Is Web3 Bullshit?
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I don't believe that every person on Twitter with $BTC in their profile understands or can knowledgeably argue the benefits of Web3, but their crypto holdings make them a hard-lined crypto zealot in the hopes of multiplying few hundred dollars they've put in.
It's fairly widely known how laughable it is to look for unbiased opinion in the interviews of pundits talking finance. This is since it's become expected that none of their advice is going to be untethered to their investments, but given the opportunity they're talk their book all they long. I don't see that much wrong with talking your book, but desperately trying to cover it up under the guise of "knowing the tech is superior" while only having superficial understanding of what's going on - makes intelligent people reading your stuff distrust you immediately.
I know people on both sides of the fence. I know of only one person that's skeptical of Web3 but still hedges on its success. I'm surprised that there is no middle ground - there are either fervent advocates or fervent opposition, and with very few exceptions (!), the opposition seems to think more clearly and is better informed.
Anyone can buy a share of a coin, and make a profit as long as the amount of fiat currency put into the chain keeps growing. Every new user convinced it's going "to the moon" pays dividends to existing holders. This automatically creates a financial incentive to become an astroturfer for the project.
Whilst it's possible to avoid those, I'd guess it's beyond many participants to do technically, so the exchanges become defacto centralization, and instead of regulated stock exchanges that operate in the same judicial location, in many cases these exchanges explicitly try to avoid regulation or accountability.
Consider on the other side of the table how the economics and network effects have created incentives for everyone to depend on centralized architecture to the point where if you’re not acting through any of the top two companies in any given market, you’re effectively shut off from large parts of modern economy and social life.
Incentives are broken all over, that doesn’t mean the cause is wrong.
The middle ground would be people who aren't invested in crypto, but have tried a few dApps and think they can be neat sometimes but maybe are rough around the edges and might be better in a few years.
These people don't exist because web3 technologies have nothing appealing to end users, only to investors. This might change eventually, but for now there's literally no reason to use blockchain if you aren't looking to invest or speculate in something.
There’s definitely a lot of potential. Judging a technology based on what the first few applications to materialize is extremely short sighted and has never been a good estimate of its future usage.
Personally I dislike full blown crypto zealots and also I dislike the Perl clutching tech crowd.
Just remember distributed tech has never been the most efficient way to get something done so if you’re looking at web3 from a purely better faster cheaper perspective then you won’t get it.
However, lucky for us, these aren’t the only problems to exist.
I'm kind of a middle ground person, perhaps leaning slightly 'against' rather than 'for', over predominantly environmental concerns. I've distanced myself from crypto since I learned what the chinese were up to, and since china is putting a stop to that now (allegedly?), and the rest of crypto seems to be quietly moving in a PoS direction, recently reintroduced myself.
Most of the objections I have, other than the climate concern involve valuation, stability vs. valuation, etc.
Because I have some experience in the open source virtual worlds arena, and because 15m square plot of decentraland just sold for over 2 million $US, I decided to make a personal investigation of decentraland and it's relationship to ethereum. I went into this quite optimistic and hopeful, because I enjoy such things. What I found, however, was no cause for joy.
Perhaps my expectations were unrealistic. In any case, as I said before elsewhere, they have fallen victim to the touch of Midas: Their various holdings became extremely overvalued in a very short period of time, to that extent where no one else can afford them.
When I posed this issue to them directly, the general attitude was 'well, Walmart and Nike can afford us, so...', but zero acknowledgement that their entire value to those corporations is based on the number of product consuming users they can bring to the table.
Their self-governance machine, the DAO, is a thing of beauty, in that it could be employed to actually produce an autonomous, self governing organization that embraced everyone on equal terms and let everyone involved behave as the peers they should be in an ideal community; instead, they have pretty well implemented everything bad about today's governments, arriving at a functional oligarchy made up of those with the most land and currency, which they call 'voting power' - and the so called officers of the various supporting and ideally moderating concerns (their foundation, their DAO, and, due to the concept of voting power, their property holders), are all the same people.
They do a steady job right now in their discord channel of gaslighting these concerns where ever they are indicated, to the extent that they tossed me out this morning for calling them out on it; I haven't troubled myself to see if they just tossed me out or banned me, because I really don't much care.
I do know that their behavior in every respect will alienate users not just to virtual worlds and cryptocurrency, but to the whole endeavor they are labeling 'web3'.
DAO or not, this is not The Way.
Not sure whether that was on purpose, but Chinese 道 Dào is literally the 'Way' (same syllable as in "Taoism" or "Judo" or "Aikido" etc... :-)
> This is not really that rare online, where basically all discourse is subconsciously understood to be people taking speculative positions on various topics (called "takes") against the value of their online brand, but it's particularly acute in the web3 world, where every project and community is blockchain-based, and all of your beliefs can be and usually are securitized into crypto tokens that can rise and fall in value
And also, as I agree with the OP, about blockchain and about our world in general right now:
> But my feeling is also: Why do I have to bet at all?! Why am I in this awful, ugly, unfun casino in the first place?? Is there a way out of the casino?? And if not, can I at least just get slowly tanked on free booze and annoy people with a reminder that the house always wins?
Either they are sure crypto is a scam or fad and will soon go to 0. Or they know for sure banks and fiat will go out of business.
I see this mentality more on the anti-crypto side.
My opinion is that there is a small chance that web3 can be huge. So I'm on the pro-crypto side. But a lot of people seem to have a hard time with this "SMALL chance it can be HUGE".
But I love and value actual (sadly minority) projects that solve (or realistically aim to/can solve) real problems in genuine ways. I love how I can use my money that isn't regulated by a corrupted government (I'm from a country between Europe and Asia with an extremely corrupted government so this has extra importance), without a middleperson/controlling entity without trust where I can only trust mathematics and fully public code. Sure they bring their own problems and risks, but I'd still prefer them over current "real world" system of corrupted governments, banks, and evil corporations.
Everything I've seen so far are either people trying to get rich quick, or people trying to be, or trying to be seen to be edgy.
I'm ignoring it until somebody breaks the existing internet. Oh good, we're incentivising that now...
Another HNer made a good point recently: Compute power is nearing post scarcity. Web3 is people trying to make it scarce again.
This is a constant issue I have with crypto advocates. Most of the use cases can be done with crypto, but also with other techs (sometimes it's as simple as "we need a database for this"). But there's never a serious analysis of why those use cases have not been covered with previous tech, and when you point out that there might be issues other than the tech then you get labeled as a "crypto hater". And I wouldn't care too much if random people called you a hater, but when all crypto people label dissent as "haters" it makes me think it's like a cult where all you need to do is believe.
It would be like the gold standard all over again.
It's free money to them, why not?
I know write you an IOU for 1 bitcoin, and you buy a car with that IOU, because anyone who owns that IOU can come to me and get their bitcoin, and everybody knows that I am good for my money, because that is the whole condition of this thought experiment.
I now write another IOU and give to my uncle, who buys a house with it, because everybody knows I'm good for it.
Now the money supply has increased, without minting new bitcoins, and this is exactly what happened to gold (which, as you know as well as anybody, you can't just print)
This [1] is one of the projects I have my eye on in this space but there is many that are starting to get to work now that a lot of the technical issues around Oracles are being sorted out.
1. https://www.betdex.com/ * No affiliation
I suppose there are ways to gamble exclusively using the blockchain, but I don’t think sports betting is among them.
Then consider that people are tackling the issue of decentralized oracles. The most common platform for that is Chainlink [1]. In this space specifically, Augur [2] is among those who has attempted to make decentralized sports reporting Oracles. I'm not sure if their solution is fully fleshed out, but regardless it doesn't seem to be an insurmountable technical issue for something that is as easy to verify as outcome of a game.
If your willing to accept that the Oracle problem will be solved, I'm not sure how you would say this doesn't create value for consumers.
1.https://chain.link/education/blockchain-oracles 2. https://augur.net/
Of course I’m aware that there are attemps to incentivize oracle providers to play fairly (and even “decentralize” oracles), but I don’t quite see how it can be definitively resolved. Not saying it’s impossible, but I just don’t see it (or understand it) yet.
But blockchains do introduce a technical capability that never existed before: shared, “trustless” access to and control over data.
Previously, you could run your own webserver, your own email server, etc, and you could trust your own data, but other people collaborating with you would need to trust you to manage that data, and trust that you hadn’t manipulated the data in some way. What if they don’t know you well enough to trust you?
