8 ms·

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 ot

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/
    - ipython 4y ago
      What international bank transfer costs “thousands” of dollars to complete? What ethereum transaction only costs 3% to complete? Are you saying that a retailer accepting crypto will suddenly no longer need to “eat” the transaction costs because… crypto?
      - Tenoke 4y ago
        Any sufficiently large transaction costs less than 3% on Ethereum. MetaMask claims a transfer would cost me 63 cents, so a pure Eth transfer of more than $22 for example. Though of course you can do it a lot cheaper on L2s.
      - chrisco255 4y ago
        Every transfer service has transfer limits. Have you ever tried to send $1M or $10M internationally? What service provider would you go through to execute the transaction? What are their fees? Not only will your transaction be delayed as much as weeks, you'll have additional forms to fill out and fees and expenses associated with such a transfer. Even more so if you are converting to another currency. On Ethereum, you can execute a swap from one currency to another (0.3% fee) and have the transfer execute to anyone in the world in 15 seconds. Even in a highly congested time on the network, that will cost at most a few dozen dollars. Doesn't matter if you're sending $1K or $1B. Crypto isn't ready for retail use cases yet, but it's within the next few years (less than 3) that it gets there. Retail transactions will occur on rollups. The retailers will pay transaction fees of a few pennies to a few dozen cents. It will not be percentage based on the transaction value as VISA, AMEX, etc currently get away with.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - miracle2k 4y ago
    And yet, Tornado Cash is still running.
    - m00dy 4y ago
      I'm just wondering what would happen if there is a court order to take down a smart contract.
      - m4jor 4y ago
        It would be like a court order to ban encryption. Its just math. You cant do it and it would be meaningless.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  It is powerful. The contracts run 24/7 with 100% uptime. Hayden Adams created Uniswap with about 1000 lines of code using an elegant xy=k formula to create the first good automated market maker, Uniswap. It essentially replaces much of the functionality of an order book on a stock exchange, except it's decentralized, global and permissionless. Plenty of other good examples in web3. https://app.uniswap.org/ https://app.uniswap.org/
  - WalterSear 4y ago
    > Put bluntly, the Ethereum “world computer” has roughly 1/5,000 of the compute power of a Raspberry Pi 4! https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/web3-fraud https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/web3-fraud
    - zeroclip 4y ago
      Who said Ethereum aims to be as fast as a regular computer, or even a raspberry pi?
      - ethbr0 4y ago
        ^ Basically sums up what Ethereum is and isn't If a Pi solves your use case, for God's sake don't use the EVM. If a Pi doesn't solve your use case, because {particular reason}, then consider the EVM as an option.
        Tenoke 4y ago
        You can't really run Uniswap and expect it to be useful on a Pi for obvious reasons so a Pi doesn't solve the same issues.
  - leonsegal 4y ago
    are there any non-crypto examples?
    - 4y ago
- derefr 4y ago
  You don't, actually, though. You only put what little stuff that people might distrust if any one party had centralized control over — like ownership — into smart-contract state. Everything else is fine to be stuffed into a database or centralized web backend somewhere; or just left to everyone individually to derive + implement themselves however they like. For example: CryptoKitties. The only things in the on-chain state of CryptoKitties' contracts, are the kitties' ownerships, and their "genes" (an entropy blob, a bit like Pokemon https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Individual_values https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Individual_values.) Because these are the two things that, if they were entirely in the hands of CryptoKitties themselves, you'd be suspicious that they might "cheat" on, by e.g. making their friends special kitties with genes nobody else can have; or deciding one day that kitties that aren't "cared for" should be forcibly transferred back to an "adoption agency." If either of these things were found to be possible, the value of kitties would quickly drop to zero. Meanwhile, what exactly a kitty's genes translate to in terms of actual kitty features, is dictated by some arbitrary centralized Javascript on the CryptoKitties website. Nobody distrusts CryptoKitties on this aspect, because it doesn't really impact the value of their investment relative to other people's. If the same gene makes kitties render with wings one day and vampire fangs the next, that might upset people, but it won't make them do a mass sell-off of their kitties. After all, CryptoKitties could always change it back, so why would you sell "early" rather than wait to see if they do? Or, in short: you put data in a smart contract if a game-theoretic prerequisite of your system working out is for certain data to be only updated in an openly-audited, multilaterally-agreed-upon way. (Good non-crypto example: the dealer's shuffle between hands at a card game at a casino. Done right in front of all the players, because otherwise they wouldn't trust it.)
miohtama 4y ago
Web3 was the term created 2014 to originally describe three properties (protocols) that decentralised networks can bring to web without need to rely on centralised service providers. Web + 3 = web3: - eth: making transactions with smart contracts - bzz: decentralised storage - save files - whisper: peer-to-peer messaging, chat, etc. More about the history of web3 in my Twitter thread here: https://mobile.twitter.com/moo9000/status/1484463889224024064 https://mobile.twitter.com/moo9000/status/148446388922402406... However the usage of the term and it meaning has corrupted over the years, especially when marketing people took it over.
SrslyJosh 4y ago
> Certainly Web3 isn't just crypto-bros trying to take over the web? That's exactly what it is. They don't want anything new or innovative, they just want to be able to levy a tax on what everyone does online.
- sdiacom 4y ago
