About the Urgency of Building Web3 | Hacker News Reader

About the Urgency of Building Web3

timdaub.github.io

49 pointstimdaub85 comments

I'm very curious where the current hype for a Web 3.0 originated from.

One thing I notice among the crypto circle is how lock step all the hype building and talking points are. Within the last few weeks, all the people I personally know who are crytpo fans are suddenly talking about web 3.0 when they've had no interest in web technologies prior.

Is there a prominent set of influencers who recently published some content regarding it?

The hype seems to have come out of seemingly nowhere, though largely on the tails of Meta's recent presentation. It just seems really odd that so many people are saying the same things so suddenly without any concrete technology advancement backing it up.

Interesting observation. I can second your sentiment. For my project, we've recently had a huge push through Google [1]. And I can't remember making substantial changes that would explain this phenomenon.

I don't know why this happened, but I've also heard it from other projects too. But generally, I tend to think that it's always difficult to make out a causation for e.g. hype.

Definitely FB renaming to Meta gave lots of mainstream credibility to an otherwise kinda-fringe space. But I don't know.

- 1: https://plausible.io/rugpullindex.com?period=6mo&source=Goog...

It's mostly a term for "people in the space" if you look at twitter discussions about crypto and web3 you get a lot of answers like "You don't understand it because you are not in the space. It's for web3 people." It's an easy way out of a discussion as it was with web2.0 in the beginning further ramping up the FOMO for "normies". Some weeks ago a lot of Twitch streamers got sponsorships for nft-marketplaces like https://eternal.gg/ the biggest talking points they gave creators to handle backlash was "the future of the web, web3" and that "it's for people in the space". Have a look at /r/livestreamfail on reddit and search for nfts or crypto and you will find a lot of videos of creators defending their decision to offer nfts with "web3".

I encourage everyone to click through that eternal.gg link and go see for yourself the future these people are trying to build.

A future where content creators have alternatives to monopolies like google amazon and facebook and most importantly the advertising cabal for revenue? Yes please, build more of that future.

The term has frequently featured in Ethereum docs for quite a few years now.

Not sure if that's where it originated from, but that's where I first came across it.

This is web 4.0, if anything.

Web 3.0 already happened with semantics, microformats, etc.

The fact that there are API-like tools to query documents for certain info is because of Semantic Web.

Just because you aren't familiar doesn't mean we didn't learn an immense amount. Triple and graph stores are a thing because of it.

Don't trample web 3.0.

> I'm very curious where the current hype for a Web 3.0 originated from.

It is from the crypto fans. Mostly from several web3 related blockchain projects and they all have invested in Ethereum after missing Bitcoin, so they need to hype something else.

Before it was ICOs, then DAOs, DeFi, NFTs and now it is Web3.

The hype is just amplified as the price and euphoria keeps climbing which is why you see lots of these people screaming Web3 because they have already invested in those projects and creating FOMO around it, by bringing in more influencers on board; hence the urgency that the author of the article detests.

Right now, the fundamentals in several blockchain projects are not suitable for web3 to scale to what is advertised by the crypto fans. It's clear that it needs more time to mature.

Could be something with Meta. Metaverse crypto tokens also have likely been rallying due to that, and maybe that helped spread the word about Web3.

Web3 isn't new though. Here is an article from Coinbase from 2018 on it: https://blog.coinbase.com/understanding-web-3-a-user-control...

We're still in the first inning of Web3.

Was at Coinbase in 2017 - am now waiting for more dev tooling to come out before jumping back in to the industry. The existing infrastructure is abysmal - equivalent of programming at the network layer.

Google and Amazon were built 2 decades after the invention of the internet. No need to FOMO in when the first programmable blockchain (Ethereum) is only 6 years old.

Well put. In addition, Ethereum is also not the most ideal blockchain in the world. Given more time, I'm sure better options will become available. There's no reason to pile onto a flawed system like that just because it's the only option now. Realistically, we should be still developing out better chains rather than building everything onto Ethereum.

I did a Buildspace project building on the Solana blockchain a couple of weeks ago. It solves a bunch of problems with Ethereum - it processes thousands of transactions a second and has tiny fees. Had to learn some Rust to write it though, and it’s definitely very early still. But I think it or something like it is going to become a really good option eventually because so many apps can’t really work with Ethereum’s transaction speed and fees.