Sure, other people could keep their own copy of that same data, and sync with you somehow, but most pre-blockchain data services lack replication capability out of the box, and as far as I know there are no non-blockchain data services that can give you any assurances at all that data has not been tampered with.
And on top of the issue of trust is the issue of network size. If you personally know who you want to collaborate with, you can share a single server, but what if you want open collaboration and discovery to be part of the application?
Federated application services capable of competing with big tech have been a dream and an objective of open-source advocates for decades, but no one has been able to deliver. I would say the major reason is because trustless data syncing at scale is orders of magnitude harder than running a single standalone server, and all of the solutions until web3 attempted to perform data syncing at the application layer—which means a lot of duplicated effort, and almost zero opportunity for reuse between projects.
Blockchain tech moves replication and tampering protection to the data layer, as a generalized service that is relatively trivial to set up. The promise of web3 is that shared-data applications can be built on top of that data layer in the same way that complex centralized applications can be built on well-defined centralized data layers like the file system and the relational database.
A robust and abstracted data layer allows application developers to spend more time thinking about application logic and less time thinking about data.
I don’t think blockchains control access over data at all without the integration of other technologies (i.e. using public key authentication to prove to some third-party service that you hold a key that performed a blockchain transaction). They only control permissions to update things on-chain and everything on the chain is still publicly readable anyway. PKI is capable of doing the same thing and has existed for a very long time.
> Sure, other people could keep their own copy of that same data, and sync with you somehow, but most pre-blockchain data services lack replication capability out of the box, and as far as I know there are no non-blockchain data services that can give you any assurances at all that data has not been tampered with.
Look at the existing NFT mess. The problem here is that the blockchain _doesn’t_ replicate anything other than a bit of metadata for these types of applications — the content still has to be stored elsewhere, often on a classic web server which is centralised and can go down any time.
If you want an example of something that replicates data and guarantees integrity then look at IPFS.
> Federated application services capable of competing with big tech have been a dream and an objective of open-source advocates for decades, but no one has been able to deliver. I would say the major reason is because trustless data syncing at scale is orders of magnitude harder than running a single standalone server, and all of the solutions until web3 attempted to perform data syncing at the application layer—which means a lot of duplicated effort, and almost zero opportunity for reuse between projects.
Blockchain’s answer to “federation is hard” is just to replicate the entire chain to all participants and have all participants repeat the exact same work to arrive at the same position. This is not exactly a glamouring success story of how to avoid “duplicated effort” — in fact, duplicated effort is a fundamental part of the blockchain architecture.
> Blockchain tech moves replication and tampering protection to the data layer, as a generalized service that is relatively trivial to set up. The promise of web3 is that shared-data applications can be built on top of that data layer in the same way that complex centralized applications can be built on well-defined centralized data layers like the file system and the relational database.
This isn’t really true though — it’s more like the blockchain provides a tamperproof metadata store. Putting actual quantities of information onto a typical blockchain is either prohibitively expensive computationally (it needs to be replicated everywhere) or prohibitively expensive financially (Ethereum gas costs as an example).
I don't think you can fully replicate a general database in blockchain, at least not to any decent performance/size level. And interacting with the blockchain will always be more complex than interacting with your own database. A blockchain app will always take more developer resources than a non-blockchain app.
Also, another problem with federated services is money. In a centralized app, one party controls the app and can exploit it for money and use that money to pay developers. They can even run at a loss the first years to create a good product until they start making money. With federated apps, it's harder to invest and blockchain doesn't change the fact that people don't like to pay for services they have gotten for free previously. Crowdfunding existed before too and not too many projects got enough to even start.
The third point is... people just don't care about decentralized/centralized. So insisting on going blockchain is a technology choice that's probably not going to bring you too many users (other than fans of the tech) and it's going to cost you more developer time. It doesn't make too much sense.
But that's not a new capability. You can do that with existing tech. At most, it seems to me, what blockchains introduce is convenience, but it comes with a pretty heavy cost in terms of computational resources.
This gives me the initial dropbox dismissal comment (you can do it trivially with ftp) vibe...
How can you not think: well, if this is how much of Hollywood works now, isn't that proof that you don't need a blockchain for it?!
It also disregards that loads of projects/works are not "how Hollywood works".
Nearing? 99.9% of the Internet content I care about is pure text.
In quantities could be served and stored on SBC or a phone from 10 years ago.
Think of text messaging, IM rooms, forums like HN or mailing lists, activitypub.
Do the math around how much text a person can consume in a day and how much data can a SBC handle in a day.
A $0.80 microcontroller would get you pretty far.
Capitalism can only work with scarcity to monetize. With scarcity nearing an end, there's now two camps:
* those that are excited for the post-scarcity future where we can freely share data and culture
* those who are deeply bought into capitalist ideology and who are terrified of capitalism ending with scarcity.
The first group hates all the crypto stuff because it's a technological attempt to put the genie back in the bottle and undo the progress we've made in eliminating scarcity. The second group hails crypto as their savior and thinks it will revolutionize everything by reintroducing scarcity everywhere, giving capitalism a life line. I think that's the core disconnect.
Despite all the claims from crypto advocates about crypto freeing us from existing power structures, I think the truth is actually the opposite.
Crypto entrenches existing power structures, where capital = power. You can see that formalized in various decentralized organizations where votes are allocated by token count, or in other words, more capital means more power.
Crypto is an effort to preserve the status quo, not to change it. If the "web3" were to succeed, moneyed interests would still be controlling everything, with the only change being that some early crypto adopters would also rise to their level. Crypto advocacy comes down to an attempt to rise to the ruling class by serving it, not to topple it.
web3 is a marketing brand that defines a future version of web apps where the frontend is a compiled SPA possibly hosted on decentralised platforms (IPFS) and where the backend is a decentralised blockchain (and in its purest form only that).
This goes a step beyond web 2.0 where you would build a SPA with a cloud backend, e.g. Firebase / Google. With web 2.0, you have to trust the backend (so again in most cases Google or Amazon) and that is a limiting factor for sensitive apps, or simply if you care for decentralisation.
Another addition of web3 is the payments, which could have been standardised in the web platform (I am a former W3C member and there were lots of discussions on that), but instead of the browser implementing payments, we ended up with a few centralised processors like Stripe. Same goes for identity.
Quite interestingly, web3 solves both Identity + Payments with a technically elegant solution. Many people got rich by holding AMZN stock, which is in great part due to AWS -- the cash cow of the company. Why would you have a problem with a cryptocurrency token being used to pay for the backend infrastructure i.e. paying for accessing a database-as-a-service?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPA
Edit: also, I suspect you’re being cheeky there, because when I Google “SPA”, the top results are local spas (even in private mode), and thus not “places to go for a holiday/vacation”, as if you only guessed what a Google search would give and had decided to make a joke about the ambiguity and most common lay meaning of (case-insensitive) SPA, rather than express an actual frustration at an honest attempt to look up the meaning of that term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Password_Authentication
I guess that’s what led you to “keep googling” the same term over and over?
Either that or they are holding a huge bag of some project-native token and so they have a vested interest in developing it because increased usage usually correlates to the price of said token increasing as well.
For web2 (which was also abused to death as a buzzword), the defining technical component was asynchronous requests through js and dhtml. Decoupling the rendering of views from data.
For web3 it’s decoupled frontends and backends (the frontends should support being self-hosted/run locally), peer-to-peer and federated architectures, having not SPoF.
Actually I've got a customer using Ethereum first and then Algorand to timestamp events but it was only a little more than calling a HTTP API for us.
Sure, you will still have backend processes but the exposure to "the app" is greatly reduced.
IMO there’s room for small benevolent communities where people choose to share in the cost of infrastructure (e.g. hosting seedboxes in torrenting communities where you are expected to keep your up/down ratio even) but expecting users to run full nodes is a tall order, computation and bandwidth-wise you’re offloading costs to your users. I always thought something like wikipedia could work like this since there’s thousands of committed super-users that could afford to run a background process, and indeed there’s IPFS mirrors of it, but IIRC the edits still happen on jimmy wales’ computer.
As for "who's going to run the nodes", if cryptoeconomics or users don't take care of it, I assume businesses will. The nice thing is that regardless, the payment for this infrastructure is also facilitated through cryptocurrency transactions on L2 networks. For someone who doesn't want or need to take ownership of that, it can just be proxied through to the client and not need to be the concern of the developer of publisher of the app.
