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Comment by rjknight | Hacker News Reader

I can't really see which bits of web3 are meant to threaten the existing web, or are more dangerous to it than the existing threats.

The balkanization of the web seems like a threat that gets bigger every year. Surveillance gets worse every year. Regulatory attempts to combat certain kinds of surveillance do so by shifting the burden of "consent" on to users who don't understand what they're consenting to. Fewer and fewer people have any kind of "ownership" of the web in the form of personal servers, privately-hosted websites, independent self-managed communities, and so on.

Perhaps web3 could be a danger if it proposes unworkable solutions to those problems. Token economies and blockchains do give a kind of "ownership" and "participation", but the sheer volatility of the pricing of the goods, services and induced-scarcity "land" on offer makes it impractically risky or expensive for anyone who isn't running some kind of trading strategy.

There are lots of good critiques of web3, and good arguments against specific projects, features, or consequences it produces. "Keep the web free" is a fine idea, but I'm not sure that web3 is where the real danger comes from.

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> I can't really see which bits of web3 are meant to threaten the existing web, or are more dangerous to it than the existing threats.

I’m not sure about dangerous or threatening, but virtually every “web3” product so far has come with a blockchain and token solution that makes it extremely expensive and prone to weird incentives like speculative investing and hoarding.

Look at any web3 style project from distributed file storage to virtual land sales and you’ll find the majority of participants in the ecosystem aren’t actually interested in using the platform. They’re interested in getting there early and scooping up as many tokens or coins as possible so they can flip them to someone else in the future. Actually using any of the NFT based systems can be shockingly expensive ($10-$100 in fees just to modify an ENS entry, for example) or involve a lot of weird financial quirks like a price that effectively varies wildly from month to month depending on blockchain congestion and speculative forces.

Great phrasing I saw: "In web2, the user is the product. In web3, the user is someone else's exit liquidity"

But haven’t we already been seeing that out of tech companies for the last, what? 15 years? So many companies are built from the ground up to be sold off once the user base crosses a certain threshold. Then it’s sold and either absorbed by a massive company or broken apart for its contents. So many founders build companies for the explicit purpose of build it -> sell it -> build next one. Staying power is barely a factor in that. It’s the buyer’s problem. You just need to convince them it can be done and it’s worth it.

Companies like Reddit are the exception to the norm in many ways. They’re almost this weird experiment in “what happens when a built-to-sell startup decides to stick around?” Hell they sold to Condé Nast and lived there for years as just a part of the portfolio. They were in the red for roughly a full decade.

That whole arc is weird now that I think about it haha

A good point. You could call all those "end of our incredible journey" posts "rugpulls", except the investment isn't financial but the investment of your data on a platform which gets deleted. There are a few extra steps in "Vine sell out and now all your vines are gone", but the overall effect can be similar. Founders cash out, users lose out.

Somehow it's difficult when people invest actual cash money, especially in large sums.

Man you are too right about the data rug pulling.

I agree with your description of the situation, but that is actually a good thing (for the internet). [1]

The reason everyone is doing speculative bullshit in Web3 is exactly why it isn't a threat to the internet. There is nothing useful that it has created. There is no reason for anyone who isn't trying to fleece bigger fools to buy into it. There is nothing that ecosystem does that's at all better than what we have today.

Web3 isn't going to replace the internet - all it has replaced is the penny stock scam.

[1] it's a bad thing for the participants in these schemes.

One problem is that if all the engineers are devoted to web3 nonsense, who is working on the real stuff? I know it’s not a zero sum game but at the same time we only have limited resources, and at a country-level scale the corporations interested in web3 employ a lot of engineers, at a scale where whatever FAANG is doing, the rest of the world is keen on doing.

I guess what I’m saying is web3 being terrible, scammy, and useless don’t strike me as reasons why it won’t supplant the web as it exists today. It could just win through attrition, as everyone interested in keeping the current web going retires and dies, as there’s no money in maintaining old systems; while those making fortunes off web3 scams are massively incentivized to keep the scam money flowing.

