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Comment by bern4444 | Hacker News Reader

There's so much talk about web3 - it's a bit overwhelming - and almost feels a bit toxic by all the people shilling it without any actual proof (in the form of new products or services).

I have yet to see any product or service that actually leverages "web 3 technologies" - whatever that means to you - to create something that can't be done with web 2 or that is either marginally or substantially better.

This doesn't mean they don't exist. Rather, I don't even conceptually understand what a service built on "web 3" technologies would accomplish that is distinct from what we have today with web 2 technology.

Does anyone have examples beyond crypto currencies as an investment and NFTs - which is just digital art?

Fundamentally, many of Web 2.0 is distributed, FB, AWS, Google and most tech companies all do massive amounts of working in creating distributed systems - distributed databases, distributed serverless infrastructure, CDNs etc.

The "centralization" is that there are companies that operate these services.

Is the goal of Web 3 to not have companies but have individuals' machines running these?

I certainly don't want my personal computer, phone, Alexa etc running and supporting someone else's "decentralized application".

What is the goal of web 3? I haven't seen any articulate answer that clarifies this question in any meaningful way. I'm hoping someone here can shed some light for me.

ETA: The only interesting use case I can think of is to simplify transfer of ownership of digital assets - ebooks, video games etc. Maybe blockchain would be good at simplifying lending of these digital assets between friends, stores, etc without the need for DRM?

I'd explicitly include TV, movies, and music but very few people purchase these 3 categories since streaming came along.

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The reason you haven’t heard a coherent answer to what problems web3 is supposed to solve is because there aren’t any. It’s just a continuation of the past 5-10 years of cryptocurrency pump and dump schemes (which also include ICOs and NFTs). Just a bunch of hot air. As you correctly put it, it’s just a bunch of opportunists making money off of tech-gullible people.

You forgot the more important part:

What Web3 is pitched to be is completely antithetical to what most people want in the sense that by it's nature, Web3 basically makes AML and other financial controls pretty much impossible to reliably implement and enforce.

You will not get trivial money transfer over the Internet without a gatekeeper. Not permanently anyway. As soon as the primitive for doing so comes into existence, it is guaranteed to be regulated on a when not if basis.

Whether you try to exploit the short time before the law catches up to it says more about whether you're a gambler or not than anything else.

Do you have any citations for your claim that most people want KYC? All the data I've seen indicates it's a government initiative and not debated or discussed with the general public. In fact the polls we do have show an overwhelming support for cash which is private and peer to peer.

it really doesn't matter whether the public hates KYC or not, because Law Enforcement will alwaya have the regulators ears, and eventually the KYC and AML can get pushed hard enough to increase traceability enough to start potentially prosecuting white collar crimes.

And if you don't think there's a war on cash with the push for CBDC's you're high. Or have you not noticed the going on 2 year coin shortage entirely because someone just isn't interested in keeping up the coinage supply? Or how there are currency transaction reports to law enforcement on any sizable cash withdrawal, or how banks train employees to red flag any type of regular transacting just below the SAR monitoring point?

It is too profitable and powerful a diplomatic tool to be a realistic outcome in my cynical view for government to do anything but double down on financial surveillance.

I was responding to this

>What Web3 is pitched to be is completely antithetical to what most people want in the sense that by it's nature, Web3 basically makes AML and other financial controls pretty much impossible

So you've pretty much made my point with your reply. People don't want KYC, authoritarian governments do. People decide what they are okay with and not governments and as the failed war on drugs has shown governments don't really get what they want long term.

People want private cash and an open financial system and then will have it regardless of what government thinks.

>People want private cash and an open financial system and then will have it regardless of what government thinks.

What people want, and what they actually get are two completely different things, and the process of moving from one thing to another is slow, bump filled, spans lifetimes, and requires a refresher every few generations.

I'm not denying that KYC and AML is a pain in the arse most people wish would go away. Hell, I'm ready for a bit of that. I have, unfortunately, been part of that system though. I have also seen from sampling of job offerings in the space, that the hires getting planned out paint a picture of societies getting ever more tightly integrated, and doubling down on who can participate in the financial system.

A theoretical question for you. Do you believe that authorities will blink at enacting some coercive structural implementation that will give them an effective lever to use for controlling cryptocurrencies? Do not mistake slow progress, for no progress. Especially when immutable stores of data are concerned.

