4 ms·

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 2

by 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.
RC_ITR 4y ago
It’s always so interesting to me that we already saw this happen - look no further than China - and they became oligapolized even more than the west. Centralization works. You may not like it and you hope that developing world won’t either, but WhatsApps success sort of invalidates all your points. Countries are fine handing over nearly all their data to whatever platform works best, because who wants less than the best?
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  It's not a problem yet because for much of the developing world, large scale internet adoption is a very recent phenomenon. And the leadership in most of these countries is still non tech savvy. There has simply not been enough time for the people or their leadership/bureaucracies to figure out what the long-term impact of this technoloy will be. India, for instance, had 250M internet users in 2015. That number is now nearly a billion. In nearly 25 years of the commercial internet, India could only bring 250M people online. Then it brought another 750M online in the span of just 7 years. For the bulk of India's online population, the internet is still a novelty. A prime minister elected in 2014 - who claimed to be "tech savvy" - was 58 when the iPhone was released - not exactly an age where you "get" new technology immediately. Now fast forward to 2032. A 65 year old prime ministerial candidate would have spent 22 years of his/her life in the smartphone world. The bulk of the population would have a decade's worth of experience of the digital world. Their understanding of the problems, risks, security issues, etc. would be far better. Already, the Indian government has announced plans to create its own mobile app store after protests by entrepreneurs against Google's app store fees. This is only going to increase moving forward.
  - pwinnski 4y ago
    We've seen countries moving online for may years now, and the move up the scale in economic prosperity always seems to be more of a factor than the actual technical savvy. Haiti could build an App Store, but they'd have trouble attracting developers for the fractional pennies they could charge for apps. The government of my garden shed has announced plans to create its own mobile App Store, too, but so far uptake has been minimal. The move toward viable alternatives takes time, and the seven years you've allocated doesn't seem like nearly enough. 2030 is as far from now as we are from 2015, and things haven't changed nearly as much in the last seven years as you seem to be predicting they will in the next seven years. Past performance is no guarantee of future results... but they're an indicator.
swivelmaster 4y ago
The history of technology over hundreds of years is a history of convergence to centralization that can only be disrupted by new technologies that will also converge to centralization. You're probably right that the current incumbents will eventually be replaced (not by 2030 though, that's only in a little more than seven years!), but they will need to be replaced by something that is at least 10x better AND has an extremely low barrier to entry. Decentralized solutions (as we currently understand them) don't offer either of those, and it's unlikely that they ever will.
mlsu 4y ago
What makes internet commerce any different from any other commerce? I will absolutely make this bet. We already see it. Countries who don't like to play by the rules of US trade -- those who resist signing trade agreements and using our currency develop or attempt to develop alternatives, and if they lack the capability to do so, they turn to other powers (basically: China). Economic activity gets silo'd into blocs, depending on which large power you want to depend on. Some countries are very cozy to the United States and participate in its trade agreements, joint ventures, currency, etc. Some countries do not. Internet commerce is not any different at all, and cryptocurrency does not change this one bit. For example, China notably separates its internet traffic from the United States by giving heavy advantages to its own enterprises and internet infrastructure. No country at all runs their internet economy on some cryptocurrency or cryptocomputation stack. And they never will, no matter how "decentralized" it is. The exception, maybe, is North Korea. Cryptocurrency has allowed them to be sort of digital pirates through ransomware payments. And you can see why they do that (it's not because they're building a productive internet economy on cryptocurrency!) and what the result ends up being (nobody is collaborating on a crypto venture with North Koreans, despite the heavy flow of bitcoin in and out of that country!).
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  > No country at all runs their internet economy on some cryptocurrency or cryptocomputation stack. And they never will, no matter how "decentralized" it is. Yep. They won't. They will centralize control even more and things that are not as conducive for the ruling power will likely get delisted and deplatformed. Which is precisely why building out the decentralized web matters. At the very least, there should be an alternative available to citizens. Even if its hard to access. The penalty for not building it out is walled gardens everywhere. If it ends up being adopted by governments and companies, great. If it's just used by a bunch of nerds to send messages or money to friends outside the walled garden, then, too, it is worth building. Surely, a reader of HackerNews would agree.
  - pwinnski 4y ago
    We have a decentralized web, right alongside the centralized web. It does't require any sort of crypto to function, and functions better without crypto added. Crypto is just another variety of wall.
asadotzler 4y ago
None of this, though reasonably stated, is good reason why crypto should underpin what comes next. And 7 years goes by fast. I've been in the web business professionally for almost 25 years and I can promise you that the fundamentals of the platform are not going to be upended by the fantasies of crypto dreamers by 2030. Hopefully we'll see more decentralization, or at least decentralized solutions more effectively competing with the centralized systems, but we're absolutely not going to see HTML, CSS, and JS apps and sites served over HTTPS replaced by this Web3 nonsense. My prediction is that the web of 2030 will look pretty much like it does today with a bit more capability and a somewhat different set of dominant players. My wish is that some of those dominant players are building experiences that are more user empowering, with better privacy and even anonymity characteristics.
