web0 manifesto
web0.small-web.org
web0.small-web.org
I can understand some critics’ opposition to cryptocurrencies on public policy grounds (although I think most critics are too broad in their critique), or their opposition to NFTs based on the fact that many NFTs are bullshit don’t represent ownership of anything at all (although I think that will not always be the case).
What I don’t understand—and where these critics loose credibility with me—is their rejection of the entire class of blockchain technologies.
If you don’t want to use a blockchain to build your app, fine! Don’t do it!
But if I want to build my app with a blockchain integration, or using a blockchain to store a portion of my data, what’s your problem with that?
To me, it all sounds very similar to, “don’t build your app using Microsoft tech, only use open source” or “don’t use NoSQL for storage, use an RDBMS instead.” It’s like a new version of those ridiculous religious wars people would have over technology preferences, only now higher-stakes and even more passionate.
If anything, it's the FOMO-ing developers of these techs that are looking for problems.
You must be kidding when you say that AI produced as much snake oil as cryptos. Sure, there were/are startups using AI as a selling point when there is not much behind, but in most cases AI actually solves real world problems and adds value. Cryptos are stricly a negative-sum game and ponzi schemes.
Just because it's corporate snake-oil doesn't mean it isn't snake oil.
And "zero trust" is a myth. We can see that from the $7.7 BILLION in fraud that has been committed in crypto markets in just the last year. https://www.zdnet.com/article/scammers-grabbed-7-7-billion-w...
"Zero trust" is meant to refer to the data layer: because the current state of a blockchain system can be re-generated deterministically from the historical data—which is immutable and fully auditable—you don't have to trust anyone's version of the current system state, even if you are not yourself currently keeping a copy of it.
These technologies do not solve all of the moral and ethical problems that humanity faces, but I don't think anyone is claiming that they do. Blockchains don't stop people from deceiving each other, and they don't make people smarter so that they entirely avoid introducing bugs into their software, and they don't stop people from trying to steal from one another.
But they do make it possible to decentralize high-value data records that would otherwise need to live in high-security environments controlled by governments or well-capitalized businesses that would also need to be trusted 100% not to tamper with those records.
Tell me how someone living in a country with heavy capital controls can participate in the global economy on equal footing with someone from a more developed country without blockchain, and you might be a candidate for a Nobel Prize.
Or tell me simply how someone can make a living with work that threatens the status quo without worrying about being ostracized.
If you want to have any kind of hedge against the continuous, systemic institutional failures, you can not simply try to build another system that puts another institution at the top.
I doubt you will, but you asked, so: byzantine Paxos.
The point of the person you are responding to is that solving decentralized consensus is only an academic exercise. If your country wants to prevent your from participating in an economy, it can; the only recourse is political.
Okay, I should've added "permissionless" to the list of desired properties. If you can a priori choose who gets to participate you´d have a point.
> If your country wants to prevent your from participating in an economy, it can
I think that the eternally losing "War on Drugs" should be a lesson that shows this is simply not true. Also, consider how Black Markets are a thing in authoritarian places, not free ones.
So, no, as much as a country can make it difficult for others, they can not outright stop anyone without significant cost to themselves.
So don't use blockchain to create a digital currency, or anything decentralized because it still needs a central authority to determine the truth. What is the actual use case then?! What app uses it successfully and solves problems that were hard to solve before?
I'm sincere, BTW. You sound like you have some examples in mind.
Anyway, this topic has been discussed to death already, you can also search in HN for detailed articles on the topic.
There you go.
> But if I want to build my app with a blockchain integration, or using a blockchain to store a portion of my data, what’s your problem with that?
Many people incorrectly associate 'blockchain' == 'Bitcoin' with all the issues it has. So anything blockchain is bad / scam / pyramid ponzi / planet destroyer, proof-of-waste (PoW), piece-of-sh*t (PoS) etc.
If web3 with blockchain / NFT / metaverse / etc is not the future, ignore it. Simple. I should not see anyone who hates blockchains, NFTs or metaverse in general to continue to comment on every. single. thread. tweet. or post about it. as it is excruciatingly difficult for some to do this.
So I will expect a ton of responses when another crypto scam happens, but not when an emerging regulated application of a blockchain project is used today.
The problem is that many people building blockchain projects mean "Blockchain" == "Ethereum", which is basically the same thing.