  It's a bit sillier than that, since for the time being, crypto-bros are making money not by levying a tax on what people do online, but by speculating on the potential future income from levying a tax on what people do online. Convincing others that there's imaginary future money on taxing online interactions is where the real present money is actually made. In a way, this turns their biggest weakness (they can't actually achieve their goal) into their biggest strength (their audience is people who aren't tech-literate enough to understand that they can't actually achieve their goal)
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    Where can I read about this? What tax is being proposed? Staking?
  - gernb 4y ago
    The crazy thing is Google, Microsoft, Amazon (and I'm pretty sure Apple and Meta too) have Web3 stuff https://cloud.google.com/web3 https://cloud.google.com/web3 https://mybuild.microsoft.com/en-US/sessions/dce02ee4-1c0d-4999-9962-92910000bd90?source=sessions https://mybuild.microsoft.com/en-US/sessions/dce02ee4-1c0d-4... https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/startups/register-today-for-aws-web3-ready-on-september-15/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/startups/register-today-for-aws...
    - jazzyjackson 4y ago
      You don't get rich digging for gold, you get rich selling shovels.
- threeseed 4y ago
  Also about VCs having a lot of excess money that they siphoned from LPs during the zero interest rate period. And since Web2 has largely picked its main winners and losers an opportunity existed to reset the game and pick another set. Only this time they would be the ones to invest in the next Apple, Google etc.
chrisco255 4y ago
Applications centered on user ownership created from decentralization of the data models and hosts themselves.
- jfghi 4y ago
  ?, Most of the websites visited have powerful servers serving them with data that is held privately.
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    It doesn't take that powerful of a server to serve static websites. And some data is held in open data stores, such as Filecoin or Arweave. Some data is held on-chain, as ENS does, for example.
- jay_kyburz 4y ago
  I get it. It sounds good. But I come from the generation that knows information wants to be free.
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    Nothing is free. Whatever we got for free from Web2 came with a surveillance, censorship and ad-based regime attached to it.
    - jazzyjackson 4y ago
      Torrenting continues to be free, because when we were growing up we learned to share.
- threeseed 4y ago
  Except that (a) there is no requirement to put all data on the blockchain and (b) it is prohibitively expensive to do so. So you end up with a situation like OpenSea. Half of the information about the NFT is on the chain but then the other half is in its own private database e.g. ratings, reviews etc.
zeroclip 4y ago
There is no single company driving the PR and marketing for Web3, so the term is whatever somebody wants it to be. But the vague way to describe it is an approach to building web apps with decentralized public blockchains and smart contracts, like DeFi or ENS.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  Enabling what? Use cases > technology shiny objects.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    Money laundering, gambling and stock trading for kids of all ages. Also the whole rug-pulling game has been an impressive transfer of wealth from VCs -> influencers.
    - joeax 4y ago
      Sounds more like the early days of web 1.0
      - threeseed 4y ago
        I was on the internet in the early days of Web 1.0 None of those things were happening.
  - zeroclip 4y ago
    It's a distributed ledger, that you can deploy a computer program to. Use cases extend outward from there.
    - andsoitis 4y ago
      Can you articulate one end user benefit / use case that’s not possible today or that would be better than today?
WalterSear 4y ago
It's more than just crypto-bros trying to take over the web. It's an italian serial conman in a dark room somewhere, pressing "print" on software that generates ostensibly a dollar-equivalent crypto currency out of thin air, wrapped in a network of criminal enterprises that is currently using special 'insider only' versions of those tokens (tether-trons, vs tether-eths) to facilitate the theft of the life savings of a generation of middle class chinese, wrapped in a nesting doll of scams and pyramid schemes, wrapped in the greed, hubris, and legitimate desperation of a generation of 1st world hustlers, all wrapped in crypto-bros trying to take over the world. If it was just crypto-bros, there wouldn't be anywhere near so much smoke to confuse/conflate with fire: the market manipulation being facilitated by the dirty (and clean, albeit grifted) money entering the system makes the whole thing seem financially bigger than it really is. But despite all the smoke making, it is still just a fart in a colander: the entire crypto market cap, as fanciful and hyperbolic as it is, is still less than the market cap of Apple. The really astounding part is that so much of this activity is being recorded on publicly accessible server ledgers, in real-time.
- muxator 4y ago
  > It's an ITALIAN serial conman... Wow. I have been guilty of this very same blunder many times and I understand it's just a joke, but please realize that it is not pleasant to be on the wrong side of a joke for no reason. I'll be more careful with my generalizations in the future. I am confident you will be, too. Thanks.
  - cbozeman 4y ago
    - jjulius 4y ago
      Yikes.
  - hervature 4y ago
    Following HN guidelines, I assumed they meant that Italy is aiding and abetting the effort. My low effort search yielded [1] immediately. [1] - https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/10/05/italy-has-a-registry-of-73-unvetted-crypto-firms/ https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/10/05/italy-has-a-regis...
felipellrocha 4y ago
Web3 are browser-based wallets (or mobile based) that can authorize transactions in a blockchain securely because it's separate from the web page itself. When I use metamask to buy something on the chain, it'll ask me to confirm if that's ok or not. That's all that the developer of the page can do, they can ask metamask to confirm the transaction is safe. Once it's confirmed, a one-time unique token for the transaction is created, and used to execute the transaction. This can work because the browser provides the secure separation between app and wallet. Otherwise, no one would trust a 3rd party to run transactions for them on the blockchain.
