Ask HN: Do you think web3 is a hype or a real thing about to happen? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you think web3 is a hype or a real thing about to happen?

24 pointsgls2ro48 comments

These days I keep reading about web3 and how it means the next iteration (revolution ??) of the web and how it will protect free speech (?) and some other advantages.

I liked a lot the period of mid to late 1990 until mid 2000s where I was mostly communicated with strangers over internet and focused on learning things. I installed my first linux version those days, setup a mail server and then later a http server, played with Netscape and Mozaic. Remember using Pine to read emails and I remember how many nights I spent downloading resources from mailing lists as the internet was cheap during the night.

What a wonderful time going from linux to window 3.1 to windows 95 back to Fedora and Redhat and waiting hours with enthusiasm to install a new OS and playing with what it had to offer, discovering almost every default installed program, tweaking and sharing and learning.

Do you think that web3 will really work? My scepticism is related to users hosting content for other users. I don't see yet how this will truly work at a massive scale. But of course I did not read everything about this subject so I am sure there are things that I miss, maybe trends that I am not aware of.

View on HN

Web3 isn't solving problems that the average user cares about. The vast majority of people just care that they can read articles, watch videos, do shopping, etc...

Web3 makes these tasks more complex and slower in order to create a decentralised, privacy-preserving, cryptocurrency supporting network. No average user cares about privacy on the web or paying with anything other than fiat.

And if the user base isn't there, what company will build software to interact with Web3? Every usable browser today is made by a for-profit company.

I can see it being used for niche, nerdy communities, but that's about it. I don't think it will ever be mainstream.

We were the first adopters of WWW, of all internet everything.

We will work the kinks out of this protocol, as well.

> We will work the kinks out of this protocol, as well.

It's not a protocol problem, it's a purposefulness problem.

You can have the most perfectly oiled and flawless Rube Goldberg machine, but that doesn't mean it manages to become useful because all the kinks are ironed out. At the end of the day, it's still a convoluted way to do stuff no one cares about.

Hard disagree - actually the usefulness is numerous, it’s the protocol(s) I think that either doom it or fracture it’s use.

The big fundamental is it allows for platforms to share equity with their users. It also has a bunch of marginal features downstream of “I can code my treasury/board” and anonymity, but the big one is it allows for platforms to share the upside with early adopters. And if that’s the only benefit, it’s a huge one.

The problem is it has no single protocol. Browsers and http somehow unified on similar standards. I don’t know if that was a miracle, but I don’t see it happening in crypto. There’s a fractal of competition, and that’s actually bad for adoption. It has no correlate, though it’s possible bridges over bridges and a lot of hammering on the UX will eventually paper things out.

But contracts that guarantee revenue share or other types of equity share with users is a significant benefit and a new world.

Regulation May kill it as well.

> Hard disagree - actually the usefulness is numerous, it’s the protocol(s) I think that either doom it or fracture it’s use.

Ok I'll bite: in your opinion what is the absolute best application you associate with the web3 keyword, and is a clear unquestionable selling point?

> The big fundamental is it allows for platforms to share equity with their users.

What leads you to believe that equity sharing is not possible right now without resorting to web3 buzzwords? I mean, the only reason that stops platforms from sharing equity with anyone at all is the fact that platform owners do not want that. That is a business model consequence, not a technology limitation.

> The problem is it has no single protocol.

I don't know if you even noticed that you haven't described a single problem at all, at least one that people care about. You only talked about crypto as a solution to a problem than no one has.

And the reason why no one shares equity is quite simple: no one wants to, because the ones that do never felt blocked at all.

> Ok I'll bite: in your opinion what is the absolute best application you associate with the web3 keyword, and is a clear unquestionable selling point?

Anything with user generated content. The takes on web3 are significantly smaller and you can argue why but the fact is people get to choose their platform based on public contracts. Trust is the feature, the platforms can do anything web 2 does just with better more solid terms.

> What leads you to believe that equity sharing is not possible right now without resorting to web3 buzzwords?

