4y ago
This sort of opaqueness: Many people hail it as the next big thing since sliced bread, but when you actually spend the effort digging in you realize its barely good for anything except money laundering and tax evasion. Give me some bitcoin and i would not know what to do with them except changing them back into money.
- legutierr 4y ago
  > its barely good for anything except money laundering and tax evasion You can’t think of any situation where you would want to share access to and control of data with multiple untrusted third parties, where you would need to guarantee not only that data modifications are only executed in an authorized fashion, but also that no previous modifications have been reversed? The list of use cases for that capability is not limited to “money laundering and tax evasion.”
  - falcolas 4y ago
    > You can’t think of any situation where you would want to share access and control of data with multiple untrusted third parties, where you would need to guarantee not only that data modifications are only executed in an authorized fasion, but also that no previous modifications have been reversed? Do you mean a cryptographic signature? Been doing those for decades back in email chains and newsgroups. Each message could contain the prior messages and their signatures. What’s new was assigning a currency to it.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - legutierr 4y ago
      What you are describing is something like an informal blockchain. Including prior messages ensures that new messages are presented in the context that their authors want them to be presented in. This approach resembles the back references that bind each block to its predecessors in a blockchain. But you can't rely on this approach to ensure that surreptitious deletion of old messages or threads is impossible. Not every old message in a newsgroup will be duplicated within new messages, and threads will typically not reference each other. If an old message or a separate thread provides necessary context for interpreting a new message, the maintainer of the newsgroup or the email server has the ability to change the meaning of a conversation simply by deleting messages or threads. Or the owner of a relay server can block certain messages from propagating. You still have to trust these people. Email is itself very decentralized, at least in concept, with every new email being copied into multiple accounts on multiple servers, so censorship like this is more difficult. But you can imagine how in a more centralized system (like Facebook or Twitter or HN itself) history can be rewritten by the entity hosting the conversation simply by their deleting messages. If all references to the unwanted messages are also removed, then for all intents and purposes, those messages would never have existed. Gmail is dominant enough that you can imagine Google being able to assert this power over much of the email traffic that currently exists. A blockchain ensures that every modification to the shared state follows rules that all participants in the system agree upon. No modification to that global state can occur unless those rules are strictly followed, and because all participants receive all details of every state modification, the entire history of the global state can be replayed at any time by any participant such that surreptitious deletion is not possible. There is no other technology that I am aware of that is able to systematically prevent surreptitious deletions. Cryptocurrencies are not the only thing that is new, and they are not even the most important feature of blockchains. Cryptocurrencies function as an incentive mechanism to ensure that there are a healthy number participants validating the state transitions. They can improve the reliability and security of a blockchain system, but there are blockchain systems that do not depend upon them.

ransom1538 4y ago

Web3 is cryptocurrencies? Are we sure about this? Just because it was on someones blog?

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
What do you believe web3 is?
- egeozcan 4y ago
  I believe it's what the spider drawn by David Thorne produces: https://27bslash6.com/overdue.html https://27bslash6.com/overdue.html Ironic that payment via random drawings became a "reality" in this crazy world after all.
  - sph 4y ago
    Jane Gilles should mint an NFT of that spider to get back those $233.95, with interests.
- andai 4y ago
  I miss the days when Web 3.0 was semantic web!
Semiapies 4y ago
You could as usefully rephrase that as: "Web3 is <anything at all>? Are we sure about this? Just because it was on someones blog?" It's an empty marketing phrase that some people have latched onto.
GuB-42 4y ago
Web3 as it is known today is a term coined by Gavin Wood, cofounder of Ethereum, and all of his notable work is related to blockchain technology, and that includes web3. Despite all the vague talk about freedom, really, web3 is all about cryptocurrencies. That is, web3 needs cryptocurrencies to work and it has no reason to exist without cryptocurrencies.

golergka 4y ago

> And one major aspect I keep coming back to is that web technologies in the 90s, and even their descendent technologies now, are simple enough for most technology-literate people to understand, and that carried with it a lot of comfort and trust. I was a 9 year old building websites in the 90s, and while I could write HTML and upload files via FTP, I had no clue about TCP/IP stack, socket implementation on the filesystem, how Windows 95 and Windows NT core worked, how my Pentium processor worked, and about a thousand other technologies that I used in the process. I relied on abstractions. > The world of blockchains and cryptocurrencies and "web3" feels vastly more opaque and esoteric by comparison Nobody's stopping you from just as blindly trusting underlying web3 abstractions as you did in the 90s with the web. But we're professionals who learned not to do that and have drastically different approach to technologies that we use. We're not 9 year old kids anymore. We had to learn these things after waking up to an outage, or after our site struggled with 10 requests per second (because we didn't know that database indexes existed), or after any other number of perfectly valid reasons. Now we don't trust tech, we read the whole documentation, and we want to dig in. The world hasn't changed as much. It's us who's changed.