- dwaite 4y ago
  Is Apple Pay considered Web3?
- SkyMarshal 4y ago
  > This can work because the browser provides the secure separation between app and wallet. I thought the app and wallet were the same thing. What's the difference here?
  - derefr 4y ago
    The "app" (Distributed App / DApp) is some arbitrary thing written by a developer, running in a sandbox in a tab in your browser. The "wallet" (Metamask) is a browser extension containing a set of pairs of (RPC gateway URI for a given blockchain, cryptographic private key for an account on said blockchain.) It can also proxy through to other such "wallets", e.g. "hardware wallets" (smart cards.) "web3" is an API (like any DOM API) that the browser extension exposes to app, allowing the app to ask the wallet to do things (where the wallet then asks the user to confirm that they want to do those things); and, through the wallet's connection to blockchains, to watch for things to happen on a blockchain. Together, these additional APIs allow web3 "DApps" to transact on blockchains, and to observe what happens in response to their transactions. Example DApps: - Gnosis Safe (https://gnosis-safe.io/ https://gnosis-safe.io/) — an interface for deploying and managing multi-signature smart contracts (i.e. trusts whose assets are controlled by M-of-N voting) - Sushiswap (https://www.sushi.com/swap https://www.sushi.com/swap) — an interface for creating and managing Automated Market Maker liquidity pools - OpenSea (https://opensea.io/ https://opensea.io/) — a marketplace for buying and selling NFTs On all of these websites, you'll notice that instead of registering an account, there is a button that CTAs you to "Connect a Wallet." This is requesting permission to communicate with the web3 agent installed as an extension in your browser.
kobieyc 4y ago
This gives you a good overview of what web3 is https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
- moffkalast 4y ago
  Guy decides to build a couple of dApps... and immediately makes a pyramid scheme. I just can't, hahahah
- janalsncm 4y ago
  Seems like “web3” has completely missed the mark and is actually highly centralized, arguably more so than web2. If I had to guess, it’s because expediency requires it. If you’re in the middle of a gold rush, first principles like decentralization are quickly supplanted by principles like “line goes up”.
  - sshine 4y ago
    > Seems like “web3” has completely missed the mark and is actually highly centralized, arguably more so than web2. In the sense that the “web3” brand is mostly used to make proof-of-concept and crypto startups in the Ethereum ecosystem, which is just one ecosystem, and a highly centralised one at that, 100%. Creating a decentralised web is extremely difficult. Most Ethereum web3 projects are more like concept art within a research project.
    - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
      > Creating a decentralised web is extremely difficult We’ve had it for years: tor’s .onion sites. And look how popular they are… when was the last time you visited one? Technically, You could say Web2 sites are decentralized, by the way: most include JS, CSS, and images from different domains and servers.
      - q-big 4y ago
        > We’ve had it for years: tor’s .onion sites. And look how popular they are… when was the last time you visited one? Don't ask this kind of rhetorical question on HN - HN is exactly where you can find a lot of audience that can honestly answer this question with "today" or "yesterday". :-D
paxys 4y ago
> Whenever I try to learn about it the discussion digresses into blockchain pyramid schemes that clearly won't scale and other such nonsense Congratulations, you understand exactly what web3 is.
- whymauri 4y ago
  I feel like crypto meant something different in the early days. I think the 2017/2018 bull run with the BitConnect collapse is where we start seeing major faults in the crypto ecosystem. The NFT/DAO and VC boom is the ideological nail in the coffin for me. I guess that's what people cal Web3... so perhaps you are right.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Nah, scamming was there basically from the start, it's just that every iteration of it has been more egregious than before (NFTs today, ICOs in the previous iteration...) The good news is that it's hard to imagine how it could get any worse, the bad news is that perhaps I am just lacking imagination ?
twic 4y ago
I am also skeptical of it. I think the idea is that if you have pervasive microtransactions, and smart contracts which can participate in them, then you can easily create web applications where revenues are shared with users, in a transparent and predictable way. Consider Facebook. Facebook is an advertising platform: advertisers pay money in exchange for users looking at ads; users look at ads. But the users don't receive the money! Facebook keeps the money. A Web 3.0 version could pass some fraction of the advertisers' money on to each user; the amount passed on could be based on various aspects of the user's activity, to incentivise them to do things which increase the value of the ads (looking at ads, attracting other users to the site, etc), and to not do things which decrease the value of the ads (driving other users away from the site, posting naughty content, etc). The fundamental theorem of Web 3.0, as i understand it, is that this is both better for users (they get paid), and also better for site operators (users will be attracted by the prospect of getting paid). There are problems with this, even on its own terms. Firstly, every site now has to be structured around some sort of transaction, where somebody is prepared to pay. You can't just have people hanging out aimlessly. Now, maybe that just means that Web 3.0 isn't universal, and there are sites where it doesn't make sense. But the best places on the net have always been places where people hang out aimlessly, so this seems like a substantial lacuna. Secondly, detailed, mechanically applied incentives often end up driving behaviour that isn't what the setter really wanted; you end up with everyone breeding