52 ms·

Keep the web free, say no to Web3 (2021)

• phoe-krk 4y ago
  Random thought - is Web3 a real danger to the currently existing web, where "real" means "plausible" rather than just "possible"? I'm asking because every Web3 project I have seen so far has collapsed after getting just enough speculators (and therefore money) to make a nice rug pull/attack, but well before gaining any significant traction of non-paying users that are there to use the platform rather than speculate. It seems to me that it's completely unsustainable to keep a Web3 project running long enough to even gain these users in any way. It seems to me that Web3 is, so far, only providing us with three things: the first is a way to speculate, the second is a way to waste our electricity, the third is laughing stock via https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ which only sorta sweetens points number one and two. Are there any notable exceptions to my above observation? Am I wrong in some more fundamental way?
  • coffeeblack 4y ago
    Regarding point 2, not all blockchains use the useless calculation of hashes as a method to establish trust.
    • planb 4y ago
      This comes up everytime someone mentions the energy waste, so please answer one simple question: Which web3 services that are CURRENTLY online are not based on proof of work?
      • sascha_sl 4y ago
        It's not like they don't exist, they just have a lot of problems scaling to capacities that are in any way meaningful.
        • bogomipz 4y ago
          Might you or someone else say what or where the bottlenecks are that prevent these from scaling?
          • redox99 4y ago
            The biggest challenge in general is that the approach of storing every transaction forever leads to petabytes of storage. And you can't expect a decentralized system to require petabytes of storage.
            • bogomipz 4y ago
              I apologize if this a naive question but Proof of work is also decentralized no? Why does Proof of Stake incur these scaling limitations but Proof of work does not?
              • coffeeblack 4y ago
                Both do.
                • bogomipz 4y ago
                  Can you elaborate? The person I was replying to indicated that the problem was one of storage however the only scalability problems I have seen written about have been around transaction processing.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem
            • MacroChip 4y ago
              Not every node has to store every transaction ever. Nodes can prune old state
      • 4pkjai 4y ago
        https://www.projectserum.com/ https://www.projectserum.com/ I'm not pro web3, but it didn't take much effort for me to find an example.
        • LegitShady 4y ago
      • 0x64 4y ago
        Any Ethereum L2 that commits transaction bundles to the mainnet, plus anything on Binance's EVM chain, Cardano, Solana, Polkadot, Avalanche... They're all proof-of-stake or not based on PoW. And, Ethereum will transition to PoS by this year, ideally in August. All of the popular nine Ethereum execution/consensus clients should be ready for the merge, and mainnet has already been test-merged five times successfully. The first existing PoW testnet will be merged on the first week of June. After that, there's two testnets remaining that will be upgraded (Ropsten -> Goerli -> Sepolia), and then it's time for mainnet.
        • coffeeblack 4y ago
          Interesting. Never thought that Eth will actually transition it’s consensus method. So that means there’s hope for Bitcoin to do the same some day.
          • DonHopkins 4y ago
        • skocznymroczny 4y ago
          > Ethereum will transition to PoS by this year, ideally in August. I feel like every year is the year when Ethereum will finally transition to PoS, but it never happens.
          • 0x64 4y ago
            Name another year that has had feature-ready clients across the board, with a working merge transition mechanism implemented across all of them. The proof-of-stake chain we're merging to was launched in December of 2020, and has been running since, with almost 400'000 validators currently.
          • rekoil 4y ago
            The difference is that this time we actually have testnets already running the full Proof-of-Stake code, most recent news on this front is that the Ropsten testnet will merge on June 8th, that's a huge milestone considering Ropsten is like _the_ testnet if you're developing for the EVM, and is only slightly younger than the ETH mainnet itself.
      • coffeeblack 4y ago
        Not an expert, but as far as I know IOTA and NANO as two examples.
      • ddjsn111 4y ago
        Algorand, Cardano
    • hnbad 4y ago
      Yeah, the alternative is called proof of stake. Now please explain to me how "having a lot of money means you get more control and more money in the future" as a system is in any way adhering to the promise that crypto will disrupt the existing oligopolies and bring power back to the people (unless you define "the people" as "other billionaires who missed out on being part of the current tech oligopolies and want to be Caliph in the place of the Caliph).
      • Kbelicius 4y ago
        Now please explain to me how what you wrote doesn't apply to PoW.
        • hnbad 4y ago
          It does. What's your point? The only difference is proof-of-work measures it more indirectly by letting rich people compete in how fast they can burn cash rather than just flaunting what they have. Both are bad.
          • Kbelicius 4y ago
            My point is.. it does. I can now see that I've misinterpreted your post, apologies.
  • DebtDeflation 4y ago
    >is Web3 a real danger to the currently existing web Are cryptocurrencies a real danger to regular currencies? Are NFTs a real danger to tangible items? Are DAOs a real danger to actual corporations? I'd answer all of those questions with a hard NO.
    • sascha_sl 4y ago
      Cryptocurrencies will obviously be forgotten, especially in their current iteration. But the climate and energy impact is not that easy to set aside. The article itself mentions one of the many consequences could be flooding the termination points for underwater sea fiber. So while web3 isn't a threat to the web itself by superseeding it, it's a threat to its existence (and a whole lot of other existences).
      • KptMarchewa 4y ago
        Too many fools losing too much money is a threat in itself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_Civil_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_Civil_War
      • toolz 4y ago
        Which metrics would suggest people might forget bitcoin? (much less, make it obvious they will forget about it).
        • guerrilla 4y ago
          The fact that it's all useless.
          • Shish2k 4y ago
            That hasn’t stopped anybody so far - what makes you think it’ll stop people in the future?
          • nobody9999 4y ago
            >The fact that it's all useless. But Bitcoin is definitely not useless. I can use it to buy drugs, guns, child porn and other important commodities.
  • christopherwxyz 4y ago
    Ethereum name service (ENS), which ties a wallet to a human readable domain name.
    • phoe-krk 4y ago
      What does the adoption look like and what are its perspectives for future adoption? It seems to me that it's as popular as Handshake right now, which is not popular at all.
      • throwaway98797 4y ago
        a couple hundred thousand people use it
        • rvz 4y ago
          That tells us that ENS, Handshake, etc are the only 'NFT' project(s) so far that has a use case for web3. Handshake is also part of this as well and the CEO of Namecheap is somewhat convinced on that. Only a few useful projects will survive.
          • throwaway98797 4y ago
            have you heard of POAP? non-financial & fun
      • everfree 4y ago
        ENS is much more broadly adopted than Handshake. Pretty much the entire Ethereum ecosystem has standardized on it.
  • verisimi 4y ago
    > the second is a way to waste our electricity I wonder how much electricity has been wasted on cat videos... There are all sorts of wastes - the process of waste in attempting to find (R&D) a good crypto, should lead to a net gain in the long run. Cat videos, not so much..
    • NikolaNovak 4y ago
      There are a zillion wasteful activities. I think what gets me, and where the arguments sometimes seem disingenuous, is that in cat videos, the energy waste is "accidental". Both the provider and consumer would readily see it reduced, and in fact optimization happens constantly and mercilessly. Providers typically expend effort to reduce energy expenditure, especially in mature fields, as it represents real cost to bottom line. In proof of work crypto though, energy expenditure is by design / intentional, and not only that, but designed to consistently increase. That feels any comparison between POW crypto to anything else not even apples and oranges, more like car accidents and nuclear weapons - one is an accident, the other is designed to nuke you.
    • phoe-krk 4y ago
      Cat videos provide tangible relaxation and a way to rest in between other tasks, whereas any Web3 endeavours in the "crypto mainstream" I have seen so far have been purely speculation vehicles disguised as something useful.
    • DonHopkins 4y ago
      Cat videos are not purposefully distributed uncompressed, in ultra high definition resolution, with extremely high frame rates, including enormous amounts of extra redundant padding, with 24 hour and longer durations, so they take as much time as technologically possible to download.
      • guerrilla 4y ago
        Cat videos also aren't completely useless: they make people happy. Shitcoins hasn't done anything but scam people and contribute way more CO2.