Because modifying the cap table is hard and controlled by a single entity, so even if they somehow jumped through all the regulatory hoops they wouldn’t have the trust.

You’re also arguing against reality. Name companies that do it without crypto, because every crypto company does.

> you haven't described a single problem at all

I guess you think Twitter, YouTube and Facebook don’t have trust problems.

> the reason why no one shares equity is quite simple

Crypto has proven this wrong already.

> Anything with user generated content.

I'm sorry but that is meaningless. I was hoping for a concrete, tangible example, but this sounds an awful lot like handwaving and question marks preceding the inexplicable "profit" stage.

> (...) but the fact is people get to choose their platform based on public contracts.

What exactly leads you to believe that's something anyone cares about or is even a problem that people need fixing? Right now it's more than enough to just point to a resource as a reference.

> Because modifying the cap table is hard (...)

No one even know what a "cap table" is, let alone cares about it.

I was hoping to hear about real world problems that the web3 buzzword promises to fix, but at best that's just a contrived way to shoehorn crypto as a solution to a problem that does not exist at all.

> I guess you think Twitter, YouTube and Facebook don’t have trust problems.

To the eyes of virtually everyone, no it does not. Content is posted by users, and to most checking who posted it is more than enough.

More importantly, even if people cared about that, you're trying to pass off the web3 buzzword as the only possible way to address the problem, while at most it's just a contrived way to propose one alternative approach to the issue.

> Crypto has proven this wrong already.

I'm sorry but your statement is plainly absurd. Crypto does not nor ever addressed the issue of equity at all.

If that's the very best argument you can muster to sell the web3 buzzword on it's perceived merits then I'm sorry but you've only inadvertently demonstrated once again that at best web3 is a convoluted solution to a problem that does not exist.

What? Your asserting against things that are plainly true today. Like I understand not believing that sharing equity is a good incentive, but literally denying the current day reality is just weird. Maybe some dissonance going on.

A lot of people definitely are not happy with existing platforms, and they very much understand getting paid for their contribution vs not. All your replies are essentially “sorry that’s ridiculous” so there’s not much for me to reply to here.

Argue why trust isn’t worthwhile or isn’t plausible, don’t argue that it doesn’t exist or somehow isn’t understandable especially without reasoning. Any boomer can understand a smart contract that’s not changeable without heavy majority vote ensuring they make 90% earnings on their, say CryptoTube channel and why it’d be better than 30% at Googles whim.

> What? Your asserting against things that are plainly true today. Like I understand not believing that sharing equity is a good incentive, but literally denying the current day reality is just weird. Maybe some dissonance going on.

I made no assertion at all. I asked you to present what you feel is the best value proposition behind the web3 buzzword, the best examples you could come up with were "equity sharing" and "trust", and I pointed out the fact that in the eyes of virtually everyone in the world none of those examples register even remotely as issues, and in fact they are seen as solved problems.

That is exactly the core problem with the web3 buzzword: at best, it is nothing more than a solution searching for a problem to fix, and so far the best that the hand-full of web3 buzzword supporters could come up with are irrelevant things that no one really cares about but require major technical overhauls to address?

The whole story is totally absurd, and we're talking about the absolute best examples you could come up with.

> Like I understand not believing that sharing equity is a good incentive, but literally denying the current day reality is just weird.

You're unwittingly demonstrating another problem linked with web3 enthusiasts: you handwave an awful lot to try to fill in all the holes in your arguments.

Here you are trying to use the term "reality" to try to deflect the fact that no one cares about web3's convoluted value proposition for "equity sharing" and "trust", two solved problems in the eye of the world that are only orthogonally related to web3.

If your arguments had any substance or merit to them, you could simply support your claims that people are willing to migrate to an entirely new infrastructure to benefit from the value proposition you've presented, but instead you fell back to handwaving and personal attacks.

> A lot of people definitely are not happy with existing platforms, and they very much understand getting paid for their contribution vs not.

Don't you understand that neither of those arguments comes close to make a case for web3?

At most, web3 proposes a specific proposal that is convoluted and demands a complete overhaul of the current infrastructure, but it is at best orthogonally related.

