Ask HN: Are Web3 and DApps the Future? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are Web3 and DApps the Future?

25 pointswarent63 comments

Reflecting on my skills as a full stack web developer (senior; in a management position now), I can't help but feel that with all the bootcamps, accelerated courses, all this new talent entering the field, that at some point the market will become saturated and I'll be less valuable especially as a developer.

Now I'm hearing more and more about Web3 and decentralized apps (DApps) all the time and think about when the internet was new, the average layperson had no idea what a "website" was or a "dot com" meant. Yet now it's common knowledge. Is it possible that decentralized apps and blockchain technology is going follow a similar course? And when "classical" web development becomes saturated, these will continue being the highly valued specialist markets?

I guess what I'm asking is, do you feel it is wise and valuable in the long term to begin pivoting one's career to blockchain now rather than staying as a typical web dev?

View on HN

Distrubuted virtual machines are the slowest, most expensive compute possible to devise - they wear "trustless" as a virtue but you save gobs of time and money with just an ounce of trust.

I do believe distributed hash tables as used in IPFS and webtorrent are enabling some futuristic anti-censorship tech, and using metamask for identity is pretty cool, but smart contracts are very stupid - just post the source code and let anyone run it, why does the source need to be stores forever on everyone's computer?

There are some really bad incentives with ETH contracts apecifically - the number of instructions your code compiles to determines the gas fees to run the code every time - want to add a type check, range check, write code a little more verbose so its easier to understand ? all of that adds multiple-dollars-per-api-call. That's one reason multi-million dollar hacks are so common. Check out https://rekt.news , they do a good balance between technical and laymen-accessible about how these hacks happen.

The source code needs to be on everyone’s computer so that its execution is decentralized.

Part of the problem is confusion around the word decentralized. If I have a website billprin.com , in a sense it’s decentralized because there’s a million websites and that one is my little corner and you have your corner.

But in another sense it’s centeralized since I get to be the sole arbiter of truth on billprin.com

On ethereum, everyone runs the same code and has the same state so nobody is the sole source of truth.

Blockchain is way slower and more expensive that a centralized db but it has this key feature that no single party controls it. This enables us to write applications like automated market makers that require no trust in a centralized party or more choice in whom to trust and more granular control over trust.

It also has the nice side effect of making a lot of stuff more transparent and programmable.

When do we prefer not to have to trust a party? Many people don’t trust Wall St entities so are excited about potential ways to decentralize finance.

Others don’t trust big tech companies and are excited about ways to decentralize identity and communication.

And the future is hard to predict , it feels plausible that a big blank canvas will lead to more applications that are hard to predict.

The key is realizing that the core feature is not having to trust a centralized entity.

There’s technological challenges , and ways in which the current landscape doesn’t live up to the ideology. The money both incentives early adoption and development and turns it into a casino. But hopefully that helps clarify why some people are excited about the underlying potential.

No.

Investing in crypto is very similar to learning to win at poker. It's totally possible to make a lot of money in crypto, but there is no positive impact on the world.

Because of this, nobody invests in a certain crypto because they think it will have a positive impact on the world. They only invest to make money. "Successful" Web3 startups will be the ones that focus on making their coin go up instead of focusing on making the world a better place.

Personally, I don't see a reason to invest time/money in something that doesn't help people.

What stops you to build a decentralized app / web3 whatever that improves the world?

Maybe you can't do it with bazillions from VC, but you're certainly free to try.

I see your point though. nobody will care about your project until they see $$$ themselves...

Sad late capitalism is sad

What decentralized app/web3 will improve the world that we can’t do in ‘web2’?

Uniswap / automated market makers / decentralized exchanges are already a “killer app” of web3.

It’s not a hypothetical, it already has billions in daily volume.

It’s true that , for any blockchain app, you could trust a third party who could use traditional database to do it faster and cheaper.

What the web3 detractors repeatedly refuse to understand is that not needing to trust a third party is a feature many people care about. By handing trust to a third party over important things like your money and your identity, you hand over a massive amount of power over yourself to them.

It’s also true that all this tech is still nascent. Big picture, ~10 years is really not that long. In many ways, technological limitations means a lot of these projects are still “toys” , just like microcomputers and Linux once were. But there is a ton of cryptography research and application that _might_ transform these from toy to the future. And again, with billions in daily volume, calling it a toy is unfair, it’s in between a toy and the future.

To clarify “not needing to trust a third party” - it’s better to phrase it as “needing to trust fewer parties and having more choice in who you trust.”

I’m amazed people can watch scam after scam from Wall St financiers and struggle to understand why some find axing the middlemen appealing.

Anyone can list 100 reasons why it won’t work long term. The question is do you use that list as a reason to write it all off, or a list of problems to solve as an engineer. HN obviously leans towards the former.

not needing to trust a third party is a feature many people care about

I think this is overblown. Most DeFi is illegal so people are using it because of regulatory arbitrage, not because it's trustless.