Every honestly distributed blockchain is scam or soon to be scam, because to incentivize distribution a rewards are required (tokens), and that completely upends social expectations of the app, regardless of its stated purpose. Node keepers and token owners want to pump the token price by any means necessary. App users (if any) are facing an adversary and hostile environment because they are the afterthought, second class, and hodlers are a priority.
Centralized blockchain on the other hand is simply ridiculous, except for the ultra narrow market of version control systems. People are delusional if they think a centralized blockchain will ever be more useful for anything else than a normal DB.
At the top of the page is a black box with white text that has the following pseudo-math propositions:
web3 = decentralisation + blockchain + NFTs + metaverse
web0 = web3 - blockchain - NFTs - metaverse
And then the black text on white background then has: "In other words, web0 is web3 without all the corporate right-libertarian Silicon Valley bullshit."
I don't think there's really any more to it than that.
Currently the signature is basically just a "like" on a funny tweet.
Instead of hating "web3" for all the bad actors using it, why don't we embrace web3 for what it can be? I see so much potential for it to replace all the current social logins that everyone hates, all the awkward digital (PDF) contract signatures, and ad ridden blog spam that could be funded with digital microtransactions.
Sure there are differences in the general trends with how people interact with the web and internet, but it's more complicated than that.
I understand the difference between Web1 an Web2 since web pages have become a lot more interactive over the years, but that doesn't justify making special terms for old and modern sites. Nobody goes around saying "this website is Web1 and this one is Web2." If a website looks old you just say it looks old.
There's no specific cutoff point that makes sense for web versions. Websites have slowly become more and more interactive over the years. Since pages started to become interactive, there have been so many changes to the web that are arguably just as worthy to get their own version numbers. CSS has gained so much more functionality, JavaScript has become a compilation target, and with the advent of WebAssembly, virtually any programming language to be used on the web.
All of the things that make Web3 different from Web2 seem like niche use cases for the web, not something that will replace everything like more interactive web pages have. There won't be any decentralized websites, there will just be a bunch of regular websites where you create an account to interact with technology that has been around for over a decade.
The other changes I mentioned actually pertain to the web, while the trendy stuff like the "metaverse" and "blockchain" actually have nothing to do with the web. Maybe they can interact with the web, but a lot of things can interact with the web. With the click of a button I can have virtually anything delivered to my doorstep, but for some reason owning a picture of a monkey is more impressive to some people.
They are buzzwords. There was no Web 1.0. The "Web 2.0" was coined as an umbrella term for AJAX-using sites that allowed a lot more interactivity. It's not like some product got a version bump. It became vogue to refer to older style static or HTTP form POST sites as "Web 1.0".
Now the cryptobros are trying really hard to push "web3" as a buzzword for their dystopian blockchain based nightmares. Tim Berners-Lee had already started pushing "Web 3.0" to describe the semantic web technologies he's very excited about.
Block chain solves a real problem of trust (albeit with some caveats). NFTs do no such thing.
Remember that you only see overpriced JPEGs and the outrage about it because that's where the money (and hype, and marketing) is, but that doesn´t mean that people aren't using them to build other stuff. You need to give time for actually useful dapps to actually pop up, as opposed to just slapping a price on an image and calling it a day.
Literally none of these require blockchains. And literally none of these are aided in any way, shape, or form by NFTs.
For tickets specifically I already had this conversation recently, see my two responses here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29282931
> but that doesn´t mean that people aren't using them to build other stuff.
The question still stands: do show us this "other stuff" so that it actually requires this tech.
> You need to give time for actually useful dapps to actually pop up, as opposed to just slapping a price on an image and calling it a day.
Dapps have been around for 8 years now. So...
Yup. Because all crypto and blockchains are the Internet, and cars, and all other great inventions. Even if all signs point to them being the next Juicero, Enron and AT&T ISIS Mobile Wallet.
> but
There's always a "but", isn't there?
> Except I did, and your answer was "Yeah but you don't need blockchain for that!", which further confirms that you don't want to hear answers.
Oh no. I do want to hear answers. What you don't want to hear is valid questions and criticisms.
Your "answers" for "useful applications for NFT" are literally just a list if things that don't require NFTs (or are made worse by them) and a car analogy.
