25 ms·

Tim Berners-Lee: Web3 is not the web

446 points by TangerineDream 4y ago

superkuh 4y ago
I'd go further than this and suggest that web applications, sites that don't display anything without executing code, are not web at all. They just use web protocol to transfer the executable. And pretty soon most web applications will switch to using HTTP/3 implemented on QUIC so they won't even be using HTTP.
- notyourwork 4y ago
  Ding, ding, ding! We started diverging from the "web" long ago with the introduction of SPA.
  - lolive 4y ago
    Funnily, the fact that Google can only index resources/documents associated to a URL has saved the whole concept of the web (for now). Note: and the fact that there is no search engine inside companies has led them to disregard the concept of permalinks. All SPAs there simply never change the URL in the address bar. Which is an HORRIBLE experience as a user!
    - foobarian 4y ago
      > Funnily, the fact that Google can only index resources/documents associated to a URL has saved the whole concept of the web (for now). That's a great point. You wouldn't believe the hemming and hawing that ensues at work when teams encounter SEO-driven constraints.
    - nr2x 4y ago
      Wow, good point.
- samwillis 4y ago
  The web platform, HTML/js/css in a browser, is one of the greatest inventions of all time. Its versatility is immeasurable. The fact we have one toolkit that scales from a simple text based publishing platform to full application development environment, is insane. It covers all paradigms of computing, from thin client to full offline enabled local computing. It is incredible that the community have built this general purpose platform, and that it's not only versatile but also incredibly performant. Modern JS engines are only 50% the speed of native C, no compiler or toolkit needed. How insane is that! CSS/HTML is growing from strength to strength, it's a gui toolkit with so much power universally supported on all computing platforms, from phones to desktops. It has so many features, and is so extendable, but anyone can use it anywhere. There's no limit to its capability, or who can use it to build their inventions. The same toolkit can be used by small children to explore the ideas around "programming" all the way up to the best developers in the world. Honestly the argument that we have somehow gone wrong with html/css/js is absurd. What this platform has contributed to humanity is immeasurable. The "original vision" of the web as a publishing platform for text may be dead. But it lives on as a publishing platform for human invention, ingenuity and creativity.
  - beebmam 4y ago
    This is beautifully said and absolutely true. The HTML/js/css platform is truly incredible. Looking forward to seeing how people can use WASM in incredible ways!
    - samwillis 4y ago
      Absolutely, and like all new things some of the original uses will not work out but what it brings to the table is awesome. (I'm unconvinced by trying to "speed up" normal web apps with it) The two places I'm most excited about it is using it in combination with WebGPU for games/engineering/ai/science, and with the "origin privet file system" enabling client side databases such as SQLite and DuckDB. I think it's the final peace of the jigsaw to make PWAs take off like a rocket. Honestly, PWAs are the true future of the web, the perfect extension of its vision.
    - tracker1 4y ago
- cmckn 4y ago
  > soon most web applications will switch to using HTTP/3 implemented on QUIC so they won't even be using HTTP. HTTP/3 is definitely still HTTP. QUIC is replacing TCP.
  - superkuh 4y ago
    HTTP/3 is HTTP because Google and Microsoft said so and had the people in place to push it through the IETF. It's not really HTTP like HTTP/1.1 was and is; designed for human people to interact with for web sites made out of pages. It's a protocol designed for web applications. This is so deep in it's core it won't even allow you to connect to another IP unless you get continuing approval from an incorporated entity running a CA to lease a TLS cert.
    - Seirdy 4y ago
      QUIC does not require a CA. Self-signed or DANE-backed TLS certificates work fine. Try using cURL built with HTTP/3 support to see for yourself. Requiring CAs and not implementing support for other anchors of trust is an implementation decision, and is not mandated by the spec. The spec mandates TLS 1.3, not "the version of TLS 1.3 used by these three web browsers". QUIC was designed with non-browser use in mind too; it's for any situation where you want to maintain connection integrity in an unreliable network.
      - superkuh 4y ago
        True in theory, not true in practice. It might work if all the random people on the internet used cURL to visit my websites but they tend to use browsers that are Chrome based. And Chrome's QUIC (or the underlying quiche library) differs how Chrome's H1 and H2 implement TLS. It will not accept a self-signed cert during a HTTP3 QUIC connection. Even going localhost (defeats the point, but to check) and trying --disable_certificate_verification --allow-insecure-localhost will not work. Like I said, the megacorps that designed QUIC designed it for their use cases and that does not include allowing human people to host websites by themselves. Not if it potentially impacts e-commerce security. Their implementations reflect this.
- stepanhruda 4y ago
  It’s only HTTP if it comes from the 1.1 region of France, otherwise it’s sparkling bytes?
abeppu 4y ago
So, we should ignore Web3. Fine. But should we ignore Solid? The project started in 2016. Can you _do_ anything with it yet? You can "start a pod", but all the apps are clearly written to demonstrate the platform features rather than to _do_ anything or meet any user need. Of the ones listed, I couldn't actually get any to work with a newly created pod. https://solidproject.org/users/get-a-pod https://solidproject.org/users/get-a-pod https://solidproject.org/apps https://solidproject.org/apps
- nr2x 4y ago
  Why not both?
- wmf 4y ago
  Solid is probably not going to happen and it does give TimBL the appearance of a conflict of interest, but if you can put that aside his point stands.
  - krapp 4y ago
    It stands either way. One can have a conflict of interest, or even be a hypocrite, and still be correct.
  - abeppu 4y ago
    I don't think there's a 'conflict of interest' here; he has a startup, was talking at a web conference, and expressed an opinion about the landscape. I don't take issue with his points about web3. I would like to see _something_ that moves towards decentralization (or at least weaker centralization / greater portability), and if it's not Solid, I hope something else will step into that gap. But I am genuinely confused why there's not at least _something_ useful built on that framework after several years.
- ajacksified 4y ago
  Hi, I work at Inrupt (Tim's company.) Here's two recent examples: The BBC just announced that they're hosting Solid Pods for personal data, allowing users to control access to their information[1][2]. The government of Flanders is hosting Solid Pods for citizen data[3]. Solidproject.org is a community-led project, but I'd recommend trying out going through our docs at https://docs.inrupt.com https://docs.inrupt.com under "getting started" if you'd like to play around with it. Feel free to let me know if you have any issues or questions. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2022-10-social-tv-and-personal-data https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2022-10-social-tv-and-personal... [2] https://advanced-television.com/2022/10/27/bbc-social-tv-personal-data-project/ https://advanced-television.com/2022/10/27/bbc-social-tv-per... [3] https://inrupt.com/blog/digital-flanders-reconnects-citizens-with-their-data-through-inrupts-solid-server https://inrupt.com/blog/digital-flanders-reconnects-citizens...
hiidrew 4y ago
> His new startup aims to address this through three ways: A global “single sign-on” feature that lets anyone log in from anywhere. Login IDs that allow users to share their data with others. A “common universal API,” or application programming interface, that lets apps pull data from any source. Cool to see his project is centered around these goals, but also funny because these are some of the few aspects that I find interesting about Ethereum. Much more interested in the identity/SSO potential vs the financial stuff.
- ChainOfFools 4y ago
