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Web3 – An Arrogant and Treacherous Successor Doomed to Fail

128 points by g147 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ugjka 4y ago
I seriously do not see and never saw how "Web 3.0" is a follow up from web 1 and 2. The whole thing was a hijack by ponzi schemers or just another way to get someone to get their life savings into some crypto nonsense.
- bhhaskin 4y ago
  It's all just marketing.
- roody15 4y ago
  Exactly… NFT’s blah blah .. blockchain everything .. came off as like a sales pitch and never seemed to resonant as where the web was headed
  - k__ 4y ago
    Web2: you stop paying a cloud provider, your data is gone. Web3: you stop paying a network, your data stays online. Either because it's permanent by default (blockchain, blockweave) or because people deem it interesting and pin it (IPFS) Seems like a fundamental improvement to me.
    - vkou 4y ago
      Web2 - stores exabytes of data. Web3 - stores a few text files and rotten hyperlinks to jpgs of (if you're lucky) poorly-drawn apes and (if you're unlucky) rugs, while setting billions of dollars on fire.
      - k__ 4y ago
        I think, you should look into Filecoin and Arweave. Your assumptions seem to be based on the (rather specific) use-case of art NFTs. They got quite some hype, but to be honest, I didn't get them either.
        this_user 4y ago
        Why exactly would you trust random strangers with your critical data rather than use S3?
        jhoechtl 4y ago
        In the same sense I trusted my MP3 downloads on eDonkey before the records association played a foul game.
        Godel_unicode 4y ago
        s/played a foul game/forced me to pay for what I’d been stealing/ FTFY.
        Dzugaru 4y ago
        There is one reason is that the protocol of storage is open. Doesn't mean the thing can't die obviously, but there is some hope that someone will continue to store the data - there is some incentive (crypto value, however low or unstable that can be) to do that. Also, nothing stops you from storing the critical data in S3 too. I wouldn't bet what will last longer as a permanent storage.
        vkou 4y ago
        1. Both the mindshare and marketshare of NFTs and similar garbage dwarfs any use of Filecoin. 2. Dropbox and Drive are cheaper and better. S3 is cheaper.
        k__ 4y ago
        1. That's not really an argument. There is literally exabytes of data on Filecoin (https://stats.filecoin.io/d/z6FtI92Zz/filecoin-chain-stats?orgId=1&refresh=30s&from=now-30m&to=now&kiosk https://stats.filecoin.io/d/z6FtI92Zz/filecoin-chain-stats?o...) 2. And gone if you stop paying.
    - ok123456 4y ago
      Web3: your data is gone once VCs stop incinerating money into Web3 startups.
      - k__ 4y ago
        Yes, I think there aren't many chains that could live on without VC money.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      > Either because it's permanent by default (blockchain, blockweave)... https://coloradosun.com/2022/11/21/brush-eastern-colorado-sexting-hearing/ https://coloradosun.com/2022/11/21/brush-eastern-colorado-se... > Two school administrators on Colorado’s Eastern Plains were accused of possessing child pornography when they investigated a school sexting case last April. No one said the men were trying to distribute the images or had bad intent. The girl in the photos and her parents begged police and prosecutors to drop charges against the men. But one of them, 32-year-old Bradley Bass, is facing up to 12 years in prison and the possibility of being branded a sex offender. He’d have to give up his career in education, and wouldn’t be able to parent his toddler and baby boy. > Bass violated a Colorado law that says even unintentionally possessing explicit images of kids is akin to having child pornography. Even parents could be prosecuted under the broad language of the statute. That's not gonna be a fun collision between technology and the legal system.
      - mschuster91 4y ago
        Good god where has common sense in the police and justice system gone so far off the rails that this came to court and didn't get thrown out immediately?!
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      IPFS isn't Web3
      - Kiro 4y ago
        It's in the Web3 picture in the article.
        k__ 4y ago
        I met many Protocol Labs people on crypto conferences and they pretty much see themselves as one of the core web3 technologies.
        smoldesu 4y ago
        They were very influential to Web3. That being said, it's like saying that BitTorrent is a Web3 protocol just because the general interests/end goals are shared between projects.
        k__ 4y ago
        The creator of BitTorrent also sees himself and his technology as an important part of web3.
        Godel_unicode 4y ago
        Which is a pretty solid proof that web3 isn’t a real thing.
    - dehrmann 4y ago
      How does that retention strategy scale?
    - lottin 4y ago
      A fundamental improvement in terms of what? The cloud provider provides a service conditional on being paid, whereas what you call "the network" seems to provide the service for free. Who's paying for the service?
  - spaceman_2020 4y ago
    Paying for things ONLINE with a crypto wallet is legitimately a far, far better experience than fumbling around with credit cards. A seamless on-ramp from a bank account to a crypto wallet will really change the way we pay for things online. I believe this on-ramp is coming with CBDCs. Edit: HN is hopelessly anti Wayne Gretzky when it comes to crypto :D Edit 2: I should have mentioned 'online'
    - joneholland 4y ago
      What. Is this trolling? Modern credit payments from a consumer standpoint is tap a card or a phone on a reader.
      - spaceman_2020 4y ago
        With a 2.5% fee to Visa
        pwinnski 4y ago
        Which, in the US, is paid by the vendor, and so invisible. And worth it, given the protections against fraud, etc. If you're claiming that there are vendors giving a 2.5% discount for using crypto for anything, you've got some evidence to produce. P.S. It's not always 2.5%, either. Could be 1.5% at scale.
        nailer 4y ago
        > If you're claiming that there are vendors giving a 2.5% discount for using crypto for anything, you've got some evidence to produce. Or more, yes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OxtTGml564 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OxtTGml564 that said technically Visa will punish you by removing you from their network for doing this.
    - ehutch79 4y ago
      Uhhh... For real, who has issues paying with a CC at a register? Or contactless payments? Don't crypto payments like bitcoin take a bit to go through? Like longer than you'd want someone tying up a cashier line?
- angry_moose 4y ago
  Paraphrasing this week's TWiT: Web 1.0 and 2.0 were created by engineers to solve problems. Web 3/3.0 was invented by finance bros to disguise their various scams as the next technology revolution.
  - Renaud 4y ago
    >Web 3/3.0 was invented by finance bros Web3, not Web 3.0, not the same thing at all, the latter is the next incarnation of Tim Berners-Lee's vision for the web and has nothing to do with finance and crypto bros. It's important to make the distinction because 3.0 is actually important.
    - itslennysfault 4y ago
      Honestly...... 3.0 is actually dead on arrival thanks to the proliferation of "Web3" the brand damage is done and "3.0" should find a new name ASAP.
      - mkl95 4y ago
        Imo Web 3.0 is Webtransport / Webassembly / WebGPU. But Web 2.0+ may be a more fitting name.
        rhn_mk1 4y ago
        I was thinking that web 3 would be fitting for ActivityPub, WebTorrent, Namecoin and IPFS.
        smoldesu 4y ago
        No? ActivityPub is a protocol over HTTP - that's solidly last-gen. IPFS is caught between iterations but IMO is solidly Web2, and WebTorrent/Namecoin are abstractions over pre-existing technology. I think that's appropriate for a Web2.1 starter-pack, maybe.
        4y ago
- edgyquant 4y ago
  Web3 as decentralized services is the logical next step. Ethereum stealing the name and doing everything they can to be associated with it is a load of bs taking away the glamor from real decentralized services that I assure you are coming
  - larsonnn 4y ago
    What is the meaning of decentralized services ?
    - edgyquant 4y ago
      This is not a good faith question, Google it
      - Godel_unicode 4y ago
        This is not a good faith answer, it is however the type of thing that turns a lot of people off to cryptocurrency. If you google decentralized service in an incognito tab you’ll see why people ask this. The rest of the world gets Wikipedia articles about engineering distributed systems (like database clusters) and distributed consensus (like raft). Since that’s (probably) not what you mean, I submit that as the person using a standard term in a non-standard way that it’s on you to define it.
        edgyquant 4y ago
        I specifically stated that I was not referring to cryptocurrency, I’m certainly not an advocate. Every engineer knows what a decentralized service is and any who doesn’t will Google the term. You are asking it bad faith hoping I was a cryptobro. It’s an obvious red herring and I’m not feeding the troll.
        Godel_unicode 4y ago
        That’s quite the chip you have on your shoulder, too bad. Could have been an interesting discussion. For instance, Web 1.0 was already a decentralized system, as was the DNS which came before it. Why the version change? Questions have been asked, and vitriol has been your only response. Who’s actually the troll, one wonders.