- JeremyNT 4y ago
  Indeed, this is a weird false dichotomy being presented by the parent. The current centralized corporate oligopoly may be terrible, but a crypto-underpinned "web3" would be even worse. Decentralization is laudable, but "web3" (taken to mean: some kind of blockchain / cryptocurrency bolted onto the web) doesn't solve any real problems that actually exist, and even if it did it still requires centralization in the form of exchanges to make it easy enough for normal users to interact with these things.
phphphphp 4y ago
centralisation is human: it’s far more plausible that there’ll be multiple centralised systems separated by cultural boundaries — examples already exist, like China — than humans doing some sort radical cross-cultural shift from centralisation to decentralisation (which is itself a strange western-libertarian obsession).
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  This is precisely why I care about this "decentralized" web. I don't want to live in a China-like walled garden. In the absence of decentralized alternatives, enforcing such walled gardens just becomes easier.
jmbwell 4y ago
> a massive share of all purchasing power resides in Africa and Asia? I don't know about Africa, but Asia already has a massive share of all purchasing power. > 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? No, they're going to build things like Alibaba and Tencent and hold that control for themselves. Which they did do. > 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. Crackdown on what? Speech or human rights or ...? > what's the alternative? Every large country making its own app stores and social networks? Well, they have largely done that, haven't they? The "X" in Musks's "X app" clearly stands for "Wish it was WeChat" with all of the social media, shopping, commerce, banking, and communication embedded in it. > Or a decentralized variant that isn't completely controlled by a handful of western corporations? This is also already happening, isn't it? It seems like all of your hypothetical questions are already answered, and none of the answers are "Web 3."
perfecthjrjth 4y ago
Massive purchasing power of Africa, Asia? I don't believe so. USA is the major importer of illegal drugs, why? Because Americans have the purchasing power. Every country on the earth wants to export their stuff to the US. China doesn't want to depend on the West anymore--only way to do is to build their own domestic economy.
pwinnski 4y ago
> 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? It'll be Baidu and Tencent, but yes. This is already happening, and the internet is becoming more centralized, not less. Global traffic is balkanized, but it's split up among regional centralized controlling interesting, not no controlling interests. > 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. This is a false dichotomy. One need not bet for or against "current centralized western oligopolies" to bet against crypto fever dreams. One could assume that western oligopolies will be supplanted by eastern oligopolies, for example, or that the two will divvy up the market and coexist. I would definitely bet in favor of large countries having separate social networks, because that's what we have now. You seem to have a very western focus, and little to no understanding of how things are working in, say, China. Perhaps that's where you've gone wrong.
- lakomen 4y ago
  Balkanized is an interesting choice of word. It even has a Google definition, to divide countries and make them enemies of each other. Yet another victim of US imperialism. I weep for what was once a free and friendly nation. The kids nowadays are taught to hate their neighbors instead of learning how their parents or grandparents were part of a resistance that fought faschist Germany. That's just an aside. Nothing to do with the topic. I will never forget how my niece walked home from school on a road that was bombed by freedom bombs by the USA 30 minutes later. Not a single soldier has stood trial. Sorry that just struck a nerve, balkanized... is a word.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - pwinnski 4y ago
    I'm truly sorry for triggering bad memories. I spent some time with a European refugee now living in the US, and it definitely helped shape how I think about things. I probably should avoid using the word in public spaces.
root_axis 4y ago
The critiques aren't short sighted. Cryptocurrency schemes are not the future of the web. Cryptocurrency is useful as a darknet currency, other than that it's all shell games, flitting around useless tokens without any productive work being done.
- rvz 4y ago
  > Cryptocurrency is useful as a darknet currency, Yeah, having all transactions traceable on a public ledger is surely 'useful' for criminals, scammers, etc for everyone to see once it hits the exchange. /s
  - root_axis 4y ago
    The reality on the ground speaks for itself.
    - rvz 4y ago
      The reality being that it is much harder to cash out funds from crypto into fiat without leaving a single trace. Hardly benefits criminals, scammers, etc.
      - root_axis 4y ago
        If you want to make purchases on the darknet cryptocurrency is your only option.
        rvz 4y ago
        My point is, even if they use it, it is close to impossible to send, convert and cash out the crypto into fiat without leaving a single trace once it hits the exchange. This is not 2009.
      - pwinnski 4y ago
        In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, though, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and "According to the University of Technology Sydney, about 46% of criminal activity of each year is connected to Bitcoin.[0]" Other sources, more devoted to "this is good for crypto, actually" say the percentage is tiny-tiny, apparently by counting every transfer between any two addresses, including several that might all be related to a single real-life transaction. They seem to also have a pretty high standard for what they count as "illegal activity." Even so, they'll admit it's at least $14 billion of activity in a year. 0. https://bitcoinafrica.io/2020/03/04/crypto-illegal-activity/ https://bitcoinafrica.io/2020/03/04/crypto-illegal-activity/ 1. https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2022-crypto-crime-report-introduction/ https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2022-crypto-crime-repor...
zelias 4y ago
I expect world war and the following world government that it produces to remedy this issue by 2030.