  • rvz 4y ago
    > Are there any notable exceptions to my above observation? Am I wrong in some more fundamental way? Do you see web3isgoinggreat reporting about [0][1] or perhaps [2] or even [3] and maybe this [4]? As soon as the speculation calms down and the regulators limit these random DeFi projects there will be these projects like the ones I listed that will be still around that won't be 'wasting electricity' and have a valid use case rather than being a random DeFi token project clobbered up as a exit scam which is what you see that is widely reported and filtered out by web3isgoinggreat. Sorry, but as long as these companies have re-entered into the same cryptocurrency industry, it is really not going to completely 100% guaranteed go away, unless you ban it all; which that is not going to happen. The reality is, only a few projects will survive. [0] https://skiff.org https://skiff.org [1] https://skiff.org/blog/skiff-x-ethereum-naming https://skiff.org/blog/skiff-x-ethereum-naming [2] https://stripe.com/blog/expanding-global-payouts-with-crypto https://stripe.com/blog/expanding-global-payouts-with-crypto [3] https://ir.moneygram.com/news-releases/news-release-details/stellar-development-foundation-and-moneygram-partner-techstars https://ir.moneygram.com/news-releases/news-release-details/... [4] https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/octo-034-27apr22-en.pdf https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/octo-034-27apr22...
    • phoe-krk 4y ago
      Thanks for the insight, it's valuable. > As soon as the speculation calms down and the regulators limit these random DeFi projects, there are projects that will be still around that won't be 'wasting electricity' and have a valid use case rather than being a random DeFi project clobbered up as a exit scam which is what you see that is widely reported and filtered by web3isgoinggreat. I want to believe in what you say, but at the moment I simply can't. Maybe in a few years, if what you describe actually happens, I'll be able to see this matter differently.
    • lupire 4y ago
      The only hint of a real product here is using crypto to bypass exchange fees and border controls of international money movements. Those fees exist for a reason (volatility risk), and there is no reason to believe the crypto version would be different. Those controls exist for a reason, and there is no reason to believe governments would allow "legit" regulated companies like MoneyGram to bypass them.
  • rauljordan2020 4y ago
    There are so many examples. Some of the most popular web3 applications have only gained more momentum over the last few years, and have growing user bases. Examples are: Uniswap, Compound Finance, Maker DAO, Aave, Curve Finance, Tornado Cash (which is incredibly useful for preserving privacy), and more. They actually provide a service people care about and use. I agree they are still at a small scale compared to traditional web applications, but I personally know people in developing countries that rely on stablecoins to survive, such as DAI, use Aave to take out loans, and Tornado to preserve their privacy from tyrannical governments.
    • WinstonSmith84 4y ago
      The most interesting part is reading comments in HN. Obviously the interest of the average HN reader is different from the one from a developing country. And yet again different from our influencers (aka politicians) dictating policy - who have obviously a very biased interest in tradfi.
    • kredd 4y ago
      I’m fairly unexperienced in web3 world, but aren’t the aforementioned services are just financial services that are promising greater results than the traditional finances, due to volatility of the crypto market and missing regulations?
  • hnbad 4y ago
    Web3 by itself is not a real danger because anyone who looks at it objectively can see that there's nothing there worth working on. What does make web3 a real danger is the amount of money behind it. VCs and wealthy tech influencers and billionaires are pushing it because it's an easy way to scam retail investors out of their money in ways that would get the SEC breathing down your neck if crypto and web3 weren't largely lawless territories at the moment. In a lot of ways the aspect of the web that web3 actually builds on is the lawless "wild west" spirit that legislations have been finally trying to clamp down on in the past decades. The only technical innovation happening in it is the equivalent of software patents for existing technology but "on a computer" (or in this case "on the chain"). Even the crypto enthusiast tech nerds cheerleading the technology because they currently (or initially) make money by sitting comfortably near the top of the pyramid scheme will likely be screwed over and lose everything eventually, but until then they're going hand in hand with the grifters who know better than retain any actual stake in the ecosystem by the time it collapses.
• alex_suzuki 4y ago
  Have we reached peak Web3 hate yet? Feels like every day an article hits the HN front page.
  • phoe-krk 4y ago
    Well, have we reached peak Web3 yet either? /s
  • rmbyrro 4y ago
    I wouldn't classify the article as hatred. They're making fair points, explaining their arguments rationally. If criticizing became hatred, the question is: How do people involved in a space like crypto, supposed to bring freedom to individuals, become averse to freedom of speech?
    • tiborsaas 4y ago
      > They're making fair points Yes, on the surface, but they cherry-pick arguments and conveniently jump over the interesting alternatives. > It's impossible to fully understand without complex technological and financial knowledge Sure, now ask your mom how Web2 works. How does a phishing website work using web1 tech? I'd say anything under the hood for non tech people is close to magic. But that's not an issue, they don't need to know everything starting from how DNS routing works, but the article somehow suggests that they do. The only fair point here is that it's indeed more complex. > It is actively harming the environment So, what about the projects that don't use PoW? > It profits off of artificial scarcity Ummm, this is the point of NFT, this bangs an open door.
      • rmbyrro 4y ago
        By fair I mean debatable. Fair for a discussion. It's not garbage non-sense or gratuitous offenses. Certainly not hatred. I'm very cautious about wording related to classifying speech. There's too much interest in curtailing it based on subjective perceptions nowadays.
  • rvz 4y ago
• padraic7a 4y ago
  Am I wrong in thinking that there's no way to force users to participate in Web3? Like, there's no proposal to somehow move existing infrastructure over to Web3?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • halfdan 4y ago
    Honest question: What does that even mean? Web3 feels like a hodge podge of random ideas with some crypto-blockchain sprinkled on top.
• Canada 4y ago
  It's a bit of a stretch to call the current "web2" free.
  • Extra_Leaf 4y ago
    This nothing about the internet is free people pay in one way or another (i.e) data farming , targeted advertising etc
• diegoholiveira 4y ago
  The web is not free. You pay with your data and ads.
  • krapp 4y ago
    Odd. This site is on the web and yet I don't pay with either. Maybe you're confusing the web, as a network and set of protocols, with individual sites on the web, which can but (unlike with web3) aren't required to operate under a surveillance-based commercial model.
    • judge2020 4y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31470304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31470304 Looks like an Ad to me. Maybe also try clicking the Y button in the top left, or leaving ‘news.’ out of the URL bar.
    • csande17 4y ago
      If you don't think you pay for Hacker News with your data, try deleting an old comment.
      • krapp 4y ago
        How does that "pay" for anything? Who is that data being sold do? How is it being used to target advertising to me?
      • deepstack 4y ago
        try search in HN, algolia is mining the data of HN for sure.
        • mccorrinall 4y ago
          Mining for what? I bet they couldn't care less and haven't ever touched the data since the implementation.
    • hansworst 4y ago
• CPLX 4y ago
  Not sure there’s a need to say no. If we wait a couple more hours all these guys are going to pack up and head home.
• ecmascript 4y ago
  From my perspective, as a developer that reads a lot I have of course read about web3 but in the same time I barely know anything about it and I think I know a lot more than the common lay man. If I were to mention web3 to my family or my gf they would have no idea what I was talking about. I pretty much convinced that web3 will never be anything real because of this reason alone. It's just a fluff word that bears no real meaning, it's also too complicated so that most people won't care or know what it is about, not even developers.
  • b112 4y ago
    To be fair, in that you are using them as non-techie examples, your gf or family don't know what web2 is either.
    • ecmascript 4y ago
      With the big difference that if they use those technologies incorrectly, nothing bad will happen. If people use web3 incorrectly they may loose all of their money they have invested in it.
  • can16358p 4y ago
    The majority of the people don't know how IP, TCP/IP, routing, or HTTP works too, yet they probably perfectly use it (indirectly) every day. People don't need to know how technologies work in order to use their applications in daily life. I mean look at Apple and iPhone: it makes complex technology simple and only us techies here know how all those bits, silicon, and radios work to some extent. >99% of the users just use it with zero technical knowledge. Same is for blockchains/smart contracts/web3: as they become more user-friendly, regular folks (NOT us the HN community) will be using it with ease and convenience.