cobras etc. Web 3.0 sites might end up not being better for users or operators. Thirdly, a Web 3.0 site will be less profitable for its operator than an equivalent Web 2.0 site, so it will (often) be less attractive as a thing for an entrepreneur to build. I suppose the theory predicts that Web 3.0 sites will outcompete Web 2.0 sites, so entrepreneurs won't have a choice. Then there are problems where the theory interacts with reality. We already have transactions, without using cryptocurrencies, and as long as users are happy to batch up payments and withdrawals, transactions on sites themselves can be arbitrarily micro. We don't have smart contracts without blockchains, so users would have to trust operators to apply incentives fairly; but people already trust all sorts of companies to do that (credit card rewards, supermarket loyalty points, MMORPG XP, etc), so this isn't a real obstacle. If we wanted to build sites like this, we already could! And then there are the general cryptocurrency / blockchain problems. For every one genuine and sensible attempt to build a site like this, there will be a hundred which are genuine but ill-conceived, and ten thousand which are scams. This is pretty much a market for lemons. So i'm not sure there is any reason for anybody outside of the crypto scam sphere to care about it. It won't take off, and if it did, it would be crap.
musicale 4y ago
> I don't even understand what Web3 is. > blockchain pyramid schemes Sounds about right.
killthebuddha 4y ago
One piece that is for some reason insanely undervalued right now is: a global key sharing system with a baked-in reputation mechanism (you can burn cash to prove to the world you care about your public key). Combined with a human-readable naming system (like https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/ or https://www.lens.xyz/ https://www.lens.xyz/), you've got the world's simplest and most useful auth system. SIWE (https://login.xyz/ https://login.xyz/) is going to be the de-facto auth standard for all new web applications at some point in the near-ish future.
- naet 4y ago
  I've used multiple crypto based sign in mechanisms and own a (tezos) domain, and I absolutely do not think it is the future or going to go very mainstream. Maybe I'm wrong, but crypto-as-auth seems highly problematic in my experience. Perhaps the biggest issue is that if you lose your key you have no recourse to recover your identity. Another big issue is paying fees or waiting for transactions when I shouldn't have to, like updating some profile information or logging in to a service. I don't want to use any form of financial identifier or financial account to sign in to any non financial related web service for obvious reasons. There isn't really a decentralization imo if you're using metamask or kukai or other wallet service, it doesn't seem very secure, and it's a pain or flat out unsupported to use anything else. And for all these & other related drawbacks, I just don't see any upside over tradition auth systems.
wombat-man 4y ago
Feels like the "meat" centers around smart contracts and stuff, but from what I can tell it mostly breaks down to exchanging value via blockchain transactions. Maybe it's building to something awesome that I can't understand yet, but right now it's hard for me to buy the vague promises from various web3 promoters. I've been hearing "it's still early days" for quite a while now.
mattwilsonn888 4y ago
Web3, in good faith, and sophisticated vision, is taking the ability to authorize digital privilege without oversight and working backwards to scale that ability down to the minutia of online interaction. Bitcoin achieves it for the narrow privilege of publishing small amounts of block data to it's chain. It's important for the security of Bitcoin that this is what the novice would say is "inefficient" - but the minutia online activity is far lower stakes and therefore naive proclamations that Web3 is all Web2 data hosted on blockchain is an embarrassing suggestion - there are extremely basic techniques like hashing data in Merkle Trees as a timestamp service that any cryptographer would reach for before adding arbitrary data to a blockchain. Techniques like that and systems which allow one to own their identity independent of corporations or Public Key Authorities are the basis. Obviously it has a long way to go - but try not to mistake your obtuse guess for what is possible.
kuramitropolis 4y ago
It's a psyop to divert mindshare from those P2P networks that actually do something.
School-Cotton 4y ago
> Whenever I try to learn about it the discussion digresses into blockchain pyramid schemes that clearly won't scale and other such nonsense. You understand it perfectly.
jonahbenton 4y ago
I'll give you a serious answer. Certainly web3 is used by lots of different people to mean lots of different things. And many of those people are there to scam. Part of web3 are DAOs, corporate entities with both a legal presence as well as a presence on a public blockchain system of record. The DAO is an organization where people perform work in the context of workflows and incentives. The workflows and incentives are called a protocol. The protocol is implemented in code, and the record of activities are on the blockchain. Governance of the protocol occurs in the non-blockchain legal organization. There are many entities- many non-profits and public service entities, passive management entities like real estate management, many others- that in the future could be much more fairly, sustainably, and transparently operated as DAOs. Much- very much- has to be done still, of course. But I am confident that in 10-20 years participation in DAOs will be common and a net benefit to society. Cheers.
phire 4y ago
Arguably Web3 is two things: 1. An ill-defined buzzword with some vague concepts to try and "fix" aspect of the current web. Nobody can really agree what it is or isn't. 2. The crypto-bros various attempt(s) to implement their special vision of this buzzword, mostly in an attempt create a reason for cryptocurrency to have some kind of intrinsic value. > Why would anybody outside of the crypto scam sphere care about it if that were the case? People generally don't, but that doesn't so crptobros continually trying to "gaslight" people into thinking it's going to be a thing. The technique worked quite well when used for bitcoin, why not try it again?