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.

RC_ITR 4y ago

It’s always so interesting to me that we already saw this happen - look no further than China - and they became oligapolized even more than the west. Centralization works. You may not like it and you hope that developing world won’t either, but WhatsApps success sort of invalidates all your points. Countries are fine handing over nearly all their data to whatever platform works best, because who wants less than the best?

spaceman_2020 4y ago
It's not a problem yet because for much of the developing world, large scale internet adoption is a very recent phenomenon. And the leadership in most of these countries is still non tech savvy. There has simply not been enough time for the people or their leadership/bureaucracies to figure out what the long-term impact of this technoloy will be. India, for instance, had 250M internet users in 2015. That number is now nearly a billion. In nearly 25 years of the commercial internet, India could only bring 250M people online. Then it brought another 750M online in the span of just 7 years. For the bulk of India's online population, the internet is still a novelty. A prime minister elected in 2014 - who claimed to be "tech savvy" - was 58 when the iPhone was released - not exactly an age where you "get" new technology immediately. Now fast forward to 2032. A 65 year old prime ministerial candidate would have spent 22 years of his/her life in the smartphone world. The bulk of the population would have a decade's worth of experience of the digital world. Their understanding of the problems, risks, security issues, etc. would be far better. Already, the Indian government has announced plans to create its own mobile app store after protests by entrepreneurs against Google's app store fees. This is only going to increase moving forward.
- pwinnski 4y ago
  We've seen countries moving online for may years now, and the move up the scale in economic prosperity always seems to be more of a factor than the actual technical savvy. Haiti could build an App Store, but they'd have trouble attracting developers for the fractional pennies they could charge for apps. The government of my garden shed has announced plans to create its own mobile App Store, too, but so far uptake has been minimal. The move toward viable alternatives takes time, and the seven years you've allocated doesn't seem like nearly enough. 2030 is as far from now as we are from 2015, and things haven't changed nearly as much in the last seven years as you seem to be predicting they will in the next seven years. Past performance is no guarantee of future results... but they're an indicator.