- nailer 4y ago
  > The whole thing was a hijack by ponzi schemers or just another way to get someone to get their life savings into some crypto nonsense. Speculating on 'crypto' can indeed be considered nonsense. Owning your identity (instead of Google) and being able to communicate and send money directly to your peers for almost free (instead of Facebook / Twitter controlling who youcan communicate with, and Visa / Wise.com taking a chunk of all your transactions) is a MASSIVE deal.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - vkou 4y ago
    The solution to the first problem already exists (It's called having your own public/private key), and the solution to the second is to live in pretty much anywhere that's not the United States. Neither of which requires you to pay a cent to the early adopters of the token of the week. The second isn't as much of a killer app as you think to normies, and neither is the first.
    - nailer 4y ago
      Yes, wallets are essentially client side keypairs plus other tech. They’re way easier to use though as I’m sure anyone with experience in client side keypairs will tell you. I don’t live in the US and I assure you Visa is still a very big part of daily life in all of Europe, Asia and Australia.
orsenthil 4y ago
it is called 'web3'
superkuh 4y ago
Web3 is irrelevant. Actual Web 3.0 isn't anything blockchain based. Web 3.0 is the total corporate take-over of the entire web by Google/MS/Apple requiring CA based TLS in the HTTP/3 (QUIC) implementations in their browsers.
- plopz 4y ago
  i just want to be able to use udp without the headache of webrtc
  - superkuh 4y ago
    Webrtc websockets implementations (and spec!) are corrupted too. They require TLS even for localhost. But at least you can still use self-signed certs so it's not as bad as HTTP/3. It's kind of crazy to think that smartphones' inability to hold open a TCP connection (and thus the desire for UDP) are managing to ruin the entire (non-commercial) web.
    - plopz 4y ago
      my desire for udp is for out-of-order delivery for low latency game networking, nothing to do with smartphones
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- k__ 4y ago
  "Actual Web 3.0 isn't anything blockchain based." Obviously. There are also DAGs (IPFS), hashgraphs (Hedera, IOTA), blockweaves (Arweave), and probabl many more alternatives to blockchains to power DApps.
swader999 4y ago
It's not a successor. Agree on the doomed part.
throw_m239339 4y ago
Web 3.0 =/= Web3 please do not introduce anymore confusion by misnaming these concepts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
yieldcrv 4y ago
there is a subset of web3 that is a pretty unique evolution of web 2.0 which is great for developers and product marketing specifically it comes to the stack web 3 application: free static frontend website, 3 variables in a smart contract deployed for 50 cents, a funnel consisting of a single call to action which is a payment, where the profit is immediately fungible and not blocked anywhere this is applying web 2.0 principles but simplifying them to such convenient extremes that its pretty obvious why developers keep choosing it and bringing their whole communities over there have you seen a backend interview stack for any web 2.0 organization. have you seen the funnels for any web 2.0 organization, any SaaS product? have you seen what accepting payment is like, and actually having money you can use elsewhere? its all so much more complicated for less upside
- short_sells_poo 4y ago
  You raise some good points but I deeply disagree about payments being immediately released. So if I make a mistake in my purchase and want a refund but the seller is nonresponsive I'm just out of luck? There's a reason why payment processing is complex and IMO to a large degree it is because it's more than just moving some numbers in a database.
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    what you spelled out sounds like the opposite of disagreement, at least regarding the accuracy of the statements, you just don't like a theoretical merchant to consumer relationship, which has nothing to do with a web3 stack or service. My thoughts are that accepting crypto for payments for a SaaS product or tangible good sold online has nothing to do with Web3. To expand on that, a merchant that chooses not to use a payment processor that provides recourse also has nothing to do with whether they let you pay in crypto, and also nothing to do with web3, as there are payment processors that accept crypto and provide the consumer recourse. so don't use those services? you also might find what I consider to be web3 pretty interesting there’s usually a smart contract involved and a website that is just a GUI to interact with that smart contract in a way that makes it nearly impossible to make mistakes, with the service you want access to delivered immediately. Much more like an internet vending machine than anything else. (comes with its own problems though, phishing, backdoors, things to verify)
DonHopkins 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0#Web_2.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0#Web_2.0 >The term "Web 2.0" was coined by Darcy DiNucci, an information architecture consultant, in her January 1999 article "Fragmented Future": [...] Then Web 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, 9.0, 10.0, and 11.0 immediately followed in a quick succession over a few short years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_3.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_3.0 My web goes to 11, so I stopped paying attention after that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMSV4OteqBE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMSV4OteqBE Web 3.0 sounds antique!
web3isgoing 4y ago
The irony of this post criticizing DeFi and blockchain in the wake of FTX is that those decentralized applications are working just fine in this downturn. Aave and Uniswap aren’t failing, they are thriving.
- g147 4y ago
  I got my eyes on AAVE. https://twitter.com/ArkhamIntel/status/1595041038824923136 https://twitter.com/ArkhamIntel/status/1595041038824923136
  - spaceman_2020 4y ago
    That's the protocol working exactly as it's designed. Everything was transparently visible. Anyone could see where the funds were at any given point, what the liquidation price was, and what the total liabilities were. If you ride a fast motorcycle and fall off because you were speeding, it's not really the fault of the motorcycle, is it?
    - pwinnski 4y ago
      Interesting metaphor you chose. Yes, it is the fault of the motorcycle. You can "fall off" a motorcycle because of the design of a motorcycle, and it's something that doesn't happen with a car. Cars have risks when speeding as well, but they're different, and lesser, because of the protections afford by the car itself. It's like you're subtly trying to highlight how terrible crypto is, but not realizing it. Let's expand the decentralized web without building a crypto wall around it.
      - spaceman_2020 4y ago
        > It's like you're subtly trying to highlight how terrible crypto is, but not realizing it. If we're equating motorcylces to crypto, then as a motorcycle rider, I can assure you that motorcycles are amzing, not terrible.
- lottin 4y ago
bastawhiz 4y ago
It's worth noting that the title here confuses "web3" with "web 3.0". It means "web3". Web3 is the crypto nonsense that the article talks about, which has almost nothing to do with the web. Web 3.0 is Tim Berners Lee's vision for a decentralized web: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/04/web-inventor-tim-berners-lee-wants-us-to-ignore-web3.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/04/web-inventor-tim-berners-lee... I think it's an important distinction to make. Web 3.0 is noble in its vision and intentions, while web3 has been the crypto industry's attempt to get folks interested in their tech with a buzzword that sounds like it's the next hot thing.
- ghaff 4y ago
  While I agree that Web3 != Web 3.0, as far as I can tell, the meaning/scope of Web 3.0 has changed as well. At one point, as I recall, it was pretty much a synonym for the Semantic Web (which really never took off broadly). However, it now seems to encompass some other stuff that Tim Berners-Lee has been working on more recently.
- matchagaucho 4y ago
  The "web3" branding damage is done. The Web 3.0 consortium will need to revive "Semantic Web", or some derivative, to distance themselves from crypto.
- nailer 4y ago
  > Web 3.0 is Tim Berners Lee's vision for a decentralized web: TBL is not the central arbiter of web 3, in much the same way he didn't have anything to do with the coining of web 2.0.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    There's still an important distinction between "the semantic web" and "a bunch of cryptocurrency fuckery", both of which have been termed "Web 3" at times.
    - k__ 4y ago
      The distinction is that "the semantic web" went nowhere and "a bunch of crypto currency fuckery" has millions of users globally.
scifibestfi 4y ago
What should Web 3.0 be?
g147 4y ago
Thanks to everyone for letting me know about the Web3, Web 3.0 & HTTP3 confusion. I have updated the story.
TekMol 4y ago
Web3 is already making inroads piece by piece into the web. It started with ssh. Once keys were exchanged, you did not have to trust the infrastructure providers anymore. You knew whom you are talking to and that the communication is not tampered with. Similar with https. A recent development is that ActivityPub profiles have private keys and publish their public keys. So if you run your own Fediverse node, you already are in control of keys that identify you as you. I think this trend will continue to slowly put the social graph into the hands of the people.