> One problem is that if all the engineers are devoted to web3 nonsense, who is working on the real stuff?

Very few engineers are working on web3 nonsense.

> and at a country-level scale the corporations interested in web3 employ a lot of engineers

They're really not. Like, if you're defining "interested in web3" as "they have occasionally said the word 'blockchain' in an attempt to get some press", yeah, sure. But not that many large companies are actually putting significant resources into this. Of the really big tech companies... maybe Facebook is putting substantial resources into it, or has in the past? Though surely not a significant part of their total resources. The others, not at all, really.

I’m mostly forecasting in my comment based on what I’ve seen happen to the current industry. It’s completely centered around nonsense like “engagement”, and because there’s so much money involved it impacts the direction of the industry all the way down to education of school children.

We have students today who have no idea what a blockchain is, but they know they can make a fat salary working on it, and that’s enough for them to devote their career to the idea. They come to school demanding courses in blockchain, and so blockchain 101 is born. Then you need professors to teach it so you hire the blockchain researchers funded by Facebook, because they’re the experts. Next you have blockchain publications and conferences (it’s already started). Pretty soon the nsf starts funding blockchain research at the government level and your tax dollars are hard at work doing Facebook’s research for them.

Before you know, at a country-level you have devoted countless man hours and research dollars toward something no one except Facebook really wanted in the first place. That’s the way I see it going.

There are a lot of steps in the chain between what we have now and the end state you're afraid of, and none of them are certain. Maybe students don't believe they can make a fat salary working on blockchain technology. Maybe they're not successful convincing schools to offer courses in blockchain tech. Maybe Facebook researchers don't get hired by universities, and maybe academic research into blockchain tech doesn't take off in a big way. Maybe the NSF doesn't see the need to start funding blockchain research.

I can't tell the future, but given the current trajectory (like the recent big crash) I see at least a decent probability that web3 goes absolutely nowhere.

To be clear, I’m observing these things first hand as a professor. Students are asking about blockchain at info sessions more than any other tech. Many students see CS education as a fast track to blockchain tech, coins, and nfts they’ve been hearing turning people into millionaires overnight. That’s what they are interested in!

Parents want to know what blockchain classes we offer. And in fact we do have blockchain 101 and a single faculty member in the space, but there is a lot of pressure from market forces (influenced heavily by FAANG) to hire more.

Fair enough. I’ve been out of college for almost a decade, so I’m out of the loop with respect to what students want. I do suspect that unless crypto bounces back relatively soon some of that desire will go away.

I’m with you there and I’ve got all my fingered crossed.

Eh, there've been technology fads before; they sometimes make it into universities, but rarely further. When I was in college, XML databases were very much the thing, and there was a whole optional course on them (which I didn't do). You don't hear much about XML databases these days.

(I think a couple of years before this, it would have been CORBA).

I'm sorry but you do not get to arbitrate what engineers enjoy and choose to work on, whether that is web3 or something completely different.

This authoritarian approach justified "for the good of humanity" is dangerous. It actually makes me sad this comment is on "Hacker News". We should value tinkering and hacking on what we enjoy.

We shouldn't value net-negative tinkering, which is what pyramids and pump-and dumps are, so I would say that these engineers are mostly making the world a worse place.

However, I don't think most of the work that goes into internet companies at the moment necessarily makes the world a better place, either.

and this gets at what's really threatening about web3: it's an inherently libertarian technology and authoritarians on both the left and right of the cultural/political spectrum are terrified by that.

It's libertarian in the sense that the final stage of libertarianism is that the well-connected insiders get to abuse everyone else, with zero recourse against them.

In this sense, Web3 is a tremendous success of libertarian thought. No rules, no laws, and an absolute honeypot for hustlers, thieves, and fraudsters. Anonymous founders running off with the money, repeat fraudsters pulling off bigger and bigger heists, and money being poured into the dumbest schemes which, inevitably, end poorly.

