Comment by 0ldskool | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0ldskool | Hacker News Reader

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I think you are mistaken in 2 aspects. Blockchain != web3. Blockchain + cryptocurrencies make up a large part of web3 because they provide an incentive mechanism to be decentralized. Web3 is about decentralization, other solutions that follow the goals of decentralization of the web can fall into web3. I would say IPFS falls into this category. Other possible solution/algorithms that focus on decentralization could also fall into this category.

Blockchain provides incentives, those incentives can be transformed into cash for the end user. Web2 basically focused on 2 aspects. Transforming the browser into a OS that can run on any computer, using advertising for the generation of money for stakeholders. In regards to advertisement the reason why this was use d was because it worked in the past. Printing press --> newspaper --> advertisements, Radio --> audio advertisements, Movies --> pre-movie advertisements, tv --> commercials. This mechanism has worked before and worked for web2.0. The problem now is that so many companies are involved in data collection on individuals that it has become quiet scary, this was not possible with previous mediums (not to the same degree). Game companies have tried to transition to micro-transactions, psudo-gambling, upgrades as a payment form. Web3 offers a different incentive model that if successful can replace these arguably more scary methods.

Web3's model involves users actually paying for stuff. Even with all the tracking, the ad model is a win for accessibility to the poor. I'd rather be completely tracked everywhere I go then left out of all the important conversations.

Web3 kind of IS just blockchain at this point. Some are even calling for a Web4, as a non blockchain more performant version of web3 not focused on financial features.

I suspect if any P2P tech gets big without a token, people won't actually call it web3.

How will you pay for things in “web4”? If the answer is “you don’t” it makes tons of things impossible (any sort of large scale hosting, storage, commerce)

If it’s credit cards..we’ll now you’ve created a massive centralized link in your “p2p” system.

That's fine. It's what we have now , and centralized finance has a huge advantage in that there is human review to reverse fraud and theft.

I am perfectly fine using centralised finance to buy things that are mostly already inherently centralized, which is pretty much all common purchases for most people, since buying anything that can be made cheaply by an individual is rare for most.

A huge number of things can be done purely P2P with no payments, with almost no infrastructure. That should be the core feature of Web4.

Even more things can be done semi-decentralized as in BitTorrent+a seedbox, and that works just fine.

Some of those things can even be donation supported in a profitable way and don't need payment from most users in any way that actually connects to the service. They can just put a PayPal and bitcoin link and people can donate however they want.

In Wikipedia can do it, Facebook and maybe even Youtube can, with appropriate P2P load balancing.

This is almost essential because the competing centralized services are totally free(via you-are-the-product models).

An email service or something that costs money and requires linking your bank to some coin payment service is going to have a hard time competing with gmail for the general public.

If something needs payment, it probably shouldn't be a core layer of the whole system. The first priority should be make things too cheap to meter where you can, and then figure out how to decentralize the remaining stuff, assuming there is demand.

Blockchain inherently can't do offline first LAN apps properly, you can't have consensus without communication. If I can't talk to someone on a mesh network without internet, a large amount of the advantage of P2P is gone.

Using a centralized form of payment completely defeats the purpose of a peer to peer system. The system is as strong as its weakest link; if your payment processor has the ability to take down your service (by blocking payments) you might as well be hosting the service itself on a centralized system too!

I agree that not everything requires payment, but the things that do cannot truly be p2p without p2p payments.

Let me pose the question in a different way: why do you see p2p filesharing, hosting, communication etc as valuable but p2p payments as non-valuable?

The main value I see in everything else P2P is that they're resistant to network failure. If a wannabe Kaczynski somehow takes out all the data centers, you'll still be able to set up a mesh and have essential communications.

Uncensorable payments are important for some and detrimental for others, since the majority of people have no need or desire to do anything that would get them shut down by a bank, and in fact actively benefit from the ability to "censor" fraud.

Putting something like that in the core of a protocol as a mandatory element doesn't make a lot of sense. There's an incredible amount of overhead involved, and it means the protocol is no longer general purpose, it's optimized for doing stuff payment processors don't want you to do, at the expense of the other use cases.

Which would be fine, if it weren't for the fact that almost all p2p projects have become money-centric, and payment free P2P has almost totally stalled.

For most use cases, payments aren't really a weak link. Their tech is highly reliable. If I were to host something with 3 different cheap seedboxes, I'd expect very good reliability, because mastercard probably won't have a long enough outage to make an invoice overdue.

P2P payments are definitely valuable, just a bit more niche.

> Blockchain + cryptocurrencies make up a large part of web3 because they provide an incentive mechanism to be decentralized

What incentive? Users forced to mine to view content? Or just as a paywall? Because the former isn't an incentive (it's just ads taken to an even more extreme level), and the latter is already doable on 'web2' and vastly cheaper at that.

> Blockchain provides incentives

No, it absolutely does not. Blockchain is just a public ledger. It doesn't provide incentives of any kind, just an append-only list. Proof of Work provides "incentives" to burn power pointlessly, which is a pretty awful incentive. Proof of Stake provides incentives to hoard "money", which is... well actually a pretty big regression from the current state of the world, even. And that's about it.

And in both of those cases the money (and thus "incentives") still have to come from somewhere. Blockchain technology itself isn't generating any value, nor do things like IPFS. They need externalized funding to function. Filecoin then tries to make IPFS make sense for people to participate in, but that's then just a mediocre twist on AWS S3 or Backblaze or any other cloud storage provider. "Mediocre" because it completely lacks things like customer support & uptime guarantees. Kinda important things if you're trying to build a business on top of it.

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