  decentralization of X does not and cannot exist without decentralized funding of X. this is why there is simply no way to separate blockchain (as an implementation of decentralized X) from tradeable cryptocurrency derived from units of X. this is not in any way a defense or support for cryptocurrency, only that it is nonsense to claim decentralization of function can exist independently from decentralization of funding. that cryptocurrency is designed to explicitly realize this principle doesn't excuse its failure to do so.
  - robin_reala 4y ago
    Your point would perhaps be better made if you gave any explanation of why this is the case.
    - chrisco255 4y ago
      I generally agree with him, although there are exceptions. You can't generally replace the functionality that centralized servers provide without some sort of mechanic to compensate and incentivize the decentralized nodes themselves. If you relied on VISA or Paypal and charged a fee for the service in that sense, well you now have to stand up an organization that gets to straddle the network and effectively control it. And now that organization has a legal surface area, as well as an administrative surface area that is attackable and can compromise the network itself.
  - wmf 4y ago
encryptluks2 4y ago
Truth be told, while a legend of his time Tim Berners-Lee is a dinosaur who while likely has great insight also comes from a different generation. He's not much different than other blockchain cheerleaders each pushing their own solution. IPFS is the closest we've came to Web3 or whatever you want to call it, but there is still a lot of issues. Where blockchain solutions fall short is none of them are really decentralized. An ideal Web3 IMO would be a distributed storage that you can contribute a certain amount of storage on practically any device and it is able to predict and allocate resources efficiently to scale at datacenter level performance.
- trollerator23 4y ago
  Old man yells at cloud!
- valdiorn 4y ago
  So, basically Pied Piper Net?
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    Yep.. from what I remember. It is definitely the dream but still not a reality.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  > Where blockchain solutions fall short is none of them are really decentralized. Of course they are. If this is a no true Scotsman argument please advise so I can move on to more productive discussions. Filecoin or Arweave are essentially what you describe, but of course they don't achieve data center performance. That doesn't mean they aren't decentralized. There are trade-offs to decentralization.
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    That is not how Filecoin and Arweave works. I'm talking about like thousands of users distributing content for free because they like the content and they allocate a percentage of their devices storage to do so.. and no not pinning it, because IPFS doesn't auto distribute a portion based on allocation ratios. Filecoin and Arweave is nothing more than riskier data storage and usually more expensive that what you'd get with B2 or R2 with like one or two copies at most.
stevenalowe 4y ago
Solid is a great technical idea with no compelling application. yet. web3 is just a terrible idea
- mattwilsonn888 4y ago
  > web3 is just a terrible idea I'm almost certain if you were forced to define Web3 you would be incapable of anything but a strawman. I'll make it easier on you, define it how you believe a deluded but good faith proponent would, and I am still sure you would omit many important and fundamental principles, innovations and techniques.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Are you trying to dazzle us with psychic powers, or trying to explain something to us?
    - mattwilsonn888 4y ago
      I guess saying "Web 3 is trash" requires no explanation is and psychically understood - but asking to expand on the reasoning for that opinion is magical thinking. Good luck applying that method elsewhere.
jandrese 4y ago
I don't even understand what Web3 is. Whenever I try to learn about it the discussion digresses into blockchain pyramid schemes that clearly won't scale and other such nonsense. Certainly Web3 isn't just crypto-bros trying to take over the web? Why would anybody outside of the crypto scam sphere care about it if that were the case?
- koromak 4y ago
  Deploying a whole ass web application on small, immutable smart contracts seems inane to me. Reminds me of something programmers do not because its powerful, but because its hard and it makes them feel cool.
  - SrslyJosh 4y ago
    They won't, because they can't. Executing a smart contract costs thousands of times more than executing a normal piece of software. Everything you see would still be served by an ordinary web server, and interactions with the blorpchain are all mediated by one or two centralized API services. It's a potemkin village.
    - chrisco255 4y ago
      > Executing a smart contract costs thousands of times more than executing a normal piece of software. No, not necessarily. For one let's qualify that statement. Smart contracts on Ethereum are executed 100,000+ times by every node on the network, which is providing security and uptime for the network. Some software transactions have external costs associated with them, such as financial transactions. Doing an international bank transfer may simply boil down to a credit in one SQL database and a debit in another SQL database but it still can cost dozens to thousands of dollars depending on the amount, and the situation. Even a VISA credit card transaction costs 1.5-3%. You as a consumer don't see that cost, the retailer is eating it though, and marking up their products and services to accommodate that fee. But ETH transaction fees do not scale with the value of the transaction, it simply scales with the demand for the limited block space. Ethereum community has been actively developing solutions for this problem, by developing optimistic rollups and zero knowledge rollups, which are effectively able to compress transactions and scale the network throughout by 100-1000x. Innovations like this will get Ethereum to Visa scale plus. This technology is still early, but rapidly improving. Currently deployed rollups are in the 10-100x scale improvement range. Some rollups currently in production: https://arbitrum.io/ https://arbitrum.io/ https://www.optimism.io/ https://www.optimism.io/ https://starkware.co/ https://starkware.co/
yawz 4y ago
Thankfully it doesn’t take to be TB-L to deduce that.
constantcrying 4y ago
Blockchains just are not a particularly good datastructure for most applications. In cryptospace you will easily find projects where the creators took an idea and inserted a blockchain instead of a traditional database. Web3 is the same idea. But this idea is obviously really bad, blockchains are an extremely niche datastructure. They are write only and established by consensus. Most databases shouldn't have these properties and forcing them in will lead into a giant mess.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  And now... we've also hit the ricochet point where now people are taking things backed by a regular centralized database and using blockchain marketing terms for it. Because that's apparently where the $$ is. I'm crying too :-)
- chrisco255 4y ago
  They are not write only. Ethereum is a VM. Smart contracts are not databases, they are objects, classes, methods, and applications. They can be thought of as in memory applications or long lived processes.
  - constantcrying 4y ago
    >They are not write only. I guess you can delete data from a blockchain by having a rollback. The etherium blockchain also is much more than a "block chain". But it is still very much a solution in search of a usecase. Digital money is the only area where a blockchain is a sensible choice from a technical point of view, that I know of. Although I am entirely unconvinced that bitcoin or etherium actually are even close to a viable interpretation of digital money. Say what you want about paypal, it isn't distributing my payment details publically.
    - chrisco255 4y ago
      Multisigs, permissionless lending, decentralized data storage, automated market makers, social protocols, exchangeable token based authentication, digital content ownership, digital rights management, etc. All of these things already exist on the platform. Feel free to do some research if you have an open mind: Gnosis Safe: https://gnosis-safe.io/ https://gnosis-safe.io/ Uniswap: https://app.uniswap.org/ https://app.uniswap.org/ Lens: https://www.lens.xyz/ https://www.lens.xyz/ Lit: https://litprotocol.com/ https://litprotocol.com/ GMX: https://gmx.io/#/ https://gmx.io/#/ Filecoin: https://filecoin.io/ https://filecoin.io/ Arweave: https://www.arweave.org/ https://www.arweave.org/ Aave: https://aave.com/ https://aave.com/ USDC: https://www.circle.com/en/usdc https://www.circle.com/en/usdc There's over $100B in USD backed currency alone on the Ethereum blockchain. It's programmable, liquid, exchangeble 24/7, interacts with thousands of smart contracts, and increasingly will be used for day to day commerce in addition to financial investment applications. You are pseudo-anonymous on Ethereum. It's free to spin up new accounts and you can always fund them from a centralized exchange if you want Paypal-like privacy. Even then, there are solutions in the works for privacy: https://aztec.network/ https://aztec.network/ Cheers.