swivelmaster 4y ago

The history of technology over hundreds of years is a history of convergence to centralization that can only be disrupted by new technologies that will also converge to centralization. You're probably right that the current incumbents will eventually be replaced (not by 2030 though, that's only in a little more than seven years!), but they will need to be replaced by something that is at least 10x better AND has an extremely low barrier to entry. Decentralized solutions (as we currently understand them) don't offer either of those, and it's unlikely that they ever will.

mlsu 4y ago

What makes internet commerce any different from any other commerce? I will absolutely make this bet. We already see it. Countries who don't like to play by the rules of US trade -- those who resist signing trade agreements and using our currency develop or attempt to develop alternatives, and if they lack the capability to do so, they turn to other powers (basically: China). Economic activity gets silo'd into blocs, depending on which large power you want to depend on. Some countries are very cozy to the United States and participate in its trade agreements, joint ventures, currency, etc. Some countries do not. Internet commerce is not any different at all, and cryptocurrency does not change this one bit. For example, China notably separates its internet traffic from the United States by giving heavy advantages to its own enterprises and internet infrastructure. No country at all runs their internet economy on some cryptocurrency or cryptocomputation stack. And they never will, no matter how "decentralized" it is. The exception, maybe, is North Korea. Cryptocurrency has allowed them to be sort of digital pirates through ransomware payments. And you can see why they do that (it's not because they're building a productive internet economy on cryptocurrency!) and what the result ends up being (nobody is collaborating on a crypto venture with North Koreans, despite the heavy flow of bitcoin in and out of that country!).

spaceman_2020 4y ago
> No country at all runs their internet economy on some cryptocurrency or cryptocomputation stack. And they never will, no matter how "decentralized" it is. Yep. They won't. They will centralize control even more and things that are not as conducive for the ruling power will likely get delisted and deplatformed. Which is precisely why building out the decentralized web matters. At the very least, there should be an alternative available to citizens. Even if its hard to access. The penalty for not building it out is walled gardens everywhere. If it ends up being adopted by governments and companies, great. If it's just used by a bunch of nerds to send messages or money to friends outside the walled garden, then, too, it is worth building. Surely, a reader of HackerNews would agree.
- pwinnski 4y ago
  We have a decentralized web, right alongside the centralized web. It does't require any sort of crypto to function, and functions better without crypto added. Crypto is just another variety of wall.

asadotzler 4y ago

None of this, though reasonably stated, is good reason why crypto should underpin what comes next. And 7 years goes by fast. I've been in the web business professionally for almost 25 years and I can promise you that the fundamentals of the platform are not going to be upended by the fantasies of crypto dreamers by 2030. Hopefully we'll see more decentralization, or at least decentralized solutions more effectively competing with the centralized systems, but we're absolutely not going to see HTML, CSS, and JS apps and sites served over HTTPS replaced by this Web3 nonsense. My prediction is that the web of 2030 will look pretty much like it does today with a bit more capability and a somewhat different set of dominant players. My wish is that some of those dominant players are building experiences that are more user empowering, with better privacy and even anonymity characteristics.

JeremyNT 4y ago
Indeed, this is a weird false dichotomy being presented by the parent. The current centralized corporate oligopoly may be terrible, but a crypto-underpinned "web3" would be even worse. Decentralization is laudable, but "web3" (taken to mean: some kind of blockchain / cryptocurrency bolted onto the web) doesn't solve any real problems that actually exist, and even if it did it still requires centralization in the form of exchanges to make it easy enough for normal users to interact with these things.

phphphphp 4y ago

centralisation is human: it’s far more plausible that there’ll be multiple centralised systems separated by cultural boundaries — examples already exist, like China — than humans doing some sort radical cross-cultural shift from centralisation to decentralisation (which is itself a strange western-libertarian obsession).

spaceman_2020 4y ago
This is precisely why I care about this "decentralized" web. I don't want to live in a China-like walled garden. In the absence of decentralized alternatives, enforcing such walled gardens just becomes easier.

