by tbolt on 11/18/21, 9:19 PM with 446 comments
by armchairhacker on 11/19/21, 1:25 AM
AKA I don't see the general public moving away from centralized web2, but I do think it would be nice if developers created a decentralized alternative to Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, etc. which being made by individuals and mostly comprised of other developers, is very similar to old-school message boards.
I don't think this decentralized platform will necessarily involve blockchain, just peer-to-peer interactions. The "web3 movement" could simply be getting more people to join a decentralized network like the Fediverse, and improving said network, so it becomes a common peer-to-peer developer version of Twitter, Youtube, etc. Blockchain makes it easy to pay people for being part of the network, but you could do the exact same thing with stablecoins or Stripe payments.
Right now most techies and developers use YouTube and Reddit and Twitter even though they publicly loath and complain about these platforms (ironically on the platforms themselves). Because it's impossible for a small group to create anything remotely competing with a large centralized platform. But a decentralized platform, just maybe, could attract enough people and produce enough content to not be obscure.
Ultimately, I think most of the interest in web3 comes from nostalgia. Old-school developers look at the rise of "Web 1.0" (the original Internet) and "Web 2.0" (Google, Facebook, YouTube). They remember everything being so new and exciting, and recognize how much opportunity they missed. Well, in the past few years the internet hasn't "really" changed much, supposedly it's been much more boring. People want more novelty and excitement and opportunity, and they think and hope it's going to happen again in something they will call "web3".
by simmanian on 11/18/21, 10:11 PM
by ChicagoDave on 11/19/21, 1:46 AM
Web2 isn't going anywhere. It's not about some ephemeral future of web3, but more about stuff most people care about works in web2. Which is mainly, stream a flick, buy a pair of pants, watch football, order food. Web3 really doesn't influence any of those basic needs. And social networks? web3+Facebook would be EVEN WORSE. Hard pass.
Tokenizing humanity is _not_ the way to go.
by dgudkov on 11/19/21, 9:25 AM
The interoperability is what we've lost in the Web 2.0 era. Even such quintessential thing as a web API has no well defined standard or protocol, just a very vague concept of REST or RPC.
I want Web 3.0 to get interoperability back. We badly need commonly accepted standards and decentralized protocols: for web APIs, for identity management, for message queuing, for web callbacks (webhooks), for online transactions, for semantic web and ontology, etc.
Take, for instance, web APIs. It's barely usable nowadays. Imagine if you had to write a special browser every time you need to connect to a new website. But this is what already happens with APIs. Accessing programmatically any web-service requires custom coding an API. Insane!
by _gf4m on 11/19/21, 2:40 AM
That, and utilizing wallets as proof of identity, is so mindnumbingly simple compared to OAuth+OIDC for authentication and varying strategies for authorization. Granted the project is a small scale project, but with web3 architectural changes, it is empowering me to create a 2 person project (I am the only engineer too), that would be much more daunting of a project in traditional web architecture.
It's very exciting stuff, and I hope that people are able to see the tech for the possibilities it provides, especially when it comes to the NFT space. An NFT is just simply a single issue token, it can do whatever the developer wants, despite the common misperception being it is solely a link to a static image file on arweave / IPFS. Unfortunately the market is completely saturated with low-effort projects so it is very, very difficult to get eyes on innovative projects, but I hope that can change, and hope that I can create a project that allows even a small amount of people to see that there is so much more to the technology than what people have considered in 2021.
by austincheney on 11/18/21, 10:16 PM
Now it seems it is something vaguely related to blockchain. At the moment blockchain is directly tied to crypto currency, which to almost everybody looks like a giant Ponzi scheme.
Until the concept of blockchain is completely divorced from crypto currencies they can name this nonsence whatever they want. It won't stick. Nobody cares except for the few people already making money off this.
by SkeuomorphicBee on 11/19/21, 12:35 AM
That is the best explanation of Web3, it is like one of those Reddit April's folks events, just a social game.
by nyanpasu64 on 11/19/21, 10:47 AM
However I don't want a Web3 built around "pay-to-play" which rejects the idea that anyone can read, write, and publish without paying for the privilege. The web I want is closer to Gemini (a simple transfer protocol and a hypertext format built around user-chosen presentation), instead of HTML's complex element hierarchies often unreadable without CSS's author-dictated formatting, JS's drive-by code execution by design, or Ethereum's rejection of permissionless access.
by okareaman on 11/19/21, 12:14 AM
by xg15 on 11/18/21, 10:14 PM
Can we add group #3, people who are profoundly uninterested in this version of Web3 even despite all the money in it?