Most people bought bitcoin to buy weed on Silk Road , now it’s the reserve currency for a nation state.

Just because not every use case lives up to the big picture ideology and long term goals doesn’t mean there is no big picture long term goals.

A lot of modern AI exists because of GPUs which exists because people wanted higher quality zombies to shoot in their FPS games.

I use crypto to pay for things even though it's more expensive. I just like having the option to not need to trust anyone.

What are you buying that you don’t trust the seller in some way?

The seller is fine. I don't trust the payment processor to behave.

Yep, "good" blockchains like Reserve and Taler get zero attention because nobody's getting rich from them.

Untrue, I always invest because I want a project to exist and have a positive impact on the world.

If you want to earn a quick dev buck go for it

Personally I think the entire web3 thing is going to fizzle out before it goes anywhere useful. It’s already fallen off my radar for the most part

I don’t think a mainstream audience will pay for internet content in this way. Nobody is going to pay to post to Twitter, as an example, and if it doesn’t mean you need to pay to create content in this way then you might as well ditch the web3 part entirely

Intrigued if I’m wrong, but heavily doubtful

Agreed. I always wonder if maybe I'm just old and out of touch, but I don't see much promise in web3.

Oh for sure, I’m aware this might just be me arriving at my Abe Simpson limit[1]. I just really can’t see end users doing these sort of transactions at all never mind learning how to do it with crypto first

[1] “I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems weird and scary to me”

On HN, the bias is mostly negative towards anything Blockchain related. So it's not a great place for objective advise. There is a remarkable amount of emotions related the the field, here on this website, recognizable by the strong wording and lengthy discussions.

The problem with this field is also that people are pretty much incentivized to be dishonest. You never know if somebody is giving advice based on wanting some part (usually a coin) to increase in value or if they're just tired of all the spam from those same people, or just disappointed in missing out.

My advice to you: try to dig down deep into what has been created and see if that's something you see going somewhere and you see yourself contributing.

Just because something is negative doesn't necessarily mean that it's biased.

It is when it's accompanied with a lot of emotion.

Yeah, HN is negative about it precisely because it is an unbiased forum. What skin in the game would people have? This is a generic tech forum, it's about as neutral as you can get (admittedly there is a hive mind, but I think that mostly comes out when something political comes up - look at a Rust article for an example of how a "polarizing" tech gets discussed, the discourse is nothing like for blockchain). If you go to some "web3" discussion, you've automatically selected for bias.

> The problem with this field is also that people are pretty much incentivized to be dishonest.

Sounds like a great reason to be negative about the field. Who wants to be surrounded by liars in their professional life?

Because the fields might also have enough positivity to make it worth while. It's like working on Nuclear: who wants to built bombs? vs. who want to work on energy?

> It's like working on Nuclear: who wants to built bombs? vs. who want to work on energy?

But this incentives a nation to be a good steward so that the international community is comfortable with the work and allows you to continue. Which is the opposite of what the GP said.

Your list of reasons to be negative wrt web3/dapps fails to include: "professional developers, often with decades of experience with software, hardware and networking who optimistically researched the domain but concluded that it is technically unsane; that most proposed applications can be accomplished easier and more reliably with traditional architecture".

That's not cynical or emotional, just a perfectly reasonable outcome based on expertise and, to varying degrees, lived experience.

Hacker News seems to think the circles they hang out with represent all developers?

Dan Boneh teaches cryptography for Stanford and works for a16z crypto.

Silvio Macali is a Turing award winner working full time in a new blockchain.

People like Gavin Wood (CS PhD) and Vitalik are obviously top 1% of engineering talent.

It’s amazing how HN insists crypto people live in a bubble, but upvote the low effort “web3 is a scam” written by nobodies post du jour but choose to ignore all the worlds leading cryptographers excited about web3.

HN is 100x the bubble/ echo chamber than the crypto world is .

A16Z is obviously motivated by quick money because they can flip tokens much faster than traditional VC investments — exits happen in months rather than years. It’s a brilliant money-making scheme while it lasts.

One Turing winner’s opinion shouldn’t be given undue weight. Kary Mullis was a Nobel Prize recipient who used his scientific clout to advocate for the once-popular claim that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS even after evidence was overwhelming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis

Excellent scientists can be wrong outside their narrow field of expertise.

I think web3 and blockchain are thinly disguised ponzi schemes with zero potential for solving problems I care about.

If I'm wrong about this, I'll catch up later. I have enough experience in tech now that I'm confident I can become productive in some bizarre future blockchain-infested hell-scape with a few months of dedicated effort if I need to.

I'll have missed out on the chance to become a crypto billionaire the easy way. I'm OK with taking that risk.