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/
  - ipython 4y ago
    What international bank transfer costs “thousands” of dollars to complete? What ethereum transaction only costs 3% to complete? Are you saying that a retailer accepting crypto will suddenly no longer need to “eat” the transaction costs because… crypto?
    - Tenoke 4y ago
      Any sufficiently large transaction costs less than 3% on Ethereum. MetaMask claims a transfer would cost me 63 cents, so a pure Eth transfer of more than $22 for example. Though of course you can do it a lot cheaper on L2s.
    - chrisco255 4y ago
      Every transfer service has transfer limits. Have you ever tried to send $1M or $10M internationally? What service provider would you go through to execute the transaction? What are their fees? Not only will your transaction be delayed as much as weeks, you'll have additional forms to fill out and fees and expenses associated with such a transfer. Even more so if you are converting to another currency. On Ethereum, you can execute a swap from one currency to another (0.3% fee) and have the transfer execute to anyone in the world in 15 seconds. Even in a highly congested time on the network, that will cost at most a few dozen dollars. Doesn't matter if you're sending $1K or $1B. Crypto isn't ready for retail use cases yet, but it's within the next few years (less than 3) that it gets there. Retail transactions will occur on rollups. The retailers will pay transaction fees of a few pennies to a few dozen cents. It will not be percentage based on the transaction value as VISA, AMEX, etc currently get away with.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- miracle2k 4y ago
  And yet, Tornado Cash is still running.
  - m00dy 4y ago
    I'm just wondering what would happen if there is a court order to take down a smart contract.
    - m4jor 4y ago
      It would be like a court order to ban encryption. Its just math. You cant do it and it would be meaningless.
chrisco255 4y ago
It is powerful. The contracts run 24/7 with 100% uptime. Hayden Adams created Uniswap with about 1000 lines of code using an elegant xy=k formula to create the first good automated market maker, Uniswap. It essentially replaces much of the functionality of an order book on a stock exchange, except it's decentralized, global and permissionless. Plenty of other good examples in web3. https://app.uniswap.org/ https://app.uniswap.org/
- WalterSear 4y ago
  > Put bluntly, the Ethereum “world computer” has roughly 1/5,000 of the compute power of a Raspberry Pi 4! https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/web3-fraud https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/web3-fraud
  - zeroclip 4y ago
    Who said Ethereum aims to be as fast as a regular computer, or even a raspberry pi?
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      ^ Basically sums up what Ethereum is and isn't If a Pi solves your use case, for God's sake don't use the EVM. If a Pi doesn't solve your use case, because {particular reason}, then consider the EVM as an option.
      - Tenoke 4y ago
        You can't really run Uniswap and expect it to be useful on a Pi for obvious reasons so a Pi doesn't solve the same issues.
- leonsegal 4y ago
  are there any non-crypto examples?
  - 4y ago
derefr 4y ago
You don't, actually, though. You only put what little stuff that people might distrust if any one party had centralized control over — like ownership — into smart-contract state. Everything else is fine to be stuffed into a database or centralized web backend somewhere; or just left to everyone individually to derive + implement themselves however they like. For example: CryptoKitties. The only things in the on-chain state of CryptoKitties' contracts, are the kitties' ownerships, and their "genes" (an entropy blob, a bit like Pokemon https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Individual_values https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Individual_values.) Because these are the two things that, if they were entirely in the hands of CryptoKitties themselves, you'd be suspicious that they might "cheat" on, by e.g. making their friends special kitties with genes nobody else can have; or deciding one day that kitties that aren't "cared for" should be forcibly transferred back to an "adoption agency." If either of these things were found to be possible, the value of kitties would quickly drop to zero. Meanwhile, what exactly a kitty's genes translate to in terms of actual kitty features, is dictated by some arbitrary centralized Javascript on the CryptoKitties website. Nobody distrusts CryptoKitties on this aspect, because it doesn't really impact the value of their investment relative to other people's. If the same gene makes kitties render with wings one day and vampire fangs the next, that might upset people, but it won't make them do a mass sell-off of their kitties. After all, CryptoKitties could always change it back, so why would you sell "early" rather than wait to see if they do? Or, in short: you put data in a smart contract if a game-theoretic prerequisite of your system working out is for certain data to be only updated in an openly-audited, multilaterally-agreed-upon way. (Good non-crypto example: the dealer's shuffle between hands at a card game at a casino. Done right in front of all the players, because otherwise they wouldn't trust it.)