jmbwell 4y ago

> a massive share of all purchasing power resides in Africa and Asia? I don't know about Africa, but Asia already has a massive share of all purchasing power. > 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? No, they're going to build things like Alibaba and Tencent and hold that control for themselves. Which they did do. > 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. Crackdown on what? Speech or human rights or ...? > what's the alternative? Every large country making its own app stores and social networks? Well, they have largely done that, haven't they? The "X" in Musks's "X app" clearly stands for "Wish it was WeChat" with all of the social media, shopping, commerce, banking, and communication embedded in it. > Or a decentralized variant that isn't completely controlled by a handful of western corporations? This is also already happening, isn't it? It seems like all of your hypothetical questions are already answered, and none of the answers are "Web 3."

perfecthjrjth 4y ago

Massive purchasing power of Africa, Asia? I don't believe so. USA is the major importer of illegal drugs, why? Because Americans have the purchasing power. Every country on the earth wants to export their stuff to the US. China doesn't want to depend on the West anymore--only way to do is to build their own domestic economy.

pwinnski 4y ago

> 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? It'll be Baidu and Tencent, but yes. This is already happening, and the internet is becoming more centralized, not less. Global traffic is balkanized, but it's split up among regional centralized controlling interesting, not no controlling interests. > 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. This is a false dichotomy. One need not bet for or against "current centralized western oligopolies" to bet against crypto fever dreams. One could assume that western oligopolies will be supplanted by eastern oligopolies, for example, or that the two will divvy up the market and coexist. I would definitely bet in favor of large countries having separate social networks, because that's what we have now. You seem to have a very western focus, and little to no understanding of how things are working in, say, China. Perhaps that's where you've gone wrong.

lakomen 4y ago
Balkanized is an interesting choice of word. It even has a Google definition, to divide countries and make them enemies of each other. Yet another victim of US imperialism. I weep for what was once a free and friendly nation. The kids nowadays are taught to hate their neighbors instead of learning how their parents or grandparents were part of a resistance that fought faschist Germany. That's just an aside. Nothing to do with the topic. I will never forget how my niece walked home from school on a road that was bombed by freedom bombs by the USA 30 minutes later. Not a single soldier has stood trial. Sorry that just struck a nerve, balkanized... is a word.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pwinnski 4y ago
  I'm truly sorry for triggering bad memories. I spent some time with a European refugee now living in the US, and it definitely helped shape how I think about things. I probably should avoid using the word in public spaces.

root_axis 4y ago

The critiques aren't short sighted. Cryptocurrency schemes are not the future of the web. Cryptocurrency is useful as a darknet currency, other than that it's all shell games, flitting around useless tokens without any productive work being done.

rvz 4y ago
> Cryptocurrency is useful as a darknet currency, Yeah, having all transactions traceable on a public ledger is surely 'useful' for criminals, scammers, etc for everyone to see once it hits the exchange. /s
- root_axis 4y ago
  The reality on the ground speaks for itself.
  - rvz 4y ago
    The reality being that it is much harder to cash out funds from crypto into fiat without leaving a single trace. Hardly benefits criminals, scammers, etc.
    - root_axis 4y ago
      If you want to make purchases on the darknet cryptocurrency is your only option.
      - rvz 4y ago
        My point is, even if they use it, it is close to impossible to send, convert and cash out the crypto into fiat without leaving a single trace once it hits the exchange. This is not 2009.
    - pwinnski 4y ago
      In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, though, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and "According to the University of Technology Sydney, about 46% of criminal activity of each year is connected to Bitcoin.[0]" Other sources, more devoted to "this is good for crypto, actually" say the percentage is tiny-tiny, apparently by counting every transfer between any two addresses, including several that might all be related to a single real-life transaction. They seem to also have a pretty high standard for what they count as "illegal activity." Even so, they'll admit it's at least $14 billion of activity in a year. 0. https://bitcoinafrica.io/2020/03/04/crypto-illegal-activity/ https://bitcoinafrica.io/2020/03/04/crypto-illegal-activity/ 1. https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2022-crypto-crime-report-introduction/ https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2022-crypto-crime-repor...

zelias 4y ago

I expect world war and the following world government that it produces to remedy this issue by 2030.