You could, right now, implement platforms where users get paid. There are a million of those already. Why do you feel the need to ignore reality to be able to even start proposing web3 as one of all alternstive solutions to a solved problem?

This whole discussion is tiring, specially as your absolute best usecases for web3 even fail to register any relevance or usefulness. frankly, you make it all sound like a convoluted but thinly veiled and desperate attempt to pump crypto. As handwaving and personal attacks don't help anyone make any case, I don't see a point in continuing the discussion.

You motte and bailey pretty hard, and accuse me of hand waving while leaning really hard on “buzzwords” and “absurd” - you hand wave away trust and equity of all things. People respond heavily to $150 referral bonuses, we know because every company uses them. So to claim getting a stake worth $150 of equity isn’t 10x more incentivizing is wrong. And people definitely understand that, it’s why there’s so many people in crypto. In fact, it’s often the first critique of crypto that it’s all early adopters trying to make money. And I’m claiming that’s a feature not a bug, it’s a tool to kickstart platforms, and damn good at that. Too good maybe, which is why there’s so much noise. But you can’t argue that people don’t get that, as it’s been shows by about 1000 chains at this point that people “get” it and want it. The question then moves to more interesting things.

You asked for why, and I gave reasons why. When I answered the why you fled back to “examples” of specific implementations, which is a different conversation but not necessary to show why. I’m not even a web3 person or whatever you seem to be making this tribal, I’m just not a blanket denialist and can acknowledge it has interesting upsides.

Finally, crypto is already huge despite its current massive hurdles. Those hurdles will only go down. You talk like it’s failing but it’s actually been winning for over a decade. In fact it’s crazy how many non technical people have adopted a very technical thing. The claim that it isn’t catching on is quite literally perfectly backwards, it has caught on to a huge degree despite huge barriers.

Cdixon just did a nice thread on this: https://mobile.twitter.com/cdixon/status/1444072365822857219

You sound like someone in the 90s talking about web1

> You sound like someone in the 90s talking about web1

The web became popular because it solved a myriad of problems that people cared about, from text and voice communication to meeting new people.

If you cannot come up with any real world use or purpose for a new hyped tech then I'm not sure if there is any rational basis for that hype.

And searching for problems that match a solution is not how progress happens.

You tried to compare web3 to the web in the 90s, but you unwittingly make web3 sound like the semantic web in the 90s up to now.

Very much this.

It takes vision to predict the future. The people who have it are too busy making things to be making propaganda on Hackernews.

Propaganda? I was sharing my opinion on a post that explicitly asked for it, you're welcome to disagree with it

Of all the supposed value props of crypto, "privacy" is at the bottom of the list.

I think permissionless-ness is something developers and businesses will come to value greatly. Only certain technologies on the blockchain help with privacy, and most debatable make it easier to track your activity, if the user doesn't want to make the process convoluted for the explicit sake of their privacy.

Blockchain might also be attractive to users who are not developers, but are computer power users, since they can effectively rent their computer for extra money, and provide a valuable service (That they hopefully personally support) in the process.

If there comes a real usecase that the average consumer cares about, it could happen. Right now it doesn't seem like it will, but I could be wrong ofc.

I've heard a lot of positive sentiment around "having you data available wherever you browse" - but does that not create a lot of new challenges? Will I have the same data available from all my devices with browsers installed? Everything has a browser now, even my nintendo switch (kind of). How can I make sure to trust a site to handle the parts of my data that they need to interface with?

>If there comes a real usecase that the average consumer cares about, it could happen. Right now it doesn't seem like it will, but I could be wrong ofc.

Perhaps there is a concrete usecase that drives all this hype: come up with a convoluted scheme that involves attaching the Ethereum buzzword to other impressive buzzwords in order to pump it up. I mean, you need to be a fool to miss out on a profitable scheme that's about to blow up because it's web 3 point oh, am I right?

Both, just like many things in tech.

I don't believe in users hosting content for other users either. However, why don't users host their own content. I would not let anyone to host anything made by me that took me more than 15 minutes of effort. My stuff, my rule.