miohtama 4y ago

Web3 was the term created 2014 to originally describe three properties (protocols) that decentralised networks can bring to web without need to rely on centralised service providers. Web + 3 = web3: - eth: making transactions with smart contracts - bzz: decentralised storage - save files - whisper: peer-to-peer messaging, chat, etc. More about the history of web3 in my Twitter thread here: https://mobile.twitter.com/moo9000/status/1484463889224024064 https://mobile.twitter.com/moo9000/status/148446388922402406... However the usage of the term and it meaning has corrupted over the years, especially when marketing people took it over.

SrslyJosh 4y ago

> Certainly Web3 isn't just crypto-bros trying to take over the web? That's exactly what it is. They don't want anything new or innovative, they just want to be able to levy a tax on what everyone does online.

sdiacom 4y ago
It's a bit sillier than that, since for the time being, crypto-bros are making money not by levying a tax on what people do online, but by speculating on the potential future income from levying a tax on what people do online. Convincing others that there's imaginary future money on taxing online interactions is where the real present money is actually made. In a way, this turns their biggest weakness (they can't actually achieve their goal) into their biggest strength (their audience is people who aren't tech-literate enough to understand that they can't actually achieve their goal)
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  Where can I read about this? What tax is being proposed? Staking?
- gernb 4y ago
  The crazy thing is Google, Microsoft, Amazon (and I'm pretty sure Apple and Meta too) have Web3 stuff https://cloud.google.com/web3 https://cloud.google.com/web3 https://mybuild.microsoft.com/en-US/sessions/dce02ee4-1c0d-4999-9962-92910000bd90?source=sessions https://mybuild.microsoft.com/en-US/sessions/dce02ee4-1c0d-4... https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/startups/register-today-for-aws-web3-ready-on-september-15/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/startups/register-today-for-aws...
  - jazzyjackson 4y ago
    You don't get rich digging for gold, you get rich selling shovels.
threeseed 4y ago
Also about VCs having a lot of excess money that they siphoned from LPs during the zero interest rate period. And since Web2 has largely picked its main winners and losers an opportunity existed to reset the game and pick another set. Only this time they would be the ones to invest in the next Apple, Google etc.

chrisco255 4y ago

Applications centered on user ownership created from decentralization of the data models and hosts themselves.

jfghi 4y ago
?, Most of the websites visited have powerful servers serving them with data that is held privately.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  It doesn't take that powerful of a server to serve static websites. And some data is held in open data stores, such as Filecoin or Arweave. Some data is held on-chain, as ENS does, for example.
jay_kyburz 4y ago
I get it. It sounds good. But I come from the generation that knows information wants to be free.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  Nothing is free. Whatever we got for free from Web2 came with a surveillance, censorship and ad-based regime attached to it.
  - jazzyjackson 4y ago
    Torrenting continues to be free, because when we were growing up we learned to share.
threeseed 4y ago
Except that (a) there is no requirement to put all data on the blockchain and (b) it is prohibitively expensive to do so. So you end up with a situation like OpenSea. Half of the information about the NFT is on the chain but then the other half is in its own private database e.g. ratings, reviews etc.

zeroclip 4y ago

There is no single company driving the PR and marketing for Web3, so the term is whatever somebody wants it to be. But the vague way to describe it is an approach to building web apps with decentralized public blockchains and smart contracts, like DeFi or ENS.

andsoitis 4y ago
Enabling what? Use cases > technology shiny objects.
- threeseed 4y ago
  Money laundering, gambling and stock trading for kids of all ages. Also the whole rug-pulling game has been an impressive transfer of wealth from VCs -> influencers.
  - joeax 4y ago
    Sounds more like the early days of web 1.0
    - threeseed 4y ago
      I was on the internet in the early days of Web 1.0 None of those things were happening.
- zeroclip 4y ago
  It's a distributed ledger, that you can deploy a computer program to. Use cases extend outward from there.
  - andsoitis 4y ago
    Can you articulate one end user benefit / use case that’s not possible today or that would be better than today?

WalterSear 4y ago

It's more than just crypto-bros trying to take over the web. It's an italian serial conman in a dark room somewhere, pressing "print" on software that generates ostensibly a dollar-equivalent crypto currency out of thin air, wrapped in a network of criminal enterprises that is currently using special 'insider only' versions of those tokens (tether-trons, vs tether-eths) to facilitate the theft of the life savings of a generation of middle class chinese, wrapped in a nesting doll of scams and pyramid schemes, wrapped in the greed, hubris, and legitimate desperation of a generation of 1st world hustlers, all wrapped in crypto-bros trying to take over the world. If it was just crypto-bros, there wouldn't be anywhere near so much smoke to confuse/conflate with fire: the market manipulation being facilitated by the dirty (and clean, albeit grifted) money entering the system makes the whole thing seem financially bigger than it really is. But despite all the smoke making, it is still just a fart in a colander: the entire crypto market cap, as fanciful and hyperbolic as it is, is still less than the market cap of Apple. The really astounding part is that so much of this activity is being recorded on publicly accessible server ledgers, in real-time.

muxator 4y ago
> It's an ITALIAN serial conman... Wow. I have been guilty of this very same blunder many times and I understand it's just a joke, but please realize that it is not pleasant to be on the wrong side of a joke for no reason. I'll be more careful with my generalizations in the future. I am confident you will be, too. Thanks.
- cbozeman 4y ago
  - jjulius 4y ago
    Yikes.
- hervature 4y ago
  Following HN guidelines, I assumed they meant that Italy is aiding and abetting the effort. My low effort search yielded [1] immediately. [1] - https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/10/05/italy-has-a-registry-of-73-unvetted-crypto-firms/ https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/10/05/italy-has-a-regis...

felipellrocha 4y ago

Web3 are browser-based wallets (or mobile based) that can authorize transactions in a blockchain securely because it's separate from the web page itself. When I use metamask to buy something on the chain, it'll ask me to confirm if that's ok or not. That's all that the developer of the page can do, they can ask metamask to confirm the transaction is safe. Once it's confirmed, a one-time unique token for the transaction is created, and used to execute the transaction. This can work because the browser provides the secure separation between app and wallet. Otherwise, no one would trust a 3rd party to run transactions for them on the blockchain.

