Is Web3 a Scam?
stackdiary.com
stackdiary.com
As for the legality of it, maybe we can think of it as being a scam as much as companies selling tamagotchis [1] in the 90's are or were a scam. It was somewhat in fashion to own one back then. At one point it was quite profitable to manufacture and sell them. However, now and possibly forever the volumes at the peak of the fad would never be restored. At least right now, in 2022, perhaps the current trend of owning an NFT collection and presenting it to others is somewhat driven by vanity in a similar way. Perhaps it's the future with NFTs.
Can't say I agree with the present situation, and I'm kinda hoping people will find better things to do with their hard-owned money.
[1] - A Brief History of Tamagotchi | Innovation | Smithsonian Magazine - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/keeping-tamagotchi...
It's been what, 15 years? I'm still using € and $.
Why is HN so different than my experience? Have you met a lot of criminals who own BTC?
There are a lot of people who think they can swim with the sharks. Good luck with that.
Does that mean web3 isn't "just blockchains and NFTs" but also DAOs? That doesn't seem all that different from the initial assumption of it broadly being about cryptocurrencies and NFTs.
"85 terabytes per year is totally fine" -vitalik https://twitter.com/zndtoshi/status/1478387674335559681
TBH i think it is a good thing. Web3 and the finance bros that popularize it should die with it, and we should keep working with the truly decentralized fundamentals, not with intermediaries.
The crypto community is the biggest part of the push for it, so it's natural that people would make that connection.
However, I consider any web tech that has user ownership or decentralization as a principle to be Web3. Some non-crypto examples would be Mastadon, Matrix, GunDB, and IPFS (although IPFS does have crypto-backed pinning services, such as Filecoin and Arweave, IPFS itself is agnostic to crypto).
Regardless of the original or intended definitions of "Web3", it will end up being whatever the masses think it is. To recap some history:
- "web3" circa ~2014 when coined by Gavin Wood covered 3 concepts without mentioning NFTs : (1) hash-ids of static content instead of urls (2) p2p encrypted messaging (3) consensus engine. (One of the earlier essays from 2014: https://gavwood.com/web3lt.html)
- "web3" circa ~2021 emphasizing the "token economy" (e.g. NFTs) popularized by Chris Dixon (a16z VC): this is the current news mania with celebrities selling jpgs, etc
Therefore "web3==NFTs" narrative has overtaken the original Gavin Wood narrative.
Analogous situation of evolution of terms was the "internet". In the 1980s, "internet" included Gopher, telnet, USENET, ftp. (E.g. I used to be able to telnet into public computers before all firewalls and Linux configs shut off telnet access.) But Gopher/USENET/etc faded and HTTP became the dominant idea of what "internet" is.
NFTs now have constant press coverage of eye-popping sale amounts from celebrities and OpenSea founders are now paper billionaires. Therefore, NFTs dominate the meaning of "web3" because getting rich is more sexy to talk about than encrypted-p2p-communications-based-on-hash-identities.
At the moment NFTs + crypto cover up to 95% of web3’s marketing visible functionalities.
Additionally no killer “app” has been shown to the public where it demonstrate an intangible value over previous technology, at least that the public understands it.
Why its partly correct is that the internet back then was almost entirely not about buying and selling things at all. It was information.
Web3 seems today to be entirely about buying and selling. It seems to have none of the original web ideas about it but has the market at it's very centre.
Where are the people on web3? Where are the forums, comments, discussions on the network? They are consumers, participants in a market. That is why it may not be a scam, but it is un-human.
People speak of blockchain as if distributed encryption makes it impossible for malfeasance but like any implementation of encryption the devil is in the implementation details and can render encryption into obfuscation by math. Coordinated out-of-band communication between the distributed servers could lead to collusion and that is why knowing who runs these servers matters and that is just the first step.
How complex is that source code?
Are centralized APIs used in order to access the "decentralized" Ethereum blockchain?
(I was looking at this stuff a few years ago, it may be different now).
"web3" is an object provided to JavaScript by either the browser (e.g. Brave[0]) or a browser extension (e.g. MetaMask[1]). In the case of Brave it uses a local ethereum client to access the ethereum blockchain. In the case of MetaMask it uses MetaMask's centralised servers, but the API presented to the web page is the same in either case.
Re the complexity of the TODO app: I don't know that a TODO app is particularly a good use case. But for comparison, I once wrote a toy Dapp that would handle escrow (i.e. person A makes a payment to person B, but it only goes through when person C allows it, alternatively person C can send it back to person A). It was maybe 20 lines of code for the smart contract and a similar amount for the user interface.
Of course you can have multiple separate identities, meaning multiple separate crypto-wallets, if you wish.
But if you pay with crypto-currency you are in effect authenticated everywhere where crypto is accepted.
Identity is history. You could have multiple separate "anonymous" identities on the web, but that is not the same thing as no identity because associated with each account there is history. Think about credit history. You want good credit history. You don't want anonymity. But banks etc. don't really care who is paying the bills as long as they are being paid on time your credit history gets better.
I mean I dislike the giant ponzi scheme but they do have a cool name, I'll give them that.
Maybe they're trying to say "this is a better thing than the web"? But that doesn't make sense either because none of the applications can replace any aspect of the web as far as I can tell.
Web3 is all about people buying and selling things.
The bad smell is strong.
Then several years later I heard about 'Web 3.0' again, but this time most referring more to the 'internet of things', which seemed to get a bit more traction for a short time, usually around mundane household devices like internet connected fridges and toasters before also disappearing as most of those things never really took off with consumers.
Now for whatever reason it's come back again, but this time rebranded as 'web3' probably to sound more contemporary as web 3.0 sounds very mid 2000s now. This time whoever is driving this is trying to make it about crypto/decentralization etc. as if it's a new thing even though I feel that's kinda been a thing for a quite while now.