But is Solana even decentralized enough? What's the point if it's not really that decentralized?

I'm not sure, I'm not super familiar with the theory of it to be honest. I'd like to learn more though! Do you mean in terms of being proof of stake instead of proof of work, or do you mean something specific to Solana itself?

Idk so much, but basically i've heard that Solana validation isn't easily available like ETH (run on any GPU). It needs like 16 core cpu with 256gb RAM and fast SSD.

Then there's only 1000 validators right now, and 130 of them are losing money.

So it seems like their validation is very oligarchal. Which kinda defeats the purpose right?

Venmo or Visa can have superfast and supercheap transactions... but who cares.

Yep looks like you’re right, those are some pretty beefy requirements. I suppose that if they’re paid in Sol then they could become profitable/more profitable over time and then more might come in, but that’s definitely a really high floor.

Yeah idk, I don't know much about it. But it seems like centralization and gas fees are inversely related. The only way to scale is to use the L2's and L3's which are basically just smaller blockchains that clear on the L1 less often.

So for smaller transactions where you don't care about global immutability that much, you just let it get done on an L3 and then your gas fee is much much lower. Creates kind of a tree structure.

Again i don't know sh!t, but basically having a globally immutable decentralized blockchain that works for tons of transactions seems impossbile

L2 companies have liability for the transactions that passed over their infrastructure. I think they will evolve by having their own L1 chains.

So that's L3 then, right.

Will there be enough upside to Solana though when Ethereum 2 rolls out?

No idea! If Ethereum can get those kinds of transaction times and fees that'll be awesome and a big step forward for everyone though. If all I get from learning Solana is an excuse to learn Rust then that's a win in my book!

>Realistically, we should be still developing out better chains rather than building everything onto Ethereum.

This is exactly what's happening. One of the biggest trends of the last 1-2 years in crypto has been alternative approaches to smartchains. You can find many of them in the top 50 projects list.

Absolutely correct. They are only doing this because all their investments are in Ethereum (Because they missed Bitcoin).

So they have to keep hyping up the 'web3' narrative with Ethereum having to power it despite it still being expensive and useless for basic use-cases as more apps built on it begin to implement very complex features.

The best part is they know Ethereum can't scale, hence the intensity of the hype squad pushing and pumping it. There are better alternative blockchain ecosystems (not 'tokens') which solve Ethereum's shortcomings and aim to supersede it.

One of the most important thing people overlook is network effects. By being around longer those chains have built those networks, so even if you have something better, it'll have a huge uphill battle for adoption.

For same reasons that many startups tried to compete with craigslist for years and failed because they didn't account for network effects.

Can someone explain it like I am 5, why "web 3" (i.e. decentralisation from the likes of IPFS and Dat) is getting conflated with crypto?

IPFS et al seem to be working fine right now without shoe-horning in blockchain.... or am I missing something?

Because crypto scammers are spending on PR to conflate them, so that they can reap the benefits of being associated with legitimate projects.

Which legitimate projects are you referring to?

Hi, author here,

given my provenance notes, I believe the brand/vision of the term web3 originates from web3.js and those people around it. But the term is quite general, as really it's anyone's authority to bump the web's major version number.

But I'm conflating web3 with crypto as I've been witnessing "web3"'s rise through my own eyes and it has always been conflated with crypto IMO.

I accept if others have a different perspective. I think nowadays there are so may web3 efforts that I've lost track.

> IPFS et al seem to be working fine right now without shoe-horning in blockchain

Btw. I think the original creator of IPFS Juan Benet would disagree with you here. I know for a fact that the original IPFS and Filecoin whitepapers (the old Filecon paper! [1]) were kind of written in parallel (around 2015 or earlier), so I'd infer that it always had been their vision to also create a ledger or crypto component.

- 1: https://filecoin.io/filecoin-jul-2014.pdf

web3 isn't being conflated with crypto, web3 IS the decentralized web powered via crypto.

How is "powered" defined here?

Currently I can spin up a webserver and offer a blog for my friends without paying anyone to host on my own network. If it's powered by crypto will I need to pay to do the same thing?

You're paying with the time and skill it takes to maintain your own server on your own infrastructure. You have a bad storm and lose your connection to your ISP, your site is down.

