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Comment by trompetenaccoun | Hacker News Reader

IPFS is a file system, Web3 is an idea/marketing term to promote blockchain services, so I'm not sure what you mean by that.

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Brave is using IPFS for file storage but once the content address (CID) is known anyone can access the file you're looking for. So it remains to be seen how they will leverage IPFS to create scarcity of digital items for their merchandise store. It is a step backward and not what IPFS goals were. A huge number of books are currently on IPFS through libgen, and scihub is going to IPFS eventually. Web3 is just a step back from the greatness that the internet could be. With "decentralized" oracles (3 mining pools control Eth), and centralized front facing websites simply verifying some hash of something.

Again, people use these meme terms without understanding. If I pin a file on IPFS, share the link and decide to delete it tomorrow because I don't like it anymore, that file is then unavailable and anyone trying to retrieve it gets an error. That's because IPFS isn't file storage. It's not Web3. It's not a blockchain. It's decentralized but not everything that's decentralized is an archive.

Web 3.0 has been used for a long time to mean any P2P/distributed/... approach, not just blockchain, even if the blockchain people try to completely take over the term sometimes.

Web3 has also been used to describe web pages designed for easy parsing.

Reader view, tools for the visually impaired, and browser automation are actually useful and commonly used, so that definition win the title for me.

There are certainly useful distributed web tools (e.g. email, TOR, IRC, Matrix, self-hosting, bittorrent), but they're the opposite of recent trends towards monopoly.

The distributed meaning is absolutely poisoned by blockchain at this point.

Even blockchains are less monopolistic than web 2.0 (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc). At least blockchains are powered by (largely) independent users, instead of a single corporate entity. But I still prefer further decentralized technologies like email or bittorrent

Web3 has a storage layer, a messaging layer, and an execution layer. Most popular Web3 apps use Ethereum for execution, IPFS for storage, and some custom websocket garbage for messaging, but there are many viable Web3 stacks out there that people are using.

What actually defines web3 software? Is sending emails with .exe attachments considered web3?

Like, if we compare this to RESTful servers, there's no set definition but nearly everyone agrees it's verbs and paths over a hierarchical API sending JSON back and forth over HTTP[S].

It seems like most people can't agree on anything except using etherium as a backbone.

So calling something web3 doesn't seem to do a good job describing things like REST or like something like you wrote above.