8 ms·

Hmm ... "web3". The article mentions it multiple times, FTX apparently having affted its philosophy, upset its fans, abused its supporters and has people quest

Hmm ... "web3". The article mentions it multiple times, FTX apparently having affted its philosophy, upset its fans, abused its supporters and has people questioning the product. I have questions too ... like, is this even a thing at all, has it ever been? I must be missing something, I'm just not sure what. From what I can tell, it's crypto/blockhain revolutionizing the web somehow, which I know I am not seeing. I don't think it's DeFi, or maybe that is part of it too because ... that's crypto. What is the "product" that is now reportedly being questioned? It seems like it's a buzzword. Since I first saw it, I have kept seeing it. The word, nothing else. If that's the case, then I don't see its philosophy, fans, supporters, and product being affected by events at FTX at all. Because those aren't really things either? I'm not sure if it matters enough that I should even be spending time asking about it.

Waterluvian 3y ago
Web3/crypto is populated by two types: charlatans and marks. The marks are upset because SBF’s conviction casts doubt on their convictions. Nobody wants to believe they’re a fool. The charlatans are upset because SBF broke rule one of a con: don’t get caught and ruin it for the rest.
dartos 3y ago
The idea, as far as I can tell, was for web3 to be truly distributed. That is, there is no single point of failure for any website and no single entity totally controls any site. Over time as the decentralization bend of crypto faded, so did the meaning of web3. Eventually it devolved to meaning a site using a crypto wallet for purchases and identity. At least that’s been my understanding as someone following fairly closely
- kodapoda 3y ago
  I think the on-chain products like games are also considered part of web3. Some game developers attempted to store game and user state on chain. As far as I know, these are mostly gambling-type games where the actual gameplay is almost non-existent, and the only attraction (beyond the obvious gambling/crypto) is "the community", "future potential", etc.
resolutebat 3y ago
Web3 is just a snappy buzzword for blockchain-based computation: smart contracts, Ethereum VMs, all that jazz. But the broader world just knows it all as "crypto", a term that's now thoroughly associated with FTX-style fraud and snake oil, and the fact that nobody's ever managed to do anything useful with "web3" certainly isn't helping.
dgreensp 3y ago
The part in the article about calling into question “the most basic tenets of the web3 philosophy” made me laugh. Every statement ever made about web3 has been questionable.
SkyMarshal 3y ago
I’m personally not a fan of the term, but here’s what I believe is the steel-man explanation of it: Web3 refers to how the Ethereum community decided that the user interface to blockchains should be web-like, instead of say via commandline terminal or via Qt desktop apps (like Bitcoin). You can see this with Metamask, which is essentially Ethereum’s App Store for smart contracts. https://metamask.io/ https://metamask.io/ From that concept, the notion extended into using crypto to augment Web2 apps, like with micropayments or NFTs or the like. Now it is a catch-all term for the Internet of Value, or the global Web augmented with a native currency that is not controlled by any country or company. I’m not sure it was a good idea to co-opt a familiar term (Web2.0) and then define blockchain and cryptocurrency in terms of that. It’s unsurprisingly getting pushback, and Ethereum is being accused of “marchitecture” (like with the Pentium4, tech designed for marketing which compromises true performance, or security, or something else). Blockchains are expensive fully replicated distributed databases. They inherently want to host very light weight but high-value data, like accounting ledgers or internet names, and websites and apps are not that.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  >Internet of Value I’m disgusted how a bunch of VC types thought they were so incredibly clever with that piece of dystopian commodification double speak.
  - kodapoda 3y ago
    To be fair, VC types are not in the business of ethical philosophy. Crypto was not the first tech hype, won't be the last one. VC types will continue to thoughtlessly promote whatever makes them the most money.
    - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
      With my theory of everything that is wrong… MBA-ification is actually very very high on the list.
      - 3y ago
hanniabu 3y ago
web1 = read web2 = read/write web3 = read/write/own
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  Seems a little more like: - It takes some knowledge to post - It takes too little knowledge to post - It takes money to do anything
- bruce511 3y ago
  Not sure why you're getting downvoted. Sure it's not completely accurate but it does embody the "spirit" I think. I know, you could do writes with Web 1, so it's imperfect, but since that imperfection carries on to Web 3, I kinda like it. In its "wrongness" it kinda suggests it's not that simple. Web 3 might be "own" - but the -value- of what you own is questionable. There might be things of value in there, but if there is it's well hidden by the crap. "Web with blockchain" doesn't seem like a useful improvement over "Web without block chain" [1]. So I like your summary. It begs the question "own what?" Which in turn kinda answers the Web 3 question in a nutshell. [1] apart from criminal activity, clearly the killer-app for crypto, the block-chain is useful for time-stamping things. It can be used to prove that say a piece of music existed at a specific point in time. Which could be useful in copyright questions. Granted, this is an astonishingly niche case though.
  - kodapoda 3y ago
    The time-stamping use case you describe is basically non-existent. Even light media like images are not stored on-chain 99.99% of the time. Time-stamping a URL to an audio track that is hosted on a server you own is not in itself a prove of the existence of this copyrighted material. I have seen interesting on-chain visual experiments (generative animation fully stored on-chain) but that trend seems to have faded under the pressure of the NFT monetization spike+burst.
    - oasisaimlessly 3y ago
      You don't have to store the data on-chain. Simply storing a cryptographically-secure hash of the data is sufficient to attest its existence.
chrisbolt 3y ago
> FTX apparently having affted its philosophy What does affted mean?
injeolmi_love 3y ago
It is a buzzword now. Originally it meant a decentralized p2p app stack. For instance IPFS for file delivery, EVM for computation, and Greenfield for database operations. In this view bittorent would be an early example of a web3 application. The idea is open and permisionless p2p apps can provide better user service than centralized web2 apps. Now it’s mostly lost it’s origin meaning.
rsynnott 3y ago
> I have questions too ... like, is this even a thing at all, has it ever been? I must be missing something, I'm just not sure what. Define "a thing". As in a thing that VCs threw money at? Absolutely. As in a thing that any normal human ever used or would ever want to use? No, but arguably that wasn't the point. To add to the confusion, there was previously a thing called Web 3.0, or the Semantic Web. This was a big collection of W3C standards aimed around making internet data machine readable. Its main practical legacy is ActivityPub (and arguably RSS depending on how hard you squint at it). This was completely unrelated.