I was a fan of decentralisation when it stood for federated software and the idea that the web should generally be the same for hobbyists and professionals.
I really can't see a desirable vision of the future with a web based on artificial scarcity, intentional resource waste and anarchocapitalism.
by pmlnr on 11/18/21, 11:03 PM
by alfl on 11/19/21, 1:20 AM
web3 isn't all tokens and NFTs. There's a huge distributed computing piece.
The increased investment is being used to build important infra.
by isodev on 11/19/21, 1:29 AM
In other words, the prerequisite is that you already believe web3 is a real technology and not just bs.
Really, why are developers wasting their time? Plenty of real “decentralised web” technologies and opportunities are begging for your acquaintance!
by tshaddox on 11/18/21, 10:43 PM
by benreesman on 11/19/21, 3:44 AM
With that said the crypto folks have had some legitimate heavy hitters quietly building another generation of the technology and it’s just now starting to go live. Take a look at the Haskell / distributed systems bench at IO-HK: Standard Chartered would love to employ that group of people. And while it’s still a little early, Substrate is powering Kusama-bonded chains on delegated PoS + finality gadget in the wild, today. The Parity people are also not screwing around.
It will be at a minimum interesting to see how mature technology alters the fundamental “crypto” equation.
P.S. If you want to point web3.is at a modern chain, Moonriver seems like your best bet right now, but it’s early days.
by leashless on 11/18/21, 10:30 PM
The point is that the data about the assets should outlast the interest of the current owner. It should outlast the physical assets themselves.
Hard to get another architecture which can manage data beyond the lifetime of any given market actor.
by harel on 11/18/21, 11:48 PM
To me it was just yesterday that the idea of that curated list of web links called Yahoo seemed neat, ebay is some social experiment from across the bay, and then this ugly looking Google kid comes in and blows everyone away with actual relevant search results. Or those SMS messages from that SMS service Twitter or finding old friends on friendster... I can't recall any recent high impact "new thing" except maybe crypto.
by habosa on 11/19/21, 8:49 AM
Web3 is going to be the most greed and profit-driven tech the internet has ever seen.
by ocdtrekkie on 11/18/21, 10:34 PM
A big part of the problem here is that the high cost of crypto transactions and NFT minting means many Web3 things literally can't afford to let people get started for free.
by vmception on 11/19/21, 1:22 AM
The mindshare goes this direction because the project lifecycle is faster.
That’s it.
Overhead costs are lower, institutional validation requirements are nonexistent, the infrastructure requirements are minimal (frontend only, and even thats a maybe) - sure you could have used a database but now you dont even need one and your users pay to write to the database (blockchain) you do use! - the monetization paths are more lucrative, more liquid and instant, and your pedigree, geographic location or network doesnt matter to do any of this.
thats why this is going to keep happening.
tech sector is fast, this tech sector is faster. there’s no competition as far as fields go right now.
just continuing working for your exploitative ad conglomerate while imagining you are doing something more important and dont worry about everyone else. thats where we are at right now.
by rvz on 11/18/21, 10:57 PM
Yes it should. Hence the reasons why there are alternative blockchains that not only aim to supersede Ethereum but they are specifically designed to scale and handle more applications and use-cases with cheaper transaction fees and are also EVM compatible.
The only reason that they have decided on something unscalable and expensive as Ethereum is because they missed out on Bitcoin. So the Web3 crowd decides to hype it everywhere.
I still cannot use Ethereum to buy my groceries. Therefore it is completely useless for that case.
by nathias on 11/19/21, 9:07 AM
- web 2.0 are platforms
- web 3.0 will maybe be protocols agains
The next iteration of web doesn't make away with the previous, it includes it, so thee is no fear of losing deletion but as anyone that can code can imagine: there is a real benefit to immutability, it gives you a foundation you can build on and in this case a decentralized foundation. Stop being fixated on kids swaping cards and try to see the good this tech can do, becuse if not only its bad side will be explored and we will just get platforms with more insidious dark patterns.
by rburhum on 11/18/21, 10:52 PM
1) Finance (DeFi). Even for valid (non-criminal) uses cases, there are numerous laws and regulations that translate into crazy fees to do proper crossboder money transfer. I transfer money every month from the US to different countries in LATAM to pay employees, and historically you get screwed with various fees depending on how you structure the transfer (e.g. to the employee directly vs. to an entity in the receiving country that disburses the money to different local employees).