Disclaimer: I'm working on a project in this space. So take what I say with a grain of salt.

There are very few projects doing anything interesting with web3 outside of speculation or "grifter" quasi-MLMs (NFTs). Until that changes, web3 won't be interesting. But, we are on the cusp of that change. Soon, there will be interesting applications on web3, and they will change the web permanently.

Two things stand in the way::

- web3 requires specialized browser plugin or even worse, a special app. You cannot do web3 inside a web2 browser.

- transaction costs and throughput

web3 requires a browser plugin (meaning not on mobile) AND education on how to use it. Those are blockers for 99% of the people, so you only have 1% of the people who will use it, and in that small population, most of them are there to get rich quick or die trying.

And, transaction costs are high for the web3 (I'm equating web3 with Ethereum). It only makes sense to participate for people who are trying to get rich.

BUT: if transaction costs go down, and people can participate in web3 WITHOUT a browser plugin, then people will start building interesting projects OUTSIDE of speculation and MLMs.

That will be the moment really exciting things start to happen.

When will that be?

If you don't know what L2 is, here is why it is important: L2 is a way to scale transaction throughput outside of the mainnet Ethereum. There are many ways to do it, but generally they involve rollups, either optimistic or ZK-proofs.

What's a rollup? A rollup is a way to do lots of smaller transactions off the main Ethereum network, and then roll them all up into a single main Ethereum transaction. You amortize all the small transactions across one single mainnet transaction.

L2 products are still in their infancy, don't work great, and have poor UI. But, they are one of many solutions to solving the transaction cost and throughput problem.

If you are rolling your eyes at ZK-proofs and saying "Oh, those crypto guys, more snake oil!" You should know that Google is using ZK-proofs to guarantee the information they pull from Android devices and processed in ML is has a guarantee of anonymity when shared into Google. There is a lot of interesting research happening despite all the grifting in crypto, so don't miss the good stuff. If you are excited about hard math, crypto has some fun work.

So, L2 will solve the "transaction cost and throughput problem."

The only other barrier is browser plugins, IMHO. The exciting thing is that L2 solutions have their own API. When one of them finallly offers a great UX for interacting with their network, you can interact with it using web2 and not with MetaMask.

Then, everything will open up. It's going to be soon.

I think the browser plugin is a gigantic step. We're talking a whole new generation of browsers with native support having to roll in for this to gain traction, and most consumer traffic is mobile nowadays so it's not enough to ship to a PC and be satisfied there.

If it were to gain mainstream attraction it seems like we're talking at least five more years unless the chromium and safari teams pick this up and make it a priority.

I totally agree. Other than Brave, it will be years until web3 is seamlessly intergrated.

But, my point about L2 solutions is that with those you have a work around.

web3 requires that you use secp256k1 ellptic curves. Those are not available in any browser. So, you cannot sign transactions. You cannot participate in Ethereum from a browser.

But, what if the L2 network does not require that curve? What if it accepts WebCrypto signed L2 transactions? Then, you can participate in Ethereum through L2. You might give up a little in terms of absolute security (these still have much better security than anything else out there, by the way), but for certain applications that might be a tradeoff worth having.

If you can manage transactions in a vanilla browser using WebCrypto (or bundling your own crypto in JS with browserify or something -- that's what I did), and the API is over HTTP instead of into an Ethereum node, then you can participate in a vanilla browser.

Why can't browser natively sign transactions using secp256k1? And why is that not required for L2 transactions?

Browsers don't have that cryptographic primitive available.

L2s can choose whatever encryption schemes they want. They could use rot13 if their customers would be willing to work on a L2 chain with that compromise. :)

A blockchain (if you already know this, sorry...) is just a ledger with transactions created using public/private keys. Ethereum (and Bitcoin) use secp256k1. But, each blockchain can choose their own and L2s have different ones for different reasons. Eventually the L2 needs to put something back on L1 and that transaction has to be using the crytpo the L1 uses. But, the L2 can store into the L1 the answer to a ZK-proof (with the answer as a link in a Merkle tree), and how you manage transactions (and that Merkle tree) inside the L2 is up to the L2 managers.

