15 ms·

But, aren't you folks web2?

143 points by pawanrawal 4y ago

KlausWagner89 4y ago
005 4y ago
As someone who has worked within this industry, I absolutely hate these terms. Throwing things on a blockchain is a mile backwards for most use cases.
- simplotek 4y ago
  > Throwing things on a blockchain is a mile backwards for most use cases. But the buzzwords. Think about the buzzwords.
mjburgess 4y ago
For the first time my anger over crypto moves into genuine concern. Is an entire generation of young people experiencing a kind of "pokemonisation" of crypto well into early adulthood? In other words, is a generation of 20-somethings wasting the better part of that decade on this tech, in these scams? If so, this feels new (?). We're not talking about the chain-letter crazes of the 20s/30s, the housewife pyramid schemes of the 60/70s, the ponzi schemes of traditional finance. We're talking about a "pyrimidization" of technical skill acquisition itself, wherein we dont teach classical mechanics -- that's too "physics2" -- but crypto-mechanics which solves no problems of the prior, and charges. If this is happening the issues around crypto are perhaps much more severe than I, at least, initially thought. Yes, $100bn will be lost in a vareity of scams deposited, in the end, into the accounts of charlatans, children and gurus. BUT, meh, so it goes. But a cultural take-over of the technical skill space by a crypto religion is far more series and needs addressing ASAP. Someone needs to explain to the developing generation that this isnt the future.
- k__ 4y ago
  When I graduated, mobile was the big thing. That's old now. So, what to do to make a name for you? What big new field is there where you don't have to compete with people that have 10 times the experience than you? Independently of what you think web3 might solve or doesn't solve, it's still just programming. Someone learning cryptography and coding will get a job in other places.
  - mjburgess 4y ago
    That's a hopeful upside, that, say an 18 is learning data technology, programming etc. via crypto. My concern is whether that's what they are learning; too early to tell, of course. One thing I'm also thinking is that crypto functions like "wokeism" in the sense it seems a parallel right-wing version of the same kind of cultural reformation. At the same time large retail biz profess their diversity credentials, their heads of research explain how crypto is on some timeline. At the same time a 20yo engages in activism for X, another engages in crypto for Y. Do we need to "end the patriachy" or "put metriocracy on the blockchain" ? My concern isnt just the skills issue, but also, everything bound up in the culture around it. I think we're seeing Tech get to a level of cultural prestige that invites on-mass young-buyin, and mass cultish movements. No doubt finance experienced similar in the 80s. But, I think, as finance people eventually learned to inculcate some level of cultural scepticism; tech seems it has yet to do so. In otherwords, we're unprepared for this coming's generation having bought into a tech-culture landscape which is composed of scams.
    - deebosong 4y ago
      Not saying I disagree with your concerns. But didn't Banksy say something similar about young artists being funneled into the for-profit corporate propaganda machine, trading their art skills and unique perspective (and expression of their interpretations) of the world at large, for a corporate paycheck? “The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.” Seems like every generation will need to battle with selling out, no matter the industry or era. But that being said, the web3 stuff feels pointedly scammier than even mobile/ social (which critics skewered even as it was burgeoning/ proliferating when it did, and people still rightfully criticize it today). ––– edited for posting wrong Banksy quote
- nathias 4y ago
  - ekidd 4y ago
    At this point, web3 is becoming strongly associated with high-profile scams, many of them likely criminal. It's also associated with people who won't stop talking about how the blockchain will make your teeth whiter, or something equally unlikely. Blockchains are just decentralized Merkle trees. Merkle trees are a cool trick (look at git!). But the cost of decentralizing them, Bitcoin-style, has been massive carbon emissions. And the gain from decentralizing them? It's usually pretty tiny. I mean, I guess zero-trust decentralization makes it impossible to recover your coins if they're stolen or lost by an exchange, but that doesn't exactly seem like a huge advantage. /s In most of the financial blockchain pitches I've heard, you could replace proof-of-work via a time-stamping service run by a trusted clearing house. Just have someone like DTC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depository_Trust_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depository_Trust_Company keep track of the HEAD of git repository, and you'd be 95% of the way there. They already handle 100s of trillions of dollars of transactions a year with much less risk and drama than the average crypto exchange.
    - nathias 4y ago
      - z33k 4y ago
        The history of financial market regulation is written in blood. It started out very much like the crypto grift space where anything goes, until governments wised up to the negative effects and decided to regulate.
      - ceejayoz 4y ago
        If you're hoping "web3" is gonna negatively impact the power of well-off westerners, you're likely to be disappointed.
    - cameronh90 4y ago
- dopidop 4y ago
  I whole fully agree with you. That being said, this last sentence… > Someone needs to explain to the developing generation that this isnt the future.
  - mjburgess 4y ago
    I think crypto is much more like pokemon than "the internet". Much more like "coin collectables" of the 80s, than financial derivatives. It's an attempt to destabalise domestic and international economic and financial systems that if ever even got close to being useful, would immediately be shut down. The moment I can walk into a random shop and buy a chocolate bar with cyrpto is the moment the whole system will collapse.
- sdiacom 4y ago
  I hang out in spaces for people entering tech, and I see the crypto advocates and grifters creeping in and around these spaces. It's extremely successful. Lately, I'm even seeing crypto grifts specifically aimed at people entering tech from non-traditional backgrounds, weaponising the language and discourse of diversity and empowerment to trick them into not just buying into the grift, but code the grift for them. For someone entering tech, everything they see is new and exciting and mystical and hard to understand. Without prior context, it's hard to see why overengineered crypto nonsense is different from all the other overengineered nonsense they're learning about at break-neck speed. For many of them, the only reason to enter tech to begin with is to earn a decent living. They lack the technical background to understand if what they're being paid to build is a grift or a legitimate business, and in the current market, it's increasingly in their best interest to not understand the difference. I believe we lost when we collectively accepted "software is eating the world" as an inevitable positive maxim of our reality. In retrospect, it seems self-evident that the end stage of this ideology-slash-self-fulfilling-prophecy is a socially-legitimized software-based "value" chain that ingests raw wealth and produces absolutely nothing of value.
  - hocuspocus 4y ago
    I wouldn't really worry about people with a college degree. At one point or another you remember you classes on distributed systems and you realize the entire space is bullshit. I agree we'll see bootcamp grads and other people from non-traditional backgrounds get burned but it also gives them opportunities that wouldn't exist otherwise, so I'm not sure it's a net negative overall. The much bigger issue lies within politicians, the media and the general public who still believe we should let the scams happen for the sake of innovation, despite zero evidence thereof. Sadly I think we need a few more catastrophic events like FTX before people understand there's nothing to salvage.
    - enqk 4y ago
      Are you sure that college degrees inoculate people against bullshit?
      - 4y ago
- bsenftner 4y ago
- MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  Capitalism means that the best and the brightest are working on what makes the most money not on what society needs. However one should not overstate sociopaths. Lots of people are still going into healthcare or teaching because there's more to life than money.
  - paulgb 4y ago
    The tragic irony is that many of those teachers’ pension funds were the very ones making it lucrative for sociopaths to build crypto companies by blindly throwing money at them.
  - lupire 4y ago
    Healthcare and teaching are seeing severe attrition.
- csomar 4y ago
  I had an interesting discussion with a young "developer" studying in "cyber-security". The guy was clearly out of his depth, and had a little idea about Internet security themes. He was struggling about finding an internship. I told him the market is still hot for tech people and security in general. His answer? "It's hard for me because I'm a person of color". I was a bit shocked there. He was just a bit browner than me, and far from black. It's going to be an interesting generation...
  - lupire 4y ago
    "person of color" vs "white" isn't the same as colorism, it also includes other racial markers. Melania Trump is darks than many "black" "people of color".
- birracerveza 4y ago
  What the hell is this comment? And top comment on HN, what? If the technology is useful it will be used. If it's not it will die on its own. You can NOT police technical skill. What kind of mentality is this...?
  - m0llusk 4y ago
    What technology? What use? The piece starts with a relatively straightforward value play being cast as not web3 enough. What even does that mean? And we are not supposed to talk about it, just let it crash around us like a wave?
    - birracerveza 4y ago
      I am directly addressing >But a cultural take-over of the technical skill space by a crypto religion is far more series and needs addressing ASAP. The technology is blockchain, and the skills are writing/reading smart contracts, developing websites making use of Wallets, and everything else that anti-crypto folks keep screaming "IT'S USELESS, USE POSTGRES INSTEAD". If that is true, then the ecosystem will die on its own. The fact that Web3 is being banged on ad-nauseam as a marketing buzzword, muddying the waters to the point that no one is sure what the hell Web3 even is, does not undermine the technological foundation, which is blockchain. Again, if blockchain IS useless then it will die off, but ... Bitcoin is still going strong a decade in, despite all the bullshit that surrounds it, and is likely impossible to kill off completely. That alone has merit, IMO. Of course, you are free to disagree. You can talk about it, but actively advocating that "cultural take-over of the technical skill space" needs "addressing" is complete and utter insanity. Blind hatred. You people have become as religious as crypto folks, except in the opposite direction. I've seen people advocating about blacklisting people who worked in crypto/web3 as well. You are completely losing it. I am honestly worried.
  - amadeuspagel 4y ago
    People criticize technology all the time on this forum. Is this pointless because useless technology would die on its own anyway? Maybe eventually, but only after wasting resources.
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  Very, very, very few people work in the cryptography or even blockchain aspects of any element of web3. The overwhelming majority of dev in the space looks exactly like web2. You whip up an Express/Lambda/whatever API backend that (at it's most "blockchain") uses a library like web3.js to talk to a blockchain node from a commercial service provider via HTTP or websockets. More likely than that you go further up the stack and use a really easy to consume library[0] from your API provider and don't even really get exposed to the nitty-gritty blockchain methods exposed by a lower level library like web3.js. Literally import lib, provide your API key, and do things like: const nftsForOwner = await alchemy.nft.getNftsForOwner("0xshah.eth"); I find it fascinating to meet devs in the space who say they're a "blockchain developer" and after a tiny amount of conversation you realize there's no difference whatsoever between what they're doing and wiring up a backend + frontend solution to something like Square (or whatever). So I agree with you completely - when these crypto companies or whatever start laying off left and right you can be certain the vast majority of the devs in the space can use what they've learned anywhere. [0] - https://docs.alchemy.com/reference/nft-api-quickstart#alchemy-sdk-recommended https://docs.alchemy.com/reference/nft-api-quickstart#alchem...
  - pcthrowaway 4y ago
    My company put me on a "web3" project recently, and as someone who has done some kind of web development, at least at the hobby level, since 1999, I can tell you that there's quite a bit of difference with web3. I think the web skills from a decade ago translate better to web-dev today than web-dev today translates to web3 development. With web3 you have to consider the different ways to get on-chain data, and the state is all on the blockchain. Testing is a nightmare and the tooling around development and deployment are still immature. And that's before even getting to solidity or other languages you use for the "backend"