    • ecmascript 4y ago
      Okay sure, but I have yet to meet anyone in my life, developer or not, that actually uses any cryptocurrency stuff in a larger extent that to buy some on some exchange and keep it in their exchange wallet. I see a lot of hype about it, but very little actual use. It has been the case for cryptocurrencies since they arrived basically and not much have changed for the last 10 years. I guess that is no proof for things never happening but it's still very complicated to simply use and buy some crypto if you don't want to trust a exchange like coinbase. You still need to understand at least the basics on how cryptocurrency work and I at least have a lot of people in my life that will never do that. I have not met a single soul IRL that have ever used a smart contract and honestly to me as a dev "smart contracts" seem very bad since you cannot update them afaik so if you make a mistake that's gonna be permanent. It's like an unmutable code base which seems like the worst idea possible to me. But to be fair I live in a modern society that really doesn't have the need for it atm. I can see the use of stuff like that in countries where everything is corrupt, with insane inflation etc.
• coffeeblack 4y ago
  That seems very focused on cryptos. Isn’t web3 mostly the use of serialized and decentralized data stores, eg blockchains? Edit: thanks for the downvotes, but an actual answer would be useful too.
  • pornel 4y ago
    "crypto" and blockchains are inseparable. If you don't need the double spend protection, then it becomes just a plain old cryptography. You can imagine the next web as whatever you like, but "web3" has been advertised in the specific context of Ethereum and its wannabees. We've already had DHT, Bittorrent, SSH keys (== log in with a "wallet"), Certificate Transparency, self-hosting, federation, Dat, OpenID, GPG and web of trust, and many other primitives for decentralized identity and distributed storage that weren't "crypto".
    • coffeeblack 4y ago
      Ethereum is mentioned, because it has Dapps (iirc). But I don’t think you necessarily need the monetary part in order to use the blockchain to store stuff and execute procedures as a reaction to certain values. That’s what I think “smart contracts” are. I remember that IOTA has a similar function and you can send zero value entries, specifically to communicate between low power iot devices. If you really need a blockchain for most applications is a different topic though.
      • pornel 4y ago
        Using a blockchain for storing stuff without needing the double-spend protection is like using a car to just listen to music on the radio, without the driving part. You can do it, but it's a wasteful overkill.
        • coffeeblack 4y ago
          You don’t use the blockchain to store, you use it for distributed version control.
• silon42 4y ago
  Does web3 have anonymous payments/currency? If not... NO is obvious.
  • k__ 4y ago
    It has. There are things like Tornado Cash and Cardano.
  • randomran01234 4y ago
    Some crypto currencies do shield payments using zero-knowledge proofs. Within public blockchains like Ethereum, there will eventually be more layer two rollups that can support privacy through zero-knowledge proofs. Polygon Nightfall is one: https://polygon.technology/solutions/polygon-nightfall/ https://polygon.technology/solutions/polygon-nightfall/
• dnndev 4y ago
  I heard web3 is community owned state, which is the first reasonable argument for anything different than web2. Others host community state (Facebook) but sell your data to advertisers. Web3 is a way for you to pay for or earn state on a computer/storage/ether owned by those using it. It is still fuzzy, but the first compelling reason I can relate to.
  • endisneigh 4y ago
    community owned by people who already own most of the land, lol.
    • dnndev 4y ago
      What is the point you are making? Assuming by land you mean some sort of currency on said compute system.
  • lupire 4y ago
    Web3 data is mostly open access, so your data is gifted to advertisers instead of being sold.
    • dnndev 4y ago
      I think this comment assumes web3 is done. The end goal is some middle ground between ease of use and some level of privacy that no one person controls. (other than you)
  • shkkmo 4y ago
    > Web3 is a way for you to pay for or earn state on a computer/storage/ether owned by those using it. You can already buy a server or rent one with any of a large number of hosting companies. Web3 is just a worse way of paying for it that enabled scammers, grifters and is unstable due to rampant speculation.
    • dnndev 4y ago
      Agreed, for those who are technically inclined. One could argue its why facebook and twitter exist. Was too difficult or expensive to make your own / host your data. I am not advocating for web3. I am saying its some middle ground at a new shot to not give all your data to someone who says this will host your data for 'free' vs an easy (to be seen) way for my stuff to be hosted with some type of payment from me in exchange for someone not abusing it. I know that is a tall orders, but from what I have seen that is the pitch for web3.
• makerofthings 4y ago
  I’ve been enjoying gopher sites since all the recent mentions on here. It’s really fun, no images, no JS no BS.
  • premek 4y ago
    could you recommend some?
• rjknight 4y ago
  I can't really see which bits of web3 are meant to threaten the existing web, or are more dangerous to it than the existing threats. The balkanization of the web seems like a threat that gets bigger every year. Surveillance gets worse every year. Regulatory attempts to combat certain kinds of surveillance do so by shifting the burden of "consent" on to users who don't understand what they're consenting to. Fewer and fewer people have any kind of "ownership" of the web in the form of personal servers, privately-hosted websites, independent self-managed communities, and so on. Perhaps web3 could be a danger if it proposes unworkable solutions to those problems. Token economies and blockchains do give a kind of "ownership" and "participation", but the sheer volatility of the pricing of the goods, services and induced-scarcity "land" on offer makes it impractically risky or expensive for anyone who isn't running some kind of trading strategy. There are lots of good critiques of web3, and good arguments against specific projects, features, or consequences it produces. "Keep the web free" is a fine idea, but I'm not sure that web3 is where the real danger comes from.
  • version_five 4y ago
    Agreed. To be a threat to the freedom of the internet, web3 would have to do something useful enough for people to actually want to use it. So far there is no evidence of that.
    • Agamus 4y ago
      Also agreed - I don't think it would be a threat to the freedom of the internet. Look, no one forces any of us to use the obnoxious websites. For many of them, there are alternatives (email), and for the worst offenders, abstaining is easy, and the only option (social media). The old-school internet and web will always be available, ready to use, and superior in almost every way to the dumpster fire of modern websites. Did anyone else experience a palpable feeling of euphoria when visiting OP's website? For me, it was blissful and uncanny. Here is a webpage with design pulled non-ironically straight out of 1999, which also somehow feels like it was made in 1999. Not a hipster's prerequisite "indie-web" presence, not an emulation or demonstration built in a framework -- a simple, flat-file webpage that speaks to the defense of the original web, and in the native tongue. Perhaps we should encourage web3. After all, it is by virtue of this crisis that so many more people are realizing why even web 2.0 was mostly just a commercialization of web, and has changed us for the worse.
• fleddr 4y ago
  A lazy article that recycles common web3 hate without showing any sign of understanding about the problems with web2, and the potential of web3. I would agree that web3's potential hasn't materialized. Possibly it never will, but at least engage with some of the concepts. Further, when you use Stephen Diehl as a source, you already lost. This guy has an unhealthy obsession with hating crypto fueled by his own crypto startup failure.
  • logicalmonster 4y ago
    > an unhealthy obsession with hating crypto Why is this unhealthy obsession so common on HN? Expressing some concern or doubt about crypto is perfectly reasonable, but it seems odd to me that a forward looking site that's tech-focused has such intense emotionality against crypto.
    • berkes 4y ago
      Purely on speculation and anecdotal pointers seen in my own social rings, there's a lot of "missed-the-train-dissonance" happening. Many of the people in tech I meet, knew about Bitcoin very early. They even saw the potential. Some acted on that (with hindsight this may seem the "smart" move, but really, it was a gamble with lot of downside potential. Still is). Most did not -which actually, financially or investment-wise, was probably the smart move-. Those people now must find ways to deal with this internally. The simple thing is to keep convincing yourself that web3, crypto, etc is bad - a conviction that isn't too hard to base in fact, really. I gave talks in Bitcoin on tech meetups back in 2012. I've had numerous people from back then, tell me that they are really bummed that they didn't really believe me back then, to at least dabble around a bit with some spare change. Or just the tech. I strongly believe there are far more people in the tech scene who aren't this honest, not even to themselves, and instead strongly and loudly "hate" on all crypto.