I'd much rather put some money in a smart contract that pays a distributed set of CDNs to host my blog, ain't bringing that down.

Yes, because prior to crypto there wasn't an easy way to make money with decentralized applications. Now that crypto has added financial incentives, the VCs and money are coming around to decentralization (for all the right reasons of course!) and everyone is talking about it as a result.

Do you have an alternative monetization strategy for the web that doesn't involve monopolistic ad companies and payment processors?

IPFS was made by Protocol Labs which made Filecoin, which is a blockchain incentivized decentralized storage network that leverages IPFS as a first class primitive. Yes IPFS can work with centralized services and existing cloud infrastructure as well but that's not the vision that Protocol Labs has.

I don't see why ads won't work on a decentralised web.

They still could, but getting money to content creators hasn't been a strong suit of the Internet up until now and part of the point of all this decentralization is tha it makes it easier for money to move around, finally allowing for micropayments, an early Internet idea that's never managed to come to fruition due to user friction. Whether they take off this time we'll have to see.

The common thought seems to be that large scale decentralization can only be achieved with the kind of incentives cryptocurrencies provide (i.e. people get rewards for running their own nodes). You mention IPFS, but they actually implemented Filecoin a few years back as a way to incentivize storage.

Because web3 is, in part, about users having ownership and crypto is what enables that in a decentralized, censorship-resistant way.

Instead of big tech companies profiting off your data, you can profit off your data and output. A critical thing that decentralized networks have solved is the alignment of interests between the developers, the users, and the platform creators. They all share in the success of the network and you can build on it. Facebook, Twitter will deplatform you when you get too successful building on their API or for a host of other reasons. They can and do change the rules at will.

Web 1.0 - Read-only.

Web 2.0 - Read & write.

Web 3.0 - Read, write & own.

No, that isn't it. You're just parroting a standard set of talking points.

Why is having ownership desirable on the internet? On the internet, everything can be copied endlessly and perfectly. There's no scarcity or limits. I can download a song, movie or game, and that doesn't prevent anyone else from doing the same. In my mind, that's a fantastic thing! Why would we want a system where access is arbitrarily limited?

It's absolutely not desirable. Some people have capitalist brain rot.

Let's take music as an example. On web2 music artists only get 18% of the revenue. Spotify gets 33%. The music industry takes 49%. Web3 flips the script. Artists get 95%, the rest are fees. So yes, I do think web3-style ownership is desirable.

Love those stats but it's always better to provide a source for the numbers.

Are you referring to Audius or some other web3 platform for music?

Right now, a music artist can sell their albums on their own website, and get all of the revenue (minus payment processor fees). The reason people gravitate to Spotify is because it's incredibly convenient. A lot of people (myself included) like paying $10 a month for unlimited access to an incredible variety of music.

"Web3" will only disrupt the status quo if it provides a better user experience then Spotify. From what I've seen, "Web3" doesn't do anything that Spotify doesn't do better.

>"On web2 music artists only get 18% of the revenue."

Centralised "web2" solutions like bandcamp.com give the artist 80-90%. You don't need "web3" to be fairer to artists.

I do think there's an issue with companies like Facebook owning peoples' data. Instead, with Web3, the idea is that people own their own data, can verify who they are (they own their private keys), and can choose to interact with services on the web and share their data as they see fit.

I agree with you though that it's great to be able to download movies or music (even though the trend seems to be moving more and more towards streaming). I don't think Web3 means that everything is arbitrarily limited though, it means that it's more user controlled [1].

[1] https://blog.coinbase.com/understanding-web-3-a-user-control...

This really feels like a push for a need that doesn't exist so the first-movers on the crypto market can have a manufactured "need" for the technology they invested so much into to pay out.

Nothing I've found about Web3.0 makes sense as an organic need that arose from internet usage... It all feels extremely manufactured.

Web 3.0 was about RDF, RSS/Atom feeds, microformats, and document semantics.

This crypto business is web 4.0. Don't trample on all of the things we learned.

Wasn't the term "web3" actually coined (ha) by the ethereum shills?

Yeah, these "browsable torrent" systems do not really need this. Well, they need something for name registration and blockchain of course wants to insert itself into that domain name business there, because trustless™. But we can — and should — use systems with articulated trust instead. https://github.com/andres-erbsen/dename was a good experiment.