Of course businesses can still choose to pony up for it proactively of they have the finances to support it, potentially running it themselves or through a third party. You can always fall back to "the old ways" for certain things when it makes sense.
It's orhogonal to consensus so works equally well on PoW/PoS.
There are a couple of competing and complimentary solutions for L2 on Ethereum. I'm quite sure it will converge at some point.
Most people deploy a backend proxy and use APIs for indexing, etc. Originally, these APIs were centralised (e.g. Infura) but decentralised alternatives now exist (like The Graph).
For most people, a decentralized platform will usually be worse (speed, latency), and only very rarely better, than a centralized server. The "paying to access a database" will introduce a lot of issues both for users and developers, no matter how you implement it, for barely any user-facing improvement. And centralized processors appeared to make things easier, so you'd need a payment platform that is as least as easy and, also, that protects you against scams (AFAIK, you can't do too much if someone steals your crypto wallet or you forget the password).
So while I agree that web3 could provide identify + payments, it doesn't need to be technically elegant, but user-facing elegant.
Centralized web is horrible and dead. Literally _anything_ is a better alternative. The user can be convinced to adopt superior tech even if he does not explicitly know the problems. It just has to feel better.
> it doesn't need to be technically elegant, but user-facing elegant.
dont worry bro. the "set user = happy" voodoo dance has already been done. every cryptocoin wallet is a browser plugin or mobile app with 90% of code for themeing with all the bugs and slowness smartcrap/web users are accustomed to. you are even discouraged from rnunning yoyr own node
Until there is fraud, a dispute, or an innocent mistake.
The vast majority Og people will likely use a custodian for their crypto. For them it will feel like banking feels now.
Just like coinbase provide a visa card with collateral i your crypto.
So essentially these questions really are answered -- it is not an all or nothing. We will keep, eg. Visa to facilitate retailer transactions with collateral in, eg., bitcoin. Bow you can dispute and everything and you pay in crypto.
Also, why would we want bitcoin or any crypto if most people will just use Visa? How does that achieve decentralization? I doubt the goal of cryptocoins is just "replace the financial backend that big companies use".
And this is where the assumption is wrong. Web3 is about gatekeeping for profit, and additionally you not only have to trust a single vendor...but literally every other peer on the decentralized internet to be trustworthy with your data.
Computational security is not the same as data security, and this is where the marketing BS is happening.
As long as there's no permission management and no deletion feature built into the blockchain, your precious private data is as publicly accessible as it never was before.
You think encryption will hold forever? SHA might disagree.
You think 20 years ahead of time the password will still be secure and not leaked anywhere else? Ha, good luck.
The problem that I have with web3 is that 99% are ponzi schemes for gatekeeping ...and the 1% that are left try to market it as a privacy thing, which it cannot be by definition of how a blockchain works.
There are so many broken software programs out there already, and now we made those bugs persistent and unfixable for eternity (with respect to "how secure" user data is stored).
If the web3 would be about real distribution (not the same as decentralization), there could be much much easier solutions for having a local copy of your old myspace photos.
There was flattr [1] a while ago, with a similar concept, but it didn't really take off. I'm not sure a more complicated solution with a higher barrier of entry would.
SPA = Single Page Application
This is pretty much just the same thing we do today, but wait...
> possibly hosted on decentralised platforms (IPFS)
We can use a filesystem that is extremely slow, and also loses all our files if we stop paying AWS to mirror them in S3!
> the backend is a decentralised blockchain
And we can use a really slow database where each write costs $100s in gas fees!
... see, much better!
However, transaction "gas" fees with some chains (Polygon, Solana) are less than 1 cent and you probably know that.
You can pay as much with DynamoDB if you don't optimise anything (and reads are free with the chains, still costly with DynamoDB). Of course, you can say that AWS is overpriced too... maybe that's just inflation going on.
If you go with AWS's most expensive option for access (DynamoDB on-demand, infrequent access), the pricing is $1.56 per million write request units. That's 0.000156 cents per write. That doesn't include data storage, but that ranges between 10 and 25 cents per month, per GB.
But web3 strikes me as those very same people experiencing FOMO because they missed out printing a bunch of money for themselves in the early days of the web by actually providing novel value - which in hindsight now all looks like really obvious low-hanging fruit, hence the FOMO - so they're hoping to "get in on the ground floor" by rebooting the web and inserting themselves into and extracting a payment from every single transaction and interaction on this new web, hoping we use their magical tokens - which oh by the way are also speculative investments that they currently own a bunch of and you don't - as the currency.
Of course, I'm just a hater who doesn't get it.
That's just a cheap way to dismiss critics and has no actual basis in reality. The best thing to do is ignore it.
Call it what you want, but please don't sully the web with your plat du jour crypto antics.
Also for what it is worth, the web has been decentralised from the very start, I don't see what the fuss is about apart from just everyone getting rich selling the next hot coin/token/whatever.
For many things like reddit, digg, youtube etc there was only a web interface to these things. They were of and for the web
This, obviously, assumes that you believe users retaining ownership of the content they make is a real and necessary benefit. I'm not sure about that yet. I don't really see why people need to.
Unfortunately however, regardless of whether web3 content ownership is a good thing or not, the current cohort of web3 businesses and evangelists seem more interested in shilling their own coins and many-thousands-of-dollars coding courses instead.
Sure you can verify the hash and signature etc, but no one reading an article is going to bother verifying the signature apart from the real die-hards. Heck my mum can't even verify she typed in the right URI and ends up on all sorts of crazy scam sites (e.g. "I went to google and they said I had to call them about a virus and pay them £150 to fix it").
If someone posts something to reddit3, then someone copies it and reposts it again with a different hash and sig, what will happen? Nothing I expect.
The benefit of web3 is about users being able to control how their content is published by web3 websites. Reddit3 would not be able to claim ownership of user's creations. Like I said, I don't know if it's necessary or even that useful for users to have that control, but people definitely complain about it a bit. Maybe it would be.
So web3 is exactly like web2 then?
The only change that occured in the era marketed as "web2" is strong attacks against decentralization.
Web 1.0 evolved with user generated content and now more of the world's information is locked up behind a login screen than before.
What this has to do with what is being sold as "web 3.0" is not clear. Blockchains have their uses but it's not the web.
The client libraries for Ethereum are called “web3”, and have been for half a decade at least. Web3 has been a core concept promoted by the Ethereum team from the beginning.
Say what you will about Ethereum, it is not the “latest crypto pyramid scheme”.
In other words, the price of Eth is derived in part from real demand for the use of the services of the Ethereum network. If speculative interest in Eth were to completely collapse, its price would not go to zero, because demand for the use of the Ethereum network would sustain it.
I imagine that you would argue that demand for Ethereum network services is itself driven by pyramid schemes, and is therefore inflated. Perhaps. That does not mean, however, that Ethereum itself is a pyramid scheme. And certainly not all of the demand for Ethereum services is illegitimate.
A pyramid scheme requires that cashing out of one's investment depend on new investment money entering the scheme. It is not unreasonable, however, to purchase Ethereum with the hope that the price will go up because it will need to be purchased by users of the network, who will pay higher prices in the future when demand for the network's services goes up.
You can disagree with this proposition without calling Ethereum a pyramid scheme. Just because you think Eth is a bad investment does not necessarily mean that it is a pyramid scheme.
I don't think etherium is necessarily a bad investment if you have no moral or are not well informed. Many scams can be profitable.
I think you can only say this if you believe that the services provided by the Ethereum network are only valuable to individuals perusing illegitimate activities. Do you really think that there is not any legitimate use for Ethereum?
> I don't think etherium is necessarily a bad investment if you have no moral or are not well informed
Is it immoral to invest in Ethereum if you truly believe in the promise of the technology? Are you saying that anyone who believes in the promise of the technology is ill informed?
It is time to get rid of gatekeepers, toll collector and have control of our data & communities. Web 3 is a way do that and will take about a decade as the infra builds out. So it certainly is BS for big tech landlords and their retinue.
Crypto, is part of that plan for payments. Certainly there are scams but no different than scams today - where we are treated like lab rats subjected to data stimuli, our data stolen without permission or compensation.
Sure I will take the Internet of 90s any day over today’s web with its surveillance capitalism. But that boat passed long back, as will the current one. Web3 allows users to be in control of the network(s) or communities collectively. That certainly is good for most folks.
https://www.businessinsider.in/finance/news/amazon-has-a-spe...