vaylian 4y ago
> Nobody's stopping you from just as blindly trusting underlying web3 abstractions as you did in the 90s with the web Except that most web3 technology is property-related. There is no easy undo and try again. And getting off the ground as a minor is probably extra hard with such things.

eimrine 4y ago

> Why is Hacker News so anti-crypto? I have missed the discussion you have mentioned. But I remember 10 years ago HN was opposite to anti-crypto. And the anticryptoness of nowadays for me seems like stupid ppl who don't understand some basic principles and downvote me if attempting to criticize their misunderstanding.

nxmnxm99 4y ago
You lost your thread and descended into irony quite quickly there.
- eimrine 4y ago
  If my English would better I have better quality of discussion, for example better ability to detect not interesting people before talking to them.
piva00 4y ago
> And the anticryptoness of nowadays for me seems like stupid ppl who don't understand some basic principles and downvote me if attempting to criticize their misunderstanding. Name-calling and assuming that everyone that "doesn't get it" is stupid is non-conducive to discussions. Worse, it makes your point much weaker because now there are only the "true believers that have seen the truth" and the "stupid sheeple" as opposite groups, which is a very stupid take in itself.
- eimrine 4y ago
  I have no point now, I just trying to figure out of who the hell might be anti-crypto.
_Algernon_ 4y ago
You get downvoted for assuming that people who disagree with you are stupid. Attack the points being made, not the person making them.
- 4y ago

k__ 4y ago

I'm an educator and right now, I'm evaluating the crypto space. A huge problem here is that it's very fast moving. Take the fast moving Web of the 90s and multiply it by how much more people use the Web today. At Eth Amsterdam I talked to many engineers from that space and didn't get a satisfying answer to many questions devs usually ask about new tech. "Where should you store your data?" - "It depends!" Back in the days, and even today, in Web2, you would spin up a relational DB and it would be good enough for 99% of use cases. I know, that changed with the rise of NoSQL, but in Web3 it's even harder.

shafyy 4y ago
The reason the "engineers" at that conference couldn't give you straight answers is because blockchain doesn't have good answers.
bccdee 4y ago
No cryptocurrency or Web3 platforms actually store their data on the blockchain. That would be ludicrously expensive; it'd cost tens of thousands per gig at least. Relational databases, cloud object buckets, and CDNs are pretty much all you should need, storage-wise, unless you're solving an especially interesting problem.
- andai 4y ago
  So... what's the Web3 part for then?
  - bccdee 4y ago
    Branding. I'm not even joking; everything they do with blockchain can be done cheaper, easier, and just as well without it. They do the minimum they need to to hype themselves up as being "Web3" and that's it.
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  Isn't the data technically stored on-chain with proof-of-space chains?

corobo 4y ago

> The world of blockchains and cryptocurrencies and "web3" feels vastly more opaque and esoteric by comparison and therefore untrustworthy to many of us For me it's more that we can already do everything web3 does without the blockchain sprinkled all over it The only thing web3 adds to what we are already capable of is a participation fee, which sounds like someone was tasked to implement the worst possible version of the internet

eternityforest 4y ago

I think the difference is cryptocurrency, and the fact that sites are made by programmers, and programmers have a high tolerance for hassles. When there was less distinction between programmers and just everyday people, convenience was a high priority in the authoring tools. Web3 could be amazing. There's no reason it couldn't just be like BitTorrent, but for web pages, with even better performance on mobile. JS frameworks are just files. Nothing really troublesome about that, besides the fact modern expectations demand a backend and CMS, unless you really want the full retro experience. Even then, most of what backends do could be done by some hypothetical extension to WebDAV for search. Or just like, add a SQLite query verb to HTML with a standard permissions file or something. There are ways this could all be easy. SSL is another problem. There used to be one protocol and one thing to set up. HTTP. Now you need certs, and it takes a bit more effort, and it's possible to mess up in a way that takes a half hour to fix. Not quite frictionless. Facebook is free, but personal sites aren't. Web3 could be exactly what saves us, giving us a standard platform to make sites for free, that does the security for us, doesn't need a domain name, and is generally really easy while still following modern standards. We could literally have a browser with a "Make a site" button that works like a file manager, with a "Link to seedbox" button. IPFS and the like are trying, but none quite reach BitTorrent's level of practicality, and they're all weighed down by cryptocurrency. I think we really do need a Web4.