    - kkielhofner 4y ago
      Sounds like you've been at this since I have (mid-late 90s as well)! I somewhat agree with you on the state of tooling compared to web dev today but I'm not sure it matters or is terribly relevant to the point OP is making. I've been in this space one way or another for five years so prepare for a (somewhat anecdotal) "dump" that you may (hopefully) find useful for the new project that you've been put on. You mentioned Solidity so let's assume an EVM compatible chain and ecosystem. At this point I'd call anything actually on chain the "back backend". Of course Solidity is the smart contract language but due to costs, speed, etc of the chains themselves the data is all over the place... That's how we've ended up with things like The Graph[0], Ceramic[1], etc. As you've likely already experienced interacting with the chains themselves in any capacity is remarkably creaky hence the plethora of somewhat ironically centralized API providers and solutions with many layers of insane amounts of code and backend infrastructure to make things actually work for anything beyond a toy (like the various Alchemy APIs I provided an example of). This is before you get into anything like IPFS, Filecoin, etc but once again the typical interaction with these is via heavily abstracted libraries and HTTP gateways that do their best to look like any other web2 service. Smart contracts, by their nature, are rarely written and rarely deployed. If you look at some of the biggest "apps" in the space smart contracts represent a tiny fraction of the amount of dev work compared to the overall solution. Take OpenSea (as one example) they've deployed a smart contract twice in five years of operation AFAIK. If you look at their frontend and API docs it becomes clear really quickly they've done a lot more work in areas that at the risk of deploying "No true Scotsman" I would say at least 95% of the dev work in web3 is effectively web2. Now that we're talking about smart contracts, the stakes are so high there is actually a fairly robust amount of tooling IMHO. Maybe not robust compared to the state of 30 years of web development but between OpenZeppelin[2], Hardhat[3], Truffle[4], etc there's a lot out there. From everything I've seen in the space over half my decade by the time you import a bunch of OpenZeppelin contracts there's almost always very little Solidity left to be written. As traditional cryptography devs have learned "writing your own crypto" is almost always a really bad idea. If you were to look at LOC for anything in the web3 space my original point is backup up by the data. Metmask is used by 30 million people and it's all web dev (backed by an Ethereum JSON-RPC[5] interface hosted by MetaMask sponsor Infura by default)... The rest of any user facing application is your frontend pulling in ethers[6] and MAYBE a bog standard web2 service/microservice backend. Then you're off to the races. There is SQL, NoSQL, etc all over the place in web3. From my personal experience and everything I've seen I'd venture to guess that maybe 1/50 devs in the space ever touches Solidity (likely much higher). Everyone else is doing what they've always done by reading the docs for whatever JS/TS libraries they're using. I've personally worked on many projects where web2 devs became "web3/blockchain devs" in an hour - to my original point of saying you're a "blockchain developer" because you're using ethers is really funny to me. My overall point being (and to assuage the concerns of OP) the vast majority of devs that start in web3 feel right at home in web2 and vice-versa. I know exactly one dev who I would call a serious "blockchain developer". They came from a web dev background and they're all in on Cardano which meant picking up Haskell (which would send most web devs running for the hills). If a dev were to start with Cardano + Haskell I have no idea where they would end up if they left "blockchain development". [0] - https://thegraph.com/en/ https://thegraph.com/en/ [1] - https://ceramic.network/ https://ceramic.network/ [2] - https://www.openzeppelin.com/contracts https://www.openzeppelin.com/contracts [3] - https://hardhat.org/ https://hardhat.org/ [4] - https://trufflesuite.com/ https://trufflesuite.com/ [5] - https://geth.ethereum.org/docs/rpc/server https://geth.ethereum.org/docs/rpc/server [6] - https://www.npmjs.com/package/ethers https://www.npmjs.com/package/ethers
- lupire 4y ago
  The more people go work on cryptocurrency, the less competition for other tech jobs.
- caseyf 4y ago
  > For the first time my anger over crypto moves into genuine concern. Is an entire generation of young people experiencing a kind of "pokemonisation" of crypto well into early adulthood? In other words, is a generation of 20-somethings wasting the better part of that decade on this tech, in these scams? I'm a middle aged developer who spent pandemic time in "web3" (ugh) dev discords and stuff. There are scammers, sure, but mostly there are a lot of young people who are learning tech in an environment that feels fun and rebellious and honestly a little like the old internet in a way. There is a lot more happening than just people building magic ponzi boxes. It's hard to feel anything but positive about seeing people excited about learning JS or OCaml or Python or Processing. That said, truly don't understand "web3" and this obsession with things being on a blockchain. It feels like people don't know their Internet history and also I don't understand why DWeb/indie web and web3/blockchain people are fighting since I think they'd be stronger together.
  - pbronez 4y ago
    Personally, I think the Fediverse and IndieWeb are in a much stronger position. Key thing to watch: does Mastodon manage to ride the wave created by the Twitter collapse and become a socially relevant force? Even in some small communities? I'm much more bullish on small communities talking to each other with open source software (Fediverse) than magical crypto schemes that require deep economic expertise to design properly (which nobody on the project ever has). I do think Podcasting 2.0 is a neat idea. There's room in this world for micropayments. I just don't want it to be pervasive and I'm exhausted from the stream of scams.
sdiacom 4y ago
This blog post already puts way more thought into whatever "web3" is than web3 advocates do. Everything must be web3 because web3 is cool, it's the future, it's got electrolytes, it's what plants crave. It's a meaningless cargo cult.
- k__ 4y ago
  It's a bit of a straw man. Just because web3 includes many things, doesn't mean it's meaningless. Even if it makes the term harder to grasp for outsiders.
  - sdiacom 4y ago
    I would be wary of groups that rely in a strong in-group/out-group separation, where the outsiders can't understand the truthfulness and inherent value of an ideology relying on a complex web of interrelated concepts, while the insiders, who are deeply invested in both time and money into this ideology, treat it as self-evident.
k__ 4y ago
I'm in the web3 space for one year now, after working in "web2" for over 10 years. My impression of it is that people that didn't ride the rollercoaster of the dot-com era see it as their chance to get something similar. Everything is a bit more chaotic and you get better payment than in similar "web2" jobs.
- Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  What do you see it as? Are you just in it for the money? If I am a software developer hating software development who would like more money, do you know how I can learn web3 development with the goal of getting a job?
Kye 4y ago
>> "Now, web3 is a broad wildcard term that seems to revolve around a large number of concepts including decentralisation, self-sovereignty, privacy, free speech, censorship, security, BigTech, BigGov, democracy, human rights[3], monetisation, royalties, art, trust, digital rights, ownership, assets, property, proofs, cryptography, wallets … all somehow connected to a blockchain. One would be hard pressed to think of another technology term that refers to so many diverse, deeply interesting concepts." Compare to web 2.0 which simply referred to moving from pages that needed an entirely new load to do anything to pages that updated dynamically with a newly-standardized piece of functionality. Web3 has been overloaded in the same way most fake medicines have been. Web3 is essential oils for gullible nerds.
- conceptme 4y ago
  Web 2.0 was more about letting users creating the content not about SPA, Web 3.0 about the semantic web that never came to be except some niche areas, and now rebranded for crypto :P
  - Kye 4y ago
    Maybe my memory is fuzzy, but 1.0 was all about people making the content. Or at least promising content with under construction GIFs. Everyone had a guestbook on their page. Some people even had forums and/or a blog. Everything/Nothing (E/N) pages were all the rage.
Traubenfuchs 4y ago
Having a web3 startup is just as inane as having a mongodb startup. Those technologies don‘t make anything possible that wasn‘t possible before. In any case: We are talking about this buzzwords for ~8 years now. Is there a list of useful web3 offerings by now? Any heavy hitters, killer applications? Anything besides wacky money making schemes like virtual sneakers?
- tyingq 4y ago
  The only practical thing I can think of is things where businesses have to cooperate on something and pay a third party some amount of money to be the trusted ledger. Like, for example, partnerships to exchange customer loyalty points. But even that has perils, as you could set an exchange rate but somebody has to administer/manage that. And once you're back to a managed ledger, you might as well use contractual terms for trust and a database since a blockchain isn't adding much value.
- mightybyte 4y ago
  > Having a web3 startup is just as inane as having a mongodb startup. Those technologies don‘t make anything possible that wasn‘t possible before. This is not true. The blockchain was/is a genuine technicalogical advance. It makes things possible that weren't before. From Wikipedia: "The implementation of the blockchain within bitcoin made it the first digital currency to solve the double-spending problem without the need of a trusted authority or central server." Now it's certainly true that, just like MongoDB before it, overzealous people are trying to capitalize on the fad and insert "blockchain" into places where it doesn't make any sense. But there's a very important distinction between that and your statement.
  - acdha 4y ago
    That's like saying that it's a technical advance if I make an engine powered by burning dollar bills. Yes, technically it's a thing which did not previously exist before but people do not have the problem of solving double-spending without trusting third-parties. People have problems like paying rent or selling things online — and it's quite conspicuous that when you ask Bitcoin users what they use it for other than speculation, you almost never hear an answer where you couldn't swap PayPal into the same sentence interchangeably. Now, at some point it could be cheaper but that's hardly the revolutionary advance promised in the marketing literature.
SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
> web3 is a broad wildcard term that seems to revolve around a large number of concepts including decentralisation, self-sovereignty, privacy, free speech, censorship, security, BigTech, BigGov, democracy, human rights That would cover Mastodon, right? And mastodon is not web3, in fact doesn't want to be associated with the term "web3", at all.
- dist1ll 4y ago
  Mastodon is not decentralized, it's federated. So no, it wouldn't fit any common definition of web3.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
    > Mastodon is not decentralized it's federated Are you saying that this federation is not a form of decentralization? I'm pretty sure that Mastodon is not centralised like Twitter is. This is akin to the pedant/trolls who usually pop up and say "the USA is not a democracy, it's a republic!" in conversations that compare the USA's regular elections to dictatorial autocracies. https://act.represent.us/sign/democracy-republic https://act.represent.us/sign/democracy-republic
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - dist1ll 4y ago
      Federation is a very weak form of decentralization. In practice, many federated platforms turn into cartels of giant centralized providers. It's better than Twitter, but not something I'd call decentralization.
      - SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
        > Federation is a very weak form of decentralization ... not something I'd call decentralization ... is not decentralized Uh, OK; this is not all the same claim. > In practice, many federated platforms turn into cartels of giant centralized providers Sure that's a worry; for example: email is global, so lets all use GMail. git is decentralized onto GitHub and a few other providers. I think that this tendency is not just a mastodon thing, and is a separate and wider concern though than "it is not decentralized".
a_c 4y ago
Isn't it happening all the time? Web3, crypto, AI, kubernetes, microservices, docker, server side rendering, SPA, react, graphql, backend in frontend, DevOps, DevSecOps, fullstack, mongodb, new features in mongodb that mimic sql, Restful, mobile, django/rails, agile, kanban. Some of them make sense, some of them make sense for some of the people, some will be forgotten from history. And those forgotten, will reemerge as a newfoundland
- dr-detroit 4y ago
- quonn 4y ago