Hard limits on power consumption, limits on hardware manufacture, protocol filtering, other more intrusive measures; it is all on the table.

KYC/AML itself was at one point far outside the Overton Window. It only took a short time for the circumstances to arise for that to rapidly change.

This isn't a case of Tech doe tech's thing, and society does another. The tech will be judged by the rest of society on it's utility, what it enabled, and whether that justifies adoption or regulation.

People are not stupid. Do not mistake not agreeing with you or silence as assent. I apologize if I'm sounding preachy, as it isn't my intent; I merely caution to temper your estimation of societal uptake with a comprehensive reevaluation of the objectives and end goals of the apparatus to which everyone delegates the responsibility of making the infrastructure that even spawned the potential for technology/technique possible.

All tech throws more work at creating minima in terms of facilitating some way of life. By the act of an allegedly representative government, it was decreed there was utility to higher friction in this particular sector of human endeavor.

Wait til the ink is dry to pop the champagne is all I'm trying to say. It's far from a settled question, and life never ceases to find ways to surprise.

>What Web3 is pitched to be is completely antithetical to what most people want in the sense that by it's nature, Web3 basically makes AML and other financial controls pretty much impossible to reliably implement and enforce.

I don't know a single person who is in favor of "financial controls" or other coercive behavior by the US government, the FED and various regulatory agencies to track our every transaction and tell us how we are allowed to spend and use our own hard earned money.

again, that's cool. However, you elect people who then go to Washington, turn around, give their blessing to tge Fed/DHS etc... to do it, or delegate doing their jobs to tge Executive with a minimum of oversight.

if it truly were so unpopular, it'd be on legislators hit lists and talking points. That's the opposite of what I see.

Don't forget crypto's monetization of computer crime! You don't need to get that pesky data and figure out what to do with it, the processor time itself is money.

More seriously - I can't really speak to web 3 in general but as far as crypto here's an example:

https://www.ledgerinsights.com/shinhan-standard-bank-trial-s...

Another one: consider you go to a bar, and need to prove you are age of majority. Today you do this with a state issued ID, which are easily forged. What would a digital alternative look like?

You could certainly issue some sort of credential from the state, and present that credential to the bar, and the bar would validate it with the state. Now the state knows you went to the bar.

What if the state doesn't handle the validation, but provides some sort of cryptographically secure assertion to a distributed, decentralized ledger. And the bar doesn't validate your credential (your digital ID) with the state, but verifies it in the ledger.

Another one: distributed session management - https://www.pingidentity.com/content/dam/pic/downloads/resou...

Disclaimer: have worked at both Ping and Hedera

The bar example is a still a bit vexing to me, because it's the sort of problem/solution I often see brought up as an example, but I still fail to see the utility. A digital signature (e.g. PGP) already can act as a certificate of authenticity from a trusted party and all you need is their public key. Could you explain what the blockchain improves about that, or what it solves in that application that digital signatures don't already?

That its difficult to do today, you need to manage your own private key infrastructure. So it becomes reserved for a few important things, like a digital ID.

What if it were easy and dirt cheap to make a provable claim about anything, in seconds, with a fraction of the infrastructure cost?

Like "I am signed into this application". Or "I have received a covid vaccine", or "i authorized this payment". Theres probably a lot more, my background is in identity so those are the ones I know.

Yes you can do those today but they all carry significant cost, and as a result there are significant moats around established players.

Just like Letterman asking "why do I need such information, have you heard of magazines?". Its true, magazines can do that. Just like PKI can do all those things.

Why would a ledger be necessary? Couldn't a root certificate store be used, such as today with HTTPS? Then, the bar doesn't even need to connect their verification system to the internet, other than for the occasional patch.

It isn't. It just makes it cheap and easy. Its not a problem for a government agency to run a PKI, and for verifying identities they probably should.

But what about smaller entities, or even individuals. And what if they don't want to verify their identity but maybe an action.

Its not introducing anything new. It's just lowering the capital costs to doing it. Much like the internet lowered the costs to publishing and distributing an essay.

A passport can't easily be forged if you use it like it's supposed to ( read & verify data from the chip )

What can be manipulated is the visual representation of the passport. Since some people want to quickly verify a date. That wouldn't work with an Eid reader, that can be used offline.

