Ask HN: What is the state of Web 3.0? From an engineer to an engineer. | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the state of Web 3.0? From an engineer to an engineer.

29 pointsalentred12 comments

In a last couple of months, I see more and more information about Web 3.0. Mostly high-level discussions about the concept and decentralization. Although I initially attributed it to the hype, I have a stronger impression today that it becomes an important matter.

However, the resources are scarce and I want to understand what is the state of Web 3.0 as of now, early 2022? Is there any work, beyond the high-level concepts? Are there active projects in the domain (by startups or important investments from tech giants)? Research (institutional or not)?

Being a software developer, how is Web 3.0 being materialized in a sense of software engineering? Being interested in blockchain (not cryptocurrency), what are the things to look for today to stay up to date?

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It’s still hype, driven by VCs that have an investment in crypto.

Since there’s no strong technical argument, implementation doesn’t matter, if you want to pitch something just use what they own a lot of (Bitcoin, Ethereum) somehow.

Here are two projects that I've found helpful to understand the possibilities.

Helium - https://www.helium.com/ Building out wireless infrastructure for both IoT devices and 5G more recently

Arweave - https://www.arweave.org/ Provides a permanent storage solution where you pay once upfront

They are both building a new decentralized network to provide a service and using tokens to share ownership in the network and align incentives.

Of course it's too early to say whether they will succeed in their respective mission.

Disclaimer: Not affiliated with either project but I do work in Web3

I'm confused by AR weave. You buy an investment and dividends from that investment are paid to people who store your data? What exactly is that investment going into?

It's structured like an endowment and the assumption is storage cost is continue to get cheaper. Their yellow paper has more details [0]

[0] https://www.arweave.org/yellow-paper.pdf

Currently, any legitimate promise that Web 3.0 might have is confounded and overshadowed by the grifts it enables.

If you're interested, the most important thing to know is that there's real, low-level work happening, but you won't read about it on HN, at least not now at the beginning of 2022. Looking at the low-effort/dead comments on this thread should help you understand why.

I'll let someone else speak to specific projects, but I'll note Block (neé Square) and Meta (neé Facebook)'s made big moves last year near/adjacent to web3, so there's interest in it from monied groups.

As far as software engineering for Web3, the Untrustworthy Pinball Machine[0] and Year token[1] hint at the complex, low-level machinery that web3 is built on top of. Implementing non-trivial programs on top of the EVM, or other blockchains (eg Solana) is one area, as is web3.js wallet-enabled apps/webpages on the frontend a place for skills development. I've had difficulty finding some of the meanings and ramifications alluded to elsewhere in the space[2] though.

Thing is, because this is all built on top of cryptocurrency blockchains, you do have to get engaged with cryptocurrency somewhat in order to engage with web3. That doesn't mean you have to make irrational financial decisions but eg taking the time to understand the implementation details of NFTs is going to be difficult if you can't get past how dumb they are.

[0] https://medium.com/@kanewallmann_71759/an-untrustworthy-pinb...

[1] https://twitter.com/cat5749/status/1476813266462539779

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778852

I genuinely cannot determine whether this comment is a tongue-in-cheek criticism of "web3".

1) You point out that Big Tech have made "big moves" in the space. I thought the point of web3 was moving away from Big Tech ("web2")?

2) You link to two examples of useless toy projects being exploited and exposing severe vulnerabilities in the underlying technology.

It's a huge space and I got into it around Feb/March of 2021. Some interesting applications I noticed are:

1. Lending Apps - A trusted decentralized application to deposit collateral and earn more interest than a traditional bank. And then use the same application to take a loan on the basis of the deposited collateral. Example Apps: Compound / AAVE / TraderJoe.xyz to name a few

2. Exchange Tokens - A simple application to swap between two tokens (ERC-20). Example: Uniswap, QuickSwap, etc

3. Ownership of digital goods - Imagine if all the digital goods someone owned in Farmville could be sold, traded, exchanged. All of this is possible due to NFT's - ERC 721 Standard Example: Aavegotchi, Axie Infinity, etc

Interesting research is happening in the field of cryptography - Zero Knowledge Proofs, Verkle Trees. Foundations/Companies: Matterlabs, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon

A lot of work is happening in app development tooling: Solidity, Ganache, Brownie, etc

Akash Network - https://akash.network/ A decentralized, censorship-resistant alternative to AWS and othe cloud providers.

UnFederal Reserve - https://www.unfederalreserve.com/ Fund of funds that allows crypto holders to provide cash to non-bank lenders

Basic Attention Token - https://basicattentiontoken.org/ Ad-free browsing(among other things)

Enjin - https://enjin.io - tradeable assets for a digital economy

Robonomics - https://robonomics.network - Open-source platform for IoT applications.

Conceal Network - https://conceal.network/ - Decentralized finance, private transactions and encrypted messaging.

...and at least a thousand more.

The cake is a lie.

(I'm sorry, I realize this is a low effort comment and am unable to resist making it anyway.)

Wow, I guess I totally missed web 2.0. I thought that one has never happened. It was called “semantic web” back in the day.

it is just another compute with some properties and some storage. ecosystem is far from decentralized, most of things are closed and with no community governance. much hype and hundreds same projects. feels like internet of 95. so never was there. but feels like that.

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