Hacker News Reader

Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

web3 definitely could be as successful as git if you remove the payments side of it. Without payments web3 starts to look like an interesting and useful idea. Ownership of content, federation between platforms, trustless publishing, etc are concepts the web lacks, and that could definitely be interesting to layer on top of the web.

Adding payments into the mix kills it like every other microtransaction protocol though. git would have been significantly less successful if it cost you a small amount of money to merge a PR, or to fork a repo, or to push something.

View on HN

The payments are fundamental to it.

Ted Nelson described the Xanadu system in the 1970s which anticipated the web, he recognized a need for creators to get paid and planned to have a micropayments system built in. Practically the web got advertising instead and then the patron and subscription models but somebody could make the case we need something better.

Web3 has the particular horror that simple calculations that could be done on 1% of a cheap VPS instead get replicated across 100,000 nodes. It not only fries the planet but it is fantastically expensive and somebody has to pay for it… and they wish it was you!

The horrible reality is that even if the web had effective and popular micropayments infrastructure it would have micropayments and adverts on top.

Just look at how advertising is creeping into premium streaming services.

Or the fact that (nearly) every premium TV channel still has ads, when the original point of paying for cable was no ads.

Subscriptions and ads have gone together like peanut butter and jelly since the print age.

If you subscribe to The New York Times or Cosmopolitan you have qualified yourself as being interested in the subject, attached to the brand, and not hopelessly penurious. An advertiser would rather pay to get a message in front of a paid subscriber rather than anyone else.

One time I rented a unit in working-class neighborhood for 6 months and not surprisingly the amount of junk mail was half what I was used to.

There's even a HTTP status code for Payment Required. I wonder what happened to that. I think we need to go back to one time purchase model.

> It not only fries the planet

Just to point out, "Web3" usually is talking about smart contract executions; All the smart contract platforms I know of are (or will soon be) proof of stake, so no burning the planet required

I think Etherium has been talking about going to "proof of stake" for a few years...

(1) I'll believe it when I see it, (2) "proof of stake" is not proven to be effective against takeovers to the extent that "proof of work" is.

To (1), it has, but the actual switch over is slated for the next few months.

When it really happens I'll give them credit for it.

> Ownership of content

Blockchains do nothing to advance this cause, it's a technical shell game, "ownership of content" is already possible without blockchains.

> Federation between platforms

Same as above.

> trustless publishing

Same as above.

"Web3" is a highly technical MLM scheme, it's not a solution to the concerns you have expressed.

How do you get around supplying content without ads or some other metric to pay for network usage?

It would be nice if everything was free, but right now everything has a cost associated with it. Whether that's your attention, your data, or outright paying for the service.

To me the better question in regards to Web3, is it necessary to have so many middlemen? That's my issue with it.

Trustless blockchain doesn't work without payments though. You need an incentive for people to verify transactions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com