Just load the state's public key into the verification apps, have the identity QR code be signed with the state's private key and you're done. You can now verify identities without the state ever being aware of verifications taking place.

No need for blockchain when a central authority is issuing identity documents anyway.

If you want to delegate signing authority just do something like SSL certs.

Yes, exactly. And now think of all the limitations of running a PKI.

For many use cases, Crypto doesn't do things a PKI can't. It just does them without some of those limitations.

> It just does them without some of those limitations.

How so?

The hard problem is linking a public key to a real-world identity. A blockchain doesn’t help with this in any way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gipL_CEw-fk

You're david letterman.

They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Bozo was intentionally funny though. "they also laughed at DeLorean"?

Ok, but the argument against it here seems to be: "I don't really understand it, haven't tried to, and haven't bothered to use it. Therefore it's dumb and has no use case."

Wow, this is amazing.

In a way Letterman absolutely had great points: you don't need to watch baseball on your computer, you have a radio for that. You don't need access to this information via a computer, you can use magazines for that.

Looking back on this almost thirty years later, what was missing is the limitations and the consequences.

Yes, you could use your radio. But you were limited to being able to listen to certain times, or certain places. And only baseball and maybe a few sports.

Yes, you could get that information, but only through the magazine.

What the internet did was lower the barrier to this. 30 years later, and I can watch esport championships hosted in South Korea months ago, for free, after my kids go to bed.

And what were the consequences for print journalism?

I think you need the same idea for evaluating crypto: yes, you can obviously do many of the things crypto can do, without crypto. But what are the limitations? And what will be the consequences?

As I said elsewhere, permissionlessness and effeciency. Consequences are that you no longer need to be high frequency trader to transfer large amount of value with low cost.

Similarly, now if you want to transfer very little value without cost, your options are to be within same bank or telecom operator as your receiver. Or watch an ad.

Imagine you could transfer 0.5 cent internationaly every minute or every page load for no added cost. What kind of service would that enable? Content monetising without ads, one example. Censorship-free hosting as a service, the other one.

It's much more than that even IMO. We're just getting started.

The whole ecosystem is locked in this tiny box that is amendable to complete computation. It is impossible to connect that paradigm to the real world without, in some way, falling back to concepts they reject, like trusting someone’s testimony that a product was physically delivered.

That’s why they copied the concept a second time with NFTs: it’s a bit awkward to just keep trading fictional currencies for other fictional currencies. Now, you can trade something real: fictional ownership of fictional “art”.

My mindset is anyone who is a "maxi" is just an idealist. Most (all?) idealists end up being wrong; that includes 100% decentralized viewpoints and 100% centralized viewpoints. Anyone who thinks that bitcoin is going to be somehow the most efficient to buy a beer at the local bar is an idealist. Anybody who thinks that their nation's fiat currency is the only safe thing to store value in need only look at Turkey and Venezuela as counter points (or find a list of defunct currencies throughout history if you want to get more philosophical). If you want to make more nuanced arguments about making global investments go ahead; but bitcoin is attractive because the narrative is more simple. Does that guarantee Bitcoin is the answer, nope.

NFT's aren't just digital art; digital art is just an easy implementation of NFT's. DAO's are a decentralized usecase. Centralized entities issuing NFT's redeemable for services at a future point in time is another category. For example, Nike issuing a NFT which can be redeemed for a limited edition shoe rather then selling the shoe online directly, having it be bought up by bots and resold on the 3rd party market. Nike gets a cut of the resale value every time the NFT is resold at minimal effort; they don't even have to build/host the marketplace. Consumers get a limited edition shoe shipped to them directly from the manufacturer with worry about middlemen or authenticity. To your point, people already trust Nike (and many other companies) to send them products.

Do the decentralized "maxi's" like that nike example, probably not. But they don't really get a say whether it exists or not. Everyone is so quick to declare web3 100% dead or 100% going to take over the world. If this was pre social media, nobody would know about web3. The value would be orders of magnitude lower and you'd probably only find out about it once there were "useful products" or never at all if it's a complete failure. But that's not the world we live in anymore.

I think these are some good points. I’m a typical HN skeptic when it comes to crypto, but I think a lot of that comes with web3 being such an encompassing and thus refutable concept. I hope some parts of the tech that is being developed is ultimately helpful, but taking the humans out of the systems we rely on is just going to make them less adaptive and more fragile. Idealists don’t understand that our world is built on messy, imprecise systems and the strongest ones can change over time - defining them in immutable code is a mistake, though at least a noble one.

