Why We Need Web 3.0
breakermag.com
breakermag.com
Web 1.0's idealism was focused on liberal, unilateral sharing of information. People just put things up without any real commercialisation, until the dotcom era of the very late 90s. Not all the internet was the web: there was a decentralised censorship-resistant messageboard system known as USENET, and people tended to access email with local clients.
Web 2.0 was the commercialisation and polishing of the above; everything became a web app. The downside of this was everything being infested by advertising.
Web 3.0 likes to claim it's a return to 1.0 ideals of information-sharing, but if it's built on cryptocurrency it will inherit its flaws: appalling waste of energy, fundamental capacity limitations, and a tendency to collapse in fraud.
Ethereum flopped as it couldnt scale, and outside casino games, people dont care about decentralized verification.
My programming circle likes bitcoin but is totally against using blockchain for everything else.
Jaron Lanier often makes the point that the goals of free information didn't turn out quite the way they intended
> The internet was built on a socialist model that everything should be free and accessible to all. But it also celebrated visionary tech entrepreneurs who made it big with their world-changing ideas. “How do you celebrate entrepreneurship when everything is free?” he mused. Tech companies looked to advertising to fund their operations, and that’s where all the corruption began.
Ads powered by algorithms that perform behavior-modification on it's subjects is the only model left when all that "information" is free.
> A monetized information economy will create a strong middle class out of information sharing—and a strong middle class must be able to outspend the elite tip of an economy for democracy to endure,”
https://qz.com/1249955/jaron-lanier-at-ted-2018-to-fix-the-i...
https://qz.com/87795/free-information-as-great-as-it-sounds-...
I maintain that building the internet without an integrated billing system was its most impressively radical choice. If a telco had been involved they'd have built the billing first then worked out what limited range of services they felt like selling, on which they would try to keep as much of the margin as possible rather than letting third parties profit.
The economy of monetized information would be much smaller, since you would need to "buy in"; no Wikipedia, no Stackexchange, no free courses, no free software, no free maps.
> A monetized information economy will create a strong middle class
This very much depends on whether information is a form of labour or a form of capital. What's the information equivalent of "r > g"?
There is plenty of evidence that that is not a guaranteed outcome:
> HBO and Netflix’s paid subscription models have resulted in “peak TV.”
Micropayments might be a way to allow everyone to participate.
> Lanier suggested exploring other business models as well, including a scenario where individuals would be compensated for uploading quality content.
. . . only if the scale of that "micro" is truly "micro" in relation to our "micro" incomes, as consumers.
When you sit down next to someone on a train and start a conversation you don't start by saying 'the following exchange of words is free of cost'. Cost doesn't even come into it. It's not socialist, capitalist or pineapple. It's just words.
The point is that if "information is free", then it severely restricts the kinds of business models startups and entrepreneurs need to survive.
> When you sit down next to someone on a train and start a conversation
I don't think Jaron is trying to say you need to pay someone to have a conversation on a train. That is more like a strawman.
The content that you provide on a social media platform, which lives on a central, proprietary, for-profit company's server, is a bit different.
When I see a statement like this, one which seems clearly absurd, I have a hard time taking whatever follows seriously.
Sadly, TFA is not about this. TFA is about even more bloated Internet, backed by one the most ridiculous way of wasting energy ever invented.
Small (and a pretty ignorant) comparison:
Fediverse: Fair amount of clients, some users, utilizes existing technologies and creates decentralized versions of already existing paradigms based on the W3C recommendations.
Web 3.0: Uses blockchain, can't access it from your browser, has barely any users but apparently a lot of clients, inherits probably the worst aspect of .onion services (inability to just type in the URL).
However, looking purely at the financial level, Web 3.0 seems to be winning. It's where money is funneled through, because there's a small chance that it will offer something grandiose in return. Meanwhile, fediverse operates on pennies donated by the users to approachable sysadmins with some spare resources.
One of them can afford a summit in San Francisco (sponsored by a few foundations), and the second one will probably never have a summit anywhere.
You could still put all domains of an alternate domain system behind a X.web3.org that loads the whole system client side, and then connects to peers via WebRTC to load the domain X via webtorrents or ipfs or zeronet or whatever. That way it's (mostly) backwards compatible to normal websites and you can remove the "root domain" trust point later.
That's exactly what I think about most of the cryptocurrenciy ecosystem today.
Every time ETH gets used for an app, it takes down/log jams the network.
I dont think it will be possible to use blockchain to power the web. Slow, unreliable, and expensive.
Ethereum developers are currently working hard on making Ethereum more scalable. It cant definitely power the web anytime soon but its getting better and better. Read about Sharding, Plasma, Raiden etc if you are interested.
When you start talking about offchain ETH solutions or using multiple ETH systems to scale, you are removing the only thing that provides value from Blockchain - Trust.
When an ETH sidechain can get 51% attacked or the entire system is verified through a few centralized locations, you remove the only reason you should use blockchain.
I used to drink the ETH koolaid, I now realize blockchain shouldnt be used for apps.
But lately, I've become more cynical about it. I fear it just doesn't map that well to the real world. From an abstract/logical architecture it makes a ton of sense, and would be beyond amazing to have a decentralized, unstoppable, computing platform that anyone can hop on, like Ethereum promises.
But there's real computation happening in physical machines somewhere, real fiber connections between servers, real electricity costs, real national borders, real laws, etc.
These days I'm much more enthused, I think, by federation, as that seems to map more cleanly onto the real world, putting the ownership and costs and responsibilities on those who control the hardware. I was extremely excited, for example, by sandstorm.io, but it seems like it's winding down lately. I haven't really seen an equivalent that's caught my eye, but maybe I'm missing some.
I really do support the "Web 3.0" vision as defined here, and best of luck to them. If they can get that "killer app" that makes everyone want to join, and provide a little defense against detractors trying to use physical means to shut down the logical decentralization, then it would be a revolution for sure. But it looks hard to get there from here, to me.
This is both the biggest strength of federation and its biggest weakness. How do those who control the hardware profit from federating open and free services? Federation will be a contender when (if?) somebody figures that out.
So there's nothing technical driving that dated look and feel...
Perhaps it's a lesser evil, whereby the foolish money is vacuumed up and held in a relatively innocuous form before it is dispersed all around where it would cause greater mischief and misery.
What can I say, I'm an optimist.
Asking from ignorance here. Is everyone who uses ethereum subject to the ethereum developers when updates are made?
> “the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot.”
- brought to you by a humble impartial observer who maintains the blockchain protocols
This is an honest question btw
Insanity is running the same program over and over again and expecting different results. You can tweak the configs a bit and change the running environment; but until we start editing the sourcecode (our DNA) you may expect the crooked wood of humankind to always act like humans always have.
Well, I'd rather we have a web of people trusting each other...
Pay heed, as today I the great Numberwang coin the term "Web 4.0"