During the past few years I have encountered everything:
- unexpected fees beyond the local transfer fee at the receiving end (that change some times) (hello folks at Interbank!)
- low-fee provider that canceled our account because the TOS said that the service was meant to be used to send money to family and not to employees (hello folks at Xoom!)
- holding of money transferred for a week because of some threshold passed that triggered some AML check (hello folks at BCP!)
- provider that canceled transfer to a particular country for political instability (hello folks at Transferwise!)
- etc etc
All that goes away when you use p2p networks (like the ones from Binance https://p2p.binance.com/en?fiat=CNY&payment=ALL) and stablecoins to transfer money. The fees are low (or sometimes non-existent) and the transfer happens in seconds (vs the hours/days in a traditional system). Literally millions of cross-border dollars get transferred this way every day. Additionally, I hear of other folks who have escaped authoritarian regimes but still have family in those countries where there are strict restrictions to send/receive money. Guess what they are using?
2) Digital Property/Rights: Whether you want to accept it or not, there is an entire market where all kinds of property is being transferred through smart contracts. Sometimes the traditional digital item (say an NFT) has an associated real-world contract attached to it that extends some sort of right/ownership of a physical item in the real world. The rights to these items is being transferred from person to person every day. That market keeps growing, and it is not just "exchanging jpegs" anymore.
For both of these use cases, there are real world scenarios where a central authority has been by-passed for a legitimate transaction. And it happens every day today. The use cases for web3 is not running a "distributed Wordpress instance", but other useful real-world use-cases like these that we are starting to discover.
by zenlikethat on 11/19/21, 12:59 AM
Crypto definitely does have a "playing with our food" feel a lot of the time, but I also think there's a privileged American perspective in turning your nose up at DeFi. In America we can generally count on a well regulated financial system, a stable currency, and a good climate to transact and do business. Many, MANY other places do not have this. If inflation is 10-20% like Turkey or Brazil, or your bank might bail in your assets to socialize losses like in Greece or Cyprus, or the only way to invest is through shady brokerages who might rip you off, DeFi is a fantastic alternative.
Not to mention some coins helping with the right to transact anonymously. The writing is on the wall for cash, and how many of you are thrilled about a world in which your every purchase and transaction is easily available to governments and corporations? It gets lost in all the hubbub, but Monero is one of the best privacy enhancing tools to come along in years. While it can be used for horrible things, it can also be invaluable to dissidents and other benign actors, just like cryptography in general can.
Fred Wilson's post on "the opening" re: the potential of NFTs I think is also worth a read -- https://avc.com/2021/08/the-opening/ It's hard to understand the memetic disease NFT participants catch until you're actually in the middle of it. Whether everyone will catch it or it will peter out is still up for debate.
by ThomPete on 11/19/21, 12:32 AM
It's here to stay, NFT opened the floodgates and in 10 after the usual crashes and bull market runs, everyone will be integrated onto the blockchain one way or another.
by m3kw9 on 11/19/21, 12:29 AM
by pezzana on 11/18/21, 11:14 PM
Except in 99% of cases there is no technical reason for those tokens to exist. Everything they claim to do can be done with Bitcoin by itself.
Look, there's nothing wrong with harvesting money from digital rubes. But let's not fool ourselves into believing what's going on has anything to do with turning the world into a digital Chuck E Cheese.
by gfodor on 11/19/21, 2:52 AM
by barnabee on 11/18/21, 11:13 PM
That's it. That's all that needs to happen to keep me on side. The more our online lives and worlds fulfil the above statement, the better.
by tarkin2 on 11/18/21, 11:01 PM
by imgabe on 11/19/21, 1:30 AM
So did physical computers, in the beginning.
by binarynate on 11/18/21, 10:23 PM
by 015a on 11/19/21, 12:17 AM
Web 2.0, while nebulous, is reasonably defined as "the web as an application platform". Web 1.0 is for documents; static. Web 2.0 couldn't exist without 1.0; it took HTML, CSS, added JavaScript (well, argue the term "added", its nebulous, we're speaking in broad terms), and "evolved" it (or "devolved" depending on who you ask) to support much deeper user interaction and productivity.