> NFTs - which is just digital art?

I don't think it's that: it's a key associated within a particular distributed database to a hash of some digital (or digitized) art, as far as I know.

Yes, I agree. It's slightly more indirect than digital art but the consequence is the same. It's equivalent to copyright. I own this thing. Here is the proof - the NFT.

If you - a tv show, movie, etc - want to use it you can license it from me.

It's no different than a standard contract.

Except an NFT is basically just a link to some JSON which has a URL to an image. You could easily make another NFT yourself with a different link to the same image, whose NFT is the "real one"? How could you prove who made the original image and who sold it? NFTs don't any actual rights to the image and certainly don't stop people copying and using it. It's a load of crap basically.

I thought "the real" NFT is determined by what people decide "the real" one is. This is not actually a problem. NFTs are (or at least can be) a certificate of authenticity within a cryptographic framework. You can forge any physical certificate of authenticity with enough time and effort, but if you manage to forge a cryptographic one in our lifetime then congratulations! You just broke encryption.

Tangentially related: It amazes me how poorly people seem to understand anything in this space but especially cryptocurrency. In maybe one out of hundred discussions on cryptocurrency do I see any mention of a ledger, which is the entire point. If you use Venmo or any similar cash exchange app then you automatically stand to benefit from the use of a cryptocurrency. Venmo is a ledger. The only reason you are able to send $1 a thousand times a day to your friend with no transaction fee is because you're not actually sending any money to anyone (as most people would understand it). You're changing values in Venmo's database which is an implementation of a digital ledger. Only when you "square up" with Venmo by transferring money out of Venmo into your own bank account does any money move anywhere (in a way that would cost Venmo a non negligible amount of money themselves).

Cryptocurrencies are digital ledgers that, unlike Venmo, are decentralized and cryptographically backed. This means its physically impossible for Venmo (or anyone) to freeze or seize your assets, and impossible for your balances to be hacked or manipulated by a bad actor with too much authority (although your private keys can certainly still be hacked through side channels). Is that worth the energy cost of supporting a system like Bitcoin for every transaction? Not in my opinion, but I wish people would at least make an attempt at understanding what they hell they're talking about.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4

EDIT: a certificate of authenticity with proof of ownership included and modifiable only by the owner.

> NFTs are (or at least can be) a certificate of authenticity within a cryptographic framework.

NFTs are a cryptographic certificate of authenticity for... themselves. There is nothing about NFTs that authenticates anything tangible, digital or otherwise. That is what makes them useless. It's a self referencing, pointless exercise. Anyone can mint an NFT and buy and sell it... but all you've done is create an abstract digital object. The actual copyrightable asset the NFT points to is not authenticated, protected, or otherwise related in any way other than by trust - it's literally a URL, it could be anything. And if you're trusting people again, that's neither decentralized nor any different from traditional auction/trade platforms.

Your knowledge of NFTs is likely greater than mine so correct me if I'm wrong. Pointing to a URL is fine if you trust URL digital signatures. Hypothetical situation: I'm a famous artist X. I produce great painting 123 and want to issue a certificate of authenticity for it. So I post on my webpage X.com/123 a sentence "I just produced painting 123 and generated NFT 456 for it on the Ethereum blockchain" NFT 456 points to X.com/123 and the Ethereum blockchain contains the ownership information (namely that X currently owns it). Since this is on the Ethereum blockchain, I assume dilettante Y can now purchase NFT 456 from me for 1M Ethereum as a single transaction. Is this not how it's supposed to work? Is there an obvious attack vector here I'm missing?

Edit: maybe the obvious attack vector is the mutability of the sentence posted to X.com/123, so I feel like I'm close to a good system but missing something.

Also: Someone else can generate an NFT with the same URL in it. Thus, it becomes an exercise to verify the NFT out of band. At that point, in a lot of situations, it's not the NFT that's certifying the ownership, it's the public announcement by the artist. There's maybe a little to be gained because from that point forward, any transfers may be verified but... In the end the root of trust remains the public, out-of-band announcement of the NFT.

It is also worth noting that, in a lot of cases, NFTs don't actually confer any sort of special rights or ownership over the art. Often, NFTs are really just signed links to a thing that was not actually sold to you, with the actual legal ownership of the art staying with the seller.