As always with crypto peddlers, I might add.
Of course
> Again, you don't want to hear answers, and the hostile tone further confirms it.
Ah yes:
Me: provides a clear answer, links to an extended answer to one of the claims (about tickets and NFTs), asks for examples of actual useful applications of NFTs
birracerveza: starts the conversation with an ad hominem attack ("you don't want to hear answers"), repeats the same attack several more times, claims it is I who is hostile.
Yup. Crypto peddlers in all their glory
This is the last reply you're getting from me.
Yes, but a very very specific one. It's low throughput by design (because it's a linked list of consecutive blocks that must be appended slowly enough for the network to converge), and to work properly it must be deeply tied to economic incentives.
> arguable one of the better ways as it currently stands.
No, and that's part of why most engineers don't like blockchains: the pretention to be a wold changing solution. Unless you want to build bitcoin, blockchains are probably not a good solution to decentralization. Depending on the definition of the word that matters to you there are technologies that do achieve decentralization in a much more significant way: Torrents, CRDTs, Paxos, or activitypub for instance, or just the good old web since anyone can host their own website as they whish.
And people who really care about decentralization have long known that this isn't a technological issue (since the web is ultimately decentralized as a technology, but completely centralized in practice) but a social one that won't be solve by “revolutionnary tech”. User experience is a key factor here, and blockchains have probably the worst UX ever (and as such, they are overwhelmingly used from centralized platforms, even more so than the actual web).
I would have expected at least a one-pager summing up what is the proposal about: The topic of decentralization is obviously very interesting and I wanted to read something technical about an alternative to "web3". Until then...
While blockchains are cool and possibly fully decentralized, they don't scale well. So far we're no closer to finding a way to scale without making it more centralized. As usage goes up, centralization goes up too. One can no longer host a full node on basically any hardware.
I fully understand that people are sceptical. The amount of bullshit is insane, and basically no users have any idea about how any of this works. I've seen a lot of sites and services that promises you amazing things, without giving any details about how it archives it. Most people don't care if it works in a sensible way,they just don't want to miss out.
If you don't belive me, check e.g. avalanche: https://support.avax.network/en/articles/4064879-technical-r...
Is this satire? I can't tell anymore.
However, for something called Tezos Baker the minimum requirements are: https://wiki.tezosagora.org/use/baking/setting-up-a-secure-b...
- Disk: 100 GB SSD (SSD is highly recommended over HDD)
- Memory: Recommended RAM for running a Tezos Node is 8GB
- CPU: Running with at least 2 cores is recommended
So, while technically you can run it on Raspberry Pi, it's pushing it.
So they want decentralisation and reject some key technologies and tools to enable it?
I think it's time we dissociate the the technologies from its use. Blockchain is more than a ledger of monetary transactions. NFT is more than NFT art.
The web was always decentralised, but various motivations and reasonable tradeoffs caused it accumulate a lot of crap. Maybe the point is that Web3 isn't really different in this respect.
It’s already the thing, and it’s called Web 1.0. Oh, wait a second. This manifesto is from the same guy who basically stole the idea of indie web, called it “small web”, created poorly designed JS framework for it and made a website with big “please donate” button. Yep, seems legit.
It's not related to a version of HTML or to CSS features.
Yikes.Since when decentralization has been something different than a right/libertarian position?If anything not having centralized power is specifically that.
I see this train of thought from figures like Tim Pool (and even much "higher" intellectually speaking,not gonna name them), who seem to think free software and/or decentralization is a social and left-leaning issue and proposition.It's not, if you want to bring politics into discussion at least be accurate about it.Owning your own data,not being censored at will and having more control is a right/libertarian position, or at least not in anti-thesis with it.However people seem to think the internet is/can be used somehow as tool of revolutionaries against the state, that's not how it works(at least right now, where you don't have access to it w/o the government knowing about it).
Maybe it's only referring to the disgusting SV corporate aspect in the economic sense from things like NFTs, but this is vastly overblown.Corporations are not the ones selling the most NFTs snake oil right now, people are.Corporations only want to facilitate this sh*t show, I don't have a problem with that as long as the network is not centralized by them.(which is not, but people kind of pretend the internet is decentralized which is rather funny)
Since when do databases have political leaning? That website is completely nuts.
Please take your agitation elsewhere, guys.