Yea, for a senior person it's possible to quickly transition into something like this from my experience. Furthermore, there's still loads of web2 type of development that needs to be done around the web3 part. That's where it's useful to know how the space works, but not strictly required for a lot of things.

In 2018 I had the same question so I started messing around with ETH myself. I concluded after spending a few months with it and while the whole space is interesting and cool, there wasn’t a lot for me to contribute or get excited about personally. That is key. It just has to excite you! If you aren’t excited leave it alone. You will find something else. In 2010 I was a hardware engineer and played around with Android and iOS sdks every night. I was so excited and believed mobile was the future I quit my job and dove head first. I gave myself the chance to do that again with crypto but it never catalyzed. Maybe bc I am 10+ years older. But I feel wisdom gives me an even keener judgement on these sorts of things. I don’t have a family in fact I am now divorced so have even more time to plow into tech. Your job is not to predict the future but find what excites you

Nobody knew what a website was....until they found one that replaced their old way of doing things. Yahoo replaced the phone book. Amazon replaced the mail order catalog. The value in these developments were immediately obvious to most.

Have you found something on Web 3 that supplants how you do things today?

Something that Web 3 supplants? I still have yet to read a coherent explanation of what Web 3 is.

Web3 has absolutely replaced the address book. Anyone making anything on that is either a grifter, a scammer, or a moron. Super useful!

Blockchain has built so much hype driven by investors chasing the next big thing that any move in that direction is highly speculative. It's not that crypto lacks utility, clearly there is some meat there, but the amount of money invested there is based on expectations of the future that are far from a sure thing. Think about the impact of the web from 1995 to 2010. Think about the impact of the smart phone from 2007 to 2022. The revenues and profit margins of Apple, Google, Amazon over the last couple decades have been jaw dropping. Do you think crypto will be on that order of magnitude? Because VCs are willing to throw around huge investments if they think there's a 5% chance that it could be.

Personally I would not do a hard pivot into crypto. If you are interested in it, by all means learn about it and maybe dip your toes on some side projects. But in terms of your career, focus on moving up the value chain rather than chasing fads. A foundation of solid web dev skills will always serve you well, but specific tech know-how has a half-life (which gets shorter the higher you go in the stack), and you don't want to find yourself competing on pure coding prowess once you have >10 years experience. Think about your strengths that can't be replicated just by grinding code, and what you've learned over many years of experience across different environments.

Try to answer a simple question: do we have benefit from append-only files? Are them sustainable means of storage? IMVHO the answer is "very limited to specif domains, like for short-term logs" and "no".

Blockchain is an append-only big file with no real means to drop past content after a certain amount of time. Distributed (really) software have simply too much overload to work properly.

The REAL hi-tech future is from the '70s: desktops, connected via open protocols no one really own, like emails, usenet etc. Local software, local storage. The short-term future will be a continuous push to the classic mainframe model, the cloud is the actual version, is nearly not sustainable anymore so new model to offload costs and jobs appears (take a look at edge/fog computing for instance). That's just a totalitarian surveillance dream dressed as a Trojan horse to be accepted as a good thing but will not last for long.

There are chains who prune

It's hard to predict the future, but you should not use your developer's intuition to predict the outcome because it is the public sphere making that decision. The public sphere can will something into existence, despite good, bad or seemingly impossible logic to make it so. The US political situation is an example of how dysfunctional the situation can be.

Considering Web3 and DApps are largely marketing efforts, my guess is the marketing dominated portions of the software industry may end up with some variant of the Web3 DApp promises realized in a terminology stretching, primarily profit driven manner. Video games and social media may end up with something, probably just a series of $40 terms forced over what is essentially trading stamps/cards with complicated rules of use. Nobody knows what is going to happen, really, because this stuff is pure mind games territory.

No.

The future of your career is being good at what you do, having social connections, or ideally both.

Trying to jump into a less crowded field is not a long-term career solution, and the blockchain field already has more devs than it needs anyway. It's a gold rush.

The NFT thing seems to be on the way out.

* Google Trends: NFTs down 70% from peak.[1]

* Axie Infinity Smooth Love Potion token: down 95% from peak.[2]

* Use of NFTs by games that people actually play: cancelled.[3]

* NFT resale now illegal in China, sellers punished.[4]

It's hard to tell because of all the wash sales, but it appears that the NFT resale market on OpenSea does not result in profits for flippers.

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=NFT&geo=US

[2] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion

[3] https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/canceled-gaming-nft-202...

[4] https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3168188/ant-gr...

I'd say it's wise and valuable to not stay as a typical anything. Having a greater variety of experience will serve you well.

I personally don't think web3 and dapps are going to have that much impact, although others may disagree.

One observation I would make is that trying to identify "the next big thing" is innately risky. You could be right, or it might crash and burn. Do keep learning, growing and pursuing things that interest you.

No.