      • GlassKingdom 4y ago
        Are you able to list any reasons why HackerNews dislikes web3, beyond “they have sour grapes because they missed the market.”? There are many many reasons, and if you are unable to think of any then perhaps you are in a propaganda bubble?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• jzellis 4y ago
  [flagged]
• henvic 4y ago
  All this cryptocurrency/NFT thingy is just another tulipmania full of bs. https://henvic.dev/posts/bitcoin/ https://henvic.dev/posts/bitcoin/
• endisneigh 4y ago
  the entire crypto grift, including web3, is easily summarized: there's a reason why stable coins aren't the most popular crypto in their own right and only serve as a financial mechanization for others or, put another way, why are all of the popular crypto deflationary? think about it and it's obvious why
  • lupire 4y ago
    The original point of cryptocurrency was to create a free market currency that wasn't controlled by any government. Stablecoins are either backed by unstable coins or centralized. Without "nonstable coins", stable coins are just...gift cards, which we already have.
    • endisneigh 4y ago
      it's possible to have a "stablecoin" in the sense it's non-deflationary and is algorithmically trying to maintain the same price.
  • cableshaft 4y ago
    Stablecoins may not be the most popular but they're way up there (BinanceUSD is the #3 most traded coin today coin today, under Bitcoin and the main smart contract platform Ethereum). You can get pretty good yields for holding stablecoins. Personally I tend to only use it for paying for things with crypto though (I used it to buy my last computer, for example), but I'm more of "treat crypto as an asset" and not "treat crypto as a currency" person. It doesn't help that a stablecoin imploded a couple of weeks ago (Luna) so people are rightfully a bit skeptical of stablecoins (in particular, those that rely on an algorithm to automatically balance it, like Luna did) for the moment.
• dncornholio 4y ago
  > This is a no-hype, down-to-earth breakdown of everything we have learned about Web3. I don't know but it did not look like a down-to-earth article to me. "We" reads more like "me". It feels like the author doesn't like crypto and wants to push this narrative on Web3, but, there is no Web3.. It's just talk? This article seems to be a bit resentful.
• bkm 4y ago
  This person very clearly doesn't get Web 3.0. Your kid enters a wrong birthdate on YouTube? Gmail account gone. File identified as DMCA material uploaded to Gdrive? Gmail account gone. Theorized about covid origin? Disinformation; Twitter account gone. See the pattern? The key to a decentralized web is federated, decentralized identities. Sure, you can self-host videos, blogs and forums and let people create accounts for every website, but being able to log in with your wallet and pull graph data is THE non-financial killer app of Web 3.0. Log in with Metamask or Phantom on a few sites and you'll see what I am talking about.
  • mccorrinall 4y ago
    Why do I need a currency, which is used for trading, for this? The federated web already exists. (Matrix, Jabber, Mastodon, Torrents etc)
    • bkm 4y ago
      Web 3.0 is more than trading (arguably speculative) coins. Nader Dabit has done an excellent job describing the use cases: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/what-is-web3/ https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/what-is-web3/
      • headsoup 4y ago
        That reads like fairytales and wishful thinking which entirely ignores the substantial corruption and manipulation of the 'crypto economy' that exists now. Everything mentioned int it can be done right now without crypto, it's called FOSS, and people have worked out how to monetise their ideas while keeping them open and reusable.
    • dylkil 4y ago
      you dont need a currency, its just another product of byzantine fault tolerant systems. Decentralisation has many products, currency is one of them.
• onebot 4y ago
  The web isn't free. It is bought and paid for mostly by advertisers. I have seen web3 as a way to democratize the operation of services/apps people use and depend on. Literally, if there was some decentralized advertising network, that paid for web3, it would be literally no different than it is today except maybe the people making money in the middle would be taken out.
  • geysersam 4y ago
    It's interesting we haven't been able to create better financing models for the web than ads. Sure, some sites have other models. But ideally you would like something as simple as putting a small ads banner on your website, without the inefficiency of wasting (website display) space, and integrity violations. Edit: I'd be happy to transparently pay a small sum to each website I visit. If it was easy and and cheap. An interesting feature of ads financing is that it is "progressive". The more money you have to spend, the more you are likely to spend on the advertised products. This effectively becomes a kind of price discrimination. But that's difficult to achieve with a "per view" price on a website.
    • DocTomoe 4y ago
      I think one of the problems is that the the more grandiose an ad gets, the harder it is to block. Very few people have a problem with a small unobtrusive banner that's essentially an image and a link to some site. But filtering that away is trivially easy. The ads we all hate, the 40-mb-of-JS-evasion-code monstrosities, the 'we actually compete against the CIA' data broker ads, the all-screen-flashing-ads, the 'watch this video first' abominations - those are comparatively hard to filter.
  • lupire 4y ago
    > democratize the operation of services/apps people use and depend on. This is called "federation" and "peer to peer" and it already existed before "web2" and it mostly died because it was too much hassle for most people to bother with.
    • 4y ago
• TekMol 4y ago
  "Web 3" to me is that when I "get a like" on Twitter, it is not an entry in their database. But a signed message "I like post <hash> /signed <someone>". Where <hash> is the hash of one of my tweets. So I can keep this "like" and not be seperated from it by Twitter kicking me off their plattform or mingling with the like in any other way. I don't see anything bad about it.
  • pornel 4y ago
    That use-case doesn't need the double-spend protection, so it doesn't need blockchains. I'm seeing lots of "web3" use-cases proposed that are just plain old public key cryptography, but people think that reusing wallet's private key somehow makes it new and magical.
    • Hendrikto 4y ago
      How else would you create a decentralized, distributed, immutable ledger of likes (or other events) in a trustless, permissionless, uncensorable, fault-tolerant, and consistent way?
      • pornel 4y ago
        Exactly like cryptocurrency, but without the planet-incinerating part that selects the longest chain. If you treat "like" as idempotent, then you don't need double-spend protection, so you don't need to select the longest chain. In trendy terms, like IPFS where you pin your own signed like messages. Note that identity verification, forgery prevention, and distribution of messages are done using "web2" technologies, even in blockchain systems. The hard part in blockchains is literally only the double-spend protection, so if your problem is not about spending money, they do nothing.
        • ianm98 4y ago
          So if a blockchain was leveraging a proof of stake [1] along with zero-knowledge rollups [2] for scalability/ compute you would have no arguments for it? In that hypothetical example it seems like a much better alternative to IPFS with no moral qualms. 1. https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms/pos/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms... 2. https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/scaling/zk-rollups/#:~:text=Zero%2Dknowledge%20rollups%20(ZK%2D,scalable%20transparent%20argument%20of%20knowledge) https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/scaling/zk-rollups/#....
• rglullis 4y ago
  The web is not free. It never was, it never will be. But it can be made open, transparent and accountable. It seems that this is the thing that most of the corporations behind the current web fear so much.
• kruuuder 4y ago
  I don't think I understand what the long term goal of Web3 is supposed to be. What structures are we going to see? In the end, we're all humans. There is this new structure in this internet, but no matter how decentralized this will be, power structures will emerge, and lots of politics is going to happen - not from the outside, but from the inside of Web3. Then what? There will be communities, we need to communicate, find agreements, follow individual interests and protect the weak. How is this going to look like, and why should this work? We're already trying to organize ourselves in Democracies, where - in theory - everyone has a voice. What's the "macro vision" of Web3? Is this somehow a layer on top of our society? Is it a parallel world? Some kind of Dark Net? 4chan on Crypto-Steroids? Would anything like that be ... good?
  • Seb-C 4y ago
    Very good questions. People promoting their 'Web3' utopia should better study sociology, psychology, politics and history first. Even if there was anything remotely realistic and practical technologically, those attempts will not work any better than communism or anarchism, because all of those fails to acknowledge the way that humans work.
• peter_retief 4y ago
  People close and dear to me are committed to crypto, personally I dont think it adds any value and overinflates the value of money in circulation.
• m12k 4y ago
  There are legitimate ways in which the web would benefit from being more decentralized. Democratizing domain distribution away from money-printing machines like ICANN, freeing user's data from the walled gardens like the fediverse tries to do or Tim Berners Lee is trying to do with Solid. But these legitimate grievances have been co-opted by the blockchain crowd in order to legitimize their grift/solution in search of a problem, bundling it all into the term web3, so they don't need to justify their part of the whole thing, and can lure in new suckers to sell crypto to by draping it all in this air of revolution and societal progress, conveniently allowing them to dismiss anyone calling out their bullshit and get-rich-fast incentives as "anti-progress". Blockchains are just another kind of centralization, a single central source of truth that nobody can update without convincing/paying a whole bunch of others to do it for them. Conceptually bundling that together with actual decentralized technologies like DHT, IPFS and other P2P systems is doing a disservice to those that are actually working to make the web a freer place, and not just get rich quick.