Waterluvian 3y ago

Web3/crypto is populated by two types: charlatans and marks. The marks are upset because SBF’s conviction casts doubt on their convictions. Nobody wants to believe they’re a fool. The charlatans are upset because SBF broke rule one of a con: don’t get caught and ruin it for the rest.

dartos 3y ago

The idea, as far as I can tell, was for web3 to be truly distributed. That is, there is no single point of failure for any website and no single entity totally controls any site. Over time as the decentralization bend of crypto faded, so did the meaning of web3. Eventually it devolved to meaning a site using a crypto wallet for purchases and identity. At least that’s been my understanding as someone following fairly closely

kodapoda 3y ago
I think the on-chain products like games are also considered part of web3. Some game developers attempted to store game and user state on chain. As far as I know, these are mostly gambling-type games where the actual gameplay is almost non-existent, and the only attraction (beyond the obvious gambling/crypto) is "the community", "future potential", etc.

resolutebat 3y ago

Web3 is just a snappy buzzword for blockchain-based computation: smart contracts, Ethereum VMs, all that jazz. But the broader world just knows it all as "crypto", a term that's now thoroughly associated with FTX-style fraud and snake oil, and the fact that nobody's ever managed to do anything useful with "web3" certainly isn't helping.

dgreensp 3y ago

The part in the article about calling into question “the most basic tenets of the web3 philosophy” made me laugh. Every statement ever made about web3 has been questionable.

