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Comment by mrfusion | Hacker News Reader

Anyone want to explain web3 like I’m from 2007?

I haven’t been able to tell what it is?

I don't think there's a good explanation out there.

From what I've read, the main idea is decentralization, either of website databases using blockchain (which seems wildly impractical and ludicrously expensive), or of payment of advertising revenue to website users and contributors (which seems like an impossible business model)

The main issue, I think, is that "decentralization" means a different thing to every person, therefore "web3" can mean a different thing to everyone. This makes it hard to define it or to argue for it or against it.

I read a blog post linked on HN recently on "the architecture of a web3 application" [1] and it was so long and complicated that I honestly thought it was satire. I don't think the methods described in the post were at all practical.

Ultimately, web3 might simply be a rebranding of blockchain and crypto technologies in order to make them seem more democratic and transformational than perhaps they are.

[1] https://www.preethikasireddy.com/post/the-architecture-of-a-...

So, many people here complain and whine about how the internet has become too centralized and ad-rev driven by the big tech behemoths and all the little shitty fish that follow their tactics, but then when a bunch of people come along and at least propose a certain type of possibly workable solution that's particularly friendly to avoiding major centralized arbiters, they get booed down because some of them also happen to be pie in the sky or scammers (where does either o these two not exist in any tech?) The same people booing these types themselves work for the giant tech behemoths, which are themselves some of the absolute most parasitical, mendacious, lying, perpetually damaging agencies on the entire web and in the wider world of digital technology.

Tell you what, as full of scams and cons as the world of crypto is, i still sympathize with it much more than I do with any random argument in favor of a real monstrosity of dishonesty and prying scumminess like Facebook or today's Google. Those and so many of their modern digital cousins are the real enemies of so many good things.

Another fast and loose term is "User". The claim OP makes is that Users will control the network and money created. Seeing how you can't directly transfer an NFT from opensea to a different marketplace, I find this claim dubious. But that aside, the "user" is a programmer, not your Aunt and Uncle.

It’s the latest problem invented so that cryptocurrencies can fix it, after egold, currencies, payments, micropayments, apps, smart contracts, icos, asset tracking, nfts, now we have communities of bored apes and pudgy penguins who pay someone to be members of an exclusive club of pixel receipt owners.

Web 3.0 didn’t exist, so it was necessary to invent it to give cryptocurrencies value again.

Stephen Diehl to the rescue: https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/web3-bullshit.html

In a nutshell:

    Web3::web 2.0

    IPFS::filesystems

You may interpret this as praise or criticism depending on your point of view.

It's just a rebrand of the term "blockchain" and the ecosystem of apps built on top of various blockchains. It's trying to presume that these ecosystems are the next iteration of the internet.

Neither has anyone else which is the brilliance of calling something by a deliberately nebulous name.

Here's my take (coming from somebody who has been running what may now be called a "metaverse" company for the past 5 years - https://ayvri.com).

The most interesting part I find is not the 3D VR element, that's like saying the most compelling part of Web 2 was CSS and HTML5.

It's the distributed nature of data and data ownership. Where Web2 was all about user created content -> corporate owned content, in web3 you own the content you create.

The benefit of this is that the platform that you use your data on, is just a platform. You can easily move your data to another platform for other purposes.

The example I use to compare to "real world" stuff is your fitness. You pay a monthly membership to go to the gym and stay fit. When you want to go on a ski holiday, you don't have to go to your gym and tell them you want to go on a ski holiday and ask if you can use your fitness at the resort, and they can say "oh, we don't have an agreement with that ski field, or any ski fields, so sorry, your fitness stays with us. But we've been selling your data to a bike tour operator, so they know all about you, and you can go use your fitness with them...but only with the bike tour operators we've partnered with and have a commercial agreement with...if it isn't them, then...sorry, you can't use your fitness.

In a Web3 world, your data lives in your wallet, and you should be able to decide who gets access to it and how they use it, and revoke it from those you don't want access to. We're looking at adding this capability to Ayvri. We did an integration with Strava, but our users want an integration with Garmin, Suunto, every little paragliding device you've never heard of, etc.

A friend that runs a fintech company was describing the process people go through when looking for a mortgage. They go to a banks website, give their details to the bank, see the offers on mortgages, then go to the next bank or lender, and do the same again and again. If your data is in your wallet, you should be able to just go - here's my data, do your thing.

Sure there's also all the stuff about de-platforming, and there are going to be issues with propaganda, scams, etc. But will it be any worse than what we have today?

Some people found out that legitimacy is implied by coordination and started using cryptography to build various ways to coordinate multiparty computations that can simulate various banking/finance protocols.

Web3 is normal web development where you use some APIs to interact with these protocols and condition access to {functionality,resources,..} in your webapp on the current state of the multiparty computation. You can also participate in coordinating the computation.. idk maybe I'm taking the 2007 constraint a bit too far.

A few things coming together:

1/ New wave of applications - imagine 3d, AR, VR - new interfaces and possibilities.

2/ When you have these new wave of applications, these applications are going to do something (transactions). What if the transactions did not have to go through a bank or Google or Amazon.

3/ Today, you and your data are the product. What if you could control who gets access to your data.

Serving web sites from a blockchain (which is decentralized, exists in pieces across the whole Internet), instead of serving them from a single computer located in a data centre.

i.e. makes web sites harder to switch off/censor.

p.s. Freenet has been doing this since Satoshi was in diapers.

Ethereum's javascript API was named web3. It enables people to login with their wallet anywhere. From there it exploodes to a universe of possibilities.

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