  • Hendrikto 4y ago
    > Blockchains are just another kind of centralization, a single central source of truth If you really believe this, you don't understand blockchains. They are the exact opposite of that. A decentralized, distributed, immutable, censorship-resistant, trustless, permissionless ledger. You don't need centralized authorities, and you don't need to trust anybody. You don't need anyone's permission to participate, and nobody can keep you from doing so. Moreover, the data is immutable and extremely safe, as it is replicated globally.
    • shkkmo 4y ago
      Where almost nobody can store and process the whole chain so everyone uses a centralized exchanges and a single company that provides an API to see what happened on chain? In practice, web3 is just as centralized as web2, but with less privacy.
      • exit 4y ago
        you act as if everything about web3 has to be solved right from the starting gun to have any legitimacy :) there are many different competing consensus mechanism and the balance of trade-offs is still playing out.
• jillesvangurp 4y ago
  I think the web is quite safe from being disrupted by incoherent crypto utopians. I'm more than happy to let the web3 people make their point; or not. I'm not sure there is any. The way that would happen would be by delivering something that people actually want to use. People vote with their feet on the web. A lot of weird and wonderful stuff gets used. And some other stuff never gets used. All this web3 stuff reminds me of the capital S Semantic web that was fashionable 15 years ago. Never really happened. Some people got obsessed with sparql and that was about it.
  • DocTomoe 4y ago
    Never be sure about any technology not being disrupted. I laughed at the idea of web-based calendaring in 1998, and look where we are today. Good thing paper calendars still exist. Personally, I am perfectly fine with my still-existing Web 1.0
  • cableshaft 4y ago
    I think your viewpoint is perfectly rational and healthy. Be very skeptical but willing to let others do their thing and possibly build something that can prove their worth to you over time, or not. The outright hatred, attempting to ban, and not even being open to potential use cases (especially if it's not directly useful to them, then it therefore must be useless to all people) that's present in so many people's comments on here gets very tiring. I expect the hatred from other sites, but here is supposed to be about showing off or discussing the potential for new and weird and possibly not yet proven tech, or at least it seemed that way for just about everything other than crypto on here. The number of software projects I've been hired to work on in the corporate and startup world that ended up getting completely scrapped before release or failed to get traction once released and then quietly died within six months -- resulting in me feeling like my company wasted a lot of time and other people's money -- is probably more of my professional career than not at this point. But if the crypto world has any of that, it's therefore useless and evil and must be eliminated.
  • DonHopkins 4y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember a while after the Web2 craze, the Web was incrementing several times a year, at least. Because my Web goes to 11! Did I miss something, or hasn't the rest of the World Wide Web already moved far far beyond Web3, a long long time ago? Am I misunderstanding it, or is "Web3" meant to sound charmingly retro, with that "Internet Explorer 3" ring to it? What's the Web3 crowd going to re-invent next: XMLCoins, in ActiveX wallets, powered by Server Push, decorated with Under Construction animated GIF NFTs?
• taylorius 4y ago
  I honestly don't know what web3 is - so I was eager to see a section titled "What is Web3" on this article's site. Turns out it's... "a buzzword made up by one of the developers of Ethereum". Excellent. That clears that up then.
  • Hendrikto 4y ago
    If you are interested in an intellectually honest discussion and actually valuable information: Web3 is like web2, but operated and owned by its users rather than centralized authorities. This is accomplished through blockchain technology. I could also give a more detailed explanation with (dis)advantages. However, I should really get back to work. Moreover, I am under the impression that you are not really interested in the truth, given that you were happy to adopt the BS "definition" from that article. If I am wrong, I would be happy to get back to you.
    • taylorius 4y ago
      "you were happy to adopt the BS "definition" from that article." On the contrary - my comment was lightheartedly criticizing the article for defining web3 in a way which gives no further information, beyond what a sceptical person might already think, thus confirming their suspicions! I am very interested to hear a real definition of web3, and perhaps debate it a little, if it turns out to be debatable.
    • shkkmo 4y ago
      In what way do users "operate the block chain"? Almost everyone uses centralized exchanges and centralized block chain anaylisis services. The number of users who operate their own node isn't higher than the number of users who operate their own server. This is simply a cryptobro talking point that you haven't spent the time to think critically about.
  • birracerveza 4y ago
    That's how you know this is an informed and well-thought article.
  • MadeThisToReply 4y ago
• po1nt 4y ago
  Why do people act like by introducing Web3 the "Web2" will cease to exist. You'll always be able to use it without any financial knowledge whatsoever "like in the old times". Web3 as a concept exists solely to decentralize internet and take power from technological giants. If something you use is free, then you're the product. Hosting the massive data we consume is costly and difficult, that's why only a few companies do it. These companies proveably apply their political bias into internet and threaten our society as a concept. IMHO Everyone who really cares about the original message of the internet should stand behind web3.
  • tgv 4y ago
    Try "surfing" the web 1.0 with Navigator 4.6 like it's 1999. That's as dead as a doornail.
    • Seb-C 4y ago
      There are plenty of static websites today, as well as frameworks like Jekyll, which belongs to the web 1.0. Web 1.0 does not mean 'old like 1999'. It means static websites without user-generated content. And it did not disappear, it's still there, but less popular and visible.
• beeforpork 4y ago
  Storing (whistled?) information (that some people might want to suppress) in a blockchain based 'web' seems like a good idea. It sounds like it wants to make removal of published information next to impossible. Is that a bad idea? Is that a thread? Can it be used for large file sharing? :-P Or did I completely misunderstand the concept?
  • Hendrikto 4y ago
    You understand the concept correctly. This is one of Web3‘s great advantages, and it‘s already being used to circumvent real-world censorship and information decay. Also it prevents problems like dead links and expired domains. HN likes to hate on everything crypto. Not sure why. > Can it be used for large file sharing? Yes. See Arweave, for example.
    • dimillian 4y ago
      How is it working? Who will host the terabytes of content is this really take off? Who will pay for it? Sure it’s easy to host a blockchain on a number of computers when it’s small, but if it really become THE source of truth, then you need actual $$$$$ to keep it alive.
      • Hendrikto 4y ago
        I hope you still see this, it took me a few days to get back to you. > Who will host the terabytes of content […] Those people [1], among others. You too, if you want. The great thing is that you don‘t need to store the entire weave to participate. If you store only 10TB, you will earn rewards at roughly 10TB/72TB = 1/7 efficiency. > […] if this really take off? Arweave has taken off, and the weave size is already above 72TB. [0] > Who will pay for it? The uploader. You pay for 200 years of storage AT CURRENT COST upfront. The trick is that this is not paid out immediately. Instead, an endowment is created, which pays for the continued storage over time. Under the very conservative assumption that storage costs decrease by about 0.5% pa, this endowment will shrink over time, but never be exhausted (because storage gets cheaper over time). Essentially it is exponentially decaying. [2] [0]: https://viewblock.io/arweave/stat/cumulativeWeaveSizeHistory https://viewblock.io/arweave/stat/cumulativeWeaveSizeHistory [1]: https://viewblock.io/arweave/nodes https://viewblock.io/arweave/nodes [2]: https://www.arweave.org/files/arweave-lightpaper.pdf https://www.arweave.org/files/arweave-lightpaper.pdf
• mockingbird12 4y ago
  Current crypto and blockchain technologies are not enough to solve decentralization and privacy problems which web3 is targeting. To make internet truly decentralized, we need to make network of optical cables P2P in real sense. DNS too. Privacy is a very hard problem to solve without requiring some form of centralization.
• TT-392 4y ago
  How about we rebrand web 1.0 web4?
