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Comment by rchaud | Hacker News Reader

The web as it's understood by most people is about sharing messages, images, games, audio and video. Wasting time, having fun.

So why does all talk of Web3 always shoehorn in blockchain and smart contracts? Who cares about that besides crypto buyers, who are mostly conducting their business via clearweb exchanges anyway?

The best part of Web 1.0 era was that you didn't have to pay to access information beyond what your ISP charged. Ethereum and its dApps are pay-to-play. I'd be interested to know how many of the cited 7000 dApps offer free information, and not just overpriced digital trinkets.

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>So why does all talk of Web3 always shoehorn in blockchain and smart contracts? Who cares about that besides crypto buyers, who are mostly conducting their business via clearweb exchanges anyway?

Nobody - those are exactly the people who push "Web3" (which has little to do with the web) as they're in desperate need of a Greater Fool in order to realise their "investment" in cryptocurrency-related assets.

Right, one can do distributed/federated apps w/o blockchain (see email). It's too practical to be exciting

Crypto is ultimately going to prove to be a more efficient means of value exchange, and easier for developers to utilize that the current financial system.

That alone is enough to make me feel sure of my investments. However, there are many beautiful things that will come out of Web3.0 as well. End to end open source VPNs, containerized and running on a decentralized cloud is already a reality. You an use it today for free on Android and IOS (Velocity VPN - Running Sentinel back end.) Its open source and anonymous end to end. No one is keeping logs.

Don't look at the shit coins and the bubble and think the dream of Web3.0 is not real.

> You an use it today for free on Android and IOS (Velocity VPN

That's a little misleading, the app says it is "free and unlimited while in its testnet phase". Presumably it will require some cryptocoin eventually.

Instead of today, I should have said 'for now'

> open source

Are you saying sentinel is open source, or that Velocity is open source? Because I can't find any velocity repositories on the web, nor is the app on f-droid.

https://github.com/sentinel-official

> how many of the cited 7000 dApps offer free information, and not just overpriced digital trinkets

My guess is that number is zero.

It would make no sense otherwise.

No reasonable person would open a classic book store on Rodeo Drive. What's the difference?

Ah, the term "Web 3.0". I wrote a Ruby book with "Web 3.0" in the title, which to me is semantic web and linked data added to "Web 2" many years ago, and I was disappointed how quickly the book's content quickly seemed irrelevant, even to me the author.

I wish the NFT and blockchain enthusiasts better luck with the term than I had.

Unrelated, but do you know where I can collect lots of semantic web schemas for research?

Here is an unrefined set of links https://wiki.thingsandstuff.org/Semantic#Ontologies_.2F_voca...

Wow, Scripting Intelligence?!

Yes, that is the book. I was so excited when I was writing that book, but I received very little feedback from readers (a metric for evaluating my writing) compared to other books I wrote. After writing that book for Apress (a wonderful publisher to work with, BTW), my 10th book with traditional publishers, I switched to writing eBooks on leanpub. This is more fun, since I can write about very niche topics and I can instantly update books with bug fixes and new material. Off topic, but writing is a lot of fun, and I never work with people who I don’t try to talk into writing at least one book.

> I'd be interested to know how many of the cited 7000 dApps offer free information, and not just overpriced digital trinkets.

Blockchain is open by default. So all information is free. You can see who owns the trinkets, and the entire history of the trinkets from inception. You can't claim you "own" that trinket, but the information is free

Free information about overpriced digital trinkets, how amazing...

Computers 40 years ago, as understood by most people, would be giant calculators. Who cares about sound, graphics, portability, aside from a few nerds? It turns out, people will care, once they discover the new ways.

Those are small technical things and while blockchain has technology, it is more of a social change, which is harder and different.

Blockchain is getting the heat social networks should have up front. There are sufficient bad actors that blockchain will be dangerous for most people's financial well being, like social networks are for most peoples mental well being.

That's a great argument - it works for any upcoming technology!