  No really, because it's easy to point to many useful applications of AI, microservices, docker, SSR, SPA, react, GraphQL, etc. Even crypto. On the other hand, web3 applications virtually don't exist, so it's quite something to pretend that your application should be web3 as many now do.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  I understand this kind of reply, which seems very common. With AI, people say, "That's just what we do!" --- and likewise: No. I've always really struggled with this category of reply, and I'm trying to figure out why. I think it's because I can sense that some ideological battle has been lost, that the person giving this reply has bought into the (charitably) "hype framing" that disingenuous advocates have set up. It's a very exhausting kind of reply, since it takes forever to reply to. You have to explain all the ways X isnt like Y. And to a person who has quickly adopted a pathological framing of the issue.
- sebastialonso 4y ago
  Some of these things are not like the others, Some of these things just doesn't belong
- grovesNL 4y ago
  As a Newfoundlander and developer, I think we have enough Newfoundlands already :)
dsr_ 4y ago
MongoDB is web-scale. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdnDXsqiPYo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdnDXsqiPYo
- popcalc 4y ago
  Classic. Reminds me of this: https://github.com/robmerrell/hipsterdb https://github.com/robmerrell/hipsterdb
- Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  Funny, I just compared mongoDB to web3 today: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=33621496&goto=item%3Fid%3D33621076%2333621496 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=33621496&goto=item%3Fi... I remember when mongoDB came into existence and I feared that my skills in the beloved SQL would become obsolete. And at exactly that time I joined a new project that was just migrating from mongoDB to Oracle SQL.
toddmorey 4y ago
My kids (now late high school and college) grew up with the smart phones & social media companies. They’re pretty angry about it. Companies who’ve been so fast & loose with their data and their humanity & personage. So while a lot of wwb3 conversations are about get rich quick crypto schemes, I think the more interesting conversations are about new models of data ownership. Web 1 was communication via protocol. RSS & email. Web 2 was communication via ad-funded platforms. I hope we find our way back to open protocols with transparency around where & how our data is used and shared.
- mg 4y ago
  The Fediverse could be the solution. It is kind of Web2.5 because your identity is tied to the traditional DNS system. But if decentralized domains become a thing, that would automatically make the ActivityPub protocol offer decentralized identities.
World177 4y ago
There are really interesting use cases of "Web3" As an example, consider domains. Ethereum Name Service domains are currently one of the most popular. If you use these domains, you instantly have access to the 10,000,000 people using MetaMask, and the 50,000,000 people using Brave Browser. They're actually very powerful when considering the centralization of normal domains. They allow you to create decentralized domains that are - Easy to remember These are better than onions because they're easy to remember. There's no centralized host that can try to change the address to trick other people. - Censorship resistant I don't think people here are unaware of how domain seizures have impacted services. The domains are controlled by records on a blockchain. - Controllable by a single person or smart contract Domains are controlled by private keys or smart contracts. A small group of 10 people could democratically control a domain when they don't trust each other. A DAO could control vote out the CEO that controls where a domain points, and elect a new CEO. There's lots of use cases here. ----- I could write more, but I'm just trying to show that it provides use cases that Web2 does not currently.
- Zanfa 4y ago
  And as with anything web3/crypto, this example falls apart completely when you need to consider the reality of domain squatting, trademark issues, domain name theft etc. Cases where you need somebody (e.g. a court) to overrule code-is-law and thus invalidating the entire premise of putting it on the blockchain in the first place.
  - mfbx9da4 4y ago
    So much this!
  - web3isgoing 4y ago
    Why does a decentralized protocol need to be amenable to these disputes? Saying “we will have a jury of appointed authorities to manage disputes” defeats the point, and is what ENS tries to avoid. If apple.eth is held by a squatter, should courts be able to override the protocol to send it to trademark holder Apple? In the end this can get resolved by regular dispute mechanisms but without compromising decentralization and integrity of the protocol.
colesantiago 4y ago
If there is anything you take from web3 or whatever is that it is a scam. For decades there is no use case whatsoever and it's just full of grifters trying to get rich. I would like to challenge these grifters to name a legitimate, functional and valid use case that isn't speculation based or a scam that is part of web3.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  ENS (Ethereum Name Service), Filecoin and Arweave decentralized, long term, content addressed data storage, POAP (Proof of Attendance Protocol), Sign In With Ethereum (using ETH public key for auth), USDC (digital USD, redeemable by a U.S. regulated bank, tradeable and programmable in smart contracts), zero knowledge strategy gaming like Dark Forest (https://zkga.me/ https://zkga.me/), etc etc. It's a very new space so there is a Cambrian explosion of ideas. I get that it's very hard to sift through and as an outside observer it's easy to focus on the failed evolutionary paths, but in situations like these, it will be only obvious in hindsight which applications turned out to be most useful to people. Even "speculative" or financial use cases are valid. Speculation is an important part about how markets function.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Ambolia 4y ago
I have the opposite experience. I haven't heard tech people talk about any hype new thing in years, but heard many non-tech people get into Crypto to try to get rich or tax evasion. A couple of years ago I was hearing sometimes hype about AI, but now it seems to have cooled down a lot. Or hype about the cloud, microservices, IoT, Kubernetes. All of those seem to have cooled down too and all I see now is skepticism about them or they being used in limited project with limited objectives rather than as an objective in itself that will save us and bring a new Golden Age. So I would argue that we are in a techno-depression or at least a techno-reasonable period, rather than on a techno-hype period. I may be wrong and this may be my limited environment.
- paulgb 4y ago
  I wouldn’t say AI hype has cooled down; things like Stable Diffusion, Dall-E, large language models, etc. have captured people’s imagination about AI. If anything, it seems like a lot of the crypto hype has been usurped by AI as the market slumped (and as GPUs became affordable again) I agree that Kubernetes isn’t as hip as it used to be, but that’s mainly because it’s already ubiquitous in enterprise. It lived up to its goal, it doesn’t need the hype.
  - Traubenfuchs 4y ago
    You can just check out the gartner hype cycle (scroll down to the image): https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/what-s-new-in-artificial-intelligence-from-the-2022-gartner-hype-cycle https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/what-s-new-in-artificial... Quite a few technologies will soon pass the trough of disillusionment and A LOT are right before the peak.
quonn 4y ago
When I attended Web Summit last year, this was the most common thing the 20 year olds would ask at any of the bars. Are you web3? If not I don't want to talk to you ... And I was just thinking - "Well, I don't even..."
- CyberDildonics 4y ago
  Why were 20 year olds in bars?
jeswin 4y ago
This is not a commentary on the article itself - I don't have an opinion on it. Most people who have experienced the pre-2000s web can tell what Web 2.0 was. It was a cultural shift in how apps were designed and used, and while the term was vague you could actually tell the difference as a user (eg: encyclopedias v/s wikis). At that point people were similarly critical of the term Web 2.0, and they weren't entirely wrong. The underlying tech wasn't all that different - but the product certainly was. Web 3.0 as an idea is even bigger than what Web 2.0 was. It is fundamentally different in every way; the tech, the money, the trust, the product. Web 3.0 might fail, but only because it might be a radical idea ahead of its time; not because the term is meaningless.
- andai 4y ago
  Web 3.0 (Semantic Web) already failed a decade ago. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_3.0 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_3.0 So it annoys me that this new, unrelated thing has stolen its name. Though you it could certainly be argued that due to failing it didn't deserve a major version number.
  - jeswin 4y ago
    Fair point. I'm referring to whatever is implied by Web 3.0 today, discounting the misappropriation of the item.
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    Web 3.0 is not the same as web3.
    - andai 4y ago
      Yes.
- varjag 4y ago
  The technical foundation of Web 2.0 was simple: interactivity afforded by XMLHttpRequest. I have to see one yet to formulate what the hell Web 3.0 is under the hood, some definition a la "web but on blockchain" doesn't have enough meat on the bones.
chrisco255 4y ago
"In the web3 crypto world, big venture capital is the biggest champion of decentralisation, self-sovereignty, free speech, and anti-BigTech efforts?" This is a function of a hostile SEC and regulatory regime to the concept of decentralized fundraising. Everyone is afraid of being labeled a security. Most recently, LBRY, a decentralized YouTube-like startup that seemed to have their heart in the right place and built a functional product, was declared to be a security. But no one in government went after SBF's FTT token, which was being not only securitized but used as collateral to cover billion dollar holes in their books. In 2017, many projects raised ETH in the form of ICOs. A lot of projects went bust. But a few turned out great, including Filecoin, Chainlink, 0xProtocol, Gnosis, and others. A retail investor in these did extremely well, earning 10-100x or more in some cases. But the 2018 bear market coupled with a reinvigorated regulatory regime dictated that projects could only safely raise via traditional VC model. This is all because of so-called "accredited investor" laws in the US that dictate that one must have a $1 million net worth or earn more than $200K a year to be considered accredited and eligible to participate in fundraises. I think the wealth based requirement for fundraising is ludicrous and it deprives retail investors of potential life changing returns. Wealth based tests for legal privileges or rights ought to be illegal. A 100x return on investment can change someone's life. It can give someone a real chance at accruing wealth for themselves. But the current structure is designed so that progressive rounds of rich people participate in a series of fundraising, which dilutes the shares so much that by the time a company goes to IPO or a protocol releases a token, the max value has often been extracted. After viewing Sequoia's puff piece on SBF and FTX, and the sheer number of players that invested hundreds of millions without any kind of due diligence into security models or client account protection frameworks, you have to wonder what purpose these accredited investor laws serve. Many wealthy players demonstrated brazen stupidity and blind trust. Many retail investors, meanwhile, called out the FTX scandal and were lambasted for it. I'm old enough to remember the Web 2.0 moniker in the early 00s. The idea was similarly generic, but mostly dealt with the theme of user generated content powering advanced interactive applications with often realtime features that didn't require refreshing the page. Web3 is and always has been about the idea of user and community sovereignty over the content that is generated. I view it as a natural extension of the web, and even though blockchain is one useful tool to achieve this, it's not the only tool. I think this movement is bigger than VCs, and I think the long term implications have yet to be felt, as everyone is still dealing with crude early iterations of the concept. It will continue to evolve, but it's not going back in the genie bottle. I'm never going to tire of the idea of having sovereignty over my money, my content, my social relationships, or my privacy.
dncornholio 4y ago
So currently my understanding is that web2 tech doesn't scam people and everyone trusts. Web3 are the people that do scam people, using tech that nobody trusts.
kubb 4y ago
I'm way ahead of you people, I'm already on web4. web4 is a revolutionary technological paradigm that will completely change not only people's use of technology, but entire societies, unlock better forms of governance and agriculture and make human dignity and basic income an immutable right. Join me in creating tomorrow.
- zach_garwood 4y ago
  I just rewrote web4 in Rust. Come join me instead.
CyborgCabbage 4y ago