• EGreg 4y ago
  The Web hasn't been free ever since Web2. I've written about this in CoinTelegraph[1] and CoinDesk[2], etc. We live in digital Feudalism (https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/) where early adopters and VCs prop up and dump private stocks on the public (remember SoftBank and WeWork for instance?) to make a fortune, and the public proceeds to exert pressure on the companies to extract rents forever. The Web2 companies are run top-down with an iron fist. Zuck and Elon own our public forums, for instance. Web3 just decentralized the grift, but it did so on a technology (blockchain) which is about the only one in the world that promises to be slower and more expensive with time. Crypto has been around for 10 years and it hasn't gone mainstream. There are several reasons for that, and they ALL need to be fixed before it can be adopted by people and have real utility. (Some crypto does, such as FileCoin, but it's few and far between.) Here is what needs to be done: https://intercoin.org/proposal.pdf https://intercoin.org/proposal.pdf Whether that's done with tokens or not, is a separate story. But we have to move past scarcity, as Albert Wenger says in https://worldaftercapital.org https://worldaftercapital.org . I propose to coin the term Web4. 1. https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-can-find-a-new-one https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-c... 2. https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/03/12/in-defense-of-blockchain-voting/ https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/03/12/in-defense-of-block...
• notpushkin 4y ago
  I must confess: I'm a big time "cryptobro". I really think Bitcoin was revolutionary, and I still see enormous value in it. Some other projects, like Zcash and Namecoin, are solving some real problems, too. But pretty much everything that's been coming under the Web3 umbrella is, in my opinion, a load of bullshit.
  • Destiner 4y ago
    Since you mentioned Zcash and Namecoin, do you have an opinion on ENS, Aztec Protocol, and zkSync? They are trying to solve the similar problems that projects you mentioned do, and somewhat fall into Web3 umbrella.
    • notpushkin 4y ago
      ENS does aim at the similar problem, but I'm not sure if it's any better than Namecoin. There's this writeup [1] comparing ENS with NMC and Handshake (yet another similar project, with its own chain) and as far as I can tell, ENS doesn't really add anything new to the game, while it has some major inconveniences if you want just the name resolving and nothing else (which seems a pretty realistic scenario to me). I haven't looked into zkSync or Aztec just yet, but I'm assuming those are dealing with the same problems as Zcash, but on the Ethereum chain? If this means you can just throw in some generic ERC-20 token and get a zero-knowledge version of it (like what z-address is to t-addresses in Zcash), that's pretty cool. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/handshake/comments/lo894k/differences_hns_ens_unstoppable_domains/go4jp5p/ https://www.reddit.com/r/handshake/comments/lo894k/differenc...
  • redox99 4y ago
    I think ENS is pretty cool. People criticize NFTs a lot because you don't actually own anything (and I agree, especially with the JPEG NFTs). But with ENS it's the other way around. You can actually OWN a domain, unlike with registrars where you are at their mercy.
• ken47 4y ago
  As a person who is allergic to trends like this, can someone bring me up to speed on the details of the blockchain? Particularly: 1) Is it resilient to catastrophic failure? Does there exist an N < 100 such that if there is an EMP, a computer virus, or some other anomaly that wipes the data from more than N% of the nodes, the block chain enters an irrecoverable failure state? 2) How scalable is it? Sure, it might work for a very small % of the world's transactions, but could it ever handle the sort of load that is taken on by say, Visa credit cards worldwide, while still allowing transactions to complete in a "reasonable" amount of time (that the average person would tolerate)? If not, what is the upper limit of requests per second while maintaining some sufficient upper bound for transaction time? Feel free to be completely hand wavy. This is just a thought exercise for now.
  • horsecabletruck 4y ago
    1) Depends on the protocol, chain and platform. Ethereum itself is unlikely to be impacted by an EMP as the number of validators is large and widely distributed across the globe. 2) A chain like Ethereum is positioning itself as a secure and decentralized settlement base layer upon which more scalable higher-level and application-specific layers might be built, typically with rollups that batch many operations together. Other chains are making security and centralization trade-offs to provide scalability at this bottom base layer. The latter may not always work out, as seen with Luna crashing or Solana network going offline.
  • twox2 4y ago
    I'm not learned enough to answer question 1... but I don't think the fiat system is fully resistant against catastrophic black swan events either. As for question 2 - it depends on which blockchain and which use case. Blockchain does not need to replace Visa in it's entirety in order to add value.
    • ken47 4y ago
      I'm not taking a side on the fiat vs. crypto debate. I'm inquiring purely about the technical aspects of the blockchain. That being said, with non-blockchain data storage, one could create backups, so that if all the live running data stores were somehow destroyed, one could recover to some previous point in history with the redundant copies. I'm trying to understand whether this, or any other sort of failure recovery, is possible with blockchain technology.
• nathias 4y ago
  > We can make a better, free, decentralized internet without it. So why haven't you? In 20 years since the platforms have colonized the web all attempts at decentralization were completely marginal and achieved nothing or less. I'm a fan of all incentiatives for a better web, but this article is either lies or willed stupidity.
• helen___keller 4y ago
  At an abstract level I’m all for web3, where web3 is an internet application with distributing hosting and all users paying in equal proportion to their usage to maintain said hosting. That said everything we have now is a lackluster proof of concept that doubles as a pyramid scheme. Imagine if you had to pay for your Netflix subscription with Netflix stock. What a joke.
  • danpalmer 4y ago
    I think a problem with web3 is that the only mechanism it really has is "monetary transfers", and that's just not an appropriate primitive to build most things out of, as much as its proponents would like it to be.
    • helen___keller 4y ago
      I don’t agree actually. The only mechanism web3 has is “entries in a ledger”, on which you can build arbitrary data stores. The choice to tie each ledger entry to a pyramid scheme is entirely made by the founders and investors of the projects, for obvious reasons. IMO the real theoretical problem with a functioning web3 is the “a” in “entries in a ledger”. One ledger cannot power a high throughput application. This is a fatal flaw to a web3 project succeeding on non-financialized merits. There’s some research into protocols for inter-ledger transfers that could enable scalability, but that’s always (so far) for the sake of wrapping and moving around pyramid coins between ecosystems.
• l0rn 4y ago
  I don't see a real need to campaign against web3 being the unusable dumpsterfire it already is. There is no practical broader usecase actually being adopted by masses. Just a medially inflated niche of people speculating in shit. I think itll Show itself Out producing a few people that cashed out well
• Yizahi 4y ago
  Ultracorporate dystopia which is called "web3" will hopefully die on its own, along with the tokens of all kinds.
• throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
  oh wow, THAT is what threatens the free web. not that every bit of critical infrastructure is corporate owned - ISPs, registrars, PKI, payment processors. not that they're milking us with obscene profit margins. not that they have the power to shut any entity down extralegally and with no recourse. no, no, not that. it is amazing how easy it is to rally the twitter cheguevaras to the corporate cause. big pharma, central banking, the military–industrial complex. just put the right twist on it, push it from the corporate media for a while, and they'll fight the detractors for you
  • exit 4y ago
    virtue signalling satisfies a huge hole in many souls
• Hendrikto 4y ago
  It is funny to me how irrationally HN hates on crypto. Yes, there are many speculative moonboys. Sure, they overhype many things, and promote get-rich-quick schemes. There are many scammers and ponzis around indeed. But ask yourself: * Are dead links so great that we want to preserve them? * Are expired domains a good experience? * Do we want to give centralized authorities the power to control the web? * Is it good that you cannot verify the authenticity or integrity of web pages? (Yes, even with SSL, where you only verify that (a) you are talking to the correct server, and (b) you got what the server sent. That still leaves the possibility of a compromised server.) * Do you like great websites just disappearing? * Do you want to be forced to use the new version of a website despite it being inferior? * Would you like indefinite storage for a fixed fee? It is also decentralized, distributed, immutable, and censorship-resistant. Web3 offers solutions to all of these problems and more. That does not mean it's the greatest thing ever, that it solves all problems, or that it does not have its own disadvantages. It means however, that is does have merits, and that it should be discussed in that context. Blanket statements like "web3 is a scam/ponzi" are simply wrong/dishonest. I don't get why otherwise extremely intelligent and well-mannered people stoop this low when it comes to anything crypto.