I can't think of a better condemnation of libertarianism.

Are they though? How many people do you know working on shitcoins? How many people do you know working on real things?

> How many people do you know working on real things?

Pretty much everyone I know working in industry is working on imaginary things like increasing engagement and aggregating data. They are doing this because FAANG want them to, not because this is critical work that needs to be done for society.

I anticipated this objection to my phrasing and I agree, but I couldn't think of another word to use :) Maybe "other" things would have sufficed.

For what it's worth, I do think this is (or was) a problem. For awhile late last year and early this year a large proportion of the people I saw leaving my big tech company were going into blockchain stuff.

I suspect the current correction will put an end to that though, which I must say seems like a good thing.

I know exactly 0 people doing any kind of crypto work. I do know plenty that are in the ponzi scheme though.

> token solution that makes it extremely expensive and prone to weird incentives like speculative investing and hoarding.

You just reminded me of EOS, which raised over 4 billion dollars and promised to run a 'world computer', that descended into a morass of speculation on everything up to and including RAM timeslot bookings on the system. I just looked it up, and a mere two years later the entity that had all the funds is doing something else, and the community announced the project a total failure.

The blockchain space really is stunning to behold.

it's not a total failure if something was learnt in the process. web3 proposes radically restructuring the web and possibly the economy more broadly, it shouldn't surprise us if it isn't done right immediately.

I imagine what was learned was along the lines of “don’t give 4 billion dollars to a company with vague promises about development but no concrete plans or legal obligations.

Or it should have been, I see little evidence of learning in this space.

Have you checked POAP (Proof of attendance Protocol)? poap.xyz 5M mint, one the most used protocol, everything is free. Look for it on twitter and you will go nuts.

It's an ERC-721 compatible token, free to create, free to mint and collect

POAP stands for Proof of Attendance Protocol

— POAPs are NFTs that function of digital badges to prove you attended an event

— Using POAPs benefits event organizers by creating a direct line of communication with attendees, allowing more interactive, more responsive events and a more reliable way of building relationships with guests and followers

— POAPs benefit individuals by creating a completely personalized story of a person’s life, linking them with moments in time without sharing any data with big centralized platforms

That sounds objectively much worse than what we have now.

> POAPs are NFTs that function of digital badges to prove you attended an event

Save your ticket stub. Buy a t-shirt from the event. It's not even valid proof if the event organizer can hand them out to anyone.

> Using POAPs benefits event organizers by creating a direct line of communication with attendees, allowing more interactive, more responsive events and a more reliable way of building relationships with guests and followers

How does an NFT work better than emails/organizing website?

> POAPs benefit individuals by creating a completely personalized story of a person’s life, linking them with moments in time without sharing any data with big centralized platforms

Oh good, so instead of posting things on facebook, now facebook can just read the public chain to get that automatically. Brilliant.

"That sounds objectively much worse than what we have now."

I love the nft haters who think they're sounding smart but sound like absolute morons to anyone who's done at least a few hours of oBjEcTiVe research into the space. And normally I'd take the time to educate but with attitude like this and a made up mind, nah hfsp.

I simply addressed each of the points using basic observations. I'm approaching this in a good faith as per HN guidelines.

It doesn't take hours of reading academic/white papers or hours of research to evaluate this at a surface level. (And if it does, why on earth would I trust it over traditional methods I can understand?)

If someone was trying to say a pile of dog poo was a great solution to the problems described, I'd say have the same response (granted a shorted one.)

If you want to people to actually use and understand and use this technology, then you gotta take some actions towards that. If you can't actually "sell" a fix to an actual problem using these objective facts, then maybe you should go back to the drawing board and come up with a better idea.

Or I guess just stay on your bubble and stew about it if that's what you want.

Who cares?