Well Web 3.0 was originally the semantic web[0]. It began to become the decentralized web, or "re-decentralized web" as Tim Berners-Lee used to prefer, after interest in the semantic web began to fade. The cryptocurrency interest in the decentralized web then came later. I think most people would agree that the great schism occurred at the Decentralized Web Summit in 2018. That year it was sponsored by a number of cryptocurrency schemes, and most of the established members felt that the cryptocurrency oligarchs and their vassals were trying to infect and subvert the aims of the decentralized web for the private profit of shady individuals and organisations who actually made the centralised web look like the preferable option.

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

Suddenly seeing metaverse and web3 all over the place, after FB announced their rebrand. Disney even talking about their metaverse ambitions.

I'm sure the terms existed prior, but I never came across despite being an avid browser/news reader.

I believe the concepts can bear fruit, but feels like a sort of euphoria/me too kind of buzzword without a lot of substance. By substance, I mean tangible utility benefit to society in the short to medium term.

Is it just me?

I 100 agree with you. I just posted a comment saying the same. The hype machine for it just came out of nowhere and ramped up fast

Just like how in the "web 2.0" days there were a lot of "thought leaders" pushing their ideas, brands, and courses

The author is almost there! The next question should be: "And is there a need for Web3 to be blockchain based? Do those DeFi startups have any value once FOMO ends?"

Hi, author here, you might also enjoy reading:

- https://timdaub.github.io/2021/10/31/tokens-considered-harmf...

- https://timdaub.github.io/2021/10/21/on-chain-the-emperor-we...

as I think this topic deserves its own discussion and controversy.

I personally think that IPFS is the actual web3. All the noise about blockchain powered NFT's is obscuring the really interesting tech underneath: the distributed, versioned filesystem that can be used to actually host those corny images that people are buying and selling for obscene amounts.

The other thing that is interesting is ENS, which provides a distributed blockchain version of DNS so that you can give your IPFS hosted things a proper human readable name instead of just using long hashes.

IPFS and ENS together feels like it could be an actual web3. But that real tech often gets overlooked amid the buzz and speculation of people buying and selling NFT's and pumping and dumping shit coins to make huge profits. Some people are doing the actual tech work, but the rest are gambling in a flashy casino, making a lot of noise, and calling it web3.

Serious question: why would anyone use IPFS for storage compared to available options?

Everything I see points to it being ludicrously more expensive, not having good systems for redundancy and availability, etc.

It's not meaningful to talk about IPFS being expensive, it's like saying bittorrent is expensive. Both are just ways for people to seed a file, and other people to retrieve that file from its hash. There's only as much redundancy as there are people who want to seed it. IPFS is in wide usage because of libgen haha. Currently the resolver can take 30ish seconds, and there's a new, fancier resolver that supposedly takes <5 seconds, which is still pretty high compared to what people are used to but it's a work in progress. There's also IPNS which allows for the controller of a keypair to update the content associated with an identifier.

Filecoin is an incentive layer for IPFS that I'm much less bullish on. It's probably what you were thinking of, it's a way to pay money to have someone host or serve something for you on IPFS. It seems pretty underbaked to me but I think it's in the same order of magnitude, cost wise, as AWS.

What I really want is bittorrent, but with "live" file repositories, that can be updated by the maker.

Otherwise, I'm actually too well served by the regular cloud storage options to be honest.

That's IPNS

Peer to peer networking is still expensive because there aren't as many peers in it and it is not likely that data is cached at a peer close to you. This also reduces redundancy and availability.

There is nothing fundamentally stopping a peer to peer file system from having speed, redundancy, and availability, except that it doesn't have the economy of scale yet.

I think the fact that providers like Cloudflare are offering an IPFS gateway (in private beta) is an encouraging sign that we could soon reach the point where there are many more peers and providers caching IPFS at the edge, in distributed locations around the world: https://developers.cloudflare.com/distributed-web/ipfs-gatew...

ENS is only on Ethereum which that is not only expensive to purchase and renew the domain (due to gas fees) but with the way ENS is designed, you don't truly 'own' the domain as the keyholders are the ones that have access to the .eth TLD.

So basically it is more like a 'centralised' domain service with 'Ethereum blockchain' branding similar to GoDaddy, rather than 'a distributed blockchain version of DNS'.