zeroclip 4y ago
Web3 is just "web with a sprinkle of crypto and blockchains." The problem space is narrow, and different than what DNS and HTTPS tries to solve. But its not useless, and probably will continue to grow as part of the web.
throw7 4y ago
"Personal data stores have to be fast, cheap and private." Uh yeah. That's called a Personal Computer - "PC" if you haven't heard of it. The problem is that technology came along and gave us a "PC" in our hand (cell phones) that wasn't a "PC". What we need is an actual "PC" in our hand. That is: a cell phone that is under the control of the user (and no, a "global single-sign on" sounds absolutely worse than "web3" <- whatever that is).
- bhauer 4y ago
  For a decade now, or perhaps longer, I've been wanting a first-class general purpose computer in the form factor of a cell phone. Microsoft has danced ever-so-close to providing us this, through several iterations of rumored "Surface Phones," and in showcasing the promise (if not necessarily the execution) of a viable dockable phone in the Windows 10 Mobile era. A few Linux flavors of the same concept have circulated through history as well, but none particularly viable. Failing that, I'd like a computing model that I call PAO, Personal Application Omnipresence, where all of my devices are terminals to my own application server [1]. [1] https://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao https://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    What would you expect? The form factor pretty much requires a low bandwidth input interface.
  - femto 4y ago
    That would have been the Ubuntu Edge (2013). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Edge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Edge
  - rgarrett88 4y ago
    I'm pretty much there with my z fold and termux.
  - anderspitman 4y ago
    Interesting article. Honestly it's sad that you can't just wave your phone in front of any screen or input device and instantly be able to use that device to interact with the phone.
amelius 4y ago
Web3 is an online casino.
mjburgess 4y ago
I count myself as a glad evangelist of the counter-reaction to this wave of technobabble charlatanism. Can we arrange to bankrupt Andreeson? Can we un-fi defi? Can we jail them all? I'd suppose not. I'd hope someone has a match: light it!
otikik 4y ago
Web3 is a series of scams connected together by grift.
- ETH_start 4y ago
  Fundamentally, it's being able to control digital assets, like a unique name, or digital currency, with your own device. You can even forego the speculative aspect of it entirely, and just hold USDC/DAI. Sending value is as simple as effecting a transaction from your browser-based MetaMask wallet. It removes all dependencies on third party custodians and payment networks like Venmo or PayPal. The technology still has major missing pieces, like privacy (which isn't helped by OFAC's recent designation that prohibits Americans from using the largest Ethereum-based privacy protocol), but the fundamental functionality is a major innovation and leap.
  - otikik 4y ago
    First of all "controlling digital assets" is a solution in search of a problem, for a majority of people anyway. Secondly, in order for that to be even remotely possible, the first thing that is needed is trust. You can't replace that by any algorithm. Trust isn't there, and for good reason. Rug-pulls are rampant. Entities that present themselves as solvent one day fall down like a house of cards the next day. It is the Wild West, complete with gamblers, snake-oil salesmen, and bandits, and the sheriff is just another bandit. The major "innovation" crypto brought has been in leveraging psychological manipulation techniques previously used by cults and sects in order to quickly part foolish people from their money. The math part is just a distraction.
    - trophycase 4y ago
      Controlling digital things of value in a decentralized way is a solution in search of a problem? That's news to me.
      - jazzyjackson 4y ago
        I don't own any digital things that need controlling. Am I missing out?
WFHRenaissance 4y ago
Everyone on HN needs to take a week to actually look into crypto projects. Nothing that makes headlines is ever good, and it's clear that's where most of the opinions of it on here are sourced from. You're doing yourself a definite disservice by not investing a smidgeon of your time. You are looking at a garden and remarking about the rotten veggies on the soil floor.
- pornel 4y ago
  You should also spend a week getting into homeopathy and a week writing horoscopes.
  - keeganpoppen 4y ago
    maybe you should-- i am an unrelentingly rational man, but i can't deny that of all the horoscope "archetypes", or whatever you want to call them (i'm by no means an expert or even an enthusiast), Virgo is by far the best description of my personality, and just so happens to be my astrological sign (I guess... like i said, i find the whole thing rather silly). as a crypto skeptic, i did go through the exercise of learning about the space in various respects (Solidity + mostly niche, more cool, less-crypto-bro-y things like zero-knowledge proofs), and i actually must confess that i had a lot of fun, and was left with the feeling that there are certain classes of thing that the crypto mindset actually is valuable, or, at the very least, interesting. for example: if you were to ask me "would you rather deal with the shitshow of oath, or use crypto-y / solidity-ish primitives for dealing with authentication/authorization?".... i have to admit that there are some blissful aspects to the crypto view of the world. which makes sense: it was literally built to "solve" some of these problems. [written as someone who remains a "crypto-skeptic", whatever that means at this point]
    - imwillofficial 4y ago
      Same with me and Capricorn, it's weird actually.
    - aiwv 4y ago
      Yeah, it's sort of funny how much scorn people heap on astrology. I am not trying to convince anyone to take astrology seriously, but I think it's foolish to condescend to those who take an interest in it. The archetypes that astrology describes are undeniably true if you bother to read them and think about how you, yourself, and others relate to them. As a tool for forecasting what's going to happen tomorrow, it's of very dubious value. But if one thinks across longer time scales, if you are manifesting certain types of archetypal energies, and we all are, there are certain types of events: conflicts, romance, etc. that are very likely to happen and others that are quite unlikely to happen. On a meta level, it's also interesting simply because so many people find that they strongly relate to their chart, even when they really do not want to believe that their time of birth has any meaning at all. You don't have to believe that there is actually some physical influence of the position of the stars to be curious about why it has that effect. Is it just one of the greatest magic tricks of all time? If so, it might be interesting to understand how that works from a human psychological perspective.
RadixDLT 4y ago
web3 is multiversX https://multiversx.com/ https://multiversx.com/
Communitivity 4y ago