dwaite 4y ago
Is Apple Pay considered Web3?
SkyMarshal 4y ago
> This can work because the browser provides the secure separation between app and wallet. I thought the app and wallet were the same thing. What's the difference here?
- derefr 4y ago
  The "app" (Distributed App / DApp) is some arbitrary thing written by a developer, running in a sandbox in a tab in your browser. The "wallet" (Metamask) is a browser extension containing a set of pairs of (RPC gateway URI for a given blockchain, cryptographic private key for an account on said blockchain.) It can also proxy through to other such "wallets", e.g. "hardware wallets" (smart cards.) "web3" is an API (like any DOM API) that the browser extension exposes to app, allowing the app to ask the wallet to do things (where the wallet then asks the user to confirm that they want to do those things); and, through the wallet's connection to blockchains, to watch for things to happen on a blockchain. Together, these additional APIs allow web3 "DApps" to transact on blockchains, and to observe what happens in response to their transactions. Example DApps: - Gnosis Safe (https://gnosis-safe.io/ https://gnosis-safe.io/) — an interface for deploying and managing multi-signature smart contracts (i.e. trusts whose assets are controlled by M-of-N voting) - Sushiswap (https://www.sushi.com/swap https://www.sushi.com/swap) — an interface for creating and managing Automated Market Maker liquidity pools - OpenSea (https://opensea.io/ https://opensea.io/) — a marketplace for buying and selling NFTs On all of these websites, you'll notice that instead of registering an account, there is a button that CTAs you to "Connect a Wallet." This is requesting permission to communicate with the web3 agent installed as an extension in your browser.

kobieyc 4y ago

This gives you a good overview of what web3 is https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

moffkalast 4y ago
Guy decides to build a couple of dApps... and immediately makes a pyramid scheme. I just can't, hahahah
janalsncm 4y ago
Seems like “web3” has completely missed the mark and is actually highly centralized, arguably more so than web2. If I had to guess, it’s because expediency requires it. If you’re in the middle of a gold rush, first principles like decentralization are quickly supplanted by principles like “line goes up”.
- sshine 4y ago
  > Seems like “web3” has completely missed the mark and is actually highly centralized, arguably more so than web2. In the sense that the “web3” brand is mostly used to make proof-of-concept and crypto startups in the Ethereum ecosystem, which is just one ecosystem, and a highly centralised one at that, 100%. Creating a decentralised web is extremely difficult. Most Ethereum web3 projects are more like concept art within a research project.
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    > Creating a decentralised web is extremely difficult We’ve had it for years: tor’s .onion sites. And look how popular they are… when was the last time you visited one? Technically, You could say Web2 sites are decentralized, by the way: most include JS, CSS, and images from different domains and servers.
    - q-big 4y ago
      > We’ve had it for years: tor’s .onion sites. And look how popular they are… when was the last time you visited one? Don't ask this kind of rhetorical question on HN - HN is exactly where you can find a lot of audience that can honestly answer this question with "today" or "yesterday". :-D

paxys 4y ago

> Whenever I try to learn about it the discussion digresses into blockchain pyramid schemes that clearly won't scale and other such nonsense Congratulations, you understand exactly what web3 is.

whymauri 4y ago
I feel like crypto meant something different in the early days. I think the 2017/2018 bull run with the BitConnect collapse is where we start seeing major faults in the crypto ecosystem. The NFT/DAO and VC boom is the ideological nail in the coffin for me. I guess that's what people cal Web3... so perhaps you are right.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Nah, scamming was there basically from the start, it's just that every iteration of it has been more egregious than before (NFTs today, ICOs in the previous iteration...) The good news is that it's hard to imagine how it could get any worse, the bad news is that perhaps I am just lacking imagination ?

twic 4y ago

I am also skeptical of it. I think the idea is that if you have pervasive microtransactions, and smart contracts which can participate in them, then you can easily create web applications where revenues are shared with users, in a transparent and predictable way. Consider Facebook. Facebook is an advertising platform: advertisers pay money in exchange for users looking at ads; users look at ads. But the users don't receive the money! Facebook keeps the money. A Web 3.0 version could pass some fraction of the advertisers' money on to each user; the amount passed on could be based on various aspects of the user's activity, to incentivise them to do things which increase the value of the ads (looking at ads, attracting other users to the site, etc), and to not do things which decrease the value of the ads (driving other users away from the site, posting naughty content, etc). The fundamental theorem of Web 3.0, as i understand it, is that this is both better for users (they get paid), and also better for site operators (users will be attracted by the prospect of getting paid). There are problems with this, even on its own terms. Firstly, every site now has to be structured around some sort of transaction, where somebody is prepared to pay. You can't just have people hanging out aimlessly. Now, maybe that just means that Web 3.0 isn't universal, and there are sites where it doesn't make sense. But the best places on the net have always been places where people hang out aimlessly, so this seems like a substantial lacuna. Secondly, detailed, mechanically applied incentives often end up driving behaviour that isn't what the setter really wanted; you end up with everyone breeding cobras etc. Web 3.0 sites might end up not being better for users or operators. Thirdly, a Web 3.0 site will be less profitable for its operator than an equivalent Web 2.0 site, so it will (often) be less attractive as a thing for an entrepreneur to build. I suppose the theory predicts that Web 3.0 sites will outcompete Web 2.0 sites, so entrepreneurs won't have a choice. Then there are problems where the theory interacts with reality. We already have transactions, without using cryptocurrencies, and as long as users are happy to batch up payments and withdrawals, transactions on sites themselves can be arbitrarily micro. We don't have smart contracts without blockchains, so users would have to trust operators to apply incentives fairly; but people already trust all sorts of companies to do that (credit card rewards, supermarket loyalty points, MMORPG XP, etc), so this isn't a real obstacle. If we wanted to build sites like this, we already could! And then there are the general cryptocurrency / blockchain problems. For every one genuine and sensible attempt to build a site like this, there will be a hundred which are genuine but ill-conceived, and ten thousand which are scams. This is pretty much a market for lemons. So i'm not sure there is any reason for anybody outside of the crypto scam sphere to care about it. It won't take off, and if it did, it would be crap.