The fees aren't too crippling (around 15% of revenue) and FBA is an absolute Godsend for anyone based outside of the US trying to crack into that market (similar for Europe).
I could not thank Mr. Bezos more for the opportunities Amazon has given my family. The income from FBA was a major factor in my decision to quit my job back in 2020, and because of that my daughter can be with her daddy every single day.
You just don't hear about it much because it's a boring news story.
Good products are usually driven by commercial entities. I would love to use something else besides Android or iOS that is not backed by a commercial giant, which WORKS, is not full of spyware and has a healthy ecosystem but nobody is making one, nobody is able to put 2 and 2 together there.
Are the products you buy online going to physically move differently when you use the "decentralised" internet? Are the small businesses going to revive because of that? AMZN did not kill them, the consumer did. It's the consumer that spends the dollar and dictates such outcomes - none of which are going to be fixed by Web 3. For me, the centralisation that amazon provides is a feature, not a bug. You will not kill AMZN until you understand why it works the way it does and start competing with them. Don't tell me it can't be done because AliExpress is giggling in the background.
I have a few friends doing a fortune on AMZN without even seeing the products they sell (FBA). Adapt or die, it's just nature.
Mailservers not running from your house is not really all that bad...for the rest of us. Imagine all the spammy software that your friends and relatives install on their computer being able to spin one and blast campaigns.
[1] https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver [2] https://mailu.io/1.8/
Terminator 3
Home Alone 3
Jurassic Park 3
Police academy 3
Alien 3
The list is long...
Gnome 3
All these third iterations…
The whole point of DNS is to normalize an easy to remember name to an address so that everyone can access that same address easily. That is almost the purest essence of centralization.
In practice if you want to share family photos with your family do you upload those photos to a third party like a social media site or a cloud provider for all your family to access? That is centralized: an agreed upon location for everyone to access.
In contrast decentralization means no third party. Grandma pushing the family photos directly onto the kids hard drive from across the network, for example.
The confusion here is most people confuse the web for the internet. The internet is a big decentralized network thanks to BGP. The web is an application riding that network thanks to HTTP.
The goal of the web, as it was invented. was to allow decentralized content access via hyperlinks. That vision is essentially dead. Content is now an index on a database behind a walled garden.
On the web content is king. In a true decentralized platform autonomy and availability are king while content is trivial.
As there are multiple places where the family photos can be posted (Facebook, 500px, Google, etc), that demonstrates that the web is decentralized.
What it may not be is distributed, where one can easily self-host:
* https://berty.tech/blog/decentralized-distributed-centralize...
The presence of choice only means there are multiple centralized systems not interconnecting.
This is why the web is highly centralized despite choice and why Web3 won’t work. Web3 is focused upon federated solutions. A federated solution is semi-autonomous, less centralized than the web but not fully decentralized.
Things exist on a spectrum. I have autonomy to choose where to (e.g.) host my family photos, and even self-host on a VPS or even perhaps at home (either with a static IP or dynamic DNS). While things may moved towards more centralization with Big Tech, does not mean it is centralized, just perhaps less decentralized / distributed.
> multiple centralized systems
This phrase approaches an oxymoron in my mind. (Bearing in mind de/centralization being on a spectrum.)
Autonomy is the ease with which people are free to move between those governments.
I suspect people view the web as decentralized because they cannot divorce their thinking from concepts like content is king and a client/server model.
But you wouldn't say that the governing of Earth in total is centralized (e.g., the UN (with their black helicopters/s)).
Going back to my link:
> As its name implies, decentralized systems don’t have one central owner. Instead, they use multiple central owners, each of which usually stores a copy of the resources users can access.
> A decentralized system can be just as vulnerable to crashes as a centralized one. However, it is by design more tolerant to faults. That’s because when one or more central owners or servers fail, the others can continue to provide data access to users.
* https://berty.tech/blog/decentralized-distributed-centralize...
Or Baran (1964):
> For example, type (b) in Fig. 1 shows the hierarchical structure of a set of stars connected to the form of a larger star with an additional link forming a loop. Such a network is sometimes called a "decentralized" network, because complete reliance upon a single point is not always required.
* https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memorand...
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but aren’t you making exactly that error above? DNS both predates and exposes networking infrastructure that isn’t the web.
And for what it’s worth, I would consider DNS decentralized: it’s a system of different servers that coordinate to share information. No one party owns the DNS network.
Confusing the fact that DNS’s information is authoritative for centralization would presumably ensnare every blockchain as well, since they entire point of a distributed ledger is to be authoritative.
But I figure that’s the least of blockchain’s problems, given that the underlying network topology of even the largest distributed ledgers tends to be around a dozen “big fish.” Not very decentralized in practice.
The root servers kind of do, along with central authorities like ICANN which gatekeep the TLDs
Confusing the TLD situation for ownership is making the same “distributed, authoritative” mistake.
This is a hard truth that web3 will have to face: centralization happens naturally in decentralized systems.
As a recent web3 example, when twitter teased the idea of verified NFT avatars, half the comments were saying things like that they should piggyback on OpenSea verification so that people don’t just re-mint other people’s NFTs.
OpenSea has taken investment a $10b valuation, to me that implies that the people financially backing web3 think they’ll be able to extract rent by being a central player in it.
In reality, non-deflationary cryptocurrencies have been tried on various occasions. Surprise! None of them have taken off because "number doesn't go up".
That's why it shares the inflationary model.
The reason bitcoin is often described as deflationary is that many coins are lost, and the inflation is somewhat priced-in.
But again: this doesn’t change the fact that Bitcoin is deflationary. It’s a fixed supply of coins on a ledger that every current stakeholder has a strong deflationary interest in. The fact that there might be inflationary forces internal to Bitcoin’s economy doesn’t change that.
Where is this assumption coming from? I have never heard this before.
> that doesn't mean that the supply of bitcoins in a particular economic area will be fixed. It most certainly won't, unless international trade stops.
Putting non-competing sectors of the economy in competition against each other for a slice of a fixed monetary supply is another basic and sufficient precondition for deflation. There’s a very good reason we don’t do that currently.
The global supply of bitcoins is fixed if and only if financial institutions are not allowed to hold fractional reserves against deposits.
I don’t know of any exchange that offers a deposit account that’s dollar-denominated but backed by cryptocurrency. I can think of lots of reasons for that, FDIC regulations being the least of them. But again, even that wouldn’t make the number of bitcoins in circulation increase: it would be an unstable (and illegal) financial fiction.
And again, this is before we get to the problem of “the government lets you do this.”
Cryptocurrencies are currently considered securities under US law. You can't just pop unrealized securities into existence when a prospective investor asks you for them: it's akin to naked shorting. That's why the stock market has "market makers," i.e. firms that provide low-latency settlement of securities in exchange for a small part of the spread.
I can't find any evidence online that any reputable exchange is using its underlying reserves to cover multiple in-kind balances. If you have links to exchanges actually doing this, both I and the SEC would love to see them.
Edit: I'm struggling to even find links to people discussing this hypothetically online. I found this one on a wiki[1], where it's discussed in the abstract. And I found another thought piece from the Atlanta Fed[2]. But no indicator that any current above-board reserve is currently doing this.
[1]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Fractional_Reserve_Banking_and_Bi...
[2]: https://www.atlantafed.org/cenfis/publications/notesfromthev...
I used the US as an example; what you're describing is illegal on every single major international exchange[1]. And as far as banking licenses go: the FDIC won't touch Gemini's actual non-third-party-custodial depository products with a ten foot pole, and they're about as clean as a cryptocurrency firm can be.
If you want cryptocurrencies to "succeed" in some nebulous sense, it would be good to get a start on the "not just good for crime" part of the equation. This isn't it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_short_selling#Regulation...
If you measure current ownership as a percentage of final issued coins rather than current issued coins, then you've already priced in the inflation.
In other words: like the US economy, Bitcoin can have both inflationary and deflationary forces internally. But the overall economic picture of Bitcoin is intrinsically deflationary.