My experience has been the opposite, last year a speaker came in (some high up business guy, can't remember the details) and briefly mentioned blockchain. He did a show of hands for who had a favourable opinion on blockchain and no one put there hand up (20-30 people). This was in a GameDev club at university in the UK. I wonder where all these web3 advocates are coming from, maybe it is just a loud minority, or maybe that fact that they're game developers makes a difference.
- laura-media 4y ago
  Game devs definitely are much more aware that their consumers don't buy into the crypto scam. I've seen way too many NFT and crypto bros in the UI/UX/Design field.
cloudhead 4y ago
Gosh, it's not that complicated. They're just asking if the product is company-owned or community-owned. That's the distinction between web 2 and 3; just like the distinction between web 1 and 2 was whether the content was authored by the company or the community; cf. encyclopedia britannica vs. wikipedia. And yes, you can't just go from one to the other, it's a completely different way of running a product.
- ricardobeat 4y ago
  Please remind us of a successful web3 project that is “community-owned”. All the high profile ones so far, end up centralizing power and wealth under a handful of people.
- throwaway98797 4y ago
  it’s like an ESOP[1] re-imagined for owning core infrastructure [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_Stock_Ownership_Plan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_Stock_Ownership_Pla...
ankit219 4y ago
I have always wondered if people not able to quote/define the thing they are talking about is a negative or a positive. As with web3, as with AI, as with monopoly, as with censorship, as with Metaverse, and so many things in the last 10 years itself, and if I dig deeper, would find similar stuff in previous decades too.[1]. Most marketing terms are designed and chosen to get an emotional reaction out of people, not convey something exact or accurate. Judging it for accuracy is sort of missing the forest for the trees. Asking a layman what "<<any movement slogan>>" means and then saying it's bad because some people can't explain the terms of the movement is a widely used strategy. I am not defending web3, just that the angle of attack is somewhat misdirected itself. I would also argue that it(not being able to explain correctly) is a net positive, because the fact that it resonates signals a pain point . In Web3's case, it does not signal they are excited about web3 or crypto or blockchain. It signals that they are frustrated by the current order, the incumbents, and they want change, and see web3 as a gateway to that radical change. It may or may not bring out an actual change, thats not important in this context. It's about whether they are sufficiently disillusioned by incumbents to believe in a new thing as a solution to things wrong with the world. Whether or not things would change is the next step, and admittedly a pitfall of many of these campaigns in the past. I am not optimistic about it working, though I think lack of clear solution does not indicate a lack of severity of the problem. In a way, climate change is moving in the same direction. [2] [1]: Omitting the whole redefining of gender and sexual orientation for obvious avoiding-culture-war reasons. [2]: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1585935772565258240 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1585935772565258240
langsoul-com 4y ago
I believe the real problem is the black and white view of everything. Combined with the obsession to label things. In a sane world, we would look at things based on their value and merit, using whatever makes sense. Whether that be web2/3 or some other buzz world tech.
pedrocr 4y ago
We're still short and always will be of the vision and endless possibilities of zombo.com
varispeed 4y ago
This concept of web3 makes no sense to me. It seems like these are "regular" concepts with blockchain shoehorned in. For instance, I see some web3 messaging thing and it always fails to explain why the blockchain is there for. Sometimes it feels they create a problem only to justify adding crypto to it, when it could be pulled out and replaced with "traditional" tech, but I guess that wouldn't make gullible investors to part with their money? What am I missing?
greybeardednyc 4y ago
I definitely get the whole “web3” is useless argument for a lot of the cases it’s been proposed but like any new technology I think it may find valid use cases somewhere down the line. One of the few uses for which I am interested is “web3” identity - being able to keep ownership of my identity/credentials. Using, for example, a wallet to sign a message proving I own an address, I can build apps that don’t require me to store any passwords (and not rely on a “trusted” 3rd party to do so either). My app can just store the wallet address (like a username). To build on this, if that wallet has data associated with it (“assets” it holds) for example, an ENS name, my app can pull that data directly from the contract onchain - instead of showing a public key I can show the users chosen display name, avatar, etc I’m an old school dev and I wrote off “crypto” for many of the same reasons a lot of you have stated but I have realized there are some interesting cases that could emerge from its usage. Zk (zero knowledge proofs) as a means of reducing the amount of PII data that needs to be exposed to random parties also seems to have some good use cases. Alas “value” aka money being associated with the usage/tokens makes the landscape much harder to navigate and much more prone to exploitation.
- bawolff 4y ago
  I dont think web3 has really made any improvements in this area, so you got to ask what's different now. Using public keys to log into things has been forever. It caught on with ssh (1995), it failed with client-certificates aka mTLS (1996). Zero knowledge proofs also havent really caught on. And its not a new idea. The Fiat–Shamir heuristic is from 1986. Anyways, i dont really think web3 has added anything. Most of these technologies are at least 25 years old and have not caught on. If it hasn't happened yet, i dont think crypto will change that.
  - hedgehog 4y ago
    Key-as-identity has a lot of problems and I don't think that model really works for most use cases. On the other hand I'm optimistic about being able to rework identity in the spirit what poster above describes. I've been around long enough to see the long arcs of experimentation and refinement that happen before technologies reach adoption. As an example widespread adoption of end-to-end encrypted messaging, biometrics, and hardware roots of trust took a while but that's here now in ordinary consumer gear. I could have looked at low adoption of PGPfone and and drawn the conclusion that encrypted video would never work but that would have been wrong.
Barrin92 4y ago
it's an actual plight on the industry. There's now even universities who teach these nonsensical web3 courses that look more like influencer training than computer science. Just out of interest I attended a "web3" conference months ago and that's literally all it was. Hucksters, grifters, social media personalities, bizarre companies where you can't tell what they do even if you talk to them for an hour, and so on. It makes one embarrassed to work in the field and you really have to ponder how much damage this does in the long term when vital talent is drawn away from engineering and the sciences to this grift.
aconst 4y ago
In France, you can often pick up free "newspaper" at train stations. One of them "20 minutes" begun, from time to time, to print a special "20mint" (think 20 min_t___) edition talking about web3 and cryptos. This, plus other advertisement, makes me afraid that it will increase the impression for people who are a bit less tech savvy that web2 is has-been and web3 the future...
Communitivity 4y ago
Yes, there are a lot of scams in the crypto space. Yes, the terminology and hype make the SOA craze look like a toddler's tea. However, don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Some of the underlying technologies are valid, valuable, and might just play into whatever is in the future of the networking. The technologies I am talking about are: * Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) * Distributed Ledgers * Abstracted distributed filesystems such as IPFS, BlockSpace,etc. * Prediction markets with virtual currencies (I like virtual currency over cryptocurrency, though I know no one else uses it) * Decentralized identifiers * Decentralized and distributed communication * Smart contracts * Blockchains (for things other than a financial bank)
- acdha 4y ago
  Most of those, and all of the useful ones, aren’t cryptocurrency technologies and were in use beforehand. When cryptocurrency salespeople complain about negativity it is in many cases because they’re pitching a system which shows no awareness of the problems encountered a decade or more before. Now, maybe there’s some value in a prediction market which uses its own currency but that’s again not exactly revolutionary and a bit limited to build an entire field on.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  Many of these are already in use. A PGP key is a decentralized identifier, for example, as is a self-signed certificate you load into your browser for TLS auth. WebAuthn and friends are the next step for those types of identifiers. Torrents and other file sharing systems have used DHTs and merkle trees before Bitcoin even existed. XMPP had decentralized and distributed communication. I'd argue that smart contracts are new, though they're not inherently linked to currencies necessarily. I don't know any practical use for them outside the cryptocurrency/NFT/blockchain speculation niche, but they're a cool invention. The prediction market that these new currencies have created are little more than the latest version of a tulip mania. These monetized cryptography projects often manage to combine very cool software design elements but they rarely come up with something new that's useful outside of their business model.
  - 4y ago
TimJRobinson 4y ago
I think the OP is missing what those kids actually desire when they say web3 - self sovereignty. They grew up in an era where a few big tech companies control most of their experiences, and you're completely locked into them unable to escape even if you hate the platform because that's where all your friends are. Web3 is where you can have one digital login owned by you that you can use for many services and you can easily move somewhere else if that service turns evil. It's hosting your own website vs having a page on Facebook. It's being able to trade any digital with friends without having to be locked into one platform. It's having all your likes and personal preferences carry with you between services. We had more of this in the early days of the internet, but people just graduating don't remember this, they just know an internet of walled gardens they want to escape from.
- lpcvoid 4y ago
  But escaping the walled garden shouldn't be a synonym for cryptocurrency scams.
  - k__ 4y ago
    As far as I know, you don't need cryptocurrency to participate. Lens Protocol, a web3 social media platform, just requires you to have a wallet. Huddle01, a web3 Zoom alternative, even works without a wallet. Radicle, a web3 GitHub alternative, works without a wallet. IPFS, works without a wallet. And gasless transactions are a huge topic these days. Improving UX and onboarding to web3 by lowering the barrier.
- red_trumpet 4y ago
  > I think the OP is missing what those kids actually desire when they say web3 - self sovereignty. You might be right, but do they actually achieve this? > It's hosting your own website vs having a page on Facebook. I mean, running your own E-Mail or Mastodon instance is self sourvereignty in the way you propose. But I've never heard anyone claiming this to be web3.
  - TimJRobinson 4y ago
orsenthil 4y ago
Marketing is what you impress upon people, not what you define. The mechanism of marketing is very powerful force, and we have been a part of it, if we realize it or not. People have used the marketing tool successful to shape generations of humans. web3 is marketing. It hasn't failed because we are still talking about it.
nathias 4y ago
We live in a cyberpunk dystopia without cool gadgets. Corporations have hijacked most of the institutions and are selling populations of people as 'userbases' to each other in order to harvest for data and attention. Web3 is a line of flight.
K0balt 4y ago
While the current state of affairs is mostly swindlers, ponzi schemes, and problemless solutions, I do believe that distributed ledger technology can and will fundamentally change many things in society that have been working “fine” for thousands of years. “Fine” in this context meaning with extreme inefficiencies and the use of coercive force and institutional violence. Distributed ledgers can replace institutional violence and coercion with algorithmic finality. We just aren’t ready yet, and if there is anything that people don’t like to do it is to give up their power to inflict violence on others. Evolutionary monetary policy can potentially create deeply democratic societies while discarding much of the overhead normally associated with political office, enforcement, revenue collection, and more. Unfortunate, that’s not really visible in the crypto sphere right now, because the projects working on this are not spending millions on PR trying to get rich.
AlexandrB 4y ago
"Wow you guys are still doing $old_marketing_buzzword? Why aren't you doing $new_marketing_buzzword." This is nothing new. The same played out with agile/waterfall, rails/django/node/whatever, and many other technologies. The key takeaway is that young people are suggestible and fall for marketing.