> I just produced painting 123 and generated NFT 456 for it on the Ethereum blockchain"

Upon which you have to trust the artist that they actually did produce the painting themselves, and own the copyright to it, and are authorized to mint an NFT of it. If it later turns out they didn't, the NFT is a fraud. So you're still relying on centralized trust.

You also have to trust the artist not to "double-spend" their work and put it up as an NFT elsewhere or sell its copyright. The NFT itself is not tied to copyright, so there is no legal nor technical protection here.

NFTs are solid blockchain technology resting on a foundation of centralized trust (sure, distributed, but still individually centralized). It's completely against everything those crypto people claim they stand for and they don't even realize it.

It's in the damn name too. Non-Fungible Token. Token. Not Picture. The only thing you're buying and selling is a meaningless token.

I say this every time NFTs come up: go commission some custom artwork from your favorite artist instead, the normal way. At least that way you'll have something unique and personal instead of a procedurally generated monkey, and you don't need cryptononsense to know it's yours.

I agree with your assessment of the importance of trust in this example and the issues that go with it. I suspect similar issues crop up with non crypto systems as well but that's not really what I want to discuss.

NFTs still seem potentially useful to me. Let's take one more example: the Mona Lisa currently in the possession of France and held in the Louvre. How do I know all that? I looked it up on Wikipedia and "trust" what I've read. I trust it because I assume any time this painting changes hands its a carefully managed transactions likely involving 6 to 7 figures of USD (just for transaction "fees", not the value of the painting) toward dozens of people to verify various things (the authenticity of the painting, and the authenticity of the purchaser and purchaser's funds, and seller) as well as security, transportation, insurance, and desired publicity.

But maybe there's a different way to go about that kind of transaction. As long as we can establish a few initial conditions collectively with "trust", any future transactions for the Mona Lisa can be, in a way, protected with an NFT. Let's start by collectively agreeing to give the Mona Lisa NFT id "1" on the Ethereum blockchain and give France address "0x01". For whatever reason, the Mona Lisa gets sold to "0x05" as an Ethereum transaction. We no longer need to verify the authenticity of the purchaser's funds (hopefully obvious), nor do we really care who "0x05" is. Everyone who believes in cryptography can now establish that indeed "0x05" is the rightful owner of the Mona Lisa. I no longer need to trust a Wikipedia article, or be important enough to "know someone" who knows how to get in touch with "France" or whoever the current owner is if I'm a serious candidate to purchase it.

If the Mona Lisa gets stolen and later turns up, physically, anywhere, in anyone's hands, the world at least has the ability to say "prove you're 0x05". Anyone who has the ability to do so gets it. Yay! In theory, "0x05" can even sell the Mona Lisa to "0x06", WHILE IT IS IN A THIEF'S "POSSESION", and the rest of the world sans thief can agree that, indeed, "0x06" is now the rightful owner of the Mona Lisa. Pretty much the only thing the NFT doesn't help with at all here is destruction of underlying asset (the ink and canvas we collectively designate "The Mona Lisa").

I don't know. Maybe its a crazy idea. Maybe it just requires re-evaluating the importance we place on a particular organization of molecules (that are technically fungible!) with no utility. An atom-level, "perfect", physical reproduction of the Mona Lisa may even become a possibility one day. So maybe the more important thing really is the abstract idea of proof of ownership of some cryptographically protected numbers.

No it's not like copyright. Copyright are legally enforceable, NFT aren't.

They are actually a lot of artists that complains that their art is stolen and sold as NFT and the platforms that allow this, don't want to handle the copyright infringements.

The whole idea of web3 is that identity is intertwined with all of this. NFTs will be enforceable because all web3 services will use the blockchain as the main arbiter of truth in the digital world. E.g. if you built an NFT based card game, no platform (game application, deck-building site, forum, etc.) would recognize your "fake" NFT as real.

You could build an nft based ticketing platform. The ticket issuer issues NFT tickets on the blockchain, all the infrastructure for trading NFTs is in place (you could literally trade concert tickets on OpenSea). There's no "forking" this NFT because the concert venue would only accept the ones they issue. You then show up to the concert venue with your phone, sign a message proving ownership of the ticket, and walk right in. This process eliminates all exploitative middlemen like ticketmaster because all the mechanisms for ticket distribution and selling have been built on web3 already.