I hate Web3...and I love Web3. Let me explain. Web3 is akin to SOA. The concept of service-orientation was great. We could think of systems as discrete services, each single responsibility, and each working with other services to accomplish a system. Awesome. And so it became popular. Then training courses, certifications, consultants all started to appear in order to cash in on this new thing. It took little time to get to the point where you could ask 10 people what SOA really meant and get 15 different answers, some of them completely incompatible with each other. A similar thing happened with REST. A similar thing happens to many ground-breaking technologies that get popular, or make good sound-bites. So..Web3. Web3 started as a bunch of other things: * VRM - Vendor Relationship Management, the inverse of Customer Relationship Management, where the power and data control is shifted to the customer * Decentralized Identifiers - IDs that aren't controlled by some third party organization like Google, your company, or the government. This has come in different versions, including info:, XRIs, SOLID, DIDs. * DApps - Applications that run within the browser and communicate among themselves (and possibly other services) to accomplish tasks and save state. Everyone ties DApps to blockchain smart contracts, but that is just one implementation of the DApp concept. * DAO - Distributed Autonomous Organizations. This is nothing more than a set of cooperating software agents that execute control over assets based on a provided policy. Policy could be if/else rules, a smart contract, a machine learning CN, or other things. So again, not necessarily blockchain. Charles Stross's Accelerando has a great example of a DAO. * Distributed Ledgers - This is where the blockchain comes in. However, you don't need to use a cryptocurrency to do a distributed ledger, it's just a common way of doing it right now that is perpetuated in part because it makes people money. Check out the Apache Hyperledger project for more info on distributed ledgers. * Decentralized Web - Am early term that combined some of the above. Which of the above depends on who you are talking to, but often it included VRM, DApps, Decentralized Identifiers and possibly Distributed Ledgers. Now add hype (lot's of hype) and a hunger for cash (an insatiable hunger, think Ghnomb, the troll god of eat from David Edding's Elenium series). Both of those things latched onto cryptocurrencies and stirred them into the Decentralized Web mix of concepts. This amalgam birthed the abomination we know as Web3. But don't worry, Web4 is just around the corner. It'll arrive as soon as a new innovative technology arrives that is deemed a sufficiently hype-worthy and plump-enough cash cow. My bet is that you will start seeing VR/AR as Web4 within the next few years. Barnhill's First Law: Any technology movement with a number in it's name is hyper - either ignore it or seek to understand the possibly 20% gems within it and throw away the 80% dross (e.g., Web3 and 5G).
mattwilsonn888 4y ago
When VC gets to appropriate a new paradigm for the sake of driving speculation people's opinions on both sides become quite uninteresting. To debate Web3 the way most of HN is content to do it is to accept the framing of the loud and careless non-visionaries - on both sides.
nailer 4y ago
> “They’re too slow too expensive and too public. Personal data stores have to be fast, cheap and private.” Most web3 transactions are done on Solana which is fast and cheap (albeit not private). Even a cursory glance at web3 would reveal this.
eointierney 4y ago
Web3 is a computational tax on verifiable communication to satisfy financial speculation. Don't.
1970-01-01 4y ago
>Web3 is a nebulous term in the tech world used to describe a hypothetical future version of the internet that’s more decentralized than it is today and not dominated by a handful of powerful players such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google. This is not some hypothetical version of the Internet. This was how it worked until the early 2000s. Google and Amazon weren't evil back then. Microsoft was actively developing IE and had good intentions after it won the browser war. Almost everything was decentralized.
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  Curious to hear about these good intentions from MS/IE after the browser wars. Honestly, not being sarcastic. From what I've heard they stopped innovating because they no longer had competition, until Firefox in the early 2000's.
  - 1970-01-01 4y ago
    A lot of heavy lifting for e-commerce and online business was done by MS in this era. Here are some examples from MSDN: Auth design, process isolation, and why you should be using SSL and certs: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2000/july/web-security-part-2-introducing-the-web-application-manager-client-authentication-options-and-process-isolation https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2000... XML and XPath: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2000/july/the-xml-files-addressing-infosets-with-xpath https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2000... Introduction of .NET: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2000/september/microsoft-net-framework-delivers-the-platform-for-an-integrated-service-oriented-web https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2000...
    - hakre 4y ago
      IE didn't support XPath, a bit loose if style at all how the hrefs are dropping here.
    - JustLurking2022 4y ago
      As a .NET developer since the early days, it's purpose has always been to sell more Windows Server and SQL Server licenses. For the first 15 years, there was no official support for other platforms. More recently, the runtime is cross platform but many libraries only have support for MSFT products out of the box (e.g. WPF, or entity framework relying on external maintainers to write providers for most popular OSS DBs).
nr2x 4y ago
What does this jerk know about the web? Never heard of him!
superb-owl 4y ago
TBL's Solid is a decent attempt to build a decentralized web. But imo it leans too heavily on clunky w3c protocols instead of building something new. The developer experience (at least when I tried it a few years ago) was awful. The end user experience isn't much better. The problem seems to be that any move towards decentralization necessarily comes with a hit to convenience or ease of use. So outside of the tiny subculture that cares about these things, these projects never get much traction. That said, I hope we keep building them--there could be a political future where they come in handy.
mybrid 4y ago
I'm sorry but I want Internet 2 before Web 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet2
- nl 4y ago
  Internet2 is just the academic peering network and backbone. I general it used fiber leased from commercial providers, so in no way is faster or "better" than what you get outside it.
  - mybrid 4y ago
    Well that's no fun.
rvz 4y ago
> “It’s a real shame in fact that the actual Web3 name was taken by Ethereum folks for the stuff that they’re doing with blockchain. In fact, Web3 is not the web at all.” Translation: 'I'm so angry and annoyed that Ethereum has gotten more traction over the actual Web3 name than my still in research Solid project and wondering why little to no-one has heard of it let alone is using it. Please ignore Web3 as hard as you can.' At this point, it appears that crypto is going to be around for a very long time and there will be no complete and total ban on all of it by the extreme and absolutist crypto skeptics.
specialist 4y ago
All (successful) mediums (markets) become centralized. Per winner-takes-all. Unless it's actively prevented. "Web3" hubris is to be centralized from the jump, skipping a few steps of the (apparently natural) medium lifecycle. Like Ted Nelson's Xanadu, Zuck's Megaverse, and any number of other exquisite future perfect big bang utopias. Given the historical record, success of this strategy is unlikely. (John Carmack's paraphrasing of the "all successful complicated systems started simple" criticism of Zuck's betaverse makes the same point.) Nitpick: Demographic data is aggegregated and monitized. It is not siloed.
grappler 4y ago
I wonder what Tim Berners-Lee would think about the framing that says Web3 is about being self-certifying. https://jaygraber.medium.com/web3-is-self-certifying-9dad77fd8d81 https://jaygraber.medium.com/web3-is-self-certifying-9dad77f... In the context of TBL's invention combining urls, hypertext, and http, this is about the authentication and authorization steps that ask, "who is making the request, and should they be sent the resource they requested?" Lacking great peer-to-peer approaches to this, we've gotten certificate authorities and tech giants acting as identity providers. Web3 is about exploring more decentralized approaches here which may, but by no means necessarily, involve blockchains.
- notfed 4y ago
  > Web 3.0 — User-generated content, user-generated authority. A model is emerging where people don’t have to host a server or create a user account in someone else’s database to create content. Make no mistake, people will have to host servers to serve the files. That's true with web2 or with this web3 definition. No way around that one. And if you host your file on a torrent, great, but there are fundamental pros and cons of torrents, namely with mutability. Not a panacea or the whole web would have switched to this model a decade ago.
  - grappler 4y ago
    Seems like you want to quibble about some detail of the page I linked to rather than the point I was making. Sure, ok, I grant you your quibble.