(So that's not a dumb dismissal: no really, who cares? Who wants to do these things, what value are they deriving from it, why does the user want to bother with this overhead, and who pays for it?)

I'm not sure we can have it both ways. In other words, I'm growing in my conviction that freedom and privacy on the web require increased balkanization.

Neil Postman (of whom I'm a big fan, to put my cards on the table) wrote very helpfully about the concept of "filters" (that may not be his word) in Technopoly, and I've been thinking about the concept a lot ever since. Certain things are inadmissable in court, and that is true because otherwise you'll just have bedlam. The analogy doesn't hold perfectly, but the same thing is true of other situations where people gather together to communicate, whether in person or online.

The other thing that's required to avoid total chaos is authority, and I think it's a common trait to be dismissive of the value and purpose of authority in this context. People have been dismissive about authority since, uh, forever, but I think there's something about the promise of the internet that makes people think we have finally arrived at the point where it is unnecessary. (Think blockchains and crypto, for instance.) But it's not.

The sooner we see that authority isn't a bug but a feature and begin to build for it in our tech tools, the better.

We’ll need to decouple “authority” from “income” in many venues, and that’s pretty hard.

A lot of people agree that moderation helps communities. That’s “authority”. But when moderators are employed by capital holders, the authority leaks up to the capital holders and you end up with different and thornier problems than chaos.

Fedicerse-like systems probably do better in this regard, but the community has to be convinced into paying for the moderator’s time and the system’s resources. Most people have had rhat trained out of them by free-to-use services.

I can imagine blockchain tech could support improvements in this situation, but it is not itself The Solution. People need to own and manage the solution, and to choose the appropriate tech to support their choices. Blockchain people need to stop trying to sell us on the tech being the solution.

Yeah, I'm generally of this conviction as well. Particularly looking at the Tildeverse (basically multi-user shell environments that usually loosely network with each other), there are definitely sysadmins in that environment but there are a couple things they do better than, say, Facebook:

1. They personally vet the people they let in to maintain the style of community they're going for.

2. If someone's a problem, it falls to the sysadmin or the people they chose as moderators to kick the person.

3. Anyone can start a tilde and network with the others, but this is done at a human level, meaning people need to actually -want- to network with you.

4. The size of the communities are kept human-scale. It happens that a tilde "fills up" and that people who want in just need to start their own, which is how the whole "tildeverse" arose: from tilde.club reaching capacity and enough other people liking the idea they decided to copy it.

I'm a big believer in this sort of federation approach to the internet in general. The clue is in the name: the "internet" is a network of networks, and IMO we shouldn't expose everything to the rest of the world, but only carefully curated gateways behind which the trusted network with admins who the curated community believes in can operate with less fear of bad actors (at some level we all know this already because this is how Instagram users behave, just at a social level instead of a technical level).

For a very long time human beings talked to each other in groups that required no authority, only consensus; We've had a very hard time translating this online, karma, following, friending, subs and rules.. none of it is perfect. But adding an authority to dictate what is good discussion what is bad, comes with a host of problems in itself.

But i do agree that a benevolent dictator may be better than a functioning democracy, for a time.

This is highly presumptive. My experience as a human has shown me exactly the opposite. Humans are highly hierarchical.

So when a group of friends goes to the movies its always the same person deciding and not consensus?

No there is consensus, and it is real. But the hierarchies within that group (based on sex, ability, wealth, knowledge, etc) are also there and are also in play.

This is your big mistake: there is no “adding” authority. Authority is always there. I have started to think of it like the conservation of energy: it changes forms, but you can never get rid of it.

Hard disagree about authority being baked into platforms. Authority should be granted by the user using a social trust graph, with defaults in place for users who aren't savvy enough to manage their own trust.