Also, bootcamps don’t turn out experienced senior engineers or talented managers. If you’re really good at that, grow your leadership and management skills—those are rarer and more valuable than your ability to hack JavaScript.

There are pockets where salary inflation is concentrating, and web3 maybe one of them. If you're a senior blah blah and want to get paid, it's hard to beat the high margin monopoly companies in FAANG. Once you're in the club it's a lot easier to switch.

Long term is hard to project let alone correctly forecast considering the world upends itself every 10 years or so.

Now, on the metaverse front, which is what what "web3" was about before the NFT crowd came along, it's not clear what happens. What is clear is this:

* Building a good metaverse is very hard technically. You have most of the problems of making an AAA game title, some of the problems of making a web browser, and a set of new problems associated with making a world full of user content. Roblox is working on it, with 90 dev teams and billions of dollars. They're hiring, by the way. Epic is working on it, with a budget of a billion dollars. Linden Lab (Second Life) mostly has it, but their technology took two decades and is dated and sluggish.

* Even after you've done it, is it more than a niche market? So far, no. Except for Roblox, which seems to be able to suck in a sizable fraction of the middle school population.

Ask yourself if the work makes the world a better place even if the company fails. That's my measurement of good work.

This is quite profound actually.

No. "web3" is breathless hype. DApps are DOA, gas fees are absurd and from a speculation and gambling perspective DApps are always a money loser relative to just holding tokens and waiting for a pump.

Web3 is centralized, MetaMask talks to Infura which runs on AWS. Its no small task to decentralize a smart contract platform.

Opportunity lies at the edges of technology, maybe in this vein you could dig into wasm instead.

I agree! The 3rd generation of the web in my opinion is centralized, and is about utility and function. People who are overly excited about Crypto have made web 3.0 about the blockchain, but bigger things are really happening. The golden age for IOT and edge computing is just really getting started. “Use your internet for more than just browsing”.

I suspect the golden age of IoT is over. It makes your infrastructure too vulnerable to attack. We're in a war. The good case is that it becomes Cold War 2. The bad case is worse. In either case, expect nation-state sponsored cyber attacks.

Kinda hard to imagine a huge need for blockchain developers. I mean, practically speaking, what would such developers actually do?

At current, it seems like a lot of folks who like blockchain are trying to find things to do -- seems like there's a surplus of folks who want to do that sort of work, with a shortage of actual projects to be done. Which makes it seem like a weird space to enter if you're concerned about crowding.

i get contacted alot because i have rust on my cv. one time i actually took a crypto contract. every time i asked what i should be doing it was some useless answer like 'kick ass'.

I've been around awhile so take this with a grain of salt:

- web1: Anyone can publish and connect to like minded people. Everyone will want a server

- web2: dynamic web pages like GMail are amazing. Smart phones and native apps will be incredibly popular

- web3: Some smart people describe edge cases where it could be useful, but there doesn't seem to be a compelling case to drive adoption like web1 and 2

It's definitely an interesting new paradigm but not one meant to replace everything web2 even if it succeeds. If you want to develop financial apps then there's probably much more value in pivoting to web3 than if you are a dev in a different domain.

The difficulty in making accurate predictions here is based on the fact that we humans tend to think the status quo linearly into the future, which is why many wrong predictions have been made regarding the adaptation of computers or the Internet or other technologies. However, it has been shown that certain unpredictable ideas may be developed based on these technologies, leading to mass adoption of the respective medium.

Long story short: If you don't know which horse will win and you have enough money (time), bet a certain amount on the most promising ones.

Are you in a position where you could wade in, start learning and maybe start a simple side project? If so, why not try something small and see if it makes you feel creative?

No, and when I read “Now I'm hearing more and more about Web3 and decentralized apps” my instinct is to suggest that whatever channels you are hearing this through could use a good spring clean, to clear out all this obvious hype/influencing/advertizing. You don’t need to subject yourself to this nonsense. Here’s a nickel, kid - get yourself a better network.

Web3 is just cash circling the blockdrain.

Crypto isn't the future, it's right now. I haven't had this much fun online since the 90s.

You missed this trend if bootcamps are pumping out grads. Start digging for the next big thing and invest early.

May I ask, a senior full stack web developer with what skills exactly (tech stack & years of experience)?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g

Almost entirely scams, even the "real" use cases are just desperate attempts to find a novel use case and become the next big thing. Vitalik Buterin and Chris Dixon are driven much more by Libertarian ideology than actual technical advancements.

no, "web3" is reputation laundering, pure and simple.

The technology makes sense for some applications, and less so for others.

It’s also highly a dynamic environment, keep that in mind between different Blockchains and DLTs.

Do what you’re passionate about and strive to be the top 1% at it, nothing else will matter.

Yes.

Yes, if nothing else to get your head around how it's done and there are plenty of amazing opportunities in this space.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com