I'd go further than this and suggest that web applications, sites that don't display anything without executing code, are not web at all. They just use web protocol to transfer the executable. And pretty soon most web applications will switch to using HTTP/3 implemented on QUIC so they won't even be using HTTP.

notyourwork 4y ago
Ding, ding, ding! We started diverging from the "web" long ago with the introduction of SPA.
- lolive 4y ago
  Funnily, the fact that Google can only index resources/documents associated to a URL has saved the whole concept of the web (for now). Note: and the fact that there is no search engine inside companies has led them to disregard the concept of permalinks. All SPAs there simply never change the URL in the address bar. Which is an HORRIBLE experience as a user!
  - foobarian 4y ago
    > Funnily, the fact that Google can only index resources/documents associated to a URL has saved the whole concept of the web (for now). That's a great point. You wouldn't believe the hemming and hawing that ensues at work when teams encounter SEO-driven constraints.
  - nr2x 4y ago
    Wow, good point.
samwillis 4y ago
The web platform, HTML/js/css in a browser, is one of the greatest inventions of all time. Its versatility is immeasurable. The fact we have one toolkit that scales from a simple text based publishing platform to full application development environment, is insane. It covers all paradigms of computing, from thin client to full offline enabled local computing. It is incredible that the community have built this general purpose platform, and that it's not only versatile but also incredibly performant. Modern JS engines are only 50% the speed of native C, no compiler or toolkit needed. How insane is that! CSS/HTML is growing from strength to strength, it's a gui toolkit with so much power universally supported on all computing platforms, from phones to desktops. It has so many features, and is so extendable, but anyone can use it anywhere. There's no limit to its capability, or who can use it to build their inventions. The same toolkit can be used by small children to explore the ideas around "programming" all the way up to the best developers in the world. Honestly the argument that we have somehow gone wrong with html/css/js is absurd. What this platform has contributed to humanity is immeasurable. The "original vision" of the web as a publishing platform for text may be dead. But it lives on as a publishing platform for human invention, ingenuity and creativity.
- beebmam 4y ago
  This is beautifully said and absolutely true. The HTML/js/css platform is truly incredible. Looking forward to seeing how people can use WASM in incredible ways!
  - samwillis 4y ago
    Absolutely, and like all new things some of the original uses will not work out but what it brings to the table is awesome. (I'm unconvinced by trying to "speed up" normal web apps with it) The two places I'm most excited about it is using it in combination with WebGPU for games/engineering/ai/science, and with the "origin privet file system" enabling client side databases such as SQLite and DuckDB. I think it's the final peace of the jigsaw to make PWAs take off like a rocket. Honestly, PWAs are the true future of the web, the perfect extension of its vision.
  - tracker1 4y ago
cmckn 4y ago
> soon most web applications will switch to using HTTP/3 implemented on QUIC so they won't even be using HTTP. HTTP/3 is definitely still HTTP. QUIC is replacing TCP.
- superkuh 4y ago
  HTTP/3 is HTTP because Google and Microsoft said so and had the people in place to push it through the IETF. It's not really HTTP like HTTP/1.1 was and is; designed for human people to interact with for web sites made out of pages. It's a protocol designed for web applications. This is so deep in it's core it won't even allow you to connect to another IP unless you get continuing approval from an incorporated entity running a CA to lease a TLS cert.
  - Seirdy 4y ago
    QUIC does not require a CA. Self-signed or DANE-backed TLS certificates work fine. Try using cURL built with HTTP/3 support to see for yourself. Requiring CAs and not implementing support for other anchors of trust is an implementation decision, and is not mandated by the spec. The spec mandates TLS 1.3, not "the version of TLS 1.3 used by these three web browsers". QUIC was designed with non-browser use in mind too; it's for any situation where you want to maintain connection integrity in an unreliable network.
    - superkuh 4y ago
      True in theory, not true in practice. It might work if all the random people on the internet used cURL to visit my websites but they tend to use browsers that are Chrome based. And Chrome's QUIC (or the underlying quiche library) differs how Chrome's H1 and H2 implement TLS. It will not accept a self-signed cert during a HTTP3 QUIC connection. Even going localhost (defeats the point, but to check) and trying --disable_certificate_verification --allow-insecure-localhost will not work. Like I said, the megacorps that designed QUIC designed it for their use cases and that does not include allowing human people to host websites by themselves. Not if it potentially impacts e-commerce security. Their implementations reflect this.
stepanhruda 4y ago
It’s only HTTP if it comes from the 1.1 region of France, otherwise it’s sparkling bytes?

abeppu 4y ago

So, we should ignore Web3. Fine. But should we ignore Solid? The project started in 2016. Can you _do_ anything with it yet? You can "start a pod", but all the apps are clearly written to demonstrate the platform features rather than to _do_ anything or meet any user need. Of the ones listed, I couldn't actually get any to work with a newly created pod. https://solidproject.org/users/get-a-pod https://solidproject.org/users/get-a-pod https://solidproject.org/apps https://solidproject.org/apps

nr2x 4y ago
Why not both?
wmf 4y ago
Solid is probably not going to happen and it does give TimBL the appearance of a conflict of interest, but if you can put that aside his point stands.
- krapp 4y ago
  It stands either way. One can have a conflict of interest, or even be a hypocrite, and still be correct.
- abeppu 4y ago
  I don't think there's a 'conflict of interest' here; he has a startup, was talking at a web conference, and expressed an opinion about the landscape. I don't take issue with his points about web3. I would like to see _something_ that moves towards decentralization (or at least weaker centralization / greater portability), and if it's not Solid, I hope something else will step into that gap. But I am genuinely confused why there's not at least _something_ useful built on that framework after several years.
ajacksified 4y ago
Hi, I work at Inrupt (Tim's company.) Here's two recent examples: The BBC just announced that they're hosting Solid Pods for personal data, allowing users to control access to their information[1][2]. The government of Flanders is hosting Solid Pods for citizen data[3]. Solidproject.org is a community-led project, but I'd recommend trying out going through our docs at https://docs.inrupt.com https://docs.inrupt.com under "getting started" if you'd like to play around with it. Feel free to let me know if you have any issues or questions. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2022-10-social-tv-and-personal-data https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2022-10-social-tv-and-personal... [2] https://advanced-television.com/2022/10/27/bbc-social-tv-personal-data-project/ https://advanced-television.com/2022/10/27/bbc-social-tv-per... [3] https://inrupt.com/blog/digital-flanders-reconnects-citizens-with-their-data-through-inrupts-solid-server https://inrupt.com/blog/digital-flanders-reconnects-citizens...

hiidrew 4y ago

> His new startup aims to address this through three ways: A global “single sign-on” feature that lets anyone log in from anywhere. Login IDs that allow users to share their data with others. A “common universal API,” or application programming interface, that lets apps pull data from any source. Cool to see his project is centered around these goals, but also funny because these are some of the few aspects that I find interesting about Ethereum. Much more interested in the identity/SSO potential vs the financial stuff.