I am interested in Web3 if, and only if, it allows for people with specialized knowledge to benefit economically from it. For example, currently people are posting on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Reddit some insights. Who benefits from it? Microsoft (who owns LinkedIn), Meta, and Reddit. The profit margins are insane. If the same people, who usually don't care about becoming influencers could earn some extra bucks for posting good content, I am all in.

Wasn't the web way more balkanized in the past? Reddit replaced (ten?)thousands of individual (english-speaking) forums alone (many still exist, but are a dead shell without many users). YouTube killed almost all competitors. Facebook killed the smaller social networks and many websites of small companies. Most survivors of these "consolidations" were only protected by some kind of cultural or language barrier, like VKontakte or NicoNico.

Or do you mean balkanization by apps, replacing the web?

I wholeheartedly agree with the rest, though.

"Wasn't the web way more balkanized in the past? Reddit replaced (ten?)thousands of individual (english-speaking) forums alone (many still exist, but are a dead shell without any users)."

Before Reddit and web forums there was Usenet.

> Before Reddit and web forums there was Usenet.

Also, what killed Usenet was mainly the byzantine process of creating newsgroups (i.e., artificial barriers to entry), and how those who found themselves in charge of popular newsgroups tendes to be heavy-handed in how they viewed the role of censorship as beneficial (i.e., more artificial barriers to entry).

Now comes web3 and the only technical benefit that's being pushed is it's ability to impose artificial barriers to entry at a deeper architectural level.

> Also, what killed Usenet was mainly the byzantine process of creating newsgroups (i.e., artificial barriers to entry)

I don't buy it. The web forums that largely replaced Usenet also had significant barriers to entry; although you could get a PHPBB hosting account pretty easily you would then have to drive traffic to your site; people couldn't just add your site to their feedlist and see new posts automatically without "going there". And you had a much freer hand with moderation.

I think web forums won largely because they didn't require any client software - the barriers to entry for new users were non-existent. Maybe the moderation was more effective as well; I know some usenet groups had major issues with spam but that wasn't universal.

> I don't buy it. The web forums that largely replaced Usenet also had significant barriers to entry;

Not really. The fact alone that anyone could create their own web forum is already leaps and bounds ahead of what Usenet users could ever do.

Those interested in setting up their web forum had to endure the technical and financial hurdles of getting it and running just to sidestep the artificial and byzantine barriers to entry required by Usenet's self-described guardians.

Afterwards, services like Reddit and the like further simplified the process of creating a web forum, and thus virtually the whole world jumped onboard.

> "(...) although you could get a PHPBB hosting account pretty easily you would then have to drive traffic to your site*

There is nothing simple about setting up a full blown web server. Let's not fool ourselves.

This is something that some software engineers never done nor have experience in what is required to get it up and running from start to finish. This is certainly not something at the reach of any person with a hobby or even personal interest.

> There is nothing simple about setting up a full blown web server. Let's not fool ourselves.

But you didn’t have to. Shared web hosting sites had scripts to do all that for you more than 20 years ago.

Spam, and the inability to address it adequately, was a big part of what killed USENET. See Russ Allbery's legendary rant: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html

> Spam, and the inability to address it adequately, was a big part of what killed USENET.

Spam was a nuisance, but not a relevant or even significant one at a technical standpoint. Client-side spam filters and the flimsiest of moderation solved that problem.

Claiming that spam killed Usenet makes as much sense as claiming that spam killed email.

Spam accelerated the centralisation of email, certainly. Setting up your own server incurs problems in both directions, both deliverability and spam blocking.

What are you talking about? Email is definitely not centralized. At all.

The balkanization of the internet isn't having more websites on the internet. It is the internet splitting into multiple seperate internets that don't interact. Stuff like the great firewall, the sites that block EU IPs due to GDPR, and what Russia is doing are all examples of the balkanization of the web into smaller, more compartamentalized networksk.

What you are referring to is centralizarton/decentralization where the number of different sites/hosts goes up or down.

Agreed. To be a threat to the freedom of the internet, web3 would have to do something useful enough for people to actually want to use it. So far there is no evidence of that.