143 points by pawanrawal 4y ago

005 4y ago

As someone who has worked within this industry, I absolutely hate these terms. Throwing things on a blockchain is a mile backwards for most use cases.

simplotek 4y ago
> Throwing things on a blockchain is a mile backwards for most use cases. But the buzzwords. Think about the buzzwords.

mjburgess 4y ago

For the first time my anger over crypto moves into genuine concern. Is an entire generation of young people experiencing a kind of "pokemonisation" of crypto well into early adulthood? In other words, is a generation of 20-somethings wasting the better part of that decade on this tech, in these scams? If so, this feels new (?). We're not talking about the chain-letter crazes of the 20s/30s, the housewife pyramid schemes of the 60/70s, the ponzi schemes of traditional finance. We're talking about a "pyrimidization" of technical skill acquisition itself, wherein we dont teach classical mechanics -- that's too "physics2" -- but crypto-mechanics which solves no problems of the prior, and charges. If this is happening the issues around crypto are perhaps much more severe than I, at least, initially thought. Yes, $100bn will be lost in a vareity of scams deposited, in the end, into the accounts of charlatans, children and gurus. BUT, meh, so it goes. But a cultural take-over of the technical skill space by a crypto religion is far more series and needs addressing ASAP. Someone needs to explain to the developing generation that this isnt the future.

k__ 4y ago
When I graduated, mobile was the big thing. That's old now. So, what to do to make a name for you? What big new field is there where you don't have to compete with people that have 10 times the experience than you? Independently of what you think web3 might solve or doesn't solve, it's still just programming. Someone learning cryptography and coding will get a job in other places.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  That's a hopeful upside, that, say an 18 is learning data technology, programming etc. via crypto. My concern is whether that's what they are learning; too early to tell, of course. One thing I'm also thinking is that crypto functions like "wokeism" in the sense it seems a parallel right-wing version of the same kind of cultural reformation. At the same time large retail biz profess their diversity credentials, their heads of research explain how crypto is on some timeline. At the same time a 20yo engages in activism for X, another engages in crypto for Y. Do we need to "end the patriachy" or "put metriocracy on the blockchain" ? My concern isnt just the skills issue, but also, everything bound up in the culture around it. I think we're seeing Tech get to a level of cultural prestige that invites on-mass young-buyin, and mass cultish movements. No doubt finance experienced similar in the 80s. But, I think, as finance people eventually learned to inculcate some level of cultural scepticism; tech seems it has yet to do so. In otherwords, we're unprepared for this coming's generation having bought into a tech-culture landscape which is composed of scams.
  - deebosong 4y ago
    Not saying I disagree with your concerns. But didn't Banksy say something similar about young artists being funneled into the for-profit corporate propaganda machine, trading their art skills and unique perspective (and expression of their interpretations) of the world at large, for a corporate paycheck? “The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.” Seems like every generation will need to battle with selling out, no matter the industry or era. But that being said, the web3 stuff feels pointedly scammier than even mobile/ social (which critics skewered even as it was burgeoning/ proliferating when it did, and people still rightfully criticize it today). ––– edited for posting wrong Banksy quote
nathias 4y ago
- ekidd 4y ago
  At this point, web3 is becoming strongly associated with high-profile scams, many of them likely criminal. It's also associated with people who won't stop talking about how the blockchain will make your teeth whiter, or something equally unlikely. Blockchains are just decentralized Merkle trees. Merkle trees are a cool trick (look at git!). But the cost of decentralizing them, Bitcoin-style, has been massive carbon emissions. And the gain from decentralizing them? It's usually pretty tiny. I mean, I guess zero-trust decentralization makes it impossible to recover your coins if they're stolen or lost by an exchange, but that doesn't exactly seem like a huge advantage. /s In most of the financial blockchain pitches I've heard, you could replace proof-of-work via a time-stamping service run by a trusted clearing house. Just have someone like DTC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depository_Trust_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depository_Trust_Company keep track of the HEAD of git repository, and you'd be 95% of the way there. They already handle 100s of trillions of dollars of transactions a year with much less risk and drama than the average crypto exchange.
  - nathias 4y ago
    - z33k 4y ago
      The history of financial market regulation is written in blood. It started out very much like the crypto grift space where anything goes, until governments wised up to the negative effects and decided to regulate.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      If you're hoping "web3" is gonna negatively impact the power of well-off westerners, you're likely to be disappointed.
  - cameronh90 4y ago
dopidop 4y ago
I whole fully agree with you. That being said, this last sentence… > Someone needs to explain to the developing generation that this isnt the future.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  I think crypto is much more like pokemon than "the internet". Much more like "coin collectables" of the 80s, than financial derivatives. It's an attempt to destabalise domestic and international economic and financial systems that if ever even got close to being useful, would immediately be shut down. The moment I can walk into a random shop and buy a chocolate bar with cyrpto is the moment the whole system will collapse.
sdiacom 4y ago
I hang out in spaces for people entering tech, and I see the crypto advocates and grifters creeping in and around these spaces. It's extremely successful. Lately, I'm even seeing crypto grifts specifically aimed at people entering tech from non-traditional backgrounds, weaponising the language and discourse of diversity and empowerment to trick them into not just buying into the grift, but code the grift for them. For someone entering tech, everything they see is new and exciting and mystical and hard to understand. Without prior context, it's hard to see why overengineered crypto nonsense is different from all the other overengineered nonsense they're learning about at break-neck speed. For many of them, the only reason to enter tech to begin with is to earn a decent living. They lack the technical background to understand if what they're being paid to build is a grift or a legitimate business, and in the current market, it's increasingly in their best interest to not understand the difference. I believe we lost when we collectively accepted "software is eating the world" as an inevitable positive maxim of our reality. In retrospect, it seems self-evident that the end stage of this ideology-slash-self-fulfilling-prophecy is a socially-legitimized software-based "value" chain that ingests raw wealth and produces absolutely nothing of value.
- hocuspocus 4y ago
  I wouldn't really worry about people with a college degree. At one point or another you remember you classes on distributed systems and you realize the entire space is bullshit. I agree we'll see bootcamp grads and other people from non-traditional backgrounds get burned but it also gives them opportunities that wouldn't exist otherwise, so I'm not sure it's a net negative overall. The much bigger issue lies within politicians, the media and the general public who still believe we should let the scams happen for the sake of innovation, despite zero evidence thereof. Sadly I think we need a few more catastrophic events like FTX before people understand there's nothing to salvage.
  - enqk 4y ago
    Are you sure that college degrees inoculate people against bullshit?
    - 4y ago
bsenftner 4y ago
MomoXenosaga 4y ago
Capitalism means that the best and the brightest are working on what makes the most money not on what society needs. However one should not overstate sociopaths. Lots of people are still going into healthcare or teaching because there's more to life than money.
- paulgb 4y ago
  The tragic irony is that many of those teachers’ pension funds were the very ones making it lucrative for sociopaths to build crypto companies by blindly throwing money at them.
- lupire 4y ago
  Healthcare and teaching are seeing severe attrition.
csomar 4y ago
I had an interesting discussion with a young "developer" studying in "cyber-security". The guy was clearly out of his depth, and had a little idea about Internet security themes. He was struggling about finding an internship. I told him the market is still hot for tech people and security in general. His answer? "It's hard for me because I'm a person of color". I was a bit shocked there. He was just a bit browner than me, and far from black. It's going to be an interesting generation...
- lupire 4y ago
  "person of color" vs "white" isn't the same as colorism, it also includes other racial markers. Melania Trump is darks than many "black" "people of color".
birracerveza 4y ago
What the hell is this comment? And top comment on HN, what? If the technology is useful it will be used. If it's not it will die on its own. You can NOT police technical skill. What kind of mentality is this...?
- m0llusk 4y ago
  What technology? What use? The piece starts with a relatively straightforward value play being cast as not web3 enough. What even does that mean? And we are not supposed to talk about it, just let it crash around us like a wave?
  - birracerveza 4y ago
    I am directly addressing >But a cultural take-over of the technical skill space by a crypto religion is far more series and needs addressing ASAP. The technology is blockchain, and the skills are writing/reading smart contracts, developing websites making use of Wallets, and everything else that anti-crypto folks keep screaming "IT'S USELESS, USE POSTGRES INSTEAD". If that is true, then the ecosystem will die on its own. The fact that Web3 is being banged on ad-nauseam as a marketing buzzword, muddying the waters to the point that no one is sure what the hell Web3 even is, does not undermine the technological foundation, which is blockchain. Again, if blockchain IS useless then it will die off, but ... Bitcoin is still going strong a decade in, despite all the bullshit that surrounds it, and is likely impossible to kill off completely. That alone has merit, IMO. Of course, you are free to disagree. You can talk about it, but actively advocating that "cultural take-over of the technical skill space" needs "addressing" is complete and utter insanity. Blind hatred. You people have become as religious as crypto folks, except in the opposite direction. I've seen people advocating about blacklisting people who worked in crypto/web3 as well. You are completely losing it. I am honestly worried.
- amadeuspagel 4y ago
  People criticize technology all the time on this forum. Is this pointless because useless technology would die on its own anyway? Maybe eventually, but only after wasting resources.
kkielhofner 4y ago
Very, very, very few people work in the cryptography or even blockchain aspects of any element of web3. The overwhelming majority of dev in the space looks exactly like web2. You whip up an Express/Lambda/whatever API backend that (at it's most "blockchain") uses a library like web3.js to talk to a blockchain node from a commercial service provider via HTTP or websockets. More likely than that you go further up the stack and use a really easy to consume library[0] from your API provider and don't even really get exposed to the nitty-gritty blockchain methods exposed by a lower level library like web3.js. Literally import lib, provide your API key, and do things like: const nftsForOwner = await alchemy.nft.getNftsForOwner("0xshah.eth"); I find it fascinating to meet devs in the space who say they're a "blockchain developer" and after a tiny amount of conversation you realize there's no difference whatsoever between what they're doing and wiring up a backend + frontend solution to something like Square (or whatever). So I agree with you completely - when these crypto companies or whatever start laying off left and right you can be certain the vast majority of the devs in the space can use what they've learned anywhere. [0] - https://docs.alchemy.com/reference/nft-api-quickstart#alchemy-sdk-recommended https://docs.alchemy.com/reference/nft-api-quickstart#alchem...
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  My company put me on a "web3" project recently, and as someone who has done some kind of web development, at least at the hobby level, since 1999, I can tell you that there's quite a bit of difference with web3. I think the web skills from a decade ago translate better to web-dev today than web-dev today translates to web3 development. With web3 you have to consider the different ways to get on-chain data, and the state is all on the blockchain. Testing is a nightmare and the tooling around development and deployment are still immature. And that's before even getting to solidity or other languages you use for the "backend"
  - kkielhofner 4y ago
    Sounds like you've been at this since I have (mid-late 90s as well)! I somewhat agree with you on the state of tooling compared to web dev today but I'm not sure it matters or is terribly relevant to the point OP is making. I've been in this space one way or another for five years so prepare for a (somewhat anecdotal) "dump" that you may (hopefully) find useful for the new project that you've been put on. You mentioned Solidity so let's assume an EVM compatible chain and ecosystem. At this point I'd call anything actually on chain the "back backend". Of course Solidity is the smart contract language but due to costs, speed, etc of the chains themselves the data is all over the place... That's how we've ended up with things like The Graph[0], Ceramic[1], etc. As you've likely already experienced interacting with the chains themselves in any capacity is remarkably creaky hence the plethora of somewhat ironically centralized API providers and solutions with many layers of insane amounts of code and backend infrastructure to make things actually work for anything beyond a toy (like the various Alchemy APIs I provided an example of). This is before you get into anything like IPFS, Filecoin, etc but once again the typical interaction with these is via heavily abstracted libraries and HTTP gateways that do their best to look like any other web2 service. Smart contracts, by their nature, are rarely written and rarely deployed. If you look at some of the biggest "apps" in the space smart contracts represent a tiny fraction of the amount of dev work compared to the overall solution. Take OpenSea (as one example) they've deployed a smart contract twice in five years of operation AFAIK. If you look at their frontend and API docs it becomes clear really quickly they've done a lot more work in areas that at the risk of deploying "No true Scotsman" I would say at least 95% of the dev work in web3 is effectively web2. Now that we're talking about smart contracts, the stakes are so high there is actually a fairly robust amount of tooling IMHO. Maybe not robust compared to the state of 30 years of web development but between OpenZeppelin[2], Hardhat[3], Truffle[4], etc there's a lot out there. From everything I've seen in the space over half my decade by the time you import a bunch of OpenZeppelin contracts there's almost always very little Solidity left to be written. As traditional cryptography devs have learned "writing your own crypto" is almost always a really bad idea. If you were to look at LOC for anything in the web3 space my original point is backup up by the data. Metmask is used by 30 million people and it's all web dev (backed by an Ethereum JSON-RPC[5] interface hosted by MetaMask sponsor Infura by default)... The rest of any user facing application is your frontend pulling in ethers[6] and MAYBE a bog standard web2 service/microservice backend. Then you're off to the races. There is SQL, NoSQL, etc all over the place in web3. From my personal experience and everything I've seen I'd venture to guess that maybe 1/50 devs in the space ever touches Solidity (likely much higher). Everyone else is doing what they've always done by reading the docs for whatever JS/TS libraries they're using. I've personally worked on many projects where web2 devs became "web3/blockchain devs" in an hour - to my original point of saying you're a "blockchain developer" because you're using ethers is really funny to me. My overall point being (and to assuage the concerns of OP) the vast majority of devs that start in web3 feel right at home in web2 and vice-versa. I know exactly one dev who I would call a serious "blockchain developer". They came from a web dev background and they're all in on Cardano which meant picking up Haskell (which would send most web devs running for the hills). If a dev were to start with Cardano + Haskell I have no idea where they would end up if they left "blockchain development". [0] - https://thegraph.com/en/ https://thegraph.com/en/ [1] - https://ceramic.network/ https://ceramic.network/ [2] - https://www.openzeppelin.com/contracts https://www.openzeppelin.com/contracts [3] - https://hardhat.org/ https://hardhat.org/ [4] - https://trufflesuite.com/ https://trufflesuite.com/ [5] - https://geth.ethereum.org/docs/rpc/server https://geth.ethereum.org/docs/rpc/server [6] - https://www.npmjs.com/package/ethers https://www.npmjs.com/package/ethers
lupire 4y ago
The more people go work on cryptocurrency, the less competition for other tech jobs.
caseyf 4y ago
> For the first time my anger over crypto moves into genuine concern. Is an entire generation of young people experiencing a kind of "pokemonisation" of crypto well into early adulthood? In other words, is a generation of 20-somethings wasting the better part of that decade on this tech, in these scams? I'm a middle aged developer who spent pandemic time in "web3" (ugh) dev discords and stuff. There are scammers, sure, but mostly there are a lot of young people who are learning tech in an environment that feels fun and rebellious and honestly a little like the old internet in a way. There is a lot more happening than just people building magic ponzi boxes. It's hard to feel anything but positive about seeing people excited about learning JS or OCaml or Python or Processing. That said, truly don't understand "web3" and this obsession with things being on a blockchain. It feels like people don't know their Internet history and also I don't understand why DWeb/indie web and web3/blockchain people are fighting since I think they'd be stronger together.
- pbronez 4y ago
  Personally, I think the Fediverse and IndieWeb are in a much stronger position. Key thing to watch: does Mastodon manage to ride the wave created by the Twitter collapse and become a socially relevant force? Even in some small communities? I'm much more bullish on small communities talking to each other with open source software (Fediverse) than magical crypto schemes that require deep economic expertise to design properly (which nobody on the project ever has). I do think Podcasting 2.0 is a neat idea. There's room in this world for micropayments. I just don't want it to be pervasive and I'm exhausted from the stream of scams.