Moreover; Web 1.0 is still right here. It didn't go anywhere. Its as easy as its always been to publish a static site with just HTML.
Anyone on the Web3 side who argues "P2P or Nothing" is, frankly, just as pointless as someone on the other side who says "haha, all your marketing is on Web2 Twitter, you people can't even build a social network!". Its not a zero sum game, despite what the semver naming scheme asserts (and let's be fair: Web2 started it! Web3 just adopted their inaccuracy).
Really love a lot of the other points made here, though. Lots of things to ponder over.
> The money thing confounds evaluation; it’s like trying to look at a star next to the sun [...] would you still be curious about Web3 if those currencies were worthless, in dollar terms? [...] The Ethereum Virtual Machine, humming heart of Web3, is a computer that charges you many dollars to execute a very small program very slowly. [...] They were about other things — science and coffee pots, links and camera lenses — while Web3 is, to a first approximation, about Web3.
I think a lot about sort-of the thrust of all these points. Web3/ETH/etc are super interesting from a technical angle, but what "real" work are they accomplishing? First thing people point to: DeFi. But that's self-referential, as he says, and moreover, finance sucks; its important, but its fake. Where's the real productivity in Web3? Well, the Second thing; ETH VM, which is a joke.
NFTs feel like a "third" large use-case of Web3, and could be the first interesting one, as a way to create digital scarcity. I'm not sure if its good or bad, but it is, at least, Natural, and Interesting. But its still self-referential and rooted in finance.
Point being, I think I would be far, far more interested in Web3 if it actually wasn't so mired in finance. I love his wording: its like trying to look at a [planet] next to the sun. But I'm also convinced that it wouldn't exist without its roots in finance; that's how you get people interested.
by m3kw9 on 11/19/21, 12:32 AM
by sgt101 on 11/19/21, 9:02 AM
by ketanip on 11/19/21, 6:41 AM
### Main uses ?
Most people talk about censorship and decentralization but what percentage of consumers care about it negligible.
If you want to fight against censorship then just create a website on dark web ( like NYT has ), you can also use tools like Onion Share ( I haven't tested it yet ) if you have no idea how to do complicated stetting up of a dark web site.
### Decentralization
WEB 3.0 people talk about decentralization and spread their word on Twitter and discord ( Centralized means of communication ) but will never host a node of mastodon or Matrix Chat, which is a real way forward if you want to fight these platforms but no as if they will do then people will know, Oh Shit Decentralized web already exists and this will drop the value of token will drop as people will know there it no future in wasting hardware capabilities for nothing. Even a silly dog shit coin ( DOGE ) can has so much value what the hell is going on, its not even limited.
When people talk about IPFS they can only say it is decentralized and stuff but can it ever compete with the speed and cost efficiency of AWS S3, GCP Storage or Azure's offering, or even a self hosted 3 replica set on MinIO, never. And we have go guarantee of availability on IPFS so that's a big no at least for me. Also it is so slow that Cloudflare is caching content on IPFS they told in their recent blog post, so where is the decentralized bit am I missing something.
Also some decentralized blockchains have invite only miners program, so where is decentralization, am I missing some thing ?
### Is it forever ?
NO. Believe Me.
Who the hell is going to use mining resources used now when all coins are mined out and sold. No one with a right mind, as there will be a very less incentive to do so. And who will stop the spread of misinformation without censorship, well we can't ( theoretically ).
### Environmental Impact
Now let's talk about environmental impact that no one is going to talk about, why "We don't do that here.". It is one of the worst in a news article I read recently it said that it takes energy that would be required by 2 households in a day to process one transaction on Bitcoin. Global Warming WTF is that ask crypto coins.
### How do coin and protocol developers make money ?
While doing research about WEB 3.0, I was wondering how the hell are companies developing products will make their money to remain in business and thus maintaining the projects and you how they will keep around about 15-20% or more of initial coins for them. Or if it is a company like Brave ( makers of brave browser who blocks others ads and show people their ads and makers of token BAT ) pre mint all the coins and wallah here comes the centralization in the coin.
