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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

"Web 3 is an umbrella term for a set of emerging technologies intersecting cryptocurrencies, blockchains and distributed systems"

wat?

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It's the name of the ethereum JS library:

https://github.com/ethereum/web3.js/

The idea is that cryptocurrencies will represent the 3rd wave of the internet after web 2.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

Although Tim Berners lee tried to coin web 3.0 as the semantic web but that's not really taken off as a concept.

Haha, interesting.

I had the feeling everyone tried to coin web 3.0 for many years now and it didn't really take off.

Yet, the way Web 3.0 works in practice is with a browser extension (which Reborn basically integrated) that does http API calls to a centralized 3rd-party server.

So while they market decentralization and trustlessness, they are one server-compromise away from getting fed a completely false view of Ethereum's blockchain state and losing all their funds.

If that's an attempt on web 3.0, we might as well just skip straight to web 4.0.

You can use this with your own node without trusting any 3rd party server. Right now this takes some effort but projects like Ethereum 2.0 will enable running a self hosted trusted node on low power devices and even mobile phones via checkpoints. It's not a good idea to use today's capabilities to judge future use cases.

Yeah, seems like marketing bullshit (1) to me, even if the functionalities themselves seem pretty good (in theory, haven't tested yet).

(1) The term might be stronger than needed; I meant something a lot closer to "click-baity" than "garbage".

I don't think it's stronger than needed, I think you worded it exactly right, marketing bullshit is a phrase different from 'bullshit' so the sentiment is understood. It's a lot of marketing buzzwords they're making up to hype up something more than it needs to be hyped up. I absolutely hate when people / companies try to hijack terms that don't belong to them. Edit: to clarify, calling something Web 3 is confusing cause we had the adoption of Web 2.0 around the mid to late 2000's which was a huge deal, Web 3 is just wrong.

Regarding "(1)", "bs" is idiomatic and gentler than "bullshit" per se.

This is especially frustrating, considering that Sir Tim Berners-Lee himself has said, that “Web 3.0” should be about Semantic Web[1]. That does mean that it should get easier to build distributed and interlinked systems, but that seems to be a consequence, not the goal.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web#Web_3.0

The semantic web without transactions is like the www without hyperlinks. How do you weight anything? Who cares about a pristine, motionless dataset?

Maybe crypto transactions, basic at first but growing in complexity as each industry works out their own standards is how a decentralized semantic web will eventually energe

It is ironic that he later gave thumbs up to DRM which is like putting a black hole in the web. Maybe he lost faith in the web or just made a mistake.

I remember reading around that time that some people were wondering whether Semantic Web or IoT become Web 3.0. Unfortunately I won't find the references without a lot of googling. On the other hand Semantic Web is pretty much dead, HTML5 being not related to XML rather went further away again IMHO. Also IoT didn't seem to find the adaption as expected for home users, at least I don't find myself interacting with IoT devices on a day to day basis.

That said, IPFS servers and clients are there but it's not in use. So it would be quite a stretch to call that "officially" Web 3.0 until it will be in use by a significant amount of end user applications. Until now also blockchain (read Bitcoin) payment is very exceptional despite tons of frameworks, libraries, servers and clients. Even for the semantic web there are bizillions of tools but the information value remains questionable.

Looking back at Web 2.0, the transition went much more smoothly from static Web 1.0 to usage of "DHTML", HTML 4.0 with much JS/Ajax and eventually popular services making a lot of use of it, namely Facebook and Google including their plugins that were embedded on lots of websites at that time and still are.

Anyways, would be nice if a new development would get traction...

Kill it with fire. Lots of fire. There's nothing good to be coming out of this.

Because the current web is such perfection?

Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain technology has no use whatsoever. It's all made up with fictionary scenarios where any already existing and well-established technology would do just as good or even better.

Don't put that snake oil in my browser, please. Thanks.

Cryptocurrencies have all kinds of uses, people actually use them. From countries with hyperinflation, to ridiculous civil forfeiture, to PayPal freezing large amounts for no reason.

And it's my favorite method of payment, so easy.

So don't speak for everyone.

What's the Bitcoin adaptation rate in Venezuela?

So, you can go to the gas station, the grocery store and the barber and all pay them with Bitcoin? I doubt it.

I use crypto dapps almost everyday, but apparently that's a figment of my imagination.

What real world problem do they solve for you?

I can hold all my assets in one place, which includes holding an ERC20 token that follows the S&P500. I'm essentially holding an ETF outside of a brokerage. I've also been loaning some DAI, ETH and other ERC20's through uniswap, and I hold a bit of BTC through WBTC which is a wrapped ERC20 token that follows Bitcoins price. I do all of this with one asset, ETH. I expect to eventually hold tokenized real estate as well.

There's also a flight insurance app that I've used once. If your flight is delayed, then the contract automatically pays out.

And when I'm bored, I have a bunch of FUN tokens that I picked up for free when it first launched, so I use those to play casino games once in a while. I also loan these tokens out on uniswap.

I'm also involved in MakerDAO governance since I hold some MKR as well as DAOstack which is an infrastructure layer for DAOs.

Last but not least, I use Brave browser and get BAT tokens for browsing. That's mostly everything right now, other than experimenting with other dapps.

You can find people using anything if you look hard enough.

That doesn't mean those people are representative of something that's (a) useful, (b) an unstoppable trend as opposed to a fad, (c) can't be done better in other ways, (d) not harmful.

> Blockchain technology has no use whatsoever

GIT makes use of what is basically a blockchain. Calling it useless is an extremely bold claim that requires a strong evidence.

What wat?

https://web3.foundation/

https://medium.com/@matteozago/why-the-web-3-0-matters-and-y...

It's just that I heard that term for many years now and every year it gets redefined. Some even started talking about Web 4.0.

I thought they were referring to HTTP/3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/

> "Web 3 is an umbrella term for a set of emerging technologies

Umbrella Corporation... here we go

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