sdiacom 4y ago

This blog post already puts way more thought into whatever "web3" is than web3 advocates do. Everything must be web3 because web3 is cool, it's the future, it's got electrolytes, it's what plants crave. It's a meaningless cargo cult.

k__ 4y ago
It's a bit of a straw man. Just because web3 includes many things, doesn't mean it's meaningless. Even if it makes the term harder to grasp for outsiders.
- sdiacom 4y ago
  I would be wary of groups that rely in a strong in-group/out-group separation, where the outsiders can't understand the truthfulness and inherent value of an ideology relying on a complex web of interrelated concepts, while the insiders, who are deeply invested in both time and money into this ideology, treat it as self-evident.

k__ 4y ago

I'm in the web3 space for one year now, after working in "web2" for over 10 years. My impression of it is that people that didn't ride the rollercoaster of the dot-com era see it as their chance to get something similar. Everything is a bit more chaotic and you get better payment than in similar "web2" jobs.

Traubenfuchs 4y ago
What do you see it as? Are you just in it for the money? If I am a software developer hating software development who would like more money, do you know how I can learn web3 development with the goal of getting a job?

Kye 4y ago

>> "Now, web3 is a broad wildcard term that seems to revolve around a large number of concepts including decentralisation, self-sovereignty, privacy, free speech, censorship, security, BigTech, BigGov, democracy, human rights[3], monetisation, royalties, art, trust, digital rights, ownership, assets, property, proofs, cryptography, wallets … all somehow connected to a blockchain. One would be hard pressed to think of another technology term that refers to so many diverse, deeply interesting concepts." Compare to web 2.0 which simply referred to moving from pages that needed an entirely new load to do anything to pages that updated dynamically with a newly-standardized piece of functionality. Web3 has been overloaded in the same way most fake medicines have been. Web3 is essential oils for gullible nerds.

conceptme 4y ago
Web 2.0 was more about letting users creating the content not about SPA, Web 3.0 about the semantic web that never came to be except some niche areas, and now rebranded for crypto :P
- Kye 4y ago
  Maybe my memory is fuzzy, but 1.0 was all about people making the content. Or at least promising content with under construction GIFs. Everyone had a guestbook on their page. Some people even had forums and/or a blog. Everything/Nothing (E/N) pages were all the rage.

Traubenfuchs 4y ago

Having a web3 startup is just as inane as having a mongodb startup. Those technologies don‘t make anything possible that wasn‘t possible before. In any case: We are talking about this buzzwords for ~8 years now. Is there a list of useful web3 offerings by now? Any heavy hitters, killer applications? Anything besides wacky money making schemes like virtual sneakers?

tyingq 4y ago
The only practical thing I can think of is things where businesses have to cooperate on something and pay a third party some amount of money to be the trusted ledger. Like, for example, partnerships to exchange customer loyalty points. But even that has perils, as you could set an exchange rate but somebody has to administer/manage that. And once you're back to a managed ledger, you might as well use contractual terms for trust and a database since a blockchain isn't adding much value.
mightybyte 4y ago
> Having a web3 startup is just as inane as having a mongodb startup. Those technologies don‘t make anything possible that wasn‘t possible before. This is not true. The blockchain was/is a genuine technicalogical advance. It makes things possible that weren't before. From Wikipedia: "The implementation of the blockchain within bitcoin made it the first digital currency to solve the double-spending problem without the need of a trusted authority or central server." Now it's certainly true that, just like MongoDB before it, overzealous people are trying to capitalize on the fad and insert "blockchain" into places where it doesn't make any sense. But there's a very important distinction between that and your statement.
- acdha 4y ago
  That's like saying that it's a technical advance if I make an engine powered by burning dollar bills. Yes, technically it's a thing which did not previously exist before but people do not have the problem of solving double-spending without trusting third-parties. People have problems like paying rent or selling things online — and it's quite conspicuous that when you ask Bitcoin users what they use it for other than speculation, you almost never hear an answer where you couldn't swap PayPal into the same sentence interchangeably. Now, at some point it could be cheaper but that's hardly the revolutionary advance promised in the marketing literature.

SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago

> web3 is a broad wildcard term that seems to revolve around a large number of concepts including decentralisation, self-sovereignty, privacy, free speech, censorship, security, BigTech, BigGov, democracy, human rights That would cover Mastodon, right? And mastodon is not web3, in fact doesn't want to be associated with the term "web3", at all.

dist1ll 4y ago
Mastodon is not decentralized, it's federated. So no, it wouldn't fit any common definition of web3.
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
  > Mastodon is not decentralized it's federated Are you saying that this federation is not a form of decentralization? I'm pretty sure that Mastodon is not centralised like Twitter is. This is akin to the pedant/trolls who usually pop up and say "the USA is not a democracy, it's a republic!" in conversations that compare the USA's regular elections to dictatorial autocracies. https://act.represent.us/sign/democracy-republic https://act.represent.us/sign/democracy-republic
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - dist1ll 4y ago
    Federation is a very weak form of decentralization. In practice, many federated platforms turn into cartels of giant centralized providers. It's better than Twitter, but not something I'd call decentralization.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
      > Federation is a very weak form of decentralization ... not something I'd call decentralization ... is not decentralized Uh, OK; this is not all the same claim. > In practice, many federated platforms turn into cartels of giant centralized providers Sure that's a worry; for example: email is global, so lets all use GMail. git is decentralized onto GitHub and a few other providers. I think that this tendency is not just a mastodon thing, and is a separate and wider concern though than "it is not decentralized".