I suspect any coin attempting price-stability (minimum requirement for a useful currency) would need some kind of central bank to control and guarantee the supply. (We have that already too! It's called Tether and it ain't great.)
was being widely used for tipping when the lightning network was just a twinkle in btc's eye
seems to have declined for that purposed, but was the reason i have a small bag still. maybe missed my chance to sell at $0.70 but my original $70 bag i got to tip an openra server ended up doing quite nice ;)
someday my doge will hit $1
I am curious to see what will happen when the everything bubble pops
If people don’t react in an angry way that’s the clear signal from society that it wants a certain % of ponzi and scams to be allowed and tolerated
Much like it tolerates gambling , lottery and games of chance which are all zero sum games
… the market is flooded with cheap video cards and we finally have a feast. Unless I die waiting, which is what will probably happen. Please, God, Jesus, Allah, Rama, whoever; I've been waiting far too long already.
edit: keep downvoting me morons. what is microtransactions? literally the same bullshit you bitch about like NFTs and IPOs.
and the video game industry is not just scum for that, but for the terrible code they write and how they drag down the entire computing industry with pervasive poor engineering
what is steam? origin? epic store? literally webshit like a cryptocurrency wallet + vendor lock in + a bunch of mutually incompatible software deliberately made that way in the interests of the vendors instead of using open standards
Isn't this one of the most basic properties of supply and demand, though?
I mean,what do you expect to happen if your supply is artificially capped and early adopters start to pump up demand for the stuff they own?
In fact, isn't that the whole point of these schemes? I mean,do you know anyone who decided to waste their own money subsidizing anything related to crypto? Each and every single evangelist and proponent of crypto is invested in getting in cheap and pumping it up to get out with the maximum possible markup.
The most basic property of supply and demand is that price is determined by the interaction of supply and demand, so a fixing the supply alone determines nothing at all about its value, which is why the incessant pumping is necessary. The cryptoproponent's argument that cryptocurrencies must increase in value because there are hard limits on their growth rate is a cargo cult version of the law of supply and demand made to serve the pump
And? The demand for an asset is tied to its utility. You can't just assume that the demand will continue to increase forever, but that's exactly what the notion of "deflationary asset" implies.
What are you talking about? Random shit-coins that have deflationary economics?
https://btcpro.com/2021/09/05/eth-becomes-deflationary-burn/
“If the stock community wants to demonstrate that it isn't a giant Ponzi scheme, why not come up with a non-deflationary stock, which will not massively reward 'early adopters' at the expense of everyone else, in perpetuity?”
And if you look at the price graphs it's not always going up. It's a synthetic currency with no real backing economy (and the transaction costs are insane). Pretty straightforward.
Literal tens of billions of dollars are using these systems to great success. The numbers are refuting your arguments, and will continue to.
When we are all carrying counterfactual wallets, able to hold any number of cryptocurrency, or NFT ownership tokens (of the deed or lease to your house, social club entry etc), with social recovery from your closest family/friends when you smash your iPhone, then what will your argument against technology be, I wonder?
The traditional systems that are apparently inscrutable to you move, in SWIFT’s case, $5 trillion (with a T) per day. These generally settle in a few minutes.
P.S. Transparently resorting to straw men like “if you doubt crypto then you just don’t like technology” is the sort of stuff that prevents people from taking this movement seriously.
Not open to you.
I’m disheartened by how small the FTC and SEC actually are upon review.
Eve though you framed your challenge as a "no true Scotsman" argument, history is packed with IPOs that tanked after the companies went public.
https://money.howstuffworks.com/10-biggest-ipo-flops.htm
Last year Uber dropped considerably when it's IPO got out of the gate.
The main mistake of your argument is trying to compare something with tangible value with schemes driven by speculation and fear of missing out.
I don’t see why stocks have tangible value and tokens used to interact with a network don’t. A stock is a vacuous unverifiable virtual piece of paper. At least if you have a Bitcoin or Ether you can prove what you have and know how many there are.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-02-17/dole-f...
Most stocks don’t even have dividends any more so what else is a stock for other than selling to the next greater fool?
Crypto represents nothing and is backed by nothing other than sunk-cost.
This is one of the big lies.
That's true if companies are evaluated on their fundamentals.
If you start to deal with stocks as if they were meme coins, with no concern of cash flows or business models or profitability, and you add a decade of quantitative easing, then you get stocks like Tesla, and a stock market that's driven by the need to park free cash no matter how risky and absurd the investment is.
A company might be destined to make twice their profits, yet if nobody believes they could, nobody will buy their stocks, leaving stock price the same. One might think, the stock price would certainly increase when the company realizes the profits, but it’s not the case either. The market could think that it was a one off event and the company wouldn’t continue growing. Therefore, nobody buys the stock.
Maybe sometimes. However, if a token is used to pay for blockchain services (such as shared-compute and -data services), the value of the token is at least in part based on the value of those services.
Some exchanges or other cryptocurrency businesses fizzle out.
Bitcoin price gets hit on world stability news.
> The main mistake of your argument is trying to compare something with tangible value with schemes driven by speculation and fear of missing out.
People have no idea what TSLA is planning on doing besides "cool car", and ape into the stock because of FOMO. Address this?
Everybody investing in the stock market is not a Reddit day trader.
Legitimate stocks are expected to be backed by the efficient creation of valuable products or services the company can sell at a profit. These profits are distributed to stock holders as dividends or reinvested in growing the profit potential. The value of a stock crucially stems from the rights to the future profits they give their holders. Legitimate stocks are not just about giving the money of late buyers of stocks to early buyers of stock.
[0] or, alternatively, dividend payouts, but that's a totally different story.
That's not the same as forking something to do a pump and dump scheme.
Except DWAC perhaps, but that's already under investigation by the SEC. Which has no alternative in crypto land.
It's the same as putting money into NASDAQ100 or SP500 and waiting for it to go up only. Is that a Ponzi scheme? No.
It's a volatile synthetic hedge against assets with real fundamentals.
And the whole "cryptobro culture" (which is the r/wallstreetbet culture, which is a nice essence of how fundamentally small markets are more about the humans who gamble/participate than about the economic properties of the products/stocks/currencies) is not simply bad/good either.
Modern monetary systems are not zero-sum. The central banks (and to a lesser degree the legislatures) can very effectively interact with the financial markets to achieve almost any desired outcome. Furthermore legislatures can and do tax whoever they want thanks to people with money having bank accounts.
The fact that now a lot of money is/was dumped into various blockchains doesn't mean much. It's just sitting here instead of sitting in a money market fund and doing nothing. Or instead of sitting in the central bank as required reserve.
a product that does anything at all?
A token like this would jettison its pyramidal character. If it took off, it might convince me that there is value beyond scamming late adopters.
I haven't seen any gaining much traction however.
In my opinion the current challenge of the project as a whole is being able to monetize our products and return value to token/crucible holders but it has been less than a year of the project inception and we've done a lot of cool stuff.
maybe the web per se, but in practical terms it depends on the DNS which is decidedly not decentralized.
You're just along for the ride.
> The web is decentralized
I know you just want to throw in the invalid "look at me I'm an old school hacker" definition that can't be argued with, but it isn't. To serve content, it has to be hosted somewhere, and that place must be a single entity, and it must have infinite money to replicate the content for infinite users. On freenet or torrent, this isn't the case. Then there are also the other 700 ways the web is centralized...
what?
imagine it blows up in popularity
do you get the problem now?
For pyramid schemes, the idea is that you have to pay to enter a network, and you make money by recruiting new members. The system breaks down once there a no people left to recruit, which happen quickly due to the exponential nature of the scheme. The core of a pyramid scheme is the filiation system, there is no such thing in, say, a NFT market. You can make a pyramid scheme with cryptocurrencies, but none of the popular trends are. Ponzi schemes are also not pyramid schemes.
Ponzi schemes involve a promise of unrealistic returns on investment, and they do get paid, at least in the early phase. The trick is that the returns come from new investors, and the system breaks down when people stop investing. A Ponzi scheme requires a secretive central authority that pays out the promised interests. And by nature, cryptocurrencies have no central authority and make no promise, so, not a Ponzi scheme.
Instead, crypto-schemes are simply based on speculation. And if it is a scam, it is a different kind of scam.
If we start calling anything a pyramid/Ponzi scheme, the very idea of trade and investment become a pyramid/Ponzi scheme. It will always be the case that early adopters will get more money if the (honest or not) thing takes off, this is a direct consequence of the risks involved.
In the book, the Avout are basically science & philosphy nerds that the rest of society has locked up in monasteries where they are not allowed to use any form of modern technology after a few incidents in the past where they went off and invented things like gene manipulation, nuclear weapons, etc. The outside world still has technology and interacting with them every few decades is hard for the avout because they seem to adopt all sorts of technical jargon every few years (i.e. bullshytt). So, they need to figure out what these people are talking about every time they are allowed out (every 1, 10, 100, or a 1000 years).