- pornel 4y ago
  That is a dishonest retcon giving the new buzzword credit for other people's existing work. You can't just say "MyFoo stands for good things, look there's a good thing over there, therefore MyFoo is working".
- acdha 4y ago
  Both of the things you mentioned predate the "web3" marketing term and do not use any of the cryptocurrencies which that term is being used to market, and the ActivityPub people do not seem to be fans of cryptocurrencies. It's dishonest to try to claim credit for their work.
- larsonnn 4y ago
  So connecting with TLS should be fine then.
wodow 4y ago
Looks like they changed the on-page title sometime today: http://web.archive.org/web/20220000000000*/https://g147.medium.com/introducing-web-3-0-an-arrogant-treacherous-successor-doomed-to-fail-8b90529bb7be http://web.archive.org/web/20220000000000*/https://g147.medi...
- g147 4y ago
  i just changed it.
infotogivenm 4y ago
Almost stopped reading after web 1.0 was explained as “readonly”. Eventually got to this: > People who think a single-sign on is somehow a good thing. I would love to see this expanded on… I stopped reading after that.
- g147 4y ago
  I wanted to keep it all as short as I could. Maybe adding more hyperlinks will help. https://sis.binus.ac.id/2022/07/21/the-differences-between-web-1-0-web-2-0-and-web-3-0/ https://sis.binus.ac.id/2022/07/21/the-differences-between-w... https://www.renovodata.com/blog/2019/01/17/single-sign-on https://www.renovodata.com/blog/2019/01/17/single-sign-on
  - infotogivenm 4y ago
    This is better. I always equated web 1.0 with “before web 2.0”, I did not know of Berner-lee’s description. There were lots of dynamic server apps between 1.0 and 2.0. For SSO, the link does a good job presenting various pros and cons. I don’t think it backs up the articles dismissal.
LordDragonfang 4y ago
>Web 1.0, a collection of static webpages... Search Engines, Online Communities, Streaming Services were the first few among many Streaming services were literally among the last websites to come to ride the tail of the the web 2.0 craze. Online communities were the poster children for web 2.0, and search engines arguably relied on the same technologies as web 2.0. Why is it that every person that writes about web3 totally fails to understand the actual technical distinction or history of the "transition" between web 1.0 and web 2.0?
denton-scratch 4y ago
Eccentric capitalisation put me off. Also, among the protocols the internet depends on, "the Web" isn't one of them.
zenen 4y ago
Dang, this sucks. Not the post, I respect & understand the opinion. It sucks that the initiative of creating a deflationary currency started this massive wave of people thinking that they're smarter than whoever invented Bitcoin in the first place. Everybody bought in to the hype but nobody wants to invest the time into understanding how the actual technology works. "In fact the entire Blockchain arena is filled with either delusional or degenerate people who are inexperienced &, in no way, better than their predecessors." FTX was a fractional-reserve bank built on buying and selling a resource designed to replace fractional-reserve banks. It's no surprise that this is how it turned out. This whole 'decentralized wealth' thing isn't THAT difficult - get a good wallet, purchase some BTC from a friend or exchange, and transfer it into that wallet. Rinse, repeat. Don't keep your money on an exchange. Don't throw your money at pump-and-dump schemes. Don't measure your gains and losses based on what the stock market tells you, capitalism is in its late stages and government bailouts won't keep it floating forever. Sidenote - nobody has really defined what web3 is or isn't yet, maybe Tim BL has a definition you'd like more: https://solidproject.org/take3 https://solidproject.org/take3
- nemo44x 4y ago
  > capitalism is in its late stages and government bailouts won't keep it floating forever. It's funny to see this critique pop up in various places completely unaware of the fact that capitalism has more or less been dead since the 1940s. The Great Depression was the end of them as a dominating cultural force and they've been replaced by a managed-everything; a management class. So when you speak of capitalism only existing in its current late stage because of unsustainable government bailouts, you're really referring to the managed world we've lived in since the New Deal which began not only the popular things we all know and associate with it, but it also massive introduced corporate governance, a managed economy, more and more government institutions/regulations/departments/etc. We still have some rare examples of swashbuckling capitalists shaping the world to their vision (see: Elon Musk) but they are very unpopular with the managerial class because of that (see: Elon Musk).
  - zenen 4y ago
    yea, that's fair. I know that money hasn't been real since we got off the gold standard, I'm just hella socialist and take any chance I can get to take pot shots at the state of today's economy to further my narrative. Free market economy is the only way I see us cooperating on a global scale though, its hard to imagine otherwise - that's why I support Bitcoin
sys_64738 4y ago
What's a succinct definition for Web3/3.0/etc that I can tell my mother in law in 20 secs? I don't actually know what it's meant to be.
- nailer 4y ago
  You own your identity instead of Google, Facebook, and Apple.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    I do that right now without any web3 stuff.
- k__ 4y ago
  Web3 based apps where a company like Facebook or Instagram can't delete your content just because it might contain a nipple.
  - pavlov 4y ago
    It’s amazing how this description is entirely unrelated to the reality of the so-called web3. Not just “we’re still working out some of the details,” but literally none of it exists. It’s like you’re promised a grand night at the opera and the bus takes you to a roach-infested casino. “Music? We don’t need it, the slot machines make enough sound. Now are you going to buy some tokens?”
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      Entirely this. And when it comes time to show success stories, they co-opt other decentralized tech like IPFS or DID. None of that needs a blockchain to operate and does just fine without implementing one. Web3 is truly DOA.
      - k__ 4y ago
        Again, web3 isn't just blockchains. IPFS is a fundamental web3 tech since it's inception, even it's creators from Protocol Labs say so. Just because you like it more than blockchains doesn't mean it's not part of web3. IOTA uses hashgraphs. ArWeave uses blockweaves. IPFS uses DAG.
douglaswlance 4y ago
>The real single reason for which I believe that all this will come tumbling down is cause of the fact that all this is falsely hyped as being something better than its predecessors but in reality it is not. How so? If you're saying that this is the one single reason, then you have to support it with evidence.
- clpm4j 4y ago
  It's slower and more expensive.
  - spaceman_2020 4y ago
    That's not a good enough critique of a new tech. Applicable once it has reached maturity, but Ethereum and EVM smart contracts are relatively very new. If they're still slow and expensive in 2025, Web3 will rightly deserve to be forgotten and abandoned.
    - galdosdi 4y ago
      Crypto's been around for over a decade dude. How many decades do you want? Why would I ever build a business around an Ethereum smart contract when I could just write a normal contract, and then I know the courts will enforce it even if one of my business associates tries to pull a fast one? If it's about the precise coding of constraints and all that, you can easily write a legal contract that specifies that the piece of code should be followed. Ask wall street derivatives traders if they have any issues with making paper legal contracts arbitrarily mathematically complex. It works fine for them.
      - spaceman_2020 4y ago
        Crypto has been around for decades but most of the tech we now call "Web3" is very nascent. The ERC-721 standard used by most NFTs was first proposed in 2018, and didn't even reach technical maturity until 2019. And yes, you can write normal contracts and get the courts to enforce it. But what if your customers are in India or Vietnam or Tibet? Under which jurisdiction will you attempt to enforce the contract? The entire critique rests on the thesis that the world will always be the way it is - dominated by a handful of western (mostly American) corporations who will get to dictate what billions of people in the rest of the world consume, create, and share. The reality is that the non-western part of the internet is already larger, will grow even larger, and it needs tools and products that are built for its scale and diversity. Whether that's Web3 or Web2 or Web2500, it doesn't matter. What does matter is that more and more countries will seek to yank back control from western corporations (like India making its own national mobile app store). I, for one, will cheer on anything that challenges the FAANG oligopoly.
lxe 4y ago
In order to understand Web3 culture, look into Professional Wrestling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayfabe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayfabe). Web3 is fake/staged, but everyone participating in Web3 either knows this, doesn't know this, or pretends not to know this.
- k__ 4y ago