The idea is interesting but the execution is not quite as advertised. Especially on a blockchain that is unable to scale.

I agree, although I think that having a decentralized and modern payment layer is also a part of Web3.

People owning their own data, instead of companies like Facebook and Google, also seems promising, so I haven't written off the ownership layer yet.

NFTs I don't really care about and don't understand the hype.

Metaverse can also be a part of Web3 (Decentraland, The Sandbox, etc), but we'll see where all that goes along with Meta, Microsoft, and all the other companies talking about the metaverse.

There's nothing that says we have to build it either.

Like crypto up to now, the Web3 idea is a solution in search for a problem.

I'd like to see more discussion about the nuts-and-bolts infrastructure of web3: the servers, file hosting and streaming, the caching layers. All of these slick websites are probably running on the same old cloud platforms and using the blockchain as an (admittedly powerful) identity or transactions layer.

I know it's early days, but the rhetoric about freedom from FAANG is outpacing the reality. I worry about a new generation of services that lure in and capture users with a thin veneer of decentralization ("oh, your identity is on ENS, but uh we actually host your videos") or those services suddenly finding they have huge cloud infrastructure bills to pay, leading to governance catastrophes, broken promises, and rug pulls/shutdowns.

A potential small step in the right direction: it would be super cool to see a blogging platform like mirror.xyz host its user-uploaded image assets on IPFS. It would be super super cool to see a DAO engineered to put money in trust to keep these assets pinned past the lifetime of the service itself, with as little human intervention as possible.

> All of these slick websites are probably running on the same old cloud platforms and using the blockchain as an (admittedly powerful) identity or transactions layer.

I'd like to second your sentiment. I've written about this topic too [1]. I think we should accept "web3" as a demonstration of what's possible and move into systems engineering now.

- 1: https://timdaub.github.io/2020/09/08/web3/

I'm just waiting for the hype of web3 and the NFT craze to die down so I can soberly look at it later on when all the early players of it are in Margaritaville on some beach somewhere enjoying their spoils. I plan on being around in the next 5 years, and I plan to dive into it properly then. Otherwise I would be acting out of FOMO or emotions. There is also the Joy of Missing Out (JOMO) too.

> There is also the Joy of Missing Out (JOMO) too.

Ha! I love reversing negative framings into a positives too. Now that I think about it, I must have had JOMO too! Thanks for teaching me. And have fun riding your JOMO!

Web3? Right; a decentralized web. Cool idea, kind of reminds me of the semantic web. Not getting anywhere anytime soon due to the inertia of the existing web. I'm kind of waiting for the revolution where people demand to own their information, as it makes more sense and could protect against all sorts of abuse, but I'm not holding my breath.

    could protect against all sorts of abuse...

Could it, though? What's to stop someone that gains access to user data (by legitimate means) to make a copy?

Laws and law enforcement. We should demand our governments to make laws that make unauthorized (by the people themselves through a decentralized system) use of our data illegal. At least the more flagrant/large scale forms of abuse could be prevented that way.

Exactly – this is currently a regulatory problem, and blockchains, decentralized identity, etc. won't solve anything in this space. On the contrary, it will by definition enable identification in some types of data.

This makes me conclude that these types of solutions are really more about portability and making some sort of political point (the only thing users realistically control is first party authorization – nothing else); They certainly don't have any security or privacy-related guarantees.

The "existing web" and web3 aren't separate things. Web3 is the organic evolution forward of the web, and it has tons of traction already.

Traction with rich fools using "distributed" casinos to gamble their shitcoins? Absolutely no one in the real world uses any of this.

There are two sides to web3 as I see it:

On the one side there are people obsessing about ownership and monetization. They want to buy and sell digital things for profit. They want to create pay to win systems where you have to spend money to have tokens to access services.

On the other side you have the altruistic, open access web3 that is focused on decentralization and breaking down walled gardens. For example IPFS is the peer to peer network for hosting and fetching content, resistant to censorship. It is probably the closest thing to old days of web where there was an ethos of open access to data.