Asking the question if it is bullshit is kind of answering it, I would say. But it's definitely bullshytt.
Basically every tech where inventor looks you in the face and says that ”black is white” can be called web3.
Cryptocurrencies are starting to feel like that, a massive game that people take pleasure in. Nothing wrong with that. I've enjoyed real-world role-playing games, so I don't want to judge anyone else who is into such things.
Is it crazy to make a game currency your main form of investment? Maybe, but not automatically. You should, of course, invest in a diversified portfolio, but if you want to go long on this particular kind of game, it might pay off huge in the end.
I recall when I was a child me and my friends played Dungeons and Dragons -- long running campaigns that went on for years. One of the parents of my friends was upset by this and said it wasn't really a game because it didn't end and nobody could be declared a winner. I'm afraid my initial reaction to cryptocurrencies was similar, not seeing it as a game and rejecting it as not being real.
Of course, a big difference is that we insisted Dungeons and Dragons was a game, whereas the proponents of cryptocurrencies continue to insist that this is not a game. Some make some variation of the argument "there is so much money in this, it's too big to be a game" but that's an incorrect understanding of a game. There is a lot of money in esports, but we are still talking about games.
I've come round to accepting that cryptocurrencies are here to stay. I no longer consider them Ponzi schemes, I do regard them as a kind of play activity, one that deliberately tries to blue the line between play and non-play. To the extent that they enable certain kinds of criminal activity, they become real and can be used in non-play contexts. But mostly, this is a kind of play that some people find pleasure in, and there is no point in berating them for it.
The 'crypto is for criminals' narrative has been debunked so many times, but if you still need convincing just look how crime infested traditional banking is in comparison: https://youtu.be/f8iPIV9cBAs
It pretends to democratize things, but rather moves from a monopoly to an oligarchy, which works great for the 'in' group but not necessarily for those outside it.
I really like the idea of being able to "git clone" your data/website into your own local browser and just make it's own webserver. For most of content we generate, that would probably be enough.
I don't see the point of trying to place everything in a blockchain. I understand the power (and need) to decentralization though.
And I'm not sure just one tech/coin/protocol/chain will be enough, but maybe if we pack:
- a P2P browser, with a wallet for authentication+payment (abstracting money away together with authentication is a near idea)
- a versioned content manager that make it easy to pull/push from/to peers
- ways to P2P nodes to sign their own content and give permission or not to peers to read/write, so we can trace ownership through version logs
- a way to run serverless functions to share computational power, but only for complex tasks like ML training, rendering, etc
- a way to automatically (and collectively) parse in-browser data to add annotations (bringing semantics to random data, or labels to ML datasets)
- automate renderers of such data to create (and host) 2D websites, data visualizations, or 3D content (you can call it your own miniverse)
Or what I just described is the Web we're already building, we just need more hands on deck to actually build it instead of wasting our time with bs.
Blockchains have their uses - some of which I think offer real value - but from both a utility and ideological standpoint, if many people in "web3" truly stood by their principles they would be working on these kinds of technologies first. (For context, for my small part I'm attempting to build P2P zk rollups to allow users to prove to each other the correctness of their off-chain work)
Look at the Solana fiasco a while back where the network went down and required a coordinated restart.
Another centralising power in these "smart" blockchains are the stable coin issuers. In the event of a hard fork^2 Tether and USDC essentially have the power to decide single-handedly decide which chain ends up being the correct one. Why? Because they can't support two chains, the value of the tokens would be split in half. So, for example. Let's say Tether decides that Eth 2.0 is not something they would like to support, they would simply say "We will not redeem any coins on Eth 2.0" and that would be it. The value of the DeFi on that chain would evaporate instantly and no one would use it. The fact that almost no-one talks about this is pretty scary.
^1 Only Bitcoin is actually sufficiently decentralised to withstand large take-over attempts and politics, IMO.
^2 Ethereum hard forks every 6 months by design, by the way
All the other types of decentralisation are marketed to you by early adopters who want you to pump their coin in order for their asset to increase in price
They are ironically using the concept of decentralisation to centralise wealth and power in their hands
Of course even if with their dishonest intent they can never quite beat the real decentralisation provided by nature which makes it so that even the most powerful “human” ever (Jesus Christ) only has an extremely limited amount of power over the totality of humanity.
Matter of fact “he” only gets to be the spokesman of otherwise already popular concepts such as compassion , love and the reward for those who practice them
This is just a meme. If large blockers in the blocksize wars had won, the statement would still be true. Today, you cannot go against Blockstream's capture of bitcoin's IP (whatever happens will happen with the direction of /r/bitcoin, bitcointalk, @bitcoin, bitcoin.org, and bitcoin github owners).
With complete censorship both bitcoin subreddit and bitcointalk site stopped and advocacy of increase in blocksize. I hardly consider this as 'defending a take-over attempts', but if you think that was a fair action then sure bitcoin is 'decentralized' enoguh to withstand take-over attempts and politics, whatever.
The key point is that today everything is seen as a kind of speculation, and in order to have a decent life (provide for a family, and have a secure place to live, including in the old age) one has to be good at it.
It is one of the central problems of our society, and whatever is called web3.0 seems to only make it worse. As someone who is extremely unenthusiastic about being bearish, bullish and anything around stock markets I can understand author's sentiment very well
https://www.preethikasireddy.com/post/the-architecture-of-a-...
Read that, and make sure you understand the basics of what Ethereum, IPFS and maybe a few more technologies from the article etc actually are, then think about if that sounds like sensible thing to do.
If you can still take it seriously afterwards then I’m impressed!
The number of middlemen alone is farcical.
https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1310178
"Web 2.0 is a term (or rather buzzword) that you often hear when describing most “modern” web sites; however, it shouldn’t be a new concept to web developers. Web 2.0 is actually a consolidation of many existing technologies that allows you to provide a rich interactive user experience over the web. Examples of Web 2.0 technologies include, but aren’t limited to, the following areas:
- Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), which include AJAX, Adobe Flash, Silverlight, and Moonlight
- Web services
- Blogs
- Wikis
- Social networking
- Social bookmarking
- RSS/Atom"
What lasted was to move from server-side computing where all the UI was rendered server side as HTML pages, to a world where a lot of the computing and all of the UI rendering was done client-side.
So it meaningful to ask: Are we going into a world where the centralised server gets even less of a role because of things like data storage, payments, authentication are done in a distributed manner or purely client-side?
Web 3 is artificial, with little to no demand outside of being a vehicle for unregulated speculation. The people most excited for Web 3 aren't builders nor consumers, but venture capitalists and people with a financial stake waiting to cash out.
I think standards for the following:
- Authentication
- Payments
- Storage
If the tech industry bubble pops in the near future, it will be because of crypto.
(EDIT: As a sidenote, it is interesting that when I filed my taxes for 2020 revenue Canada had added a question about cryptocurrency assets.)
Of course that does come at some cost and from a pure surface user experience level a lot of these services do still feel like "existing things but worse". It takes a while for these kinds of structural changes to catch up in some ways, though there's already plenty of web3 services that are genuinely useful in their own right, too.
Disclaimer: I get paid to develop web3 applications and I like my job
Do you have any examples? Because up to this point most web3 projects I've seen fall in one of two categories: "you could do this before" and/or "nobody actually wants this".
I'm interested in read/study more about: "the broad political-economic or cultural questions: who is participating in, sponsoring, and getting rich off of web3 technologies? What is the particular political or economic dynamic that makes the blockchain attractive? Given this, what will it be used for?", or "the culture, values, and especially the backers of the web3 world."
These are all things to be investigated that don't have a "yes" or "no" answer, but are instead "what's going on and what might it mean.".
The only thing I found myself taking issues with is the author's confidence that the technical issues ("Can the blockchain do anything that other currently existing technology cannot do and/or do anything better or more efficiently than other currently existing technology?") are "difficult to definitively resolve to everyone's satisfaction" but the second category "Will the blockchain form the architecture of the internet of the future" has a simple yes or no answer that will somehow be definitively resolvable.
My own thinking-as-an-engineer reaches the opposite conclusion -- the first category are relatively simple technical answers which can be be evaluated on technical merit, while the second category is future-prediction, political dispute, and narrative choice, and that's what's difficult to "resolve to anyone's satisfaction" with a consensus determination somehow.