  Web3 isn't one centralized entity that's either fake or true. It's a bunch of bullshit, mixed with many slick ideas. I believe in web3, but I also believe that art NFTs and crypto bros running grifter companies like MtGOX and FTX give it a bad rap. Luckily, the ecosystem is now big enough that you can avoid that crap pretty easily.
  - halpmeh 4y ago
    I don’t think you can avoid it that easily. First there’s the question of identifying grift. But more broadly the price of crypto is influenced by the grifters and their operations.
  - PragmaticPulp 4y ago
    > Web3 isn't one centralized entity that's either fake or true. It’s not centralized, but the players are incredibly good at moving in lock step together. This is most obvious on Twitter, where one of the loudest crypto/web3 cheerleaders will introduce a new idea and within hours all of the other loudest crypto/web3 accounts are Tweeting some variation of the same thing. The whole industry isn’t centrally coordinated, but they’re all reading the room and playing whatever game seems to be getting traction on a given week.
    - Waterluvian 4y ago
      It’s like crypto: the con is in tricking people into thinking they’re not just pawns.
    - JamesianP 4y ago
      Herd behavior, very common in finance certainly. I guess because they can profit from momentum even when the market ends up going nowhere over the long term.
kitsune_ 4y ago
Web 3.0 is the Semantic Web anyways.
DebtDeflation 4y ago
If you want to charge people to do things on your website, you can do that today and it doesn't require the use of blockchain or the creation of new tokens for payment.
- k__ 4y ago
  Regardless of the country you're from?
  - lottin 4y ago
    Yes.
    - rvz 4y ago
      Yes PayPal. 'Please take my funds [0] and fine me $2,500 [1] if I say anything that you don't like'. Also, thank you Stripe. 'For locking my whole account account without any reason' [2] [3] [4] [5]. [0] https://twitter.com/flipper_zero/status/1567194641610465281 https://twitter.com/flipper_zero/status/1567194641610465281 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33348913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33348913 [2] https://twitter.com/zhovner/status/1384568453844066305 https://twitter.com/zhovner/status/1384568453844066305 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28085706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28085706 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33299222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33299222 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23881643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23881643
      - lottin 4y ago
        So what? Global trade reached a level of $28.5 trillion in 2021, so clearly global payments are working somehow.
    - splix 4y ago
      "Tell me you're from a rich western country without telling it"
EGreg 4y ago
So this guy is for extreme centralization. Moxie had a much more in-depth technical appologia for that. Here is a counterpoint for why decentralization is really important for the world: https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram-and-why-decentralization-matters/ https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram...
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
1) Web1 was the fruit of academia and unix neckbeards 2) Web2 was the fruit of web developers and silicon valley finance 3) "Web3" was the product of MBAs and finance bros You can see what's wrong with Web3. Silicon valley finance just wanted to get rich quick too, but they at least had to go through technology and programmers to get there. "Web3" was pushed by MBAs/Wall Street (at best) and shady crytpo finance bros (at worst), and had little in "new technology". The technology that WAS used came from the Web2 era with bitcoin. The real "next web" is in things like Mastodon (and Bittorrent and MAYBE some cryptocurrencies around distributed storage). Community or emergent things. Web1 was like that. Web2 was less so, and Web3 almost not at all. What made "web3" actually stick a bit in the zeitgeist was the emergent nature of Bitcoin. It was distributed, networked, it didn't have controlling company, or even any real celebrity originator aside from the pseudonum "Satoshi Nakomoto". Web1 was the maturation of TCPIP, networking, and basic text documents Web2 was a powerful standardized browser and more general purpose UI/computing. Web3 the hype was distributed and encryption, but has failed to produce utility to the average person, or even the average developer. Web2 only hit its stride in the post-dotcom crash when the money got back out. In a way, the dotcom boom funded the real Web2, then the crash weeded out the get rich quick people, and Web2 was built on the hardened survivors. Maybe "Web3" will similarly survive and thrive from a crash that weeds out the scammers.
abiro 4y ago
Web3 refers to the emerging shift in internet value chains from permissioned, centralized databases to permissionless, decentralized databases where users own their data. The driving force behind Web3 is that we can now enforce invariants on state transitions in a permissionless, decentralized manner for a limited set of applications (mostly financial). For an even more limited set of applications, we can also enforce invariants while preserving the confidentiality of transactions. With hindsight, the two technological breakthroughs that proved decentralized databases possible were Bitcoin and Zerocash. Bitcoin showed that state-machine replication (SMR) is solvable in a distributed, permissionless, partially synchronous setting with Byzantine fault tolerance. Zerocash showed that zero knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge can be used to ensure the confidentiality of transactions in this SMR setting. The tech is improving rapidly and it’s pretty easy to see where things are going from here: soon we’ll have general purpose decentralized databases where data is open as open source code is open. In fact, state-of-the-art blockchains can be viewed as special (financial) purpose decentralized databases. As to why decentralized databases are desirable: imagine if you could fork databases in a completely permission-less manner like you can fork code. This is how web development would look like: You, the programmer, take a look at a public data schema (eg. a smart contract that implements the ERC-721 interface) and decide to build on top of it. Then, a user, who has already interacted with what you built on, decides that they like what you built and lets your app use their data. You, the programmer, can be sure that the data you built on remains available, and the user can be sure that they'll be able to port the data produced by your app into new apps.
- polygamous_bat 4y ago
  I am sure people would like the permissionless, decentralized databases if they didn't come with microtransactions that promise early adopters large gains at the expense of later users, like... a glorified ponzi scheme.
- david_shi 4y ago
  This is a great summary. Many of the critiques I've read here criticize the early users of the technology, which is like blaming cars when the blame should be on bad drivers.
zaphod420 4y ago
web3 is about digital ownership. it's not doomed to fail.
woah 4y ago
Saving you a click: " There are many reasons contributing to the failure of Web3 but the most fundamental ones – Sophisticated & Tedious Development Self Governance & Lack of Compliance Built upon Delusions & Lies Not better than its predecessors in anyway Prone to all kinds of Cybersecurity issues that can’t be eliminated "
jmbwell 4y ago
Web 3 is the last of the ill-conceived prequels and the end of a misguided retcon. The true successor to the original Web trilogy will be episode 7.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
So many short-sighted critiques. Web3 or whatever might not be the answer, but you have to ask yourself a question: what's the internet going to look like in 2030, when the majority of its traffic is non-western, and a massive share of all purchasing power resides in Africa and Asia? Do you think by 2030, all global governments and their citizens will voluntarily give away control over what they can consume and create to Google and Apple? Are they going to ransom their digital economies to Apple's 30% tax? Betting in favor of the current centralized western oligopolies is betting on the belief that the digital economy won't grow, and that there won't be a regulatory crackdown in countries with stronger technological capabilities. In case you lose this bet, you have to ask: what's the alternative? Every large country making its own app stores and social networks? Or a decentralized variant that isn't completely controlled by a handful of western corporations? It can go either way, but it's definitely not going to be business as usual.
- k__ 4y ago
  True. I liked the term web3 somehow, but the more I read how people react to it, it might be already burned.
  - m00dy 4y ago
    More and more people realize the difference between cefi and defi. I have never seen a defi protocol wrecked during this bear market. Everybody is talking about Tether, but who knows DAI ?
    - k__ 4y ago
      To be fair, DAI is mostly backed by USDC.
    - lottin 4y ago
      How can a protocol get wrecked?
  - spaceman_2020 4y ago
    I don't care much for the term. It's marketing hogwash. The anonymity of the space already attracts a lot of bullshit artists, but everything was ramped up to 11 because of the sheer insanity of the markets in 2020-21 across the board. I hope that the terminology evolves, just as the space itself evolves as well.
npc12345 4y ago

