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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

in theory, web3 has nothing to do with cryptocurrency per se, and only relies on some blockchain technology, which is itself not bound to the value of the currency it is used by.

however, the fact that too many people seem to think that there is in fact a connection between web3 and cryptocurrency just adds to the smell.

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How do you reconcile the fact that most of Web3 is built on Ethereum which only works because miners ("soon to be" stakers) are rewarded for running the blockchain?

this. the incentives are bound by the underlying tech.

There's more and more being built outside of Ethereum and the dominance has been shrinking. As to how I explain the dominance - shrinking first mover advantage.

even for the other DVM-eqsue networks (solana, avalanche, et al), they still have the same constraint. the incentive to secure the network (either through PoW or PoS) is inherently tied to the underlying tokenomics, the currency has to have some value for the consensus mechanism to be successful.

> the dominance has been shrinking

According to what? According to the global charts on Coinmarketcap, Ethereum is still around 20% of the total marketcap of cryptocurrencies (BTC being at ~40%) today, coming from growth since January 2020 (where Ethereum started at ~7.5%). By that metric, Ethereum seems to be growing, but you might have a better source/metric to share?

In practice, everything is indirectly tied to making more money 100x your "investment" in a blink of an eye.

If the entire crypto/defi/nft/gamefi/play2earn etc marketcap was 0 then nobody would even bother with interacting/developing with web3.

In-fact, nobody would even be interested in blockchain tech.

Why are you assuming that just because something doesn't involve money, people wouldn't be interested in it?

Music creation is for most people just a hobby, with zero financial incentives to engage in, yet countless amount of people make music as a hobby and release it for free via various channels. Same goes for software with free/open source software.

Not to talk about BitTorrent (or it's predecessors in the P2P space) where people had the opinion of "sharing is caring" and shared data with each other, again with zero financial incentives.

How do you reconcile these facts with your outlook?

> Why are you assuming that just because something doesn't involve money, people wouldn't be interested in it?

Because random hashes are not inherently interesting to most people and the core concept is built around an opinionated finance model. The only value to the blockchain network is in the ability to make transactions, and that's why all of the push around it is very heavy-handed FOMO “buy now or you'll have to pay more later” which is a sharp contrast to previous new technologies which focused on what new things you could do.

But cryptocurrency has no value or meaning if it's not worth money.

That's not true of those other things.

I'm sure that some people would continue to run crypto nodes if it was not profitable, but the number of people doing so would drop precipitously. There's a huge portion of the crypto community (90%? 95%?) that are in it for the ROI and speculative gambling, not for running a decentralized web.

As an example, I suspect no one would buy old power plants and turn them into Bitcoin miners if there was no return on investment. The operating costs of this kind of infrastructure are too high to justify as a "hobby".

Currency is actually a core part of it. The point of web3 is software that can natively move money around. That "money" does not need to be ETH or BTC though, can be tokens pegged to the dollar or gold or oil etc.

Is it thought? Can’t web3 be, for an example, patient health data in a ledger? Who says it has to be tied to a monetary value?

I think that's the killer feature personally (I work in the space). It has uses for censorship resistant communication and things like identity. Not sure if I see the use case in health data though.

AFAIK all transactions on a blockchain require spending some associated currency (e.g. "gas fees"). For investors, I think the killer feature is being able to make money off of every transaction involving identity and health data.

Yes, the gas fees would be very expensive in the current state (think hundreds to thousands of dollars for a regular appointment, tens of thousands for an x-ray). There would have to be some benefit for healthcare providers to pay that and I don't see what that is..

Maybe not the healthcare provider, but a service that allows the patient to be in control of their health records. Control who can read and write to their own data. And is it not up to the implementor of the blockchain, to specify how difficult it is to calculate a new block? So lowering the "gas price"?

I think a system like that is a great idea, I'm just not sure how a blockchain helps. The things that make a blockchain interesting (uncensorable, immutable etc) aren't that important here, and with a public blockchain you still need a whole separate system that's doing access checking (maybe your doctor has a key that decrypts the onchain data). To me that system of sharing data with providers, and giving them credentials to access the data is the difficult part, and blockchain doesn't help.

Well, I do think that that is exactly things that are important. You'd want uncensorable, to give transparency to the patient. E.g. a hospital can't add a record without you knowing, that you might not want an insurance company to have access to later.

Immutable, as a patient you would want to know exactly what your data looks like at any given time. Again insurance is a good example.

If the blockchain is private, could it not be part of the implementation that does the access checking? Can't part of the ledger be unencrypted while other parts are not?

It might be wishful thinking. It's just an idea I have floating in my head, as an actually useful real world implementation for a blockchain.

I shared the link in another comment, but you might find it interesting as well: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14604582198663...

Because the security underpinning blockchain is either "spend a bunch of expensive electricity and get extra tokens" (proof of work) or "lock up some tokens for a chance to get more" (proof of stake)

These tokens have to be worth something in order for the security to functionally exist. You can't separate the monetary side from the security, because the monetary side incentives the security. And security is the only thing blockchain adds.

I don't completely agree with that. Yes the network must be secured that way, and the native token must be worth real money, but that's not something applications built on top necessarily need to worry about or interface with. You can build applications that do not use the native token (outside of transaction fees) and that doesn't affect the app's security.

I do not want my health record to be both public and immutable.

Not wanting it to be public should be obvious. Immutable though, what if I need to change my name/gender to match reality?

It's not enough to just update the value, because the old value still exists on the blockchain. That's just another method to find my deadname and use it for harassment.

So I am not an expert in blockchain or web3, I've only completed a few courses implementing a blockchain in golang and I work in the digital health industry.

But the points you raise, are exactly the issues I've been thinking could be solved with web3. I am imagining using it to give control to the patient of who has read access(to what and when), who can add data, etc.

I.e. give full transparency and control to the patient. Instead of the current situation where a patients data is on different systems, you don't know what it actually says, besides what a doctor tells you.

Could you go into how blockchain might solve those problem? Because it seems to create them instead

I can try, but to be totally clear this is only an idea that I have in my head, and is far from fully formed.

But as far as I understand, it should be possible for a user on a blockchain, to have their set of data encrypted in the ledger. It should also be possible to implement a sort of permission scheme.

So I am imagining, instead of relying on things like Epic Systems and other EHR systems, that control your data and might have incentives to not share them with other systems. One could imagine a EHR system based on a blockchain. The patient can then grant permission to, say a hospital, to read certain data from the ledger. This could be scoped to what is necessary in the context of their visit or procedure. After the visit to the hospital, the patient has full transparency to read what data has been added to their own records.

Anyway, I am not capable to give a full technical solution, since I have not thought it fully through, and not nearly knowledgable enough to actually know. So I might be very wrong in my assumptions, and would gladly be told otherwise if that is the case.

Then there's the whole issues of how do you get existing systems as Epic to integrate with said "blockchain EHR".

Edit: This might be of interest: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14604582198663...

The question is not just how do you get existing systems to integrate, it's how do you ensure that everyone uses the same blockchain? Technological solutions don't magically force anyone to agree on things and interoperate.

Yes exactly, that was actually what I meant.

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