I think TicketMaster would just be the one that sells the NFT initially. Most of those fees they charge are in there for a reason.

> If you - a tv show, movie, etc - want to use it you can license it from me.

No, I can just right-click it.

Next time you're doing production work on a TV show or movie and want to use a piece of media in your production without licensing it, try running "Hey, we can just right-click it" past the studio legal department. I'm fairly sure they'll have some objections.

I mean, I agree with the common snark you're making about NFTs here, but the part you quoted is the part the OP is correct on. :) The part they're getting wrong is conflating NFTs with copyright. An NFT could conceivably be a license itself, but that's not the same thing.

> Next time you're doing production work on a TV show or movie and want to use a piece of media in your production without licensing it, try running "Hey, we can just right-click it" past the studio legal department. I'm fairly sure they'll have some objections.

Yep the only thing that stops me is centralised copyright regime, not Blockchain. Blockchain can be a proof of license/ownership but not because of its inherent value, but because we believe particular issuer. Also it's fairly easy for Blockchain to loose connection between who legally own/license particular art with what is on it. Copyright is hard, and sometimes the answer is we don't know.

> If you - a tv show, movie, etc - want to use it you can license it from me.

That's not necessarily true, from what I understand most NFT purchases are not transfer of copyrights.

Let's say I go to a store and buy a CD of my favorite artist. That CD comes with certain restrictions - I can listen to it with my friends, but I can't rent it out to a movie producer that wants to use one of the songs on that CD.

Similarly, when buying NFT, I can use it in a certain way, defined by the license, but unless it's specified, the copyrights still belong to the creator of the artwork.

It's art in a kind of modernist "what even is art? Is this cardboard box art?" sense.

But by that (lack of) definition everything is art. Which makes this interpretation useless.

I highly recommend the recent Tim Ferris Podcast + Naval + Chris Dixon episode on web3 (https://tim.blog/2021/10/28/chris-dixon-naval-ravikant/)

The podcasts Bankless and Tapping into Crypto are also good general explainers of what's going on.

The biggest thing people get stuck on on HN is the "Dropbox is a stupid idea, I can replicate it with rsync" problem. Lots of things in web3 are possible without blockchain but they are a far worse experience.

Some things I'm excited about:

- Royal allows bands to sell an NFT of their songs on release, and then the owner of that NFT gets royalties on all future sales of that song.

- Alchemix gives you no interest loans that pay themselves back over time.

- Pool Together is a decentralized savings account where instead of getting a small interest payment all the interest is pooled and payed out as weekly prizes like a lottery.

- DAOs allow massive decentralized companies to be created around any mission - charity work, building new tech, or even buying a copy of the constitution.

- I work for a company called Balancer where you can create an index fund of your favorite coins and you earn interest from your investments rather than pay fees, as traders can use your fund for arbitrage opportunities.

Just being able to provide liqudity to decentralized finance and get a 10 - 30% yearly APY on it is amazing.

These are all still just the tip of the iceberg. When NFTs are mainstream and we have a global permissionless financial system - that's when creativity will really explode.

Going off topic a bit, but is web3 a twitter thing? The only times I see it show up is usually somehow connected to twitter. Also most of the stuff I see is a countermovement of people pointing out how the whole idea is silly, so I started wondering where people initially started talking about it positively and if they might all be on twitter (explaining why I only saw the counter-movement)

web3 is a JS library used to interact with the Ethereum RPC on Ethereum nodes or services which offer the RPC (like Infura). I'm not sure why it's become so charged from Twitter folks recently. I'm gonna guess it went viral on someone's Tweet is why.

All crypto projects appear the same to me, make the hype, the hype makes it valuable, step 3, profit.

It doesn't matter if the idea is good, workable or needed (and many are), they are all hyped primarily as it's all about making money and hype makes the money with crypto, not the idea.

Most discussions get bogged down in the "is it a good idea" question, where it's really about a kind of big vision or aim. Crypto doesn't have any attractive (e.g. for me, libre/freedom ) ideals it seems.

It's basically like a startup putting all of its runway into marketing. But with crypto, I suppose, the marketing produces the product and becomes more valuable if it succeeds.

If you count crypto in general as web 3, check out Monero.

It offers anonymized payments with low fees. Like Bitcoin but without the chain being visible to anybody.