128 points by g147 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

I seriously do not see and never saw how "Web 3.0" is a follow up from web 1 and 2. The whole thing was a hijack by ponzi schemers or just another way to get someone to get their life savings into some crypto nonsense.

bhhaskin 4y ago
It's all just marketing.
roody15 4y ago
Exactly… NFT’s blah blah .. blockchain everything .. came off as like a sales pitch and never seemed to resonant as where the web was headed
- k__ 4y ago
  Web2: you stop paying a cloud provider, your data is gone. Web3: you stop paying a network, your data stays online. Either because it's permanent by default (blockchain, blockweave) or because people deem it interesting and pin it (IPFS) Seems like a fundamental improvement to me.
  - vkou 4y ago
    Web2 - stores exabytes of data. Web3 - stores a few text files and rotten hyperlinks to jpgs of (if you're lucky) poorly-drawn apes and (if you're unlucky) rugs, while setting billions of dollars on fire.
    - k__ 4y ago
      I think, you should look into Filecoin and Arweave. Your assumptions seem to be based on the (rather specific) use-case of art NFTs. They got quite some hype, but to be honest, I didn't get them either.
      - this_user 4y ago
        Why exactly would you trust random strangers with your critical data rather than use S3?
        jhoechtl 4y ago
        In the same sense I trusted my MP3 downloads on eDonkey before the records association played a foul game.
        Godel_unicode 4y ago
        s/played a foul game/forced me to pay for what I’d been stealing/ FTFY.
        Dzugaru 4y ago
        There is one reason is that the protocol of storage is open. Doesn't mean the thing can't die obviously, but there is some hope that someone will continue to store the data - there is some incentive (crypto value, however low or unstable that can be) to do that. Also, nothing stops you from storing the critical data in S3 too. I wouldn't bet what will last longer as a permanent storage.
      - vkou 4y ago
        1. Both the mindshare and marketshare of NFTs and similar garbage dwarfs any use of Filecoin. 2. Dropbox and Drive are cheaper and better. S3 is cheaper.
        k__ 4y ago
        1. That's not really an argument. There is literally exabytes of data on Filecoin (https://stats.filecoin.io/d/z6FtI92Zz/filecoin-chain-stats?orgId=1&refresh=30s&from=now-30m&to=now&kiosk https://stats.filecoin.io/d/z6FtI92Zz/filecoin-chain-stats?o...) 2. And gone if you stop paying.
  - ok123456 4y ago
    Web3: your data is gone once VCs stop incinerating money into Web3 startups.
    - k__ 4y ago
      Yes, I think there aren't many chains that could live on without VC money.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    > Either because it's permanent by default (blockchain, blockweave)... https://coloradosun.com/2022/11/21/brush-eastern-colorado-sexting-hearing/ https://coloradosun.com/2022/11/21/brush-eastern-colorado-se... > Two school administrators on Colorado’s Eastern Plains were accused of possessing child pornography when they investigated a school sexting case last April. No one said the men were trying to distribute the images or had bad intent. The girl in the photos and her parents begged police and prosecutors to drop charges against the men. But one of them, 32-year-old Bradley Bass, is facing up to 12 years in prison and the possibility of being branded a sex offender. He’d have to give up his career in education, and wouldn’t be able to parent his toddler and baby boy. > Bass violated a Colorado law that says even unintentionally possessing explicit images of kids is akin to having child pornography. Even parents could be prosecuted under the broad language of the statute. That's not gonna be a fun collision between technology and the legal system.
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      Good god where has common sense in the police and justice system gone so far off the rails that this came to court and didn't get thrown out immediately?!
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    IPFS isn't Web3
    - Kiro 4y ago
      It's in the Web3 picture in the article.
      - k__ 4y ago
        I met many Protocol Labs people on crypto conferences and they pretty much see themselves as one of the core web3 technologies.
        smoldesu 4y ago
        They were very influential to Web3. That being said, it's like saying that BitTorrent is a Web3 protocol just because the general interests/end goals are shared between projects.
        k__ 4y ago
        The creator of BitTorrent also sees himself and his technology as an important part of web3.
        Godel_unicode 4y ago
        Which is a pretty solid proof that web3 isn’t a real thing.
  - dehrmann 4y ago
    How does that retention strategy scale?
  - lottin 4y ago
    A fundamental improvement in terms of what? The cloud provider provides a service conditional on being paid, whereas what you call "the network" seems to provide the service for free. Who's paying for the service?
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  Paying for things ONLINE with a crypto wallet is legitimately a far, far better experience than fumbling around with credit cards. A seamless on-ramp from a bank account to a crypto wallet will really change the way we pay for things online. I believe this on-ramp is coming with CBDCs. Edit: HN is hopelessly anti Wayne Gretzky when it comes to crypto :D Edit 2: I should have mentioned 'online'
  - joneholland 4y ago
    What. Is this trolling? Modern credit payments from a consumer standpoint is tap a card or a phone on a reader.
    - spaceman_2020 4y ago
      With a 2.5% fee to Visa
      - pwinnski 4y ago
        Which, in the US, is paid by the vendor, and so invisible. And worth it, given the protections against fraud, etc. If you're claiming that there are vendors giving a 2.5% discount for using crypto for anything, you've got some evidence to produce. P.S. It's not always 2.5%, either. Could be 1.5% at scale.
        nailer 4y ago
        > If you're claiming that there are vendors giving a 2.5% discount for using crypto for anything, you've got some evidence to produce. Or more, yes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OxtTGml564 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OxtTGml564 that said technically Visa will punish you by removing you from their network for doing this.
  - ehutch79 4y ago
    Uhhh... For real, who has issues paying with a CC at a register? Or contactless payments? Don't crypto payments like bitcoin take a bit to go through? Like longer than you'd want someone tying up a cashier line?
angry_moose 4y ago
Paraphrasing this week's TWiT: Web 1.0 and 2.0 were created by engineers to solve problems. Web 3/3.0 was invented by finance bros to disguise their various scams as the next technology revolution.
- Renaud 4y ago
  >Web 3/3.0 was invented by finance bros Web3, not Web 3.0, not the same thing at all, the latter is the next incarnation of Tim Berners-Lee's vision for the web and has nothing to do with finance and crypto bros. It's important to make the distinction because 3.0 is actually important.
  - itslennysfault 4y ago
    Honestly...... 3.0 is actually dead on arrival thanks to the proliferation of "Web3" the brand damage is done and "3.0" should find a new name ASAP.
    - mkl95 4y ago
      Imo Web 3.0 is Webtransport / Webassembly / WebGPU. But Web 2.0+ may be a more fitting name.
      - rhn_mk1 4y ago
        I was thinking that web 3 would be fitting for ActivityPub, WebTorrent, Namecoin and IPFS.
        smoldesu 4y ago
        No? ActivityPub is a protocol over HTTP - that's solidly last-gen. IPFS is caught between iterations but IMO is solidly Web2, and WebTorrent/Namecoin are abstractions over pre-existing technology. I think that's appropriate for a Web2.1 starter-pack, maybe.
        4y ago
edgyquant 4y ago
Web3 as decentralized services is the logical next step. Ethereum stealing the name and doing everything they can to be associated with it is a load of bs taking away the glamor from real decentralized services that I assure you are coming
- larsonnn 4y ago
  What is the meaning of decentralized services ?
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    This is not a good faith question, Google it
    - Godel_unicode 4y ago
      This is not a good faith answer, it is however the type of thing that turns a lot of people off to cryptocurrency. If you google decentralized service in an incognito tab you’ll see why people ask this. The rest of the world gets Wikipedia articles about engineering distributed systems (like database clusters) and distributed consensus (like raft). Since that’s (probably) not what you mean, I submit that as the person using a standard term in a non-standard way that it’s on you to define it.
      - edgyquant 4y ago
        I specifically stated that I was not referring to cryptocurrency, I’m certainly not an advocate. Every engineer knows what a decentralized service is and any who doesn’t will Google the term. You are asking it bad faith hoping I was a cryptobro. It’s an obvious red herring and I’m not feeding the troll.
        Godel_unicode 4y ago
        That’s quite the chip you have on your shoulder, too bad. Could have been an interesting discussion. For instance, Web 1.0 was already a decentralized system, as was the DNS which came before it. Why the version change? Questions have been asked, and vitriol has been your only response. Who’s actually the troll, one wonders.
nailer 4y ago
> The whole thing was a hijack by ponzi schemers or just another way to get someone to get their life savings into some crypto nonsense. Speculating on 'crypto' can indeed be considered nonsense. Owning your identity (instead of Google) and being able to communicate and send money directly to your peers for almost free (instead of Facebook / Twitter controlling who youcan communicate with, and Visa / Wise.com taking a chunk of all your transactions) is a MASSIVE deal.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- vkou 4y ago
  The solution to the first problem already exists (It's called having your own public/private key), and the solution to the second is to live in pretty much anywhere that's not the United States. Neither of which requires you to pay a cent to the early adopters of the token of the week. The second isn't as much of a killer app as you think to normies, and neither is the first.
  - nailer 4y ago
    Yes, wallets are essentially client side keypairs plus other tech. They’re way easier to use though as I’m sure anyone with experience in client side keypairs will tell you. I don’t live in the US and I assure you Visa is still a very big part of daily life in all of Europe, Asia and Australia.