But the web today already has graphics, sound, portability, etc. Web3 isn't offering anything beyond our current capabilities.

A blockchain doesn't necessarily have to be currency in the sense of something you use to buy and sell things. It's also a decentralized to store data that shouldn't change unless authorized by an owner (owner here = possessor of a private key). Namecoin is an example - a domain owner can update a name record whenever desired and as long as everyone is using the blockchain a centralized authority cannot prevent the owner from making changes, and a centralized authority cannot make changes the owner doesn't want without the owner's private key.

Revolution Populi is another interesting project that is working on a decentralized database with user controls and an SDK for creating social networks. According to them, preliminary testing of their blockchain showed support for +100k transactions per second: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1414962828335894536

> beyond what your ISP charged

This is misleading. Very little on the internet is actually free. Right now (and back then) there is tons of content that is either paywalled or supported by advertising.

I think by-in-large most people consume less "usage" than what they pay for with subscriptions, etc., and generate much more revenue via advertising for the sites they visit than the cost of the bandwidth they are consuming. Imagine if instead of being bombarded with ads or subscription CTAs, you are simply charged $0.00001 for your visit to [insert cool blog here], or $0.0001 per second of video you watch on [awesome youtube equivalent here]. That is the dream.

>That is the dream.

It is? That sounds horrible to me. I don't want to have to constantly think about the ticking price meter every time I open a video. It also screws over anyone without means, or the developing world. The paid-for-by-advertising model lowers the barrier to entry and allows anyone, even those without change to spare, to participate.

I dislike ads, especially in their current state, but I dislike the "dream" you're describing even more.

I'll simply refuse to use such sites then. Just like I often turn off javascript because NYT or Wapo demand I login to see an article. No and no. If your site is online without authentication restrictions by default then whatever content you host outside of that authentication process is free in my opinion and you have no right to soft block me and others into giving you something for it.

In this kind of web, it would also be quite possible for a single developer to run a site as big as Youtube without needing tons of up-front cost. Bandwidth is free from the perspective of the site developer, and doing some small finite amount of video conversion work for the network before your video starts playing could also be built into the smart contract. Not all problems scale well this way, but video conversion is embarrassingly parallel at the keyframe level AFAIK. Conversely, the site operator could just calculate the cost of running video conversions in AWS and spread this cost out to all users by increasing the page view fee slightly.

> In this kind of web, it would also be quite possible for a single developer to run a site as big as Youtube without needing tons of up-front cost. Bandwidth is free from the perspective of the site developer,

How would that work? Blockchains are far too inefficient to host video files and nobody is hosting that much data for free so you still need to set up a paid hosting environment or learn why P2P video hosting has failed every time it's been tried in the past. You can charge people to host their video, at which point you'll learn that it's really hard to compete with ad-supported hosting because the number of people who say they want to pay up front for their stuff and actually do so is a rounding error of the number of users a major video site will have.

Check out IPFS, this is already happening in the NFT world. Have you noticed how all NFTs are high quality and not compressed to shit? That's because of the IPFS.

I'm familiar and it doesn't change this in any way because IPFS is not a magic want which provides infinite storage and bandwidth at no cost. Those have real costs and someone needs to pay for them.

Many NFTs reference third-party hosting services for this reason (that's the real service; the part on the blockchain is the expensive vanity link) and anyone using IPFS for real will need to pay for ongoing hosting if they want their content to remain available.

Part of what dictates this will be abuse: if you provide free hosting to strangers on the internet, they will exhaust your capacity and some will try to host material which violates copyright or other laws. Over time, anyone not getting paid to deal with that will stop offering free hosting to random strangers on the internet.

IPFS is technically off-chain, though still decentralized.

I remember the Web 1.0 era well, and while there was some advertising, it was usually the old school model where the advertiser emailed a GIF banner to the webmaster, who hosted it on their site.

It all went to hell in the 2.0 era when DoubleClick and Google introduced Real-Time Bidding and serving ads dynamically from their servers.

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