Probably both categories are actually a mixture of both.
But what's going on right now is more knowable than predictions of future paradigm shifts, either way. That's actually the main thing I take from OP, let's lessen my interest in arguing about predicting the future, and increase it into looking into "what the hell is going on right now anyway". (Like what are the social and cultural and political factors in the current rise of blockchain interest, and who does it benefit?)
This is the key question that gets overlooked in these discussions.
Web3 is a vague term, but it’s difficult to get straight answers about who’s using Web3 technologies because most of the Web3 narrative refers to hypothetical future technologies.
But even though these hypothetical future Web3 products don’t exist yet or aren’t actually useful in their current form, there are numerous ways to buy their tokens in preparation for their imagined future usefulness.
More specifically: These projects will sell you arbitrary tokens now that supposedly will become more valuable in the future when other future people actually want to use the service. As an early adopter, you will be well positioned to sell your tokens to them at a huge markup!
The obvious question is: Why does every new service need a new, unique token to pay for it? Why must these products built on chains like Ethereum go out of their way to not use Ethereum as their payment method? The reason is that they can’t generate huge speculative profits unless they introduce arbitrary new tokens, so of course they must play the new token game.
But now the profit comes not from building an actual usable service, but from selling tokens for hypothetical future services. In fact, even the developers understand this and will often jump from one new project to the next, capitalizing on token speculation instead of actually finishing anything because that’s where the money is.
If any of the web3 projects want to be taken seriously, they need to stop introducing new arbitrary tokens and just use the existing infrastructure and coins. Build an actual service, not a new currency with a grand idea of a future Web3 service attached to it.
So, is it bs? No, it is not. If you are a developer, you can go now and build a dapp (a web3 application or distributed app).
So far so good, but:
A simple dapp will cost cents to host/run (even better: will cost only once!) but, can it scale? How easy/cheap would be to run a big, very big, social net? An online store such as Amazon? Uber?
No "password-reset" mechanism. That just sucks.
Keeping the current web safe for your uncle is a pain, yes, that uncle that clicks on every link sent from the rich African prince. Imagine keeping it safe once you help him install a chrome-ext crypto wallet so he can login and consume content from a dapp social net?
It is not really decentralized: you public facing dapp cannot be directly served from the nodes of a blockchain, you need a gateway, that is a centralized web server (good luck making SSL work for your registered domain!).
It would take many years for businesses to migrate/adopt web 3.0 standards. We are barely finishing moving tech to "online versions" from traditional client-server apps.
Miners are businesses, running nodes costs money, they ought to make more of what they spend otherwise they will just disconnect the node. Your data/code may be distributed but its persistence/availability depends on the economic success of whatever project you choose to trust. Early adopters of web 2.0 server-less apps experienced this first hand when they had to port their projects from Parse to something else when FB bought it and shut it down.
Professional miners are needed. You are not going to build your banking dapp on the spare capacities of our laptop's hard drives and CPUs, or are you? Might as well trust the engineers at Google or AWS who have it already figured out and are charging reasonably for it, no?
In sum: web 3.0 tech is here, it is interesting, but it is not a hammer for every nail.
Because every use case I heard so far can already be solved more efficiently without blockchains.
Does anybody here have a link to proper methodology for versioning the Web?
ps. Web is simply referring to a web of connected “pages” through links. Pretty much anybody who claims to work on Web3 says nothing about links.
This is happening again now with the web3 fad. A new generation of gullible idiots and sociopaths to take them for a ride.
This distinction only matters with centralized platform like AOL, Medium or Facebook though. Wikis existed long before big companies hijacked the web.
It wasn't user generated. User in this case being the visitor to a website and not its creator.
Now it seems obvious and not worthy of a label, but at least at the time I guess it kinda captured the imagination and people imagined new/different ways to do things (I think it also coincided with a lot better tooling and tech around javascript).
Perhaps web3 will do the same, but so far it just feels like "it's the web as you know it, but now you need to also buy some bitcoin to use it"
However, web3 has nothing to do with Bitcoin which does not provide smart contracts or wallets connected with web apps. Most decentralised apps are built with the Ethereum code (either using the original chain or one of the many forks).
I keep hearing that, but that's been the thrust of the web from well before the term "web 2" ever left anyone's lips.
Web3 was data. The money/asset/whatever was still going through classical channels.
Ten years ago, web 3.0 was supposed to be the semantic web (whatever happened to this fad).
> People keep asking what Web 3.0 is. I think maybe when you've got an overlay of scalable vector graphics — everything rippling and folding and looking misty — on Web 2.0 and access to a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data, you'll have access to an unbelievable data resource.
Not enough for a major version bump though. It’s just a small blip on entire spectrum of IT tech.
But perhaps I simply don't understand it sufficiently. No matter how many explanations or advocacy pieces I've read about bringing the blockchain to the web, I don't see what the actual value of doing that is. The cost/benefit ratio of it seems incredibly unfavorable.
> ... all discourse is subconsciously understood to be people taking speculative positions on various topics
> ... can I at least just get slowly tanked on free booze and annoy people with a reminder that the house always wins?
So clearly the author thinks that "Web3" is just a rebranding of crypto. I didn't see anywhere in the article an explanation of Web3 or any examples.
Let me premise my take by saying that I am not a crypto zealot. If I hear a financial/investing podcast talk about crypto, I will fast forward. I think the vast majority of investors should steer clear. What about Web3?
Let me tell you my story of independently "discovering" the concept now being called Web3 - as I'm sure thousands of others have done in the last few years. In July I was out on my walk and an idea popped into my head. It was interesting enough that I took out my phone and recorded as I thought it though out loud.
Here it is in a nutshell: Distributed smart contracts can empower information consumers.
And here's the specific form that my idea took, and why, when I got home from my walk, I bought some ETH, having never owned any cryptocurrency before. My screens are going to be "Web3 clients". This client will have a new feature that my current TV does not. It will have available an overlay like Amazon X-ray. It will display info about what is on my screen, and most importantly a "truth meter". While I couldn't work out the details of how this would work, I did decide that a) it's a feature that I think will arrive, and b) Ethereum is likely to play a role.
Here's another idea: Discuss Web3 without even mentioning cryptocurrencies. Instead, just give your idea as I did, and explain how blockchain smart contracts will play a role in the implementation, and perhaps at the very end of presenting your idea, mention that it may be considered a form of Web3.
Alright, listening...
> It will display info about what is on my screen, and most importantly a "truth meter". While I couldn't work out the details of how this would work
You are describing dislikes, reviews, stars and similar systems. They exist. They are pretty universally considered bad and when they are not it is not because magic decentralization. I'd also ask why/how a universal "truth meter" would work. Saying "I couldn't work out the details of how this would work" makes this sorta like someone saying "Imagine if we had infinite power, wouldn't that be nice?" or "What if people could just get along?".
> Discuss Web3 without even mentioning cryptocurrencies
I'd love to! But the Magic Internet Money cryptocurrency people seem to have decided it must involve cryptocurrencies so the term is tainted. I consider web3 a term similar to php6 or ipv5. Something that was but also wasn't, isn't rescuable as a term since it implies something that never actually was.
No. Not crowdsource. Remember this is to counter the effects of social media.
I mean that every moment of video is fingerprinted, and it's providence back to creator is noted, and the trustworthiness of that creator is reported. The purpose is to counter fake news and deep fakes. So if NYTimes created the video - good truth. If NYTimes showed a video they found on the internet - less good score. Still good since I'm trusting NYTimes to vet source.
There is a lot of effort being made to discredit web3 because existing players are aware that it means a loss of control.
Is it full with grifters?
Sure, but I wouldn't call the stuff that happened in the last 20 years on the internet as sound, even if it was often law abiding.
Web3 is full of ponzi schemes and, at least to me, the rich people web2 "created" tell there is something wrong too.
Decentralization is an opportunity, and I know this doesn't require blockchains, but I had the impression that OSS, and software in general, lacked in terms of "payment on the protocol level".
So, I think, this could lead to a new, better, era, for the internet. If we take the right steps.
I don't think they are somehow separate things in that or other ways, as if "web3" is like some new counter-power to "web2".
I think so too.
In the best case it will be some kind of redistribution of value.
Is this a good idea? dunno yet. Is this BS? I hope not, my intentions are surely good, no BS in them. Are there plenty of BS web3 projects? Yes, of course, same as in any other area of IT. But I really don't think the web3 idea is inherently BS, there's really plenty of value to be found in it.