orsenthil 4y ago

it is called 'web3'

superkuh 4y ago

Web3 is irrelevant. Actual Web 3.0 isn't anything blockchain based. Web 3.0 is the total corporate take-over of the entire web by Google/MS/Apple requiring CA based TLS in the HTTP/3 (QUIC) implementations in their browsers.

plopz 4y ago
i just want to be able to use udp without the headache of webrtc
- superkuh 4y ago
  Webrtc websockets implementations (and spec!) are corrupted too. They require TLS even for localhost. But at least you can still use self-signed certs so it's not as bad as HTTP/3. It's kind of crazy to think that smartphones' inability to hold open a TCP connection (and thus the desire for UDP) are managing to ruin the entire (non-commercial) web.
  - plopz 4y ago
    my desire for udp is for out-of-order delivery for low latency game networking, nothing to do with smartphones
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
k__ 4y ago
"Actual Web 3.0 isn't anything blockchain based." Obviously. There are also DAGs (IPFS), hashgraphs (Hedera, IOTA), blockweaves (Arweave), and probabl many more alternatives to blockchains to power DApps.

swader999 4y ago

It's not a successor. Agree on the doomed part.

throw_m239339 4y ago

Web 3.0 =/= Web3 please do not introduce anymore confusion by misnaming these concepts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

yieldcrv 4y ago

there is a subset of web3 that is a pretty unique evolution of web 2.0 which is great for developers and product marketing specifically it comes to the stack web 3 application: free static frontend website, 3 variables in a smart contract deployed for 50 cents, a funnel consisting of a single call to action which is a payment, where the profit is immediately fungible and not blocked anywhere this is applying web 2.0 principles but simplifying them to such convenient extremes that its pretty obvious why developers keep choosing it and bringing their whole communities over there have you seen a backend interview stack for any web 2.0 organization. have you seen the funnels for any web 2.0 organization, any SaaS product? have you seen what accepting payment is like, and actually having money you can use elsewhere? its all so much more complicated for less upside

short_sells_poo 4y ago
You raise some good points but I deeply disagree about payments being immediately released. So if I make a mistake in my purchase and want a refund but the seller is nonresponsive I'm just out of luck? There's a reason why payment processing is complex and IMO to a large degree it is because it's more than just moving some numbers in a database.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  what you spelled out sounds like the opposite of disagreement, at least regarding the accuracy of the statements, you just don't like a theoretical merchant to consumer relationship, which has nothing to do with a web3 stack or service. My thoughts are that accepting crypto for payments for a SaaS product or tangible good sold online has nothing to do with Web3. To expand on that, a merchant that chooses not to use a payment processor that provides recourse also has nothing to do with whether they let you pay in crypto, and also nothing to do with web3, as there are payment processors that accept crypto and provide the consumer recourse. so don't use those services? you also might find what I consider to be web3 pretty interesting there’s usually a smart contract involved and a website that is just a GUI to interact with that smart contract in a way that makes it nearly impossible to make mistakes, with the service you want access to delivered immediately. Much more like an internet vending machine than anything else. (comes with its own problems though, phishing, backdoors, things to verify)

DonHopkins 4y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0#Web_2.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0#Web_2.0 >The term "Web 2.0" was coined by Darcy DiNucci, an information architecture consultant, in her January 1999 article "Fragmented Future": [...] Then Web 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, 9.0, 10.0, and 11.0 immediately followed in a quick succession over a few short years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_3.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_3.0 My web goes to 11, so I stopped paying attention after that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMSV4OteqBE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMSV4OteqBE Web 3.0 sounds antique!

web3isgoing 4y ago

The irony of this post criticizing DeFi and blockchain in the wake of FTX is that those decentralized applications are working just fine in this downturn. Aave and Uniswap aren’t failing, they are thriving.

g147 4y ago
I got my eyes on AAVE. https://twitter.com/ArkhamIntel/status/1595041038824923136 https://twitter.com/ArkhamIntel/status/1595041038824923136
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  That's the protocol working exactly as it's designed. Everything was transparently visible. Anyone could see where the funds were at any given point, what the liquidation price was, and what the total liabilities were. If you ride a fast motorcycle and fall off because you were speeding, it's not really the fault of the motorcycle, is it?
  - pwinnski 4y ago
    Interesting metaphor you chose. Yes, it is the fault of the motorcycle. You can "fall off" a motorcycle because of the design of a motorcycle, and it's something that doesn't happen with a car. Cars have risks when speeding as well, but they're different, and lesser, because of the protections afford by the car itself. It's like you're subtly trying to highlight how terrible crypto is, but not realizing it. Let's expand the decentralized web without building a crypto wall around it.
    - spaceman_2020 4y ago
      > It's like you're subtly trying to highlight how terrible crypto is, but not realizing it. If we're equating motorcylces to crypto, then as a motorcycle rider, I can assure you that motorcycles are amzing, not terrible.
lottin 4y ago

bastawhiz 4y ago

It's worth noting that the title here confuses "web3" with "web 3.0". It means "web3". Web3 is the crypto nonsense that the article talks about, which has almost nothing to do with the web. Web 3.0 is Tim Berners Lee's vision for a decentralized web: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/04/web-inventor-tim-berners-lee-wants-us-to-ignore-web3.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/04/web-inventor-tim-berners-lee... I think it's an important distinction to make. Web 3.0 is noble in its vision and intentions, while web3 has been the crypto industry's attempt to get folks interested in their tech with a buzzword that sounds like it's the next hot thing.

ghaff 4y ago
While I agree that Web3 != Web 3.0, as far as I can tell, the meaning/scope of Web 3.0 has changed as well. At one point, as I recall, it was pretty much a synonym for the Semantic Web (which really never took off broadly). However, it now seems to encompass some other stuff that Tim Berners-Lee has been working on more recently.
matchagaucho 4y ago
The "web3" branding damage is done. The Web 3.0 consortium will need to revive "Semantic Web", or some derivative, to distance themselves from crypto.
nailer 4y ago
> Web 3.0 is Tim Berners Lee's vision for a decentralized web: TBL is not the central arbiter of web 3, in much the same way he didn't have anything to do with the coining of web 2.0.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  There's still an important distinction between "the semantic web" and "a bunch of cryptocurrency fuckery", both of which have been termed "Web 3" at times.
  - k__ 4y ago
    The distinction is that "the semantic web" went nowhere and "a bunch of crypto currency fuckery" has millions of users globally.

scifibestfi 4y ago

What should Web 3.0 be?

g147 4y ago

Thanks to everyone for letting me know about the Web3, Web 3.0 & HTTP3 confusion. I have updated the story.