Unlike with regular payments, the transactions are anonymous, irreversible, and requires no KYC. Most crypto are not fully anonymous. Beware other privacy coins based on zksnarks since their creators are generally anti-anonymity (in the sense they don’t want their tokens to be used in illicit transactions and have pledged to make that harder - this defeats the entire purpose of a privacy coin, and any solution to this would reduce privacy).

While monero is not fully anonymous under 100% of cases - it’s possible to do something to allow transactions to be linked back, such as using the same receiving and sending sub addresses multiple times for transactions - it’s pretty dang good. It’s pretty close to being digital cash. And the fees are pretty low (last I checked maybe $0.10?), which is more or less a permanent feature because it has dynamic block sizes.

BTW, for any blockchain, it’s a good thing for ex fees to be non-zero. Otherwise there is no cost to “spamming” the blockchain which congests the network and increases the size of the chain (potentially making it harder to host).

It is unfortunately based on POW, but on the bright side it uses an asic resistant CPU-based algorithm to prevent centralization.

> If you count crypto in general as web 3, check out Monero.

Genuine question, is crypto sometimes not counted as part of web3 by people in the space? I understand blockchain technology is distinct from crypto currency, but crypto always seems to be included as part of web3 no?

I'll check it out.

I know generally one focus of "web 3" is to simplify transactions especially by not having to integrate or work with credit card companies, local regulations etc especially in countries that don't have that infrastructure to as strong a degree.

Certainly an admirable goal, and one I'd love to see - but I don't believe that a lot of these issues can't be solved better and faster with "web 2" technologies (minus the anonymous piece which is a fair and clear advantage).

I would include general crypto tokens in web3. Though monero is not exactly “WWW” which maybe some people think is what web3 is on?

The only reason I mention monero is that it’s one of the only cryptos that is not vaporware (it isn’t hyped up based on some as-yet unimplemented capabilities) and has real world uses (digital cash. Battle tested, most popular token for tx on the dark web). You can also imagine that instead of being used on the dark web, it can be used to route around oppressive regimes or evade censorship. It’s permissionless and anonymous which is a unique combo for payment systems. It also has a decent online ecosystem for onboarding from fiat at localmonero.co

I think that main web3 innovation is more like mindset innovation rather than more common technology innovation that improves performance, efficiency, etc.

Take bitcoin as an example, of course you can make internet money cheaper using centralized service but it would be bad because you have to put a lot of trust into someone’s hands. That culture and mindset grows into whole finance applications where you get defi and property rights where you get nft. Nft is not only digital art you can use nft to represent domain names and this will cut out authority middle man out of the equation - your keys your domain, it’s impossible to do with web2.

Some people dismiss these as important but that’s what people in crypto are concerned with - replacement of unnecessary middleman, gatekeepers, regulations with transparent cryptography and code. If you subscribe to this values than you add new constraints and previous solutions that can be better and faster no longer work.

> requires no KYC.

Has that held up in court yet?

I’m contrasting payments in general there, centralized always requires KYC legally and is pretty well enforced vs decentralized payments it may be required legally but is not enforced via the protocol. No crypto (that I know of) has KYC built into it at a protocol level, some are varying levels of anonymous and low friction.

I do think what you’re implying is correct that you actually do need to go through KYC for some payments/business relationships regardless of whether they’re conducted through the regular banking system, cash, or crypto. I’m not a lawyer though

If you want the privacy of Monero with actual Web3, SCRT makes a lot more sense. Privacy is optional, and admittedly, not as battle-tested as Monero, but Monero, for all its innovation, doesn't really have a place in web3 discussions.

The one app comes to mind that does what web3 promises, but doesn't need a blockchain at all, is Scuttlebutt[1].

[1]: https://scuttlebutt.nz/about/

Isn't Uniswap a web3 product? It's the only way to create a Dex.

Uniswap v2 perhaps started the idea of defi, at least in a 'mainstream'-accessible way. But it's not the only DEX model

yeah despite whatever VC money they have the perception isn't good. Like, suppose i want to add Metamask login to a site. It's not easy, plus it forwards all requests to some server. I thought where we are going we don't need SPOF!!

If you want to cut through all the bullshit then you should directly look into web3 the ethereum js browser library. Sadly the term seems to have been hijacked in the recent months. Additionally you might want to look into ENS and ipfs as "mature" web3 projects

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