ChainOfFools 4y ago
decentralization of X does not and cannot exist without decentralized funding of X. this is why there is simply no way to separate blockchain (as an implementation of decentralized X) from tradeable cryptocurrency derived from units of X. this is not in any way a defense or support for cryptocurrency, only that it is nonsense to claim decentralization of function can exist independently from decentralization of funding. that cryptocurrency is designed to explicitly realize this principle doesn't excuse its failure to do so.
- robin_reala 4y ago
  Your point would perhaps be better made if you gave any explanation of why this is the case.
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    I generally agree with him, although there are exceptions. You can't generally replace the functionality that centralized servers provide without some sort of mechanic to compensate and incentivize the decentralized nodes themselves. If you relied on VISA or Paypal and charged a fee for the service in that sense, well you now have to stand up an organization that gets to straddle the network and effectively control it. And now that organization has a legal surface area, as well as an administrative surface area that is attackable and can compromise the network itself.
- wmf 4y ago

encryptluks2 4y ago

Truth be told, while a legend of his time Tim Berners-Lee is a dinosaur who while likely has great insight also comes from a different generation. He's not much different than other blockchain cheerleaders each pushing their own solution. IPFS is the closest we've came to Web3 or whatever you want to call it, but there is still a lot of issues. Where blockchain solutions fall short is none of them are really decentralized. An ideal Web3 IMO would be a distributed storage that you can contribute a certain amount of storage on practically any device and it is able to predict and allocate resources efficiently to scale at datacenter level performance.

trollerator23 4y ago
Old man yells at cloud!
valdiorn 4y ago
So, basically Pied Piper Net?
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  Yep.. from what I remember. It is definitely the dream but still not a reality.
chrisco255 4y ago
> Where blockchain solutions fall short is none of them are really decentralized. Of course they are. If this is a no true Scotsman argument please advise so I can move on to more productive discussions. Filecoin or Arweave are essentially what you describe, but of course they don't achieve data center performance. That doesn't mean they aren't decentralized. There are trade-offs to decentralization.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  That is not how Filecoin and Arweave works. I'm talking about like thousands of users distributing content for free because they like the content and they allocate a percentage of their devices storage to do so.. and no not pinning it, because IPFS doesn't auto distribute a portion based on allocation ratios. Filecoin and Arweave is nothing more than riskier data storage and usually more expensive that what you'd get with B2 or R2 with like one or two copies at most.

stevenalowe 4y ago

Solid is a great technical idea with no compelling application. yet. web3 is just a terrible idea

mattwilsonn888 4y ago
> web3 is just a terrible idea I'm almost certain if you were forced to define Web3 you would be incapable of anything but a strawman. I'll make it easier on you, define it how you believe a deluded but good faith proponent would, and I am still sure you would omit many important and fundamental principles, innovations and techniques.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Are you trying to dazzle us with psychic powers, or trying to explain something to us?
  - mattwilsonn888 4y ago
    I guess saying "Web 3 is trash" requires no explanation is and psychically understood - but asking to expand on the reasoning for that opinion is magical thinking. Good luck applying that method elsewhere.

jandrese 4y ago

I don't even understand what Web3 is. Whenever I try to learn about it the discussion digresses into blockchain pyramid schemes that clearly won't scale and other such nonsense. Certainly Web3 isn't just crypto-bros trying to take over the web? Why would anybody outside of the crypto scam sphere care about it if that were the case?

koromak 4y ago
Deploying a whole ass web application on small, immutable smart contracts seems inane to me. Reminds me of something programmers do not because its powerful, but because its hard and it makes them feel cool.
- SrslyJosh 4y ago
  They won't, because they can't. Executing a smart contract costs thousands of times more than executing a normal piece of software. Everything you see would still be served by an ordinary web server, and interactions with the blorpchain are all mediated by one or two centralized API services. It's a potemkin village.
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    > Executing a smart contract costs thousands of times more than executing a normal piece of software. No, not necessarily. For one let's qualify that statement. Smart contracts on Ethereum are executed 100,000+ times by every node on the network, which is providing security and uptime for the network. Some software transactions have external costs associated with them, such as financial transactions. Doing an international bank transfer may simply boil down to a credit in one SQL database and a debit in another SQL database but it still can cost dozens to thousands of dollars depending on the amount, and the situation. Even a VISA credit card transaction costs 1.5-3%. You as a consumer don't see that cost, the retailer is eating it though, and marking up their products and services to accommodate that fee. But ETH transaction fees do not scale with the value of the transaction, it simply scales with the demand for the limited block space. Ethereum community has been actively developing solutions for this problem, by developing optimistic rollups and zero knowledge rollups, which are effectively able to compress transactions and scale the network throughout by 100-1000x. Innovations like this will get Ethereum to Visa scale plus. This technology is still early, but rapidly improving. Currently deployed rollups are in the 10-100x scale improvement range. Some rollups currently in production: https://arbitrum.io/ https://arbitrum.io/ https://www.optimism.io/ https://www.optimism.io/ https://starkware.co/ https://starkware.co/

yawz 4y ago

Thankfully it doesn’t take to be TB-L to deduce that.

constantcrying 4y ago

Blockchains just are not a particularly good datastructure for most applications. In cryptospace you will easily find projects where the creators took an idea and inserted a blockchain instead of a traditional database. Web3 is the same idea. But this idea is obviously really bad, blockchains are an extremely niche datastructure. They are write only and established by consensus. Most databases shouldn't have these properties and forcing them in will lead into a giant mess.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago
And now... we've also hit the ricochet point where now people are taking things backed by a regular centralized database and using blockchain marketing terms for it. Because that's apparently where the $$ is. I'm crying too :-)
chrisco255 4y ago
They are not write only. Ethereum is a VM. Smart contracts are not databases, they are objects, classes, methods, and applications. They can be thought of as in memory applications or long lived processes.
- constantcrying 4y ago
  >They are not write only. I guess you can delete data from a blockchain by having a rollback. The etherium blockchain also is much more than a "block chain". But it is still very much a solution in search of a usecase. Digital money is the only area where a blockchain is a sensible choice from a technical point of view, that I know of. Although I am entirely unconvinced that bitcoin or etherium actually are even close to a viable interpretation of digital money. Say what you want about paypal, it isn't distributing my payment details publically.
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    Multisigs, permissionless lending, decentralized data storage, automated market makers, social protocols, exchangeable token based authentication, digital content ownership, digital rights management, etc. All of these things already exist on the platform. Feel free to do some research if you have an open mind: Gnosis Safe: https://gnosis-safe.io/ https://gnosis-safe.io/ Uniswap: https://app.uniswap.org/ https://app.uniswap.org/ Lens: https://www.lens.xyz/ https://www.lens.xyz/ Lit: https://litprotocol.com/ https://litprotocol.com/ GMX: https://gmx.io/#/ https://gmx.io/#/ Filecoin: https://filecoin.io/ https://filecoin.io/ Arweave: https://www.arweave.org/ https://www.arweave.org/ Aave: https://aave.com/ https://aave.com/ USDC: https://www.circle.com/en/usdc https://www.circle.com/en/usdc There's over $100B in USD backed currency alone on the Ethereum blockchain. It's programmable, liquid, exchangeble 24/7, interacts with thousands of smart contracts, and increasingly will be used for day to day commerce in addition to financial investment applications. You are pseudo-anonymous on Ethereum. It's free to spin up new accounts and you can always fund them from a centralized exchange if you want Paypal-like privacy. Even then, there are solutions in the works for privacy: https://aztec.network/ https://aztec.network/ Cheers.