  • kebman 4y ago
    I think you're right. The guys downvoting you should really try to argue against your argument instead of just trying to make you go away by downvoting. If they cannot make a good argument, then downvoting doesn't make them more right, only more bitter and entrenched. To the low and bitter people downvoting this, know that it was still worth writing it. You need to see that you can't win simply by risking nothing.
  • vehemenz 4y ago
    It's not a matter of bad faith or bad manners. There are numerous ways to solve the problems you are interested in that don't involve wasting so much energy or enriching rent-seeking grifters.
• spinaltap 4y ago
  I'm a 10-year web developer and I failed in trying to understand how web3 works. For instance, will there be servers? How do you host databases without servers? Who pays for hard drives for sites like youtube? If I can't understand it, I doubt more than 1% of people can.
  • Hendrikto 4y ago
    It just sounds like you did not do much research. Answers to all of your questions are neither complex nor hard to find. > will there be servers? Yes, both practically and conceptually. Practically, there are servers acting as network nodes. Conceptually, your code runs on VMs like the EVM, which can be thought of as a distributed server. > How do you host databases without servers? By adding transactions to the immutable ledger, in an append-only fashion. To index the data, you could use your own node, or defer to something like The Graph. > Who pays for hard drives for sites like youtube? There are different models for that. Essentially the uploader, the downloader, or both. Take Arweave, for example. There you get indefinite storage for a one-time fixed fee. This is based on the extremely conservative assumption that storage prices will decrease by 0.5% pa on average. Over the last 50 years, it was something like 30% pa.
    • shkkmo 4y ago
      > Take Arweave, for example. There you get indefinite storage for a one-time fixed fee. This is based on the extremely conservative assumption that storage prices will decrease by 0.5% pa on average. Over the last 50 years, it was something like 30% pa. It's based on a lot more than that. The fact that you can go through their entire webpage without them even trying to explain the risks to their potential users is downright shady.
• danjac 4y ago
  Seems web3 is doing everyone a favour and imploding itself right now.
• high_byte 4y ago
  people forget that web3 doesn't cost money - it costs tokens! those tokens are minted "out of thin air"... you either produce some by contributing the network, or contribute the network by buying some. the "grass, gas or ass" of computing. no free meals, although some meals are bigger than others...
• NorwegianDude 4y ago
  I've been a fan of cryptocurrencies since 2010 and these days basically no one who puts money into it knows how it works. People are putting there entire life savings into it, and they have no idea what it is. There is so many clueless people who hope to get rich by getting in before something takes off that even the dumbest of things is a thing these days. Just as an example, let's look at NFTs. People are buying NFTs for insane prices, but they don't know what is actually is. Often the thing people are "buying" are centrally stored and controlled, and by that point there is no point in using a blockchain. There are also a lot of other things that blockchains are used for that is completely pointless as it can be done without it. Some times I wonder if most people think that blockchains is the only way to use cryptography...
• onebot 4y ago
  In it's simplest terms the aim of Web3 is simply to remove anyone in the middle monetizing both the production and consumption of services in a completely decentralized way.
• Luker88 4y ago
  uhm... I studied and worked on authentication protocols, and I worked with a company that was into web3 (though I did not work on that part directly) ...so I might have a few insights. while the (small) article shows only common arguments, and while I agree on those, we need to distinguish a bit the technical part with the financial part. Technically, web3 is merely authentication with a public key. That's fine. Good, even (if only people used hardware keys instead of software keys, sigh). I mean there is always the little catch that to actually verify stuff you need either 300+GB of data or you need to trust a webserver (thus breaking the whole point of web3), but details and details. But the big problem is tying your identity to your financial. That to me is a deal breaker. Lost keys? lost money. Stolen Key? stolen money. To actually work with web3 you need to put your keys in every stupid little service, since we use basically only software wallets at best, and most are integrated in your application be it banking or gaming. Some use services like metamask that are... browser only. chrome plugin browser-only. so you have to hop through things to use a normal application and constantly switch to your...browser, which by itself is the biggest attack surface in the current world. There is no keys-with-money/key-for-authentication, there is no key revocation, main-key/subkey, monthly-spending-limits or anything. We could have gone with some small gpg-like web-of-trust for each key to revoke, substitute or compartmentalize the purpose of the key. But no. Absolutely nothing. And the bigger the project, the more static and adverse to change it is (hello bitcoin, still at 4-7 transactions/sec?) So while I would welcome a key-is-your-id kind of web, as a security researcher I have to say that this model looks like it's built for you to lose control as easily as possible, which makes it a deal-breaker imho. The truth of course is that there is no conspiracy, just that nobody is accountable, and that looks like work, so nah, we ain't got time. Edit: typos
  • MadeThisToReply 4y ago
    > Technically, web3 is merely authentication with a public key. I thought "web3" meant "something, something, blockchain"?
    • Luker88 4y ago
      it's kind of a lie. The blockchains are huge and slow. So all it means is that you have a public/private key. You end up sending and receiving money by signing stuff you don't really verify, and trust some other 3rd party website for any chain verification. So you have a private/public key, and the rest is website. You don't really do anything on the chain by yourself
• t_mann 4y ago
  A bit boring seeing those lopsided anti-crypto/web3 comments at the top of HN so regularly. Those who entered crypto markets during the boom have already been burnt severely, that should be all the warning they need. I don't even disagree with many of the critiques, but I think they don't acknowledge some merits that web3 actually has. The ability to host open source web services pretty much indefinitely (with or without maintenance) after initial deployment is interesting, especially for hackers. The fact that a ridiculously high percentage of current projects may be scams doesn't negate that, it's not an uncommon phenomenon with dissemination technologies (printing presses were also used to disseminate outrageous propaganda lies). The more interesting critique is that web3 tends to 'financialize everything'. I can see what's meant there and I wouldn't even contest that there is such a tendency. I can also see why people would be opposed to that, but I think that argument misses what's already happening. Facebook, gmail, Google Maps, pdf-merge,... may be mostly free for users, but their data is heavily monetized by the companies providing those services, with little to no transparency. Web3 can shift the pendulum of economic power a little bit (not fully, as maybe claimed by some enthusiasts) in the direction of users again. Public databases, anyone can build frontends for popular services, no need for rate-limited APIs when building on top of other projects,... I can see why FAANG shareholders should be opposed to that, but not why there seems to be such fundamental opposition on HN.
  • FargaColora 4y ago
    Could you give an example of a successful and useful web3 implementation? Because I look around, and all I see are grifters, scams and pyramid schemes. There must be some examples of something useful and popular that has been built, if it's such a revolutionary technology?
    • basisword 4y ago
      >> There must be some examples of something useful and popular that has been built, if it's such a revolutionary technology? That’s a very high bar. There are lots of fun web2 websites that are useless, fun and used by a few people. Also, useful is highly subjective. For example if you are into NFT’s you might find OpenSea popular and useful. If you are not, then you won’t.
• shp0ngle 4y ago
  Eh. There is really nothing there. Just ignore web3 peddlers and move on. It’s not really “dangerous”, it’s just newest MLM under the Earth. There was Amway and Rainbow and scientology and Herbalife; now we also have crypto. The only thing that makes me angry is how many jobs are in this nonsense. Just look at the job market anywhere… half of the job openings are just The Blockchain.
  • can16358p 4y ago
    We don't see Amway or Herbalife job openings everywhere, yet crypto job opening are everywhere as you said. Maybe that's because crypto isn't an MLM like those, but provide real value, perhaps.
    • nobody9999 4y ago
      >Maybe that's because crypto isn't an MLM like those, but provide real value, perhaps. That's as may be. But at least in this disucssion, no one has provided even one example of "real value" provided by Web3 "applications." What might something that does so look like? Note that I am specifically referring to Web3 and not blockchains or cryptocurrencies.