SkyMarshal 3y ago

I’m personally not a fan of the term, but here’s what I believe is the steel-man explanation of it: Web3 refers to how the Ethereum community decided that the user interface to blockchains should be web-like, instead of say via commandline terminal or via Qt desktop apps (like Bitcoin). You can see this with Metamask, which is essentially Ethereum’s App Store for smart contracts. https://metamask.io/ https://metamask.io/ From that concept, the notion extended into using crypto to augment Web2 apps, like with micropayments or NFTs or the like. Now it is a catch-all term for the Internet of Value, or the global Web augmented with a native currency that is not controlled by any country or company. I’m not sure it was a good idea to co-opt a familiar term (Web2.0) and then define blockchain and cryptocurrency in terms of that. It’s unsurprisingly getting pushback, and Ethereum is being accused of “marchitecture” (like with the Pentium4, tech designed for marketing which compromises true performance, or security, or something else). Blockchains are expensive fully replicated distributed databases. They inherently want to host very light weight but high-value data, like accounting ledgers or internet names, and websites and apps are not that.

SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
>Internet of Value I’m disgusted how a bunch of VC types thought they were so incredibly clever with that piece of dystopian commodification double speak.
- kodapoda 3y ago
  To be fair, VC types are not in the business of ethical philosophy. Crypto was not the first tech hype, won't be the last one. VC types will continue to thoughtlessly promote whatever makes them the most money.
  - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
    With my theory of everything that is wrong… MBA-ification is actually very very high on the list.
    - 3y ago

hanniabu 3y ago

web1 = read web2 = read/write web3 = read/write/own

SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
Seems a little more like: - It takes some knowledge to post - It takes too little knowledge to post - It takes money to do anything
bruce511 3y ago
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. Sure it's not completely accurate but it does embody the "spirit" I think. I know, you could do writes with Web 1, so it's imperfect, but since that imperfection carries on to Web 3, I kinda like it. In its "wrongness" it kinda suggests it's not that simple. Web 3 might be "own" - but the -value- of what you own is questionable. There might be things of value in there, but if there is it's well hidden by the crap. "Web with blockchain" doesn't seem like a useful improvement over "Web without block chain" [1]. So I like your summary. It begs the question "own what?" Which in turn kinda answers the Web 3 question in a nutshell. [1] apart from criminal activity, clearly the killer-app for crypto, the block-chain is useful for time-stamping things. It can be used to prove that say a piece of music existed at a specific point in time. Which could be useful in copyright questions. Granted, this is an astonishingly niche case though.
- kodapoda 3y ago
  The time-stamping use case you describe is basically non-existent. Even light media like images are not stored on-chain 99.99% of the time. Time-stamping a URL to an audio track that is hosted on a server you own is not in itself a prove of the existence of this copyrighted material. I have seen interesting on-chain visual experiments (generative animation fully stored on-chain) but that trend seems to have faded under the pressure of the NFT monetization spike+burst.
  - oasisaimlessly 3y ago
    You don't have to store the data on-chain. Simply storing a cryptographically-secure hash of the data is sufficient to attest its existence.

chrisbolt 3y ago

> FTX apparently having affted its philosophy What does affted mean?

injeolmi_love 3y ago

It is a buzzword now. Originally it meant a decentralized p2p app stack. For instance IPFS for file delivery, EVM for computation, and Greenfield for database operations. In this view bittorent would be an early example of a web3 application. The idea is open and permisionless p2p apps can provide better user service than centralized web2 apps. Now it’s mostly lost it’s origin meaning.

rsynnott 3y ago

> I have questions too ... like, is this even a thing at all, has it ever been? I must be missing something, I'm just not sure what. Define "a thing". As in a thing that VCs threw money at? Absolutely. As in a thing that any normal human ever used or would ever want to use? No, but arguably that wasn't the point. To add to the confusion, there was previously a thing called Web 3.0, or the Semantic Web. This was a big collection of W3C standards aimed around making internet data machine readable. Its main practical legacy is ActivityPub (and arguably RSS depending on how hard you squint at it). This was completely unrelated.