zeroclip 4y ago

Web3 is just "web with a sprinkle of crypto and blockchains." The problem space is narrow, and different than what DNS and HTTPS tries to solve. But its not useless, and probably will continue to grow as part of the web.

throw7 4y ago

"Personal data stores have to be fast, cheap and private." Uh yeah. That's called a Personal Computer - "PC" if you haven't heard of it. The problem is that technology came along and gave us a "PC" in our hand (cell phones) that wasn't a "PC". What we need is an actual "PC" in our hand. That is: a cell phone that is under the control of the user (and no, a "global single-sign on" sounds absolutely worse than "web3" <- whatever that is).

bhauer 4y ago
For a decade now, or perhaps longer, I've been wanting a first-class general purpose computer in the form factor of a cell phone. Microsoft has danced ever-so-close to providing us this, through several iterations of rumored "Surface Phones," and in showcasing the promise (if not necessarily the execution) of a viable dockable phone in the Windows 10 Mobile era. A few Linux flavors of the same concept have circulated through history as well, but none particularly viable. Failing that, I'd like a computing model that I call PAO, Personal Application Omnipresence, where all of my devices are terminals to my own application server [1]. [1] https://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao https://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  What would you expect? The form factor pretty much requires a low bandwidth input interface.
- femto 4y ago
  That would have been the Ubuntu Edge (2013). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Edge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Edge
- rgarrett88 4y ago
  I'm pretty much there with my z fold and termux.
- anderspitman 4y ago
  Interesting article. Honestly it's sad that you can't just wave your phone in front of any screen or input device and instantly be able to use that device to interact with the phone.

amelius 4y ago

Web3 is an online casino.

mjburgess 4y ago

I count myself as a glad evangelist of the counter-reaction to this wave of technobabble charlatanism. Can we arrange to bankrupt Andreeson? Can we un-fi defi? Can we jail them all? I'd suppose not. I'd hope someone has a match: light it!

otikik 4y ago

Web3 is a series of scams connected together by grift.

ETH_start 4y ago
Fundamentally, it's being able to control digital assets, like a unique name, or digital currency, with your own device. You can even forego the speculative aspect of it entirely, and just hold USDC/DAI. Sending value is as simple as effecting a transaction from your browser-based MetaMask wallet. It removes all dependencies on third party custodians and payment networks like Venmo or PayPal. The technology still has major missing pieces, like privacy (which isn't helped by OFAC's recent designation that prohibits Americans from using the largest Ethereum-based privacy protocol), but the fundamental functionality is a major innovation and leap.
- otikik 4y ago
  First of all "controlling digital assets" is a solution in search of a problem, for a majority of people anyway. Secondly, in order for that to be even remotely possible, the first thing that is needed is trust. You can't replace that by any algorithm. Trust isn't there, and for good reason. Rug-pulls are rampant. Entities that present themselves as solvent one day fall down like a house of cards the next day. It is the Wild West, complete with gamblers, snake-oil salesmen, and bandits, and the sheriff is just another bandit. The major "innovation" crypto brought has been in leveraging psychological manipulation techniques previously used by cults and sects in order to quickly part foolish people from their money. The math part is just a distraction.
  - trophycase 4y ago
    Controlling digital things of value in a decentralized way is a solution in search of a problem? That's news to me.
    - jazzyjackson 4y ago
      I don't own any digital things that need controlling. Am I missing out?

WFHRenaissance 4y ago

Everyone on HN needs to take a week to actually look into crypto projects. Nothing that makes headlines is ever good, and it's clear that's where most of the opinions of it on here are sourced from. You're doing yourself a definite disservice by not investing a smidgeon of your time. You are looking at a garden and remarking about the rotten veggies on the soil floor.

pornel 4y ago
You should also spend a week getting into homeopathy and a week writing horoscopes.
- keeganpoppen 4y ago
  maybe you should-- i am an unrelentingly rational man, but i can't deny that of all the horoscope "archetypes", or whatever you want to call them (i'm by no means an expert or even an enthusiast), Virgo is by far the best description of my personality, and just so happens to be my astrological sign (I guess... like i said, i find the whole thing rather silly). as a crypto skeptic, i did go through the exercise of learning about the space in various respects (Solidity + mostly niche, more cool, less-crypto-bro-y things like zero-knowledge proofs), and i actually must confess that i had a lot of fun, and was left with the feeling that there are certain classes of thing that the crypto mindset actually is valuable, or, at the very least, interesting. for example: if you were to ask me "would you rather deal with the shitshow of oath, or use crypto-y / solidity-ish primitives for dealing with authentication/authorization?".... i have to admit that there are some blissful aspects to the crypto view of the world. which makes sense: it was literally built to "solve" some of these problems. [written as someone who remains a "crypto-skeptic", whatever that means at this point]
  - imwillofficial 4y ago
    Same with me and Capricorn, it's weird actually.
  - aiwv 4y ago
    Yeah, it's sort of funny how much scorn people heap on astrology. I am not trying to convince anyone to take astrology seriously, but I think it's foolish to condescend to those who take an interest in it. The archetypes that astrology describes are undeniably true if you bother to read them and think about how you, yourself, and others relate to them. As a tool for forecasting what's going to happen tomorrow, it's of very dubious value. But if one thinks across longer time scales, if you are manifesting certain types of archetypal energies, and we all are, there are certain types of events: conflicts, romance, etc. that are very likely to happen and others that are quite unlikely to happen. On a meta level, it's also interesting simply because so many people find that they strongly relate to their chart, even when they really do not want to believe that their time of birth has any meaning at all. You don't have to believe that there is actually some physical influence of the position of the stars to be curious about why it has that effect. Is it just one of the greatest magic tricks of all time? If so, it might be interesting to understand how that works from a human psychological perspective.