I really hate the web 2.0 personally and I stay far away from it. I'm not trying to convince anyone to follow my path, but I'm hoping that the true meaning of Internet will shine soon. Maybe the 3.0 is the way to go and in my opinion it cannot be worst than 2.0.
But I think all the proponents of stronger algorithmic decentralization ignore the fact that the web doesn't quite live in a vacuum, and "real world" power will mostly like be translated into virtual/web power as well, and the decentralization will just make it less transparent, and with even less accountability.
The ever-marching disappearance of offline-only humans also points towards a higher standard of understanding for the average internet user. Someday everybody might run their cloud or at least be involved in a direct way somehow
Yes.
I know it must be easy to use Google's or Facebook SSO. But why rely on a Third party for this? And why - as user - must i open new accounts on all these webservice?
If this is your argument then just stick to your 401k and fuck off.
Yes. It's bullshit.
Do we see the initial applications of web3 about creating these decentralizing apps to decommission centralized infra & taxation ? I guess not. The web does need to fundamentally evolve from already now being turned into walled gardens.
Web3 with decentralized protocols around not only comms but value will hopefully be a spur and movement towards this. Time will tell
What I love? Young entrepreneurs diving head first into an opaque technology stack looking to build something good.
[1]: when we reach Type 1 as a civilization with eg large-scale application of fusion power. (According to mass–energy equivalence, Type I implies the conversion of about 2 kg of matter to energy per second https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#Type_I_civiliz... )
It'll never be a perfect system. But overall we shouldn't under-estimate the impacts of the wealth transfer [2] created by BTC, ETH, etc, to the hands of young and tech-believed optimists. And what this means from an evolutionary consumer-market perspective and how cultures are being shaped very differently (in US, EU, China, etc). (I’m in Hangzhou now and it's quite surreal to hear random people chatting about NFT in a cafe here despite CCP's ban of cryptos.)
[2] There were ponzi schemes for sure. But there are (a larger number of) honest people that became wealthy simply because they bought some BTC at $10 and are holding to this day too.
The wealth transfer is through ponzi schemes, shit coin pumping, and luck. There's no new merit here--instead of lucking out and making a fortune because you majored in finance, you lucked out and majored / are interested in computer science at an opportune time and place. The systemic issues still exist, and the same class of people are still benefiting.
Framing this as the money is going to tech bros instead of finance bros, like that was a quality we wanted in the system, is hilarious. Please recognize your own bias.
(Not you directly, but the people who are justifying this after the fact)
The phrase "social media" has become passé and even toxic.
The language around BTC & Crypto have political & other baggage.
Web3 is an attempt to re-package the past 10-15 years of web trends in a hip new label that leaves behind the baggage and allows for the appearance of "new stuff happening". But nothing much new is happening.
web2: information, people
web3: information, people, value
(value as in money and other valuable assets)
Web always had value exchange from the beginning - in fact a big part of the largest companies we have today were built around that value.
In fact I was naive enough to think the web would eventually become more free of that "need" for value exchange (like processing power and network speeds would be enough for everyone to have their own "node" to host and share what ever they wanted), but the endgame o web3 seems to be to have micro transactions everywhere.
> people who claim to be working on web3 and crypto desperately try to fit their technology to user problems. none of them seems to be working on the fundamental issues or the foundation needed to solve the existing problems.
> Most of them are half baked product/ marketing guys
> pretty much they create glittering websites and post tweets threads like "here is why web3 is a big thing" and nothing else they do
web3 can be proven bullshit the moment you realize all the implementations require web browsers instead of coming up with a solid foundation. this has caused major issues in ethereum (such as realizing their shit is completely broken and replacing it with metamask which is still bullshit). this on top of the fact that it's all MVP half working crap. almost all cryptocoin applications (and basically 100% of things titled "web3") require a web browser, which means you are trusting google/mozilla with all your money, on the web which is the most insecure, error-prone possible way to develop an application.
even from a layman perspective it's crap. you get something competing to be a standard web app, with all the same bugs and slowness, instead of a properly developed "native" GUI. example:
last time i tried to do something with metamask (a browser plugin), it didn't work on firefox. oh yeah, this was a top 10 (i.e, multi billion dollar market cap) cryptocoin's main use case which requires you to run code from a webpage on the internet that interfaces with metamask and you have to trust both of course as well as CA infra which is the opposite of decentralized. so i went with chrome. it tries to be a popup menu you're meant to just open and click one button in and close. if you open another window (like a text editor), it closes and you have to reopen it. so when i tried to open it to do some stuff and cross reference some number, i had to repeatedly: reopen metamask and press a bunch of buttons to bring me back to the same screen within metamask.
let's also look at the standard web3 "onboarding" user experience:
- they assume you're a giant moron (and are correct)
- they make you setup a password to encrypt your private key and not tell you this will be used as an encryption key (do they really believe I as a giant moron will come up with a password with sufficient entropy to be used as an encryption key for the 5th application today that asked me to make a password?)
- next, they display the seed used to generate your password in the form of 20 or so words and ask you to write it down
- next, they force you to input the words to "prove" you wrote it down, typically with some hack to disable copy/paste
- at this point you may have lasers and spaceships flying around your screen as well as animated 3D polygons, to emphasize how cool it is to go through this step (and lessen the chance the user understands what is going on)
- they do not provide an option to skip any of the above (typically, you may need to go read undocumented internal API)
- it's terribly documented
- it's js
- a language that does not support numbers
- go-ethereum ships with a version that is several years old, i don't remember the numbers, but it's on an order of magnitude like 0.4.0 vs 2.3.4
- in go-ethereum, there is no real way to find documentation for the web3 JS APIs you can use from its shell. but that's fine since the web3 JS API largely is an incoherent mess anyway
- it's full of quirky shit (largely for the sake of snakeoil) like: every time you use a function in the "personal" namespace, like personal.listAccounts, it erases that line from your shell history
- in fact, they dont want you to use the shell, they want you to be a mindless consumer and use premade web applications (hosted behind web pages "secured" by CAs) to do everything
- i never used it outside go-ethereum, because why would i want to use js. may as well just use the node API at that point
- all these are a multi billion dollar companies that could easily have allocated resources to these problems
- it's a web app in electron, that takes between 4 seconds (eternity) and several minutes to display the main GUI
- on most coins, there is no official wallet. not CLI. not GUI. so it is indeed an electron app by a 3rd party
- the text "undefined" is written everywhere
- menus mysteriously fail to open on certain occasions
- it has several hundred thousand lines of code to do animations like lasers flying around the screen, yet the program literally has no features aside from "transfer in" and "transfer out", and "recover from seed"
- the code is written by a mix of teenaged script kiddies, dot com boomers, and silicon valley startup hipsters (actually this applies everywhere in blockchain stuff, not just GUI wallets)
- they do not tell you how you are synchronizing to coin #35. is it using an internal server owned by the wallet vendor? is it doing light sync?
- they do not provide you with an option of *how* to connect to the coin's network, it "just works"
It was wrong to put your name on that piece for posterity to see (and mock you) , but if you listened to that article and shorted the Nasdaq you’d have made 5000% type returns .
And if Krugman himself listened to his own brain , he’d have had enough money not to care about that piece or make people forget about it
The web3 might not be bullshit , but if you want to make money the only trade out there is to bet that it is .
Bulls who say that web3 is in its early days surely mean the technical early days , because financially the web3 is already priced for world domination .
Bulls forget that when you have to learn a programming language to profit off a trend you already missed on life changing money and hockey stick price increase (bitcoin 2010-2020 and Ethereum 2015-2020)
[0] https://twitter.com/kevincadogan/status/1195521960437932033?...
Web1.0 teaches this just by looking at the big tech giants which dominate. There’s space for only one in each of the big tech sub fields. Search - social media -cloud - Desktop OS - phone OS
The ideal is to bet on a trend instead of a company and do so when the rising tide lifts all boats such as Nasdaq 1995-2000 and Bitcoin 2010-2020.
I get what you are saying but in today society there is not only no glory but outright ridicule and financial trouble for people who have a cool project which gets copied by a giant . It ends up in tears .
I wish it was different . I contacted on LinkedIn the guy who put together the first Facebook like social network in 2000. He works for Sony and nobody knows his name
every dollar made in bitcoin is someone else’s dollar lost, it’s a casino, nothing more