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Comment by giantrobot | Hacker News Reader

> But there's also so much weird, non-commercialized crypto stuff out there that shares a lot of the ethos of early web tinkerers.

Bullshit. Without miners there's no "crypto" and without payouts there's no miners. So "web3" can only exist where there's some financial incentive to run miners. Users can't spend real money to access this system so they need to convert their money to Geoffrey dollars to even access "web3" content. This is 180° from the "old web". End users needed no more investment than their computer and Internet connection. They didn't have to prop up some asshole's upline to check out the Unofficial X-Files Fan Page.

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> So "web3" can only exist where there's some financial incentive to run miners.

I can say the same about anything else on the internet. Keeping the servers running costs money

> Users can't spend real money to access this system so they need to convert their money to Geoffrey dollars to even access "web3" content.

You can actually access most web3 content without spending Geoffrey dollars, or US Dollars. If we're talking about public blockchains like Ethereum, it's all out in the open. By definition, it's a public ledger. IPFS data (which has nothing to do with crypto) is also very public.

> End users needed no more investment than their computer and Internet connection.

I guess some web3 websites require you to connect with a wallet, but downloading a browser extension doesn't seem very prohibitive.

What problem is web3 even trying to solve? As it stands today I can conduct commerce over the web, pay for access to content directly, or have free content that is advertising supported. Having to connect with a wallet and spend some specialized cryptocurrency to access a website provides what benefit? It seems like a solution chasing a problem like literally everything else crypto related.

I think the main class of problems it solves is it lets multiple applications, which may be developed by completely different entities at different times, share data with very strong guarantees.

So in the context of the Web Revivalist movement, how do you build stateful applications? It's great when individuals host their own DIY servers, but that doesn't really give you much stability. And in aggregate, it's even more difficult to build rich, stateful ecosystems of applications. How do you handle servers going down and APIs changing? Link rot for stateless websites is a hard enough as it is.

> I think the main class of problems it solves is it lets multiple applications, which may be developed by completely different entities at different times, share data with very strong guarantees.

It doesn't, though. That's bullshit. Sharing data between web applications is not some sort of grand challenge that required new technology to solve.

I'm not trying to swindle you. I'm trying to have an intelligent conversation. You don't need to call all my points bullshit :)

It depends on the level of guarantees you want for that data. If we're communicating, and you're okay with me changing my APIs, or even changing the data itself in ways we didn't previously agree upon, then you 100% don't need a blockchain. And if you don't have a lot of entities that need to coordinate on the data, then there might be an easier solution.

And introducing a blockchain to the equation changes nothing about that! It doesn't magically make applications interoperate with each other, or make them consume each other's data, or force them to maintain API compatibility. At most, it provides a shared, public location for them to store data -- and even that has some very awkward limitations associated with it.

A lot of the blockchain boosterism I see online comes from a place of assuming that the blockchain represents a solution to a problem, and trying to work backwards from there. Avoid that.

Maybe we're just talking past each other, but this is the entire point of a smart contract platform. I deploy code to it, and you now have a guarantee forever on the interface of that code, as well as its implementation logic. If I'm running the same code on my server and you're hitting my API, then I can change the interface, change the logic, or mutate the data in ways not specified by that code.

So really when I say "applications" I'm referring specifically to other smart contracts.

Smart contracts that cost money to run on a virtual machine with less power than a Raspberry Pi. In order to access a DApp someone needs to buy into some cryptocurrency, providing some early holder the ability to cash out. The DApp user also has to trust that the smart contract doesn't have a stupid bug that will drain their wallet. Oh and thanks to the low transaction rate of a blockchain that DApp might never execute or have a flash crash type spike in cost.

It's a bunch of rent seeking bullshit on top of what could just be a web API. Storage on a blockchain is stupid expensive so there's oracles everywhere pointing to off-chain resources with zero guarantee of availability.

Blockchains aren't adding any value. They're only extracting rent and adding friction.

Not bullshit, I've seen it happening already. One team set up http://hicetnunc.xyz/ to host niche NFT-s on the Tezos blockchain. Later they abandoned the whole project and meanwhile another team started to build a new platform on the same dataset. https://objkt.com/

This was pretty cool because all the Hic en nunc generated content over their existence is still accessible through Objkt.

Sharing data is of course possible since stone tablets, but doing it without any form of collaboration or approval is probably unique to crypto.

> Sharing data is of course possible since stone tablets, but doing it without any form of collaboration or approval is probably unique to crypto.

To the extent that crypto doesn’t require collaboration or approval, neither does Wikipedia. Or libraries.

Or, indeed, stone tablets — Pharaoh 𓃹𓈖𓇋𓋴 didn’t give anyone permission to go raid his tomb, and yet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unas

> Without miners there's no "crypto" and without payouts there's no miners. So "web3" can only exist where there's some financial incentive to run miners.

People have motivations besides financial incentive.

I've got a website. I'm paying for it. I make no money from it. The web exists.

A miner is just a spare computer in service of a network. Like a closet web server, or a seeder in a public torrent swarm.

A closet web server or torrent seeder can perform its task on its own. It only requires Internet access and some electricity and it's good to go. Unless you're paying by the byte to your ISP the costs of running the server is electricity costs.

A single miner can't do anything on its own so blockchain transactions require the aggregate waste of a whole network of miners to accomplish anything.

For DApps to run the network of miners runs them. They demand payment for doing so. You can run a web server in your closet free of charge, a DApp that doesn't offer incentive to miners will never run. If you foot the bill for some DApp it'll cost you orders of magnitude more than a Raspberry Pi in your closet.

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