RadixDLT 4y ago

web3 is multiversX https://multiversx.com/ https://multiversx.com/

Communitivity 4y ago

I hate Web3...and I love Web3. Let me explain. Web3 is akin to SOA. The concept of service-orientation was great. We could think of systems as discrete services, each single responsibility, and each working with other services to accomplish a system. Awesome. And so it became popular. Then training courses, certifications, consultants all started to appear in order to cash in on this new thing. It took little time to get to the point where you could ask 10 people what SOA really meant and get 15 different answers, some of them completely incompatible with each other. A similar thing happened with REST. A similar thing happens to many ground-breaking technologies that get popular, or make good sound-bites. So..Web3. Web3 started as a bunch of other things: * VRM - Vendor Relationship Management, the inverse of Customer Relationship Management, where the power and data control is shifted to the customer * Decentralized Identifiers - IDs that aren't controlled by some third party organization like Google, your company, or the government. This has come in different versions, including info:, XRIs, SOLID, DIDs. * DApps - Applications that run within the browser and communicate among themselves (and possibly other services) to accomplish tasks and save state. Everyone ties DApps to blockchain smart contracts, but that is just one implementation of the DApp concept. * DAO - Distributed Autonomous Organizations. This is nothing more than a set of cooperating software agents that execute control over assets based on a provided policy. Policy could be if/else rules, a smart contract, a machine learning CN, or other things. So again, not necessarily blockchain. Charles Stross's Accelerando has a great example of a DAO. * Distributed Ledgers - This is where the blockchain comes in. However, you don't need to use a cryptocurrency to do a distributed ledger, it's just a common way of doing it right now that is perpetuated in part because it makes people money. Check out the Apache Hyperledger project for more info on distributed ledgers. * Decentralized Web - Am early term that combined some of the above. Which of the above depends on who you are talking to, but often it included VRM, DApps, Decentralized Identifiers and possibly Distributed Ledgers. Now add hype (lot's of hype) and a hunger for cash (an insatiable hunger, think Ghnomb, the troll god of eat from David Edding's Elenium series). Both of those things latched onto cryptocurrencies and stirred them into the Decentralized Web mix of concepts. This amalgam birthed the abomination we know as Web3. But don't worry, Web4 is just around the corner. It'll arrive as soon as a new innovative technology arrives that is deemed a sufficiently hype-worthy and plump-enough cash cow. My bet is that you will start seeing VR/AR as Web4 within the next few years. Barnhill's First Law: Any technology movement with a number in it's name is hyper - either ignore it or seek to understand the possibly 20% gems within it and throw away the 80% dross (e.g., Web3 and 5G).

mattwilsonn888 4y ago

When VC gets to appropriate a new paradigm for the sake of driving speculation people's opinions on both sides become quite uninteresting. To debate Web3 the way most of HN is content to do it is to accept the framing of the loud and careless non-visionaries - on both sides.

nailer 4y ago

> “They’re too slow too expensive and too public. Personal data stores have to be fast, cheap and private.” Most web3 transactions are done on Solana which is fast and cheap (albeit not private). Even a cursory glance at web3 would reveal this.

eointierney 4y ago

Web3 is a computational tax on verifiable communication to satisfy financial speculation. Don't.

1970-01-01 4y ago

>Web3 is a nebulous term in the tech world used to describe a hypothetical future version of the internet that’s more decentralized than it is today and not dominated by a handful of powerful players such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google. This is not some hypothetical version of the Internet. This was how it worked until the early 2000s. Google and Amazon weren't evil back then. Microsoft was actively developing IE and had good intentions after it won the browser war. Almost everything was decentralized.

danielvaughn 4y ago
Curious to hear about these good intentions from MS/IE after the browser wars. Honestly, not being sarcastic. From what I've heard they stopped innovating because they no longer had competition, until Firefox in the early 2000's.
- 1970-01-01 4y ago
  A lot of heavy lifting for e-commerce and online business was done by MS in this era. Here are some examples from MSDN: Auth design, process isolation, and why you should be using SSL and certs: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2000/july/web-security-part-2-introducing-the-web-application-manager-client-authentication-options-and-process-isolation https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2000... XML and XPath: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2000/july/the-xml-files-addressing-infosets-with-xpath https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2000... Introduction of .NET: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2000/september/microsoft-net-framework-delivers-the-platform-for-an-integrated-service-oriented-web https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2000...
  - hakre 4y ago
    IE didn't support XPath, a bit loose if style at all how the hrefs are dropping here.
  - JustLurking2022 4y ago
    As a .NET developer since the early days, it's purpose has always been to sell more Windows Server and SQL Server licenses. For the first 15 years, there was no official support for other platforms. More recently, the runtime is cross platform but many libraries only have support for MSFT products out of the box (e.g. WPF, or entity framework relying on external maintainers to write providers for most popular OSS DBs).

nr2x 4y ago

What does this jerk know about the web? Never heard of him!

superb-owl 4y ago

TBL's Solid is a decent attempt to build a decentralized web. But imo it leans too heavily on clunky w3c protocols instead of building something new. The developer experience (at least when I tried it a few years ago) was awful. The end user experience isn't much better. The problem seems to be that any move towards decentralization necessarily comes with a hit to convenience or ease of use. So outside of the tiny subculture that cares about these things, these projects never get much traction. That said, I hope we keep building them--there could be a political future where they come in handy.

mybrid 4y ago

I'm sorry but I want Internet 2 before Web 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet2

nl 4y ago
Internet2 is just the academic peering network and backbone. I general it used fiber leased from commercial providers, so in no way is faster or "better" than what you get outside it.
- mybrid 4y ago
  Well that's no fun.

rvz 4y ago

> “It’s a real shame in fact that the actual Web3 name was taken by Ethereum folks for the stuff that they’re doing with blockchain. In fact, Web3 is not the web at all.” Translation: 'I'm so angry and annoyed that Ethereum has gotten more traction over the actual Web3 name than my still in research Solid project and wondering why little to no-one has heard of it let alone is using it. Please ignore Web3 as hard as you can.' At this point, it appears that crypto is going to be around for a very long time and there will be no complete and total ban on all of it by the extreme and absolutist crypto skeptics.

specialist 4y ago

All (successful) mediums (markets) become centralized. Per winner-takes-all. Unless it's actively prevented. "Web3" hubris is to be centralized from the jump, skipping a few steps of the (apparently natural) medium lifecycle. Like Ted Nelson's Xanadu, Zuck's Megaverse, and any number of other exquisite future perfect big bang utopias. Given the historical record, success of this strategy is unlikely. (John Carmack's paraphrasing of the "all successful complicated systems started simple" criticism of Zuck's betaverse makes the same point.) Nitpick: Demographic data is aggegregated and monitized. It is not siloed.

grappler 4y ago

I wonder what Tim Berners-Lee would think about the framing that says Web3 is about being self-certifying. https://jaygraber.medium.com/web3-is-self-certifying-9dad77fd8d81 https://jaygraber.medium.com/web3-is-self-certifying-9dad77f... In the context of TBL's invention combining urls, hypertext, and http, this is about the authentication and authorization steps that ask, "who is making the request, and should they be sent the resource they requested?" Lacking great peer-to-peer approaches to this, we've gotten certificate authorities and tech giants acting as identity providers. Web3 is about exploring more decentralized approaches here which may, but by no means necessarily, involve blockchains.

notfed 4y ago
> Web 3.0 — User-generated content, user-generated authority. A model is emerging where people don’t have to host a server or create a user account in someone else’s database to create content. Make no mistake, people will have to host servers to serve the files. That's true with web2 or with this web3 definition. No way around that one. And if you host your file on a torrent, great, but there are fundamental pros and cons of torrents, namely with mutability. Not a panacea or the whole web would have switched to this model a decade ago.
- grappler 4y ago
  Seems like you want to quibble about some detail of the page I linked to rather than the point I was making. Sure, ok, I grant you your quibble.