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Comment by mattlondon | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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