You've set yourself apart from the 'grifters' in the Web3 space in your comment but didn't explain much more than that about current use-cases. Could you elaborate on what it is you're making that's so unique?

Edit: Thanks for the interfacing explanation btw, very clear and concise.

I'm building a way to accept microtransactions on regular websites inside regular vanilla browser.

https://finneyfor.com/

You can see transactions delivered using this method when I started this four years ago.

https://etherscan.io/address/d2bb82d40c8bcf50d008e39ecb9e44d...

Those were $1 transactions at the time. Now that ETH is worth $200+!

Transaction costs are such that I'm refactoring it to use L2, but my solution works inside vanilla browsers without a browser plugin.

Is there a demo I can interact with?

Email me? chris@finneyfor.com. I can set you up with a testnet. I'm in the end of a massive refactor, but I can give you that.

I really like this idea (microtransactions) and yet don't really like the usage of ETH for them. Maybe this is unrelated, I guess I just want to receive payments in a currency that is relatively stable, and it seems like ETH, with so many people trying to make money off it rising in value (and maybe its monetary policy), has quite a volatile value.

Do you think web3 will work with such volatile currencies? Will these currencies stabilize?

I guess right now I'm hesitant to receive payment in crypto for that fear.

I worked at a large e-commerce company with a marketplace of several hundred million. That's what Ethereum has, a massive set of users, at least compared to other cryptocurrencies. There is no reason why web3 won't work with anything else, but onboarding users is really, really hard with even Ethereum, and that's a problem for any app.

Your point should have been my third point in my long rant above.

Yes, until the price stabilizes, it will be less exciting for a lot of people.

But, until we have utility applications, the ecosystem will just be full of grifters causing instability.

Seems like a catch 22. But, hopefully utility applications will start to appear and that will help stabilize things. .

And, at least the value is consistent in rising, not falling. :)

As a relative outsider to crypto, mostly jumping in with the oh-I-should-have-invested-in-2010-when-my-boss-told-me-about-it, I wonder if some structural elements are causing the price instability, or rather, making them be less like currencies and more like gold.

Perhaps ETH is different in this, as I don't know it well. I know BTC is deflationary by default, and so it seems to be ripe for prospecting/grifting: "buy it today, it'll be worth more in the future! HODL!" If I have a currency that I think will almost certainly be worth more the next day, why would I spend it? Who wants to be the $80M pizza guy?

From what I can tell about ETH, it doesn't seem to be as predictably deflationary, and yet maybe it is, because, if someone is trying to make money off of holding a digital asset, doesn't it have to be deflationary? If the asset inflates, then people lose money and would have an incentive to spend it.

The other option seems to be stable coins, which somehow make me laugh, because many people in the space seem to be so against fiat currency and the US Fed, etc., and then create a currency tied directly to it and those policies.

Maybe I'm naive on this or just brainwashed by what I hear from the US Fed, it just seems that for a currency to work well, it has to almost be slightly inflationary, plus or minus a bit, so that people have an incentive to spend it more than save it.

Anyways, I'm glad you're working in this space and grateful for the way you shared with us :-)

Very neat, thanks for sharing. The name sounds familiar, I'm sure I've seen it mentioned alongside BAT in conversations about tipping creators. How's the adoption rate so far? Is there a development roadmap?

My biggest issue with the entire crypto space is I have to wade through a veritable ocean of shilling, memes and straight up disinformation to find substantial comments like this one.

That really makes me laugh. So true.

I am still trying to find my voice but I am writing about all this here:

https://basqui.at

Just read through it, it's good! Do you have any other high signal to noise sources for info - I fall somewhere between a crypto skeptic and pragmatist so it's _hard_ to find information that doesn't strike me as breathless PR or people trying to pump whatever they're currently bagholding.

Thanks, I appreciate that. I don't have great sources of information yet.