• thrwawy283 4y ago
  I think hardware attestation is the most dangerous thing in recent history. All they have to do is convince the public that certain programs are like owning a gun or a bazooka that can do real harm, and begin normalizing the idea that only applications signed by microsoft or the gov should be running on your computer for national security. We've already become friendly to companies owning devices on tablets/phones. Then extend that with attestation so virtually every website or service you interact with is confirming you're using unmodified software. I recognize this is tinfoil hat stuff, but the pieces are there to make things painful. At minimum it becomes inconvenient to use any software you like. At worst, the content we enjoy begins owning us. </tinfoil>
• JSavageOne 4y ago
  HN's constant unsubstantiated, unimaginative, and irrational hate towards anything crypto related is the reason I almost never frequent this site anymore. If you're going to write a critique, at least put some effort into it. When the first bullet point of the article is "it's being driven by predatory marketing tactics", it's already clear that this is merely a hit piece with an agenda. Anytime one is critiquing a futuristic idea that sounds outlandish, they should first stop to ask themselves if they're really given the concept a fair chance. Every major technological revolution was initially considered outlandish and criticized by the mainstream - calculators, computers, the GUI, the internet, cars, planes, remote work, etc. I'm not saying that web3 is the next evolution of the web. But this article is a very elementary take that suggests the author has no understanding of web3 and hasn't made any effort to.
  • hans1729 4y ago
    Not at all, that's just what it is to non-enthusiasts. If you lose interest in HN because HN likes to dump on crypto, that's fair, but that's a you-problem, not an indicator of HN losing quality. It's pretty simple really: crypto is a solution to a problem we apparently don't really have. If you find the problem it solves, HN won't discredit that, the opposite is the case. Many people here would like to be enthusiastic about crypto, we're just not given any reasons for it. What HN rightfully discredits is the cryptosphere, because for every thoughtful person driving progress forward, there appear to be hundreds, if not thousands, of scam projects trying to separate idiots from their money. There is nothing respectable about such a space, so don't expect the public, and this includes the hacking scene, to be infinitely open minded about it, if you're not bringing substance to the table. That response isn't hate, or irrational. The planet is burning and crypto enthusiasts are contributing a significant share to that, I feel exactly zero incentive to applaud these efforts.
    • JSavageOne 4y ago
      > crypto is a solution to a problem we apparently don't really have Crypto allows for decentralized money that one can self-custody and send/receive without going through any centralized government/bank authority or middleman. If you can't even admit this most basic use case of crypto, then either (1) you know nothing about the thing you are criticizing (2) you have an agenda. > not an indicator of HN losing quality. You are case in point to HN losing quality. How about instead of commenting on stuff you know absolutely nothing about, take a second to actually do some research and learn about what you're criticizing. You're at best wasting other peoples' time, at worst spreading misinformation.
• zerkten 4y ago
  We already have IndyWeb (https://indieweb.org/ https://indieweb.org/). What is web3 other than an attempt to distract from crypto-scamming?
• 16Sinker 4y ago
  Agreed. Every time I have seen some form of NFT advertising or the like, it is chock-full of predatory marketing, not to mention the get-rich-quick aura that surrounds it all.
• taylodl 4y ago
  Am I missing something about Web3? When I look at Web2 it made the web programmable, it's what allowed applications to be built on the web. I don't see Web3 changing any of that - it appears to be blockchain technologies, which I can use today. What exactly is changing and how does it affect how I create and deliver web applications?
• douglaswlance 4y ago
  >It's being driven by predatory marketing tactics Most of the web is done the same way. All web1 and web2 company valuations were nuts. It was a ponzi that was regulated by the SEC. Whenever a new technology like this hits the market, there will be low-effort ponzis. >It's impossible to fully understand without complex technological and financial knowledge Do you understand how SWIFT works? Do you understand how Twitter works? The user experience will hide the complexities over time. >It is actively harming the environment Ethereum, which powers the vast majority of web3, is moving to Proof of Stake, which is a system that will reduce the environmental impact by ~95% soon. >It caters to early adopters and whales You can't get rid of first movers advantage. That's probably a law of nature. The first systems to exploit a new platform have unfair advantage. That doesn't mean we should stop creating new platforms. >It profits off of artificial scarcity I don't think that the scarcity of NFTs is artificial. What the popular conception of image-based NFTs are monetizing is attention, which is a scarce resource. The more attention an image NFT receives the more it is worth. If an NFT receives zero attention, it is worth essentially zero. This is just the first time we've been able to productize that attention and be able to trade it as a unit. >Investors are banking on Web3 and they really don't want to be wrong This was true of web1 and web2. Were they a mistake? This is also true of almost every single product you use in your daily life. This is not an argument. Having investors is not a bad thing. Profit is not a bad thing. An investor making money means that they properly allocated resources. That is a good thing.
• merricksb 4y ago
  Discussed 5 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29481120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29481120 (130 points/96 comments)
• elephanlemon 4y ago
  One of the theoretical goals of Web3 to my understanding was the (rightful) destruction and replacement of centralized marketplaces that hold near-monopolies. Companies like eBay, AirBnB, Uber that have a massive first mover advantage and use it to extract very high fees from the sellers. Web3 seemed like a potential way to open these marketplaces up. Am I wrong about this?
  • exit 4y ago
    you're not wrong about this and much of the negative sentiment directed at web3 comes from establishment players of one form or another opposed to being disrupted. it's also clownish to expect bitcoin/crypto/web3 to have delivered 100% on their potential this early. a lot still has to be figured out.
• kebman 4y ago
  “Remember: those pushing Web3 and anything else crypto-related are those who stand to profit off of it.” Remember: those pushing bread and anything else bread-related are those who stand to profit off of it. Or did you think the bread makers would just hand out their pastry for free?
• javier_e06 4y ago
  I just listened to Hidden Brain: Origin of money https://www.npr.org/2020/01/10/795246685/emotional-currency-how-money-shapes-human-relationships https://www.npr.org/2020/01/10/795246685/emotional-currency-... It based on human relations. But not relations among us the but rather our relation between us and authority. We use to think of authority as a collection of somewhat well intended group of people. Are algorithms our new uber-fair non bias overlords? Perhaps.
• mattwilsonn888 4y ago
  I can find better counter arguments to crypto from competing crypto projects.
• fareesh 4y ago
  Web3 is currently bullshit, but decentralization is important. I don't fault the excitement around it, but it's hopium for the most part. This is not practical currently, there are some very important missing pieces.
• cy_overlord 4y ago
  The whole web3 hype is that it promises a utopia version of the Internet hence no matter where you choose to attack it, it almost always seems vague. But remember this, Internet itself is someone's utopia in very beginning but it morphed and transform from inspiration and motivation into a technology that we use almost every day. Having a vision is the necessary step for disruption to happen, the wilder and more resonating it is the bigger the disruption is going to be. However, when someone tries to define the future (or un-define it like in this article), it is almost always cringey. The next web or the next big thing cannot be define, if it could be then it would already happened, the technology would already be accessible right from our pocket. If one look closely underneath the web3 blanket, there are lots of innovation to was expedite as we are throwing in so much resources and talents. Will all of them come together and form the next web? I doubt it but will one of them preserve, stood the test of time and finds its application? I remain very optimistic.
• thricegreat 4y ago
  I'm really starting to think this anti-web3 and generally anti-crypto sentiment is being encouraged and pushed by corporations and elites so they can take over the space and add it to their hypercapitalist armoire
• MadWombat 4y ago
  Web3 is not going to happen. The crypto economy is failing. The promise of crypto was (and still is among the devoted) to provide a viable alternative to government backed currency. At this time, crypto accounts for a fraction of a percent of global economy and is already plagued by so many technical issues to make it almost impossible to actually use for anything. Also, I highly recommend the video on YT called Line Goes Up. https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g I don't agree with the video author on 100% of things, but I do agree with a lot and he is very comprehensive.
• bradnickel 4y ago
  Oh look, an unsigned article recycling myths about what Web3 is and what its impact will be. So tiresome to see how ignorant people in tech are about what is being built, how it will be used, and what the potential is without actually trying it out. As with anything with a financial incentive there are bad players in the space, but there are also people dedicating their lives to creating a better financial future for everyone. The fact that people like whomever wrote this dreck get away with the BS the spread, because people aren't actually intellectually curious enough to check it out is disappointing along with the spin that there is some nefarious force of people trying to steal from others. Do yourself a favor and actually try shit before you comment on it. Example:. There is an entire social network protocol called Lens that frees people from the nefarious crap that Web2 gives to us. No costs to using it and it is built so anyone can build a network with privacy protected.