Web 3.0 can never obtain or create new innovative technologies like FANG as they can hire best engineers who really enjoy their work and their salary do not depend on value a silly token so they try to promote it everywhere they go.
Now companies like twitter and discord and facing backlash as they unveil their plans to use tokens, so that's actually good I think.
### Any Solution:
Yes, if you are on the immutability train let me introduce you to ImmuDB https://github.com/codenotary/immudb it is a super fast, so fast that blockchains can never accomplish these speeds "SQL SQL SQL" database which is so much more feature rich then the dumb blockchain.
If you are on public ledger thing then just create a read-only node of database and let it open to public so everyone can use it, there are 1000s if not millions of people who know SQL that only few who the blockchain protocols.
### How can a blockchain be destroyed ?
Simple Method Govt. can just block transaction from banks and exchanges and you are done no one accepts silly coins in real world.
Hard Method ( Permanent / Long Lasting ) As far as my knowledge blockchains are venerable to 51% attack which people say is impossible, but let's say I'm XYZ country and I want to ruin a blockchain I will just force all the cloud providers in my country ( big and small ) to lend their computers for few minutes for free or paid and then just do 51% attack and ruin it and then when other good people will do the 51% attack to reset it to original form we know that it is not immutable and people will lose trust and wallah you just shot yourself in the foot and value of your tokens and all other tokens is below the ground.
### How to can content on IPFS be blocked ?
Govt. can just tell ISP to block url to IPFS on web ( like cloudflare thing ) and check it against banned IPFS content signature and you have successfully blocked IPFS content. As govt. keeps a list of porn sites they can keep one for IPFS over http and update them regularly.
So torrent it let's say 100 times if not 1000 times better that it.
### How censor people on Web 3.0 ?
This is the biggest argument I hear so I decided to tell people a simple way to do it. Enjoy :).
Just do it in frontend as social media today do, that's it. Then the Web 3.0 people say we will just use another frontend and well that's what we do today.
For example: If some content is not available in your country let's say on reddit then you can just use another reddit client or if you are a pro then just read JSON response from the public API, or just use a VPN or TOR.
## Why ?
I was frustrated will all this Web 3.0 coins and speculation everywhere so I wrote it and it is more that what I expected that I would write, also if you find any grammatical, spelling or any other errors just let me know I will fox it.
by outside1234 on 11/18/21, 10:51 PM
Crypto currencies are terrible - or at least I have heard of no reason why people need them outside of ponzi scheming, ransomwaring, or your drug deal - especially since they are NOT cheaper to do transactions in and are NOT anonymous and are definitely NOT (yet) even close to green.
That said, things like distributed file storage (IPFS) and distributed identity are really interesting. We really do need solutions around how we prevent China, Russia, and other governments from basically brainwashing folks through turning off any part of the internet they don't like. I'm all-in on that part.
by ChrisArchitect on 11/18/21, 10:12 PM
by PaulHoule on 11/18/21, 9:22 PM
by aunty_helen on 11/19/21, 12:47 AM
As disclosure, I don't own more than 500usd in crypto (which I mined at a much lower price), don't have a trading account anywhere and have never speculated on it.
However, the reason web3 excites me is this. Imagine the web, but there's a value exchange mechanism built in (a payment system if that helps your imagination).
I see a lot of frontier tech wild west stuff going on and that's fine. Let's not look at the trees here. There have a been a lot of web 1 and 2 approaches that are no longer. But things like braves attention token to relpace the advertisement model and micro transactions for supporting pages directly.
On chain tools which do away with backends, payment processors, account management etc
NFTs as true assets. Currently the closest thing to a digital asset that we have is an email account that we don't want to have blocked or lose.
Now you have people with 5000$ NFTs that they have a level of attachment to and can use as collateral.
They seem silly now, but it meets the definition of a digital asset. And that will help grow a network of tools that use them.
One example, you put your NFT up as collateral for a DeFi loan, you don't pay it back by the time given, a smart contract repos your NFT.
Obviously this is a lot of speculation and opinion, how it all plays out is not going to be and already hasn't been a smooth ride. However, it's bringing a lot of innovation very rapidly.
And one last thing for the sceptics, try to remember that crypto doesn't solve technical problems, it solves problems at a societal level.