Also agreed - I don't think it would be a threat to the freedom of the internet.

Look, no one forces any of us to use the obnoxious websites. For many of them, there are alternatives (email), and for the worst offenders, abstaining is easy, and the only option (social media).

The old-school internet and web will always be available, ready to use, and superior in almost every way to the dumpster fire of modern websites.

Did anyone else experience a palpable feeling of euphoria when visiting OP's website? For me, it was blissful and uncanny. Here is a webpage with design pulled non-ironically straight out of 1999, which also somehow feels like it was made in 1999. Not a hipster's prerequisite "indie-web" presence, not an emulation or demonstration built in a framework -- a simple, flat-file webpage that speaks to the defense of the original web, and in the native tongue.

Perhaps we should encourage web3. After all, it is by virtue of this crisis that so many more people are realizing why even web 2.0 was mostly just a commercialization of web, and has changed us for the worse.

> Look, no one forces any of us to use the obnoxious websites.

Not really true. The network effect. You get to be isolated and lose your friends if you don't.

>> Look, no one forces any of us to use the obnoxious websites.

<Not really true. The network effect. You get to be isolated and lose your friends if you don't.

I may be misunderstanding your point (if so, my apologies), but if someone is a friend, an actual, real friend, not an online acquaintance, there are many, many ways to stay in touch and maintain those relationships that have nothing to do with online social media sites.

I'd posit that if someone is unwilling to interact with you because you don't wish to use the same social media site, they're not really your "friend," just an acquaintance on (or a shill for) some social media site(s).

People say this but that's not my experience. People just don't keep up by other means and some people just don't even have or use other means at all. In some places, Facebook is the entire Internet, for example. I have exchange student friends from all over the world and I would 100% lose contact with them if I left certain platforms/apps. This has no bearing on whether we have deep friendships (and sometimes more) or not.

>I have exchange student friends from all over the world and I would 100% lose contact with them if I left certain platforms/apps.

Then those folks aren't your friends. Feel free to disagree (as I'm sure you do), but if such folks actually gave a rat's ass about you, they'd use one or more of the dozen or so other ways to stay in touch should you leave such social media sites.

I can't (and wouldn't pretend to) speak for anyone else, but I want to be around folks who want to be around me. And not all of those.

tl;dr: If someone's "friendship" is contingent on the use of a particular website/app, then they're not really your friend.

I definitely disagree with you and you're being extremely condescending, patronizing and dismissive. Have some respect. You have no say in who my friends are and who cares about me. You have no knowledge about that. They definitely do care about me and I definitely do care about them.

I think you live in some kind of bubble where people have more choices than they do. You also forget that your friends would stop visiting you if they couldn't drive, even if bus, train and walking were available. That's just the way things are. People have lives and limitations, and that doesn't make the connections or exchanges between them any less valuable to any party.

>I definitely disagree with you and you're being extremely condescending, patronizing and dismissive.

Yes, we do disagree. But there's no reason to attack me for not agreeing with you.

I don't know you and don't care about you (except in a general, wishing all sentient life a positive experience, sense), nor do I care about your friends or family.

I related my experience and the views those experiences have engendered in me.

There was no intent to be any of the things you ascribe to me and it appears that you take offense to my point of view. Fair enough.

And since I want to be around folks who want to be around me and you're clearly not one of those, we can avoid the dishonesty of false pleasantries (which, it seems, you've already decided to do) and get on with our lives.

I wish you a good day and much success in whatever endeavours you undertake.

I mean, you were being a bit condescending? You're also quite wrong, in that you define "friendship" in a very strict way that doesn't comport with how other people use the term. It's quite possible to have friends that aren't close friends; people whom you have fun with, whose lives you would prefer to be able to know something about, but whom you wouldn't go out of your way to keep up with if it became inconvenient. These people still count as friends.