TekMol 4y ago

Web3 is already making inroads piece by piece into the web. It started with ssh. Once keys were exchanged, you did not have to trust the infrastructure providers anymore. You knew whom you are talking to and that the communication is not tampered with. Similar with https. A recent development is that ActivityPub profiles have private keys and publish their public keys. So if you run your own Fediverse node, you already are in control of keys that identify you as you. I think this trend will continue to slowly put the social graph into the hands of the people.

pornel 4y ago
That is a dishonest retcon giving the new buzzword credit for other people's existing work. You can't just say "MyFoo stands for good things, look there's a good thing over there, therefore MyFoo is working".
acdha 4y ago
Both of the things you mentioned predate the "web3" marketing term and do not use any of the cryptocurrencies which that term is being used to market, and the ActivityPub people do not seem to be fans of cryptocurrencies. It's dishonest to try to claim credit for their work.
larsonnn 4y ago
So connecting with TLS should be fine then.

wodow 4y ago

Looks like they changed the on-page title sometime today: http://web.archive.org/web/20220000000000*/https://g147.medium.com/introducing-web-3-0-an-arrogant-treacherous-successor-doomed-to-fail-8b90529bb7be http://web.archive.org/web/20220000000000*/https://g147.medi...

g147 4y ago
i just changed it.

infotogivenm 4y ago

Almost stopped reading after web 1.0 was explained as “readonly”. Eventually got to this: > People who think a single-sign on is somehow a good thing. I would love to see this expanded on… I stopped reading after that.

g147 4y ago
I wanted to keep it all as short as I could. Maybe adding more hyperlinks will help. https://sis.binus.ac.id/2022/07/21/the-differences-between-web-1-0-web-2-0-and-web-3-0/ https://sis.binus.ac.id/2022/07/21/the-differences-between-w... https://www.renovodata.com/blog/2019/01/17/single-sign-on https://www.renovodata.com/blog/2019/01/17/single-sign-on
- infotogivenm 4y ago
  This is better. I always equated web 1.0 with “before web 2.0”, I did not know of Berner-lee’s description. There were lots of dynamic server apps between 1.0 and 2.0. For SSO, the link does a good job presenting various pros and cons. I don’t think it backs up the articles dismissal.

LordDragonfang 4y ago

>Web 1.0, a collection of static webpages... Search Engines, Online Communities, Streaming Services were the first few among many Streaming services were literally among the last websites to come to ride the tail of the the web 2.0 craze. Online communities were the poster children for web 2.0, and search engines arguably relied on the same technologies as web 2.0. Why is it that every person that writes about web3 totally fails to understand the actual technical distinction or history of the "transition" between web 1.0 and web 2.0?

denton-scratch 4y ago

Eccentric capitalisation put me off. Also, among the protocols the internet depends on, "the Web" isn't one of them.

zenen 4y ago

Dang, this sucks. Not the post, I respect & understand the opinion. It sucks that the initiative of creating a deflationary currency started this massive wave of people thinking that they're smarter than whoever invented Bitcoin in the first place. Everybody bought in to the hype but nobody wants to invest the time into understanding how the actual technology works. "In fact the entire Blockchain arena is filled with either delusional or degenerate people who are inexperienced &, in no way, better than their predecessors." FTX was a fractional-reserve bank built on buying and selling a resource designed to replace fractional-reserve banks. It's no surprise that this is how it turned out. This whole 'decentralized wealth' thing isn't THAT difficult - get a good wallet, purchase some BTC from a friend or exchange, and transfer it into that wallet. Rinse, repeat. Don't keep your money on an exchange. Don't throw your money at pump-and-dump schemes. Don't measure your gains and losses based on what the stock market tells you, capitalism is in its late stages and government bailouts won't keep it floating forever. Sidenote - nobody has really defined what web3 is or isn't yet, maybe Tim BL has a definition you'd like more: https://solidproject.org/take3 https://solidproject.org/take3

nemo44x 4y ago
> capitalism is in its late stages and government bailouts won't keep it floating forever. It's funny to see this critique pop up in various places completely unaware of the fact that capitalism has more or less been dead since the 1940s. The Great Depression was the end of them as a dominating cultural force and they've been replaced by a managed-everything; a management class. So when you speak of capitalism only existing in its current late stage because of unsustainable government bailouts, you're really referring to the managed world we've lived in since the New Deal which began not only the popular things we all know and associate with it, but it also massive introduced corporate governance, a managed economy, more and more government institutions/regulations/departments/etc. We still have some rare examples of swashbuckling capitalists shaping the world to their vision (see: Elon Musk) but they are very unpopular with the managerial class because of that (see: Elon Musk).
- zenen 4y ago
  yea, that's fair. I know that money hasn't been real since we got off the gold standard, I'm just hella socialist and take any chance I can get to take pot shots at the state of today's economy to further my narrative. Free market economy is the only way I see us cooperating on a global scale though, its hard to imagine otherwise - that's why I support Bitcoin

sys_64738 4y ago

What's a succinct definition for Web3/3.0/etc that I can tell my mother in law in 20 secs? I don't actually know what it's meant to be.

nailer 4y ago
You own your identity instead of Google, Facebook, and Apple.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  I do that right now without any web3 stuff.
k__ 4y ago
Web3 based apps where a company like Facebook or Instagram can't delete your content just because it might contain a nipple.
- pavlov 4y ago
  It’s amazing how this description is entirely unrelated to the reality of the so-called web3. Not just “we’re still working out some of the details,” but literally none of it exists. It’s like you’re promised a grand night at the opera and the bus takes you to a roach-infested casino. “Music? We don’t need it, the slot machines make enough sound. Now are you going to buy some tokens?”
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    Entirely this. And when it comes time to show success stories, they co-opt other decentralized tech like IPFS or DID. None of that needs a blockchain to operate and does just fine without implementing one. Web3 is truly DOA.
    - k__ 4y ago
      Again, web3 isn't just blockchains. IPFS is a fundamental web3 tech since it's inception, even it's creators from Protocol Labs say so. Just because you like it more than blockchains doesn't mean it's not part of web3. IOTA uses hashgraphs. ArWeave uses blockweaves. IPFS uses DAG.

douglaswlance 4y ago

>The real single reason for which I believe that all this will come tumbling down is cause of the fact that all this is falsely hyped as being something better than its predecessors but in reality it is not. How so? If you're saying that this is the one single reason, then you have to support it with evidence.

clpm4j 4y ago
It's slower and more expensive.
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  That's not a good enough critique of a new tech. Applicable once it has reached maturity, but Ethereum and EVM smart contracts are relatively very new. If they're still slow and expensive in 2025, Web3 will rightly deserve to be forgotten and abandoned.
  - galdosdi 4y ago
    Crypto's been around for over a decade dude. How many decades do you want? Why would I ever build a business around an Ethereum smart contract when I could just write a normal contract, and then I know the courts will enforce it even if one of my business associates tries to pull a fast one? If it's about the precise coding of constraints and all that, you can easily write a legal contract that specifies that the piece of code should be followed. Ask wall street derivatives traders if they have any issues with making paper legal contracts arbitrarily mathematically complex. It works fine for them.
    - spaceman_2020 4y ago
      Crypto has been around for decades but most of the tech we now call "Web3" is very nascent. The ERC-721 standard used by most NFTs was first proposed in 2018, and didn't even reach technical maturity until 2019. And yes, you can write normal contracts and get the courts to enforce it. But what if your customers are in India or Vietnam or Tibet? Under which jurisdiction will you attempt to enforce the contract? The entire critique rests on the thesis that the world will always be the way it is - dominated by a handful of western (mostly American) corporations who will get to dictate what billions of people in the rest of the world consume, create, and share. The reality is that the non-western part of the internet is already larger, will grow even larger, and it needs tools and products that are built for its scale and diversity. Whether that's Web3 or Web2 or Web2500, it doesn't matter. What does matter is that more and more countries will seek to yank back control from western corporations (like India making its own national mobile app store). I, for one, will cheer on anything that challenges the FAANG oligopoly.