Did you see my post regarding the DeFiant podcast with Nate Chastain from OpenSea? He's the one who resigned after he was allegedly purchasing NFTs anonymously and then trying to resell them. My favorite part of the podcast is when he noted NFTs are exciting because the blockchain is a transparent ledger, which is exactly why he got caught. It's so funny.

Almost all the information out there should be filtered through: "why is this person talking about this, what's their incentive?" Cryptocurrency is, of course, all about financial incentives, so that's fitting. And, make no mistake, there is a good reason I'm in here talking too...

I've started to dive into smart contract development, mainly to do contracting on the side. Do you think this is a viable path? How is the job market for dapp/block chain developers?

I've been closely following the recommendations by zoenolan, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28333766

Are there other resources you'd recommend?

That's a great list. The only thing I found recently that is interesting is this:

https://www.cairo-lang.org/ https://github.com/martriay/nile/

Yes, learn and play with solidity.

That wasn't on the list, but if you don't know about remix, go there first.

https://remix.ethereum.org/

Hardhat is great, but you can do everything inside a browser with remix, it is amazing.

This is a good starting point video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyoFT4QkoL4

Can we solve the browser problem with webassembly ? What do you think about it ?

When you say "liked" do you really mean you have positive feelings around the nostalgia from that time period in your life? The reason I ask is because you describe the details from that time, but don't mention the unique benefit it brought. I think this relates to web3 in that I am not sure what problem it solves. It seems like we have vague nostalgia over something and then this vague thing called web3 that is suppose to be our fix. It's probably vaporware.

For me that period was like a new Universe for learning: I discovered so many new things that I never imagined.

Now I discover new things but - maybe because I am older or I have a better imagination - I dont have the same awe or wow factor of discovering a new type of knowledge that I never even dreamt about like back then.

So I am wondering will web3 bring something like this?

Of course it could be nostalgia and I probably see that period through a magnifying glass.

I feel this too. When I was 13/14 in the mid 90s the internet was amazing. Not the web but IRC. Back then I learned to reverse engineer, write graphics demos in x86 assembly. The internet was my world and the real world barely mattered. I'm nearly 40 now and my life and the world is just different. I hope kids feel the same way I did. I don't think its the internet, it's us. Also the fact that billions of people are on it now. The natural filter for who is online is gone.

I doubt it, but in any case, I certainly hope not. If anything, I think we need to reverse the trend of consumers gobbling up content directly created by other consumers. Getting information from your personal network of social media friends rather than from professional scientists, reporters, and investigators is bound to lead to worse information. Getting entertainment from whoever is most popular on TikTok these days is almost certainly bound to be worse artistically and probably even less entertaining than professional content created by real production studios. Just as watching your friends play basketball in the street is a worse product than watching the NBA.

There are always tradeoffs, of course. Content produced by people who don't get paid to produce it is certainly cheaper. And being a middleman who gobbles up data and sells ads is cheaper than being a content producer.

Ideological tradeoffs, too, of course. You have censorship on one side and curation and information quality on the other side. Unfortunately, I don't think very many people on either side of this want to acknowledge that there isn't a strict ideology we can just adhere to all the time and say one of those is more important than the other. Resisting censorship is probably more important when you're living under the Khmer Rouge, but when you're living in a time of abundance where the motivations of most information peddlers is solely to sell something to you, curation starts tipping the scales. This is going to be constantly changing and there is no fixed answer.

I think it would be possible to come up with a web3 defined as big interesting improvements on the web that justify that version number increment without having to dive into a web3 defined as crypto, dapps, etc

I hope the wannabe rich crypto scammers will have the same success than the semantic web community about winning the web 3 label.

Color me very very very skeptical it can solve a real-world problem for the average user.

I consider myself relatively up-to-date on the web, and where it’s going, but I have not ever heard of web3. This means mostly to me that it doesn’t have the traction it needs to be actually happening - at least not yet.

I’m certainly not the barometer of whether or not a technology or protocol will be successful.

Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 are pretty pointless to talk about. But web3.js is a real JS lib for dapps and on top of that we will probably get better at decentralization. How big will decentralization get, it's hard to say.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com