The "for profit" crowd is trying to create an artificial decentralized monetization system on top of the fundamentally free, decentralized, peer to peer stuff like IPFS. For example if I host something in IPFS then there is nothing stopping folks from accessing it from any peer that has a copy. There is free and open exchange of data. But if I have an NFT then I can claim that I "own" something that is hosted in the distributed, decentralized IPFS. Some people are going so far as to say that they want NFT's to be used to implement a form of DRM on top of the peer to peer decentralized tech that would otherwise be freely exchanging data.

Personally I see web3 as the underlying decentralized tech like IPFS and ENS, but the NFT monetization and speculation side of things is a toxic casino and monetization layer bolted on top and it will probably harm the ecosystem of actual open decentralized tech underneath.

Well put!

Cryptocurrency and related speculative technology does not define “web3” as much as that community would like to pretend it does.

Personally, I always use Netscape 5 to browse Web3

Odd choice naming a new technology after an existing technology. It's like calling something HTML.

I was going to add a joke about internet 2, but I remembered that it was real.

I must admit that the hype around web3. But, I also realised how powerful the DEFI is. I think banks are waiting for DEFI to be disrupted.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the founding members of LongShort Finance. It is a decentralised, permissionless, crypto derivative exchange.

I typed this up for another comment, but lost what comment I was replying to, so I'm posting it here. It's about the three most interesting blockchain-associated projects I know of. I'm trying to figure out what's being built that's actually useful, outside of DeFi stuff (which I don't understand the hype for).

The first is a retroactive public goods funding system, sponsored and partially designed by Vitalik: https://medium.com/ethereum-optimism/retroactive-public-good... . The idea is that, instead of trying to figure out which public goods will be worthwhile in advance and funding those, they collect money from transaction fees (or something) and pay it to public goods projects that in retrospect were beneficial to society. ("The core principle behind the concept of retroactive public goods funding is simple: it’s easier to agree on what was useful than what will be useful.") In theory, you could have a startup whose business plan is "raise money from investors, build a public good, then get a ton of money once the public goods funding oracle agrees our good is beneficial and repay our investors". That's not a change that requires a blockchain or a cryptocurrency or whatever, but it definitely meets the criteria of "some people interested in and working on blockchain and related technologies are pursuing ambitious goals that could reshape the economy and politics".

Next up, Ethereum Name Service. The idea here is basically just DNS as an Ethereum smart contract. This, combined with the really ergonomic key-management tools that have popped up like Metamask, could enable an interesting future: one where everyone has a keypair that's associated with a human-meaningful name. You could imagine websites where your account is a public key, and you "log in" by solving challenge (decrypting something encrypted with your pubkey), and your "username" is just whatever ENS name is associated with that pubkey. Basically, it decentralizes the concept of an authentication/user accounts. (disclaimer, I got some ENS token for free when they did an airdrop that I haven't bothered to sell yet so I guess I have a stake in it)

Third, filecoin/IPFS/IPNS. IPFS is a protocol for retrieval of a file corresponding to a hash (basically it's bittorrent, nothing really that new or exciting, although it performs quite a bit better). IPNS is a way of creating an identifier that's associated with a hash you can update, basically replicating the concept of static websites that the website maintainer can update, except it's decentralized so anyone can provide hosting for the site instead of just the original site owner. (Imagine if you could download every site in your bookmarks and seed it, so they would never go down for anyone in the world as long as your computer is online.) You can associate an IPNS identifier with an ENS name, which is the only way I know of to have a website with a human-meaningful name where the whole stack is fully decentralized. I think IPFS and IPNS feel delightfully "webby", there's no complicated blockchain or anything like that, it's essentially just a souped-up bittorrent.

Filecoin is interesting because its goal is to act as an incentive layer for IPFS. On the traditional web, hosting a website costs money that the website owner has to pay, and then website users enjoy the site for free. That's nice, but it means that without ads or some other form of monetization the website can be a financial burden on the owner. (it's fine for text sites, but imagine a video-hosting site or something, the bandwidth alone can be extremely expensive.) Filecoin rebalances the incentives by allowing the users to pay a small fee to the host (and it's decentralized, so anyone can be the host if they choose), that way as long as there's some interest in the site someone is at least being compensated a little for storage and hosting. I don't know how much progress they're actually making towards any of these goals though, it doesn't seem usable in its current state in the way IPFS or ENS are.

What happens when someone's private key is lost/stolen?

Scrypto

Reply on news.ycombinator.com