a_c 4y ago

Isn't it happening all the time? Web3, crypto, AI, kubernetes, microservices, docker, server side rendering, SPA, react, graphql, backend in frontend, DevOps, DevSecOps, fullstack, mongodb, new features in mongodb that mimic sql, Restful, mobile, django/rails, agile, kanban. Some of them make sense, some of them make sense for some of the people, some will be forgotten from history. And those forgotten, will reemerge as a newfoundland

dr-detroit 4y ago
quonn 4y ago
No really, because it's easy to point to many useful applications of AI, microservices, docker, SSR, SPA, react, GraphQL, etc. Even crypto. On the other hand, web3 applications virtually don't exist, so it's quite something to pretend that your application should be web3 as many now do.
mjburgess 4y ago
I understand this kind of reply, which seems very common. With AI, people say, "That's just what we do!" --- and likewise: No. I've always really struggled with this category of reply, and I'm trying to figure out why. I think it's because I can sense that some ideological battle has been lost, that the person giving this reply has bought into the (charitably) "hype framing" that disingenuous advocates have set up. It's a very exhausting kind of reply, since it takes forever to reply to. You have to explain all the ways X isnt like Y. And to a person who has quickly adopted a pathological framing of the issue.
sebastialonso 4y ago
Some of these things are not like the others, Some of these things just doesn't belong
grovesNL 4y ago
As a Newfoundlander and developer, I think we have enough Newfoundlands already :)

dsr_ 4y ago

MongoDB is web-scale. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdnDXsqiPYo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdnDXsqiPYo

popcalc 4y ago
Classic. Reminds me of this: https://github.com/robmerrell/hipsterdb https://github.com/robmerrell/hipsterdb
Traubenfuchs 4y ago
Funny, I just compared mongoDB to web3 today: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=33621496&goto=item%3Fid%3D33621076%2333621496 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=33621496&goto=item%3Fi... I remember when mongoDB came into existence and I feared that my skills in the beloved SQL would become obsolete. And at exactly that time I joined a new project that was just migrating from mongoDB to Oracle SQL.

toddmorey 4y ago

My kids (now late high school and college) grew up with the smart phones & social media companies. They’re pretty angry about it. Companies who’ve been so fast & loose with their data and their humanity & personage. So while a lot of wwb3 conversations are about get rich quick crypto schemes, I think the more interesting conversations are about new models of data ownership. Web 1 was communication via protocol. RSS & email. Web 2 was communication via ad-funded platforms. I hope we find our way back to open protocols with transparency around where & how our data is used and shared.

mg 4y ago
The Fediverse could be the solution. It is kind of Web2.5 because your identity is tied to the traditional DNS system. But if decentralized domains become a thing, that would automatically make the ActivityPub protocol offer decentralized identities.

World177 4y ago

There are really interesting use cases of "Web3" As an example, consider domains. Ethereum Name Service domains are currently one of the most popular. If you use these domains, you instantly have access to the 10,000,000 people using MetaMask, and the 50,000,000 people using Brave Browser. They're actually very powerful when considering the centralization of normal domains. They allow you to create decentralized domains that are - Easy to remember These are better than onions because they're easy to remember. There's no centralized host that can try to change the address to trick other people. - Censorship resistant I don't think people here are unaware of how domain seizures have impacted services. The domains are controlled by records on a blockchain. - Controllable by a single person or smart contract Domains are controlled by private keys or smart contracts. A small group of 10 people could democratically control a domain when they don't trust each other. A DAO could control vote out the CEO that controls where a domain points, and elect a new CEO. There's lots of use cases here. ----- I could write more, but I'm just trying to show that it provides use cases that Web2 does not currently.

Zanfa 4y ago
And as with anything web3/crypto, this example falls apart completely when you need to consider the reality of domain squatting, trademark issues, domain name theft etc. Cases where you need somebody (e.g. a court) to overrule code-is-law and thus invalidating the entire premise of putting it on the blockchain in the first place.
- mfbx9da4 4y ago
  So much this!
- web3isgoing 4y ago
  Why does a decentralized protocol need to be amenable to these disputes? Saying “we will have a jury of appointed authorities to manage disputes” defeats the point, and is what ENS tries to avoid. If apple.eth is held by a squatter, should courts be able to override the protocol to send it to trademark holder Apple? In the end this can get resolved by regular dispute mechanisms but without compromising decentralization and integrity of the protocol.

colesantiago 4y ago

If there is anything you take from web3 or whatever is that it is a scam. For decades there is no use case whatsoever and it's just full of grifters trying to get rich. I would like to challenge these grifters to name a legitimate, functional and valid use case that isn't speculation based or a scam that is part of web3.

chrisco255 4y ago
ENS (Ethereum Name Service), Filecoin and Arweave decentralized, long term, content addressed data storage, POAP (Proof of Attendance Protocol), Sign In With Ethereum (using ETH public key for auth), USDC (digital USD, redeemable by a U.S. regulated bank, tradeable and programmable in smart contracts), zero knowledge strategy gaming like Dark Forest (https://zkga.me/ https://zkga.me/), etc etc. It's a very new space so there is a Cambrian explosion of ideas. I get that it's very hard to sift through and as an outside observer it's easy to focus on the failed evolutionary paths, but in situations like these, it will be only obvious in hindsight which applications turned out to be most useful to people. Even "speculative" or financial use cases are valid. Speculation is an important part about how markets function.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Ambolia 4y ago

I have the opposite experience. I haven't heard tech people talk about any hype new thing in years, but heard many non-tech people get into Crypto to try to get rich or tax evasion. A couple of years ago I was hearing sometimes hype about AI, but now it seems to have cooled down a lot. Or hype about the cloud, microservices, IoT, Kubernetes. All of those seem to have cooled down too and all I see now is skepticism about them or they being used in limited project with limited objectives rather than as an objective in itself that will save us and bring a new Golden Age. So I would argue that we are in a techno-depression or at least a techno-reasonable period, rather than on a techno-hype period. I may be wrong and this may be my limited environment.

paulgb 4y ago
I wouldn’t say AI hype has cooled down; things like Stable Diffusion, Dall-E, large language models, etc. have captured people’s imagination about AI. If anything, it seems like a lot of the crypto hype has been usurped by AI as the market slumped (and as GPUs became affordable again) I agree that Kubernetes isn’t as hip as it used to be, but that’s mainly because it’s already ubiquitous in enterprise. It lived up to its goal, it doesn’t need the hype.
- Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  You can just check out the gartner hype cycle (scroll down to the image): https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/what-s-new-in-artificial-intelligence-from-the-2022-gartner-hype-cycle https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/what-s-new-in-artificial... Quite a few technologies will soon pass the trough of disillusionment and A LOT are right before the peak.

quonn 4y ago

When I attended Web Summit last year, this was the most common thing the 20 year olds would ask at any of the bars. Are you web3? If not I don't want to talk to you ... And I was just thinking - "Well, I don't even..."

CyberDildonics 4y ago
Why were 20 year olds in bars?

jeswin 4y ago

This is not a commentary on the article itself - I don't have an opinion on it. Most people who have experienced the pre-2000s web can tell what Web 2.0 was. It was a cultural shift in how apps were designed and used, and while the term was vague you could actually tell the difference as a user (eg: encyclopedias v/s wikis). At that point people were similarly critical of the term Web 2.0, and they weren't entirely wrong. The underlying tech wasn't all that different - but the product certainly was. Web 3.0 as an idea is even bigger than what Web 2.0 was. It is fundamentally different in every way; the tech, the money, the trust, the product. Web 3.0 might fail, but only because it might be a radical idea ahead of its time; not because the term is meaningless.

andai 4y ago
Web 3.0 (Semantic Web) already failed a decade ago. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_3.0 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_3.0 So it annoys me that this new, unrelated thing has stolen its name. Though you it could certainly be argued that due to failing it didn't deserve a major version number.
- jeswin 4y ago
  Fair point. I'm referring to whatever is implied by Web 3.0 today, discounting the misappropriation of the item.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  Web 3.0 is not the same as web3.
  - andai 4y ago
    Yes.
varjag 4y ago
The technical foundation of Web 2.0 was simple: interactivity afforded by XMLHttpRequest. I have to see one yet to formulate what the hell Web 3.0 is under the hood, some definition a la "web but on blockchain" doesn't have enough meat on the bones.

chrisco255 4y ago

"In the web3 crypto world, big venture capital is the biggest champion of decentralisation, self-sovereignty, free speech, and anti-BigTech efforts?" This is a function of a hostile SEC and regulatory regime to the concept of decentralized fundraising. Everyone is afraid of being labeled a security. Most recently, LBRY, a decentralized YouTube-like startup that seemed to have their heart in the right place and built a functional product, was declared to be a security. But no one in government went after SBF's FTT token, which was being not only securitized but used as collateral to cover billion dollar holes in their books. In 2017, many projects raised ETH in the form of ICOs. A lot of projects went bust. But a few turned out great, including Filecoin, Chainlink, 0xProtocol, Gnosis, and others. A retail investor in these did extremely well, earning 10-100x or more in some cases. But the 2018 bear market coupled with a reinvigorated regulatory regime dictated that projects could only safely raise via traditional VC model. This is all because of so-called "accredited investor" laws in the US that dictate that one must have a $1 million net worth or earn more than $200K a year to be considered accredited and eligible to participate in fundraises. I think the wealth based requirement for fundraising is ludicrous and it deprives retail investors of potential life changing returns. Wealth based tests for legal privileges or rights ought to be illegal. A 100x return on investment can change someone's life. It can give someone a real chance at accruing wealth for themselves. But the current structure is designed so that progressive rounds of rich people participate in a series of fundraising, which dilutes the shares so much that by the time a company goes to IPO or a protocol releases a token, the max value has often been extracted. After viewing Sequoia's puff piece on SBF and FTX, and the sheer number of players that invested hundreds of millions without any kind of due diligence into security models or client account protection frameworks, you have to wonder what purpose these accredited investor laws serve. Many wealthy players demonstrated brazen stupidity and blind trust. Many retail investors, meanwhile, called out the FTX scandal and were lambasted for it. I'm old enough to remember the Web 2.0 moniker in the early 00s. The idea was similarly generic, but mostly dealt with the theme of user generated content powering advanced interactive applications with often realtime features that didn't require refreshing the page. Web3 is and always has been about the idea of user and community sovereignty over the content that is generated. I view it as a natural extension of the web, and even though blockchain is one useful tool to achieve this, it's not the only tool. I think this movement is bigger than VCs, and I think the long term implications have yet to be felt, as everyone is still dealing with crude early iterations of the concept. It will continue to evolve, but it's not going back in the genie bottle. I'm never going to tire of the idea of having sovereignty over my money, my content, my social relationships, or my privacy.

dncornholio 4y ago

So currently my understanding is that web2 tech doesn't scam people and everyone trusts. Web3 are the people that do scam people, using tech that nobody trusts.

kubb 4y ago

I'm way ahead of you people, I'm already on web4. web4 is a revolutionary technological paradigm that will completely change not only people's use of technology, but entire societies, unlock better forms of governance and agriculture and make human dignity and basic income an immutable right. Join me in creating tomorrow.

zach_garwood 4y ago
I just rewrote web4 in Rust. Come join me instead.