To put it another way, I have family I would lose touch with if I left Facebook. They're still family and I would still prefer to know if they graduated college or got cancer or died. Same with friends-who-aren't-close.

>I mean, you were being a bit condescending? You're also quite wrong, in that you define "friendship" in a very strict way that doesn't comport with how I use the term.

If we're diving to /. depth here (as you seem to want to do), I'll go with it.

There (see above). FTFY.

I’ll be honest, I’m not sure what you mean about “/. depth”, but fair enough.

>I’ll be honest, I’m not sure what you mean about “/. depth”, but fair enough.

/. == slashdot.org noted in the last decade for shallow discussion, infighting and poor quality discourse.

Hence the "FTFY."

Not attempting to continue our disagreement, just clarifying my earlier post.

Have a good day!

>They definitely do care about me and I definitely do care about them.

If you care so much about each other, then why would you lose your friendship if you dropped facebook?

I have never used social media sites like Facebook, and I have not lost touch with any of my friends.

Not even kidding, the postal service still works quite efficiently, and email is very useful.

Part of the problem here may be generational definitions. Perhaps I am wrong, but I think the definition of "friend" has changed quite a bit since the pre-web days.

All of these technologies are tools. If your friends are really friends, you'll use whatever tools you need, and even if significant time passes, you'll still be friends when you finally connect on the other side.

> Agreed. To be a threat to the freedom of the internet, web3 would have to do something useful enough for people to actually want to use it.

That does not change the fact that Web3's main selling point is it's ability to eliminate their user's basic freedoms.

But a lot of people do use it?

If anything "web3" is a privacy nightmare.

Before platforms have to incentive you to use SSO and cookies to draw you in. now people are tagging NFTs with their address and act as SSO, reasonably anyone can pinpoint you with a few tech skills if such is the future.

Whatever you think the bad thing in "web2"(I hate this term) will happen and 100x in so called "web3" future.

This is a political problem seeking a technological solution. There are wires connecting my computer to yours, it's just a question of who owns them. Any technologically incompetent government can institute bad laws that damage the ability to use those wires in an empowering way.

Web3 as it is is impotent and useless. Yeah, that makes it harmless, but the idea behind it isn't.

The idea behind web3 is that everything lives "on chain" (the same way the idea of the Internet to some was that everything is "online"). This is not just a whimsical dream but a vital necessity for most of its promises to even function. Listen to crypto enthusiasts and you'll hear many scenarios which only work if this is already the case.

"Smart contracts" are useless for anything "off chain" because they can only interact within the chain. You can set up a smart contract to grant royalties off the trade of an NFT, sure, but if you mint an NFT of your book to do that you can literally still sell copies of that book "off chain" without triggering the contract (so you still need the entire legal apparatus of the centralized state dealing in fiat currency, which NFTs and crypto and smart contracts were supposed to replace).

You can see this play out in the (poor and thus cheap to invest in) African countries crypto enthusiasts have been trying to use as lab rats: universities issue their degrees "on chain", land ownership is tracked "on chain", and so on. If all legal documents and claims are replaced by tokens and smart contracts, you can circumvent laws because what's the point of having a legal claim if you can't enforce it because everything runs on the chain and the chain disagrees with your claim?

Even the enthusiasts of course forget to talk about how this makes every person incredibly transparent (no need to "dox" strangers, you can just track their transaction history and literally inspect their wallet to find out everything there is to know about them) and how it turns identity theft from an annoyance to something irreversible (because to the chain, every owner is the rightful owner) that can happen to you as easily as accidentally leaking your Facebook password. Yes, I know about tumblers but if you have to resort to money laundering tools to recreate any semblence of privacy I hope I don't need to spell out how this seems to be more about money laundering than privacy.