musicale 4y ago

> I don't even understand what Web3 is. > blockchain pyramid schemes Sounds about right.

killthebuddha 4y ago

One piece that is for some reason insanely undervalued right now is: a global key sharing system with a baked-in reputation mechanism (you can burn cash to prove to the world you care about your public key). Combined with a human-readable naming system (like https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/ or https://www.lens.xyz/ https://www.lens.xyz/), you've got the world's simplest and most useful auth system. SIWE (https://login.xyz/ https://login.xyz/) is going to be the de-facto auth standard for all new web applications at some point in the near-ish future.

naet 4y ago
I've used multiple crypto based sign in mechanisms and own a (tezos) domain, and I absolutely do not think it is the future or going to go very mainstream. Maybe I'm wrong, but crypto-as-auth seems highly problematic in my experience. Perhaps the biggest issue is that if you lose your key you have no recourse to recover your identity. Another big issue is paying fees or waiting for transactions when I shouldn't have to, like updating some profile information or logging in to a service. I don't want to use any form of financial identifier or financial account to sign in to any non financial related web service for obvious reasons. There isn't really a decentralization imo if you're using metamask or kukai or other wallet service, it doesn't seem very secure, and it's a pain or flat out unsupported to use anything else. And for all these & other related drawbacks, I just don't see any upside over tradition auth systems.

wombat-man 4y ago

Feels like the "meat" centers around smart contracts and stuff, but from what I can tell it mostly breaks down to exchanging value via blockchain transactions. Maybe it's building to something awesome that I can't understand yet, but right now it's hard for me to buy the vague promises from various web3 promoters. I've been hearing "it's still early days" for quite a while now.

mattwilsonn888 4y ago

Web3, in good faith, and sophisticated vision, is taking the ability to authorize digital privilege without oversight and working backwards to scale that ability down to the minutia of online interaction. Bitcoin achieves it for the narrow privilege of publishing small amounts of block data to it's chain. It's important for the security of Bitcoin that this is what the novice would say is "inefficient" - but the minutia online activity is far lower stakes and therefore naive proclamations that Web3 is all Web2 data hosted on blockchain is an embarrassing suggestion - there are extremely basic techniques like hashing data in Merkle Trees as a timestamp service that any cryptographer would reach for before adding arbitrary data to a blockchain. Techniques like that and systems which allow one to own their identity independent of corporations or Public Key Authorities are the basis. Obviously it has a long way to go - but try not to mistake your obtuse guess for what is possible.

kuramitropolis 4y ago

It's a psyop to divert mindshare from those P2P networks that actually do something.

School-Cotton 4y ago

> Whenever I try to learn about it the discussion digresses into blockchain pyramid schemes that clearly won't scale and other such nonsense. You understand it perfectly.

jonahbenton 4y ago

I'll give you a serious answer. Certainly web3 is used by lots of different people to mean lots of different things. And many of those people are there to scam. Part of web3 are DAOs, corporate entities with both a legal presence as well as a presence on a public blockchain system of record. The DAO is an organization where people perform work in the context of workflows and incentives. The workflows and incentives are called a protocol. The protocol is implemented in code, and the record of activities are on the blockchain. Governance of the protocol occurs in the non-blockchain legal organization. There are many entities- many non-profits and public service entities, passive management entities like real estate management, many others- that in the future could be much more fairly, sustainably, and transparently operated as DAOs. Much- very much- has to be done still, of course. But I am confident that in 10-20 years participation in DAOs will be common and a net benefit to society. Cheers.

phire 4y ago

Arguably Web3 is two things: 1. An ill-defined buzzword with some vague concepts to try and "fix" aspect of the current web. Nobody can really agree what it is or isn't. 2. The crypto-bros various attempt(s) to implement their special vision of this buzzword, mostly in an attempt create a reason for cryptocurrency to have some kind of intrinsic value. > Why would anybody outside of the crypto scam sphere care about it if that were the case? People generally don't, but that doesn't so crptobros continually trying to "gaslight" people into thinking it's going to be a thing. The technique worked quite well when used for bitcoin, why not try it again?