lxe 4y ago

In order to understand Web3 culture, look into Professional Wrestling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayfabe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayfabe). Web3 is fake/staged, but everyone participating in Web3 either knows this, doesn't know this, or pretends not to know this.

k__ 4y ago
Web3 isn't one centralized entity that's either fake or true. It's a bunch of bullshit, mixed with many slick ideas. I believe in web3, but I also believe that art NFTs and crypto bros running grifter companies like MtGOX and FTX give it a bad rap. Luckily, the ecosystem is now big enough that you can avoid that crap pretty easily.
- halpmeh 4y ago
  I don’t think you can avoid it that easily. First there’s the question of identifying grift. But more broadly the price of crypto is influenced by the grifters and their operations.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > Web3 isn't one centralized entity that's either fake or true. It’s not centralized, but the players are incredibly good at moving in lock step together. This is most obvious on Twitter, where one of the loudest crypto/web3 cheerleaders will introduce a new idea and within hours all of the other loudest crypto/web3 accounts are Tweeting some variation of the same thing. The whole industry isn’t centrally coordinated, but they’re all reading the room and playing whatever game seems to be getting traction on a given week.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    It’s like crypto: the con is in tricking people into thinking they’re not just pawns.
  - JamesianP 4y ago
    Herd behavior, very common in finance certainly. I guess because they can profit from momentum even when the market ends up going nowhere over the long term.

kitsune_ 4y ago

Web 3.0 is the Semantic Web anyways.

DebtDeflation 4y ago

If you want to charge people to do things on your website, you can do that today and it doesn't require the use of blockchain or the creation of new tokens for payment.

k__ 4y ago
Regardless of the country you're from?
- lottin 4y ago
  Yes.
  - rvz 4y ago
    Yes PayPal. 'Please take my funds [0] and fine me $2,500 [1] if I say anything that you don't like'. Also, thank you Stripe. 'For locking my whole account account without any reason' [2] [3] [4] [5]. [0] https://twitter.com/flipper_zero/status/1567194641610465281 https://twitter.com/flipper_zero/status/1567194641610465281 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33348913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33348913 [2] https://twitter.com/zhovner/status/1384568453844066305 https://twitter.com/zhovner/status/1384568453844066305 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28085706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28085706 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33299222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33299222 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23881643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23881643
    - lottin 4y ago
      So what? Global trade reached a level of $28.5 trillion in 2021, so clearly global payments are working somehow.
  - splix 4y ago
    "Tell me you're from a rich western country without telling it"

EGreg 4y ago

So this guy is for extreme centralization. Moxie had a much more in-depth technical appologia for that. Here is a counterpoint for why decentralization is really important for the world: https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram-and-why-decentralization-matters/ https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram...

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

1) Web1 was the fruit of academia and unix neckbeards 2) Web2 was the fruit of web developers and silicon valley finance 3) "Web3" was the product of MBAs and finance bros You can see what's wrong with Web3. Silicon valley finance just wanted to get rich quick too, but they at least had to go through technology and programmers to get there. "Web3" was pushed by MBAs/Wall Street (at best) and shady crytpo finance bros (at worst), and had little in "new technology". The technology that WAS used came from the Web2 era with bitcoin. The real "next web" is in things like Mastodon (and Bittorrent and MAYBE some cryptocurrencies around distributed storage). Community or emergent things. Web1 was like that. Web2 was less so, and Web3 almost not at all. What made "web3" actually stick a bit in the zeitgeist was the emergent nature of Bitcoin. It was distributed, networked, it didn't have controlling company, or even any real celebrity originator aside from the pseudonum "Satoshi Nakomoto". Web1 was the maturation of TCPIP, networking, and basic text documents Web2 was a powerful standardized browser and more general purpose UI/computing. Web3 the hype was distributed and encryption, but has failed to produce utility to the average person, or even the average developer. Web2 only hit its stride in the post-dotcom crash when the money got back out. In a way, the dotcom boom funded the real Web2, then the crash weeded out the get rich quick people, and Web2 was built on the hardened survivors. Maybe "Web3" will similarly survive and thrive from a crash that weeds out the scammers.

abiro 4y ago

Web3 refers to the emerging shift in internet value chains from permissioned, centralized databases to permissionless, decentralized databases where users own their data. The driving force behind Web3 is that we can now enforce invariants on state transitions in a permissionless, decentralized manner for a limited set of applications (mostly financial). For an even more limited set of applications, we can also enforce invariants while preserving the confidentiality of transactions. With hindsight, the two technological breakthroughs that proved decentralized databases possible were Bitcoin and Zerocash. Bitcoin showed that state-machine replication (SMR) is solvable in a distributed, permissionless, partially synchronous setting with Byzantine fault tolerance. Zerocash showed that zero knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge can be used to ensure the confidentiality of transactions in this SMR setting. The tech is improving rapidly and it’s pretty easy to see where things are going from here: soon we’ll have general purpose decentralized databases where data is open as open source code is open. In fact, state-of-the-art blockchains can be viewed as special (financial) purpose decentralized databases. As to why decentralized databases are desirable: imagine if you could fork databases in a completely permission-less manner like you can fork code. This is how web development would look like: You, the programmer, take a look at a public data schema (eg. a smart contract that implements the ERC-721 interface) and decide to build on top of it. Then, a user, who has already interacted with what you built on, decides that they like what you built and lets your app use their data. You, the programmer, can be sure that the data you built on remains available, and the user can be sure that they'll be able to port the data produced by your app into new apps.

polygamous_bat 4y ago
I am sure people would like the permissionless, decentralized databases if they didn't come with microtransactions that promise early adopters large gains at the expense of later users, like... a glorified ponzi scheme.
david_shi 4y ago
This is a great summary. Many of the critiques I've read here criticize the early users of the technology, which is like blaming cars when the blame should be on bad drivers.

zaphod420 4y ago

web3 is about digital ownership. it's not doomed to fail.

woah 4y ago

Saving you a click: " There are many reasons contributing to the failure of Web3 but the most fundamental ones – Sophisticated & Tedious Development Self Governance & Lack of Compliance Built upon Delusions & Lies Not better than its predecessors in anyway Prone to all kinds of Cybersecurity issues that can’t be eliminated "

jmbwell 4y ago

Web 3 is the last of the ill-conceived prequels and the end of a misguided retcon. The true successor to the original Web trilogy will be episode 7.

spaceman_2020 4y ago

So many short-sighted critiques. Web3 or whatever might not be the answer, but you have to ask yourself a question: what's the internet going to look like in 2030, when the majority of its traffic is non-western, and a massive share of all purchasing power resides in Africa and Asia? Do you think by 2030, all global governments and their citizens will voluntarily give away control over what they can consume and create to Google and Apple? Are they going to ransom their digital economies to Apple's 30% tax? Betting in favor of the current centralized western oligopolies is betting on the belief that the digital economy won't grow, and that there won't be a regulatory crackdown in countries with stronger technological capabilities. In case you lose this bet, you have to ask: what's the alternative? Every large country making its own app stores and social networks? Or a decentralized variant that isn't completely controlled by a handful of western corporations? It can go either way, but it's definitely not going to be business as usual.

k__ 4y ago
True. I liked the term web3 somehow, but the more I read how people react to it, it might be already burned.
- m00dy 4y ago
  More and more people realize the difference between cefi and defi. I have never seen a defi protocol wrecked during this bear market. Everybody is talking about Tether, but who knows DAI ?
  - k__ 4y ago
    To be fair, DAI is mostly backed by USDC.
  - lottin 4y ago
    How can a protocol get wrecked?
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  I don't care much for the term. It's marketing hogwash. The anonymity of the space already attracts a lot of bullshit artists, but everything was ramped up to 11 because of the sheer insanity of the markets in 2020-21 across the board. I hope that the terminology evolves, just as the space itself evolves as well.

npc12345 4y ago