And this doesn't even go into how all the fabulous claims about NFTs in games are little more than microtransactions, lootboxes and DLC, how "play to earn" just replaces game mechanics with grind (or at best encourages literal ponzi schemes of renting out your account to allow other people to fight over scraps until the currency becomes worthless) and how none of the technologies involved are "new" or offer any interesting solutions to problems that actually exist outside crypto itself.

Oh, and of course on top of that every single crypto project is either a ponzi scheme (or pyramid scheme, or any of the dozens of variants of scams that are legally neither of those because of technical details but still function the exact same way) or a "rugpull" waiting to happen.

>"The idea behind web3 is that everything lives "on chain" (the same way the idea of the Internet to some was that everything is "online")."

That's interesting. For some reason I had imagined the umbrella of web 3 tech and protocols were somehow additive to what we have now. In looking at the Web3 Foundation's page I can see they have an entire stack defined but nowhere was I able to find where their "vision" for the web was laid out.[2] This seems kind of odd. Is this intentional or is this just not the right place to look?

>"Smart contracts" are useless for anything "off chain" because they can only interact within the chain."

Isn't this what "oracles" are supposed to do though?[1]

[1] https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/oracles/

[2] https://web3.foundation

> For some reason I had imagined the umbrella of web 3 tech and protocols were somehow additive to what we have now.

Because that's how it is sold. The tech is additive (though at this point hardly novel) but the value proposition boils down to "what if everything was a financial transaction".

> In looking at the Web3 Foundation's page I can see they have an entire stack defined but nowhere was I able to find where their "vision" for the web was laid out.

Yeah because the vision isn't particularly appealing to most people. The momentum web3 has is part astroturfed (i.e. wealthy investors leveraging their "fiat" fortunes to pump crypto currencies so they can cash out and VCs pushing their web3 startups for an exit) and part people buying into the hype without fully understanding the bigger picture and its ramifications.

> Isn't this what "oracles" are supposed to do though?

Sure, except they're vulnerable to manipulation (just search for "oracle" on https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ to see a number of noteworthy attacks).

The only way to fix the problems of blockchain technologies is to move everything on the chain. The reason crypto enthusiasts don't worry about the privacy implications is that it will still be possible to "buy privacy" and they believe they're going to make it big so it won't be a problem.

Thanks for the reply. The idea of an all transactional web would be horrifying.

I was curious about this: >"he reason crypto enthusiasts don't worry about the privacy implications is that it will still be possible to "buy privacy" and they believe they're going to make it big so it won't be a problem."

What would their solution be then? How would one buy privacy?

Using the digital equivalent of money laundering to hide their transactions and make deals off-chain by talking to people (or having their people talk to them). If you are wealthy enough you can afford whatever levels of indirection are necessary to retain your privacy.

>Web3 as it is is impotent and useless. Yeah, that makes it harmless

I would disagree. It's impotent and and useless, but also the basis for billions and billions of dollars worth of scams. That makes it not harmless, even if it is itself impotent. It's impotent for any useful work, but highly harmful in effect.

For me, the biggest suck to web experience since I first started using it back when MSN came out (90s) is every page prompting GDPR.

Which is often immediately followed by a pop-up asking me to subscribe to get email updates. Curiously this prompt seems to occur before you've had time to read the first sentence of content.

Yes, it's pretty stupid. I don't know why anyone would subscribe to a newsletter before even knowing what it's about, they should do it once you've read the entire article.

While the prompt is annoying the true culprit of ruining the web experience are websites trying to gather as much data as possible

which is due to the centralised framework which incentivises the web now.

I have uBlock filters to bin off these cookie popups, I'm amazed those irritating things ever became law without someone pointing out how completely futile alarm fatigue makes them.

Now if the GDPR could realistically do something about the tidal wave of spam I've got from pubs in random parts of England and Wales I happened to visit once while waiting for a train back when they were insisting on doing everything through an app that would be nice! I'm fairly sure most apps don't need to be apps at all, they could be websites if companies weren't desperate to inject analytics and yet another vector for spammy marketing into every interaction with them.

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