CyborgCabbage 4y ago

My experience has been the opposite, last year a speaker came in (some high up business guy, can't remember the details) and briefly mentioned blockchain. He did a show of hands for who had a favourable opinion on blockchain and no one put there hand up (20-30 people). This was in a GameDev club at university in the UK. I wonder where all these web3 advocates are coming from, maybe it is just a loud minority, or maybe that fact that they're game developers makes a difference.

laura-media 4y ago
Game devs definitely are much more aware that their consumers don't buy into the crypto scam. I've seen way too many NFT and crypto bros in the UI/UX/Design field.

cloudhead 4y ago

Gosh, it's not that complicated. They're just asking if the product is company-owned or community-owned. That's the distinction between web 2 and 3; just like the distinction between web 1 and 2 was whether the content was authored by the company or the community; cf. encyclopedia britannica vs. wikipedia. And yes, you can't just go from one to the other, it's a completely different way of running a product.

ricardobeat 4y ago
Please remind us of a successful web3 project that is “community-owned”. All the high profile ones so far, end up centralizing power and wealth under a handful of people.
throwaway98797 4y ago
it’s like an ESOP[1] re-imagined for owning core infrastructure [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_Stock_Ownership_Plan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_Stock_Ownership_Pla...

ankit219 4y ago

I have always wondered if people not able to quote/define the thing they are talking about is a negative or a positive. As with web3, as with AI, as with monopoly, as with censorship, as with Metaverse, and so many things in the last 10 years itself, and if I dig deeper, would find similar stuff in previous decades too.[1]. Most marketing terms are designed and chosen to get an emotional reaction out of people, not convey something exact or accurate. Judging it for accuracy is sort of missing the forest for the trees. Asking a layman what "<<any movement slogan>>" means and then saying it's bad because some people can't explain the terms of the movement is a widely used strategy. I am not defending web3, just that the angle of attack is somewhat misdirected itself. I would also argue that it(not being able to explain correctly) is a net positive, because the fact that it resonates signals a pain point . In Web3's case, it does not signal they are excited about web3 or crypto or blockchain. It signals that they are frustrated by the current order, the incumbents, and they want change, and see web3 as a gateway to that radical change. It may or may not bring out an actual change, thats not important in this context. It's about whether they are sufficiently disillusioned by incumbents to believe in a new thing as a solution to things wrong with the world. Whether or not things would change is the next step, and admittedly a pitfall of many of these campaigns in the past. I am not optimistic about it working, though I think lack of clear solution does not indicate a lack of severity of the problem. In a way, climate change is moving in the same direction. [2] [1]: Omitting the whole redefining of gender and sexual orientation for obvious avoiding-culture-war reasons. [2]: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1585935772565258240 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1585935772565258240

langsoul-com 4y ago

I believe the real problem is the black and white view of everything. Combined with the obsession to label things. In a sane world, we would look at things based on their value and merit, using whatever makes sense. Whether that be web2/3 or some other buzz world tech.

pedrocr 4y ago

We're still short and always will be of the vision and endless possibilities of zombo.com

varispeed 4y ago

This concept of web3 makes no sense to me. It seems like these are "regular" concepts with blockchain shoehorned in. For instance, I see some web3 messaging thing and it always fails to explain why the blockchain is there for. Sometimes it feels they create a problem only to justify adding crypto to it, when it could be pulled out and replaced with "traditional" tech, but I guess that wouldn't make gullible investors to part with their money? What am I missing?

greybeardednyc 4y ago

I definitely get the whole “web3” is useless argument for a lot of the cases it’s been proposed but like any new technology I think it may find valid use cases somewhere down the line. One of the few uses for which I am interested is “web3” identity - being able to keep ownership of my identity/credentials. Using, for example, a wallet to sign a message proving I own an address, I can build apps that don’t require me to store any passwords (and not rely on a “trusted” 3rd party to do so either). My app can just store the wallet address (like a username). To build on this, if that wallet has data associated with it (“assets” it holds) for example, an ENS name, my app can pull that data directly from the contract onchain - instead of showing a public key I can show the users chosen display name, avatar, etc I’m an old school dev and I wrote off “crypto” for many of the same reasons a lot of you have stated but I have realized there are some interesting cases that could emerge from its usage. Zk (zero knowledge proofs) as a means of reducing the amount of PII data that needs to be exposed to random parties also seems to have some good use cases. Alas “value” aka money being associated with the usage/tokens makes the landscape much harder to navigate and much more prone to exploitation.

bawolff 4y ago
I dont think web3 has really made any improvements in this area, so you got to ask what's different now. Using public keys to log into things has been forever. It caught on with ssh (1995), it failed with client-certificates aka mTLS (1996). Zero knowledge proofs also havent really caught on. And its not a new idea. The Fiat–Shamir heuristic is from 1986. Anyways, i dont really think web3 has added anything. Most of these technologies are at least 25 years old and have not caught on. If it hasn't happened yet, i dont think crypto will change that.
- hedgehog 4y ago
  Key-as-identity has a lot of problems and I don't think that model really works for most use cases. On the other hand I'm optimistic about being able to rework identity in the spirit what poster above describes. I've been around long enough to see the long arcs of experimentation and refinement that happen before technologies reach adoption. As an example widespread adoption of end-to-end encrypted messaging, biometrics, and hardware roots of trust took a while but that's here now in ordinary consumer gear. I could have looked at low adoption of PGPfone and and drawn the conclusion that encrypted video would never work but that would have been wrong.

Barrin92 4y ago

it's an actual plight on the industry. There's now even universities who teach these nonsensical web3 courses that look more like influencer training than computer science. Just out of interest I attended a "web3" conference months ago and that's literally all it was. Hucksters, grifters, social media personalities, bizarre companies where you can't tell what they do even if you talk to them for an hour, and so on. It makes one embarrassed to work in the field and you really have to ponder how much damage this does in the long term when vital talent is drawn away from engineering and the sciences to this grift.

aconst 4y ago

In France, you can often pick up free "newspaper" at train stations. One of them "20 minutes" begun, from time to time, to print a special "20mint" (think 20 min_t___) edition talking about web3 and cryptos. This, plus other advertisement, makes me afraid that it will increase the impression for people who are a bit less tech savvy that web2 is has-been and web3 the future...

Communitivity 4y ago

Yes, there are a lot of scams in the crypto space. Yes, the terminology and hype make the SOA craze look like a toddler's tea. However, don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Some of the underlying technologies are valid, valuable, and might just play into whatever is in the future of the networking. The technologies I am talking about are: * Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) * Distributed Ledgers * Abstracted distributed filesystems such as IPFS, BlockSpace,etc. * Prediction markets with virtual currencies (I like virtual currency over cryptocurrency, though I know no one else uses it) * Decentralized identifiers * Decentralized and distributed communication * Smart contracts * Blockchains (for things other than a financial bank)

acdha 4y ago
Most of those, and all of the useful ones, aren’t cryptocurrency technologies and were in use beforehand. When cryptocurrency salespeople complain about negativity it is in many cases because they’re pitching a system which shows no awareness of the problems encountered a decade or more before. Now, maybe there’s some value in a prediction market which uses its own currency but that’s again not exactly revolutionary and a bit limited to build an entire field on.
jeroenhd 4y ago
Many of these are already in use. A PGP key is a decentralized identifier, for example, as is a self-signed certificate you load into your browser for TLS auth. WebAuthn and friends are the next step for those types of identifiers. Torrents and other file sharing systems have used DHTs and merkle trees before Bitcoin even existed. XMPP had decentralized and distributed communication. I'd argue that smart contracts are new, though they're not inherently linked to currencies necessarily. I don't know any practical use for them outside the cryptocurrency/NFT/blockchain speculation niche, but they're a cool invention. The prediction market that these new currencies have created are little more than the latest version of a tulip mania. These monetized cryptography projects often manage to combine very cool software design elements but they rarely come up with something new that's useful outside of their business model.
- 4y ago

TimJRobinson 4y ago

I think the OP is missing what those kids actually desire when they say web3 - self sovereignty. They grew up in an era where a few big tech companies control most of their experiences, and you're completely locked into them unable to escape even if you hate the platform because that's where all your friends are. Web3 is where you can have one digital login owned by you that you can use for many services and you can easily move somewhere else if that service turns evil. It's hosting your own website vs having a page on Facebook. It's being able to trade any digital with friends without having to be locked into one platform. It's having all your likes and personal preferences carry with you between services. We had more of this in the early days of the internet, but people just graduating don't remember this, they just know an internet of walled gardens they want to escape from.

lpcvoid 4y ago
But escaping the walled garden shouldn't be a synonym for cryptocurrency scams.
- k__ 4y ago
  As far as I know, you don't need cryptocurrency to participate. Lens Protocol, a web3 social media platform, just requires you to have a wallet. Huddle01, a web3 Zoom alternative, even works without a wallet. Radicle, a web3 GitHub alternative, works without a wallet. IPFS, works without a wallet. And gasless transactions are a huge topic these days. Improving UX and onboarding to web3 by lowering the barrier.
red_trumpet 4y ago
> I think the OP is missing what those kids actually desire when they say web3 - self sovereignty. You might be right, but do they actually achieve this? > It's hosting your own website vs having a page on Facebook. I mean, running your own E-Mail or Mastodon instance is self sourvereignty in the way you propose. But I've never heard anyone claiming this to be web3.
- TimJRobinson 4y ago

orsenthil 4y ago

Marketing is what you impress upon people, not what you define. The mechanism of marketing is very powerful force, and we have been a part of it, if we realize it or not. People have used the marketing tool successful to shape generations of humans. web3 is marketing. It hasn't failed because we are still talking about it.

nathias 4y ago

We live in a cyberpunk dystopia without cool gadgets. Corporations have hijacked most of the institutions and are selling populations of people as 'userbases' to each other in order to harvest for data and attention. Web3 is a line of flight.

K0balt 4y ago

While the current state of affairs is mostly swindlers, ponzi schemes, and problemless solutions, I do believe that distributed ledger technology can and will fundamentally change many things in society that have been working “fine” for thousands of years. “Fine” in this context meaning with extreme inefficiencies and the use of coercive force and institutional violence. Distributed ledgers can replace institutional violence and coercion with algorithmic finality. We just aren’t ready yet, and if there is anything that people don’t like to do it is to give up their power to inflict violence on others. Evolutionary monetary policy can potentially create deeply democratic societies while discarding much of the overhead normally associated with political office, enforcement, revenue collection, and more. Unfortunate, that’s not really visible in the crypto sphere right now, because the projects working on this are not spending millions on PR trying to get rich.

AlexandrB 4y ago

"Wow you guys are still doing $old_marketing_buzzword? Why aren't you doing $new_marketing_buzzword." This is nothing new. The same played out with agile/waterfall, rails/django/node/whatever, and many other technologies. The key takeaway is that young people are suggestible and fall for marketing.