TBD Web5
developer.tbd.website
developer.tbd.website
(I see centralization as more like clustering than a unifying of everything.)
Decentralization happens in the real world out of necessity, not because it's preferred. In fact, we centralize everything that is convenient to centralize because of its efficiency. And decentralization tends to occur at the boundaries of cooperation, where the problems lie.
So why would I want enforced decentralization when doing so would be inconvenient or inefficient?
It is possible to have hierarchical authority and decentralized decision-making work together over the long haul, to alleviate those obstacles, even if the two bump heads on occasion:
I would like to see one of these projects actually involving political scientists, sociologists, etc
Another concern is Google is well known for killing accounts because “computer says no”. Using their auth means risking losing all your accounts around the web.
That said, username, password, password manager is an effective decentralised system for authentication and has been the way since the 90s. Make a standard for programmatically changing a pssword and have more foss password managers and that would be good enough.
I mean, I guess it "solves" a problem. No one company can gain an economic advantage via the dossiers they keep on people. At the expense of... nobody having any privacy ever again.
Decentralization is not web3, it is not blockchain.
It is: Avoid having a central point of control in the system. Facebook centralizes both the servers, and the corporatation that controls the systems, for example.
10,000 blogs run on different servers by different people are decentralized.
Better example: email. Decentralized protocol and has the ability to keep information private for one person.
If identity is decentralized, individuals are free to create as many personas as they want. So you get privacy by creating one exclusive identity for each new relationship you have, and using that identity's "public key" to interact with the chain.
And if later on you'd like to present some type of "you" as a an aggregation of these identities, you can do it with a keybase-style system.
No, creating an email account is not "trivial". Either you have to run your own domain or you need to go through a fairly lengthy process with different email providers. An alternative would be something like Mozilla Relay, but the it is too new and too late to become a feasible alternative for identity management.
An example that I would accept (even though not really "trivial") would be the idea of creating alt accounts on reddit. If you look at those you'd see a lot more people creating separate accounts for different interests, and I could challenge you on the notion of how easy it would be to correlate accounts. Unless you work at reddit, I doubt that you can consistently identify accounts belonging to the same person by analyzing any type of patterns.
The only trivial system currently in use for identity generation is Hierarchical Deterministic wallets. One single passphrase can derive infinite key pairs. To get a new identity you literally press a button.
> All those identities are going to need funding
Nope. It only needs funding if you want to make some transaction on the Blockchain. If all you need is a signature (to login to a website, or decrypt a message or publish a software package on an repository), any crypto wallet can do that for you.
> there will be immutable, perpetual records tying all those identities together.
See point above, it is not true. Moreover, even the data that would make sense to be in a blockchain can be encrypted.
> web3 is about making people pay for every single thing they do.
Careful, your blind prejudice is showing.
Can you do me a favor? Could you stop with the strawmen and try to argue by considering the strongest and most charitable position from all the people that have been working and researching the space? If you have given 5 minutes of thought before barfing up your response, perhaps it would be more useful for both of us.
How that would apply to computing issues and the web isn't entirely clear, but it's likely worth considering as we head into a brave new world of everything controlled by Apple, Microsoft, or Google.
One example they posted was that Bob is a music lover. So he keeps his music on his web node. I don’t know how Bob is going to do that if it’s not painlessly easy. And it needs to be in some sort of schema-defined format, and to be honored by all decentralized apps. So Bob is going to put it in something called “MusicBase”, which now centralizes and owns all of the data + controls the schema.
A second aspect is that nothing seems to really stop the web from being decentralized. e.g. Scraping, APIs, and integrations. It’s just that orgs have learned that lock-in is advantageous and therefore found their way down that path.
Am I wrong about this?
biggest hugest problem though: no one cares, go ask your mom about the difference between web1, 2, and 3
The trade-off of the 2.0 era was (is): solving those required out-sourcing to private, pseudo-feudal institutions: Google/Facebook/etc in the first case, PayPal/Venmo/etc in the second. (One could argue that WWW did in fact have affordances to make this possible, in the form of cookies and SSL; but the point is, those affordances were insufficient on their own, requiring integration with centralized "cloud" providers, and in the case of value transfer, central banks as well.)
The alleged intent of "web3" is to address these shortcomings in a user-sovereign, platform-native way. No doubt, a huge number of projects operating in the space are glorified rug-pulls and Ponzi schemes; I don't blame skeptics at all, considering the history of moral hazards, perverse incentives, and blatant scams in crypto-economics. All the same, I wouldn't write off the category wholesale; there are some fascinating things happening in non-blockchain FOSS projects [0], voluntary creation of public goods [1], and community revivification of the Commons [2].
It's a pain to set up and use. Which is why nobody did.
If you're old enough to remember windows 2000
Cause you know, kernel_version.startsWith("9") and good old programming methodologies.
Code like this is all over the place, at least on GitHub [1] so it still seems plausible from a dev's perspective. The account on reddit that commented it (claiming to be a Microsoft dev) is deleted meanwhile, though :-/
While I agree that the underlying GetVersion() [2] and GetVersionEx() [3] and VerifyVersionInfo() [4] functions were returning "4.xx.yy" as a specific version number, most platforms and runtimes (including NSIS, and even python at the time) were using the platform string to compare whether or not they were on a supported Windows environment.
[1] https://github.com/search?q=startsWith("windows+9")&type=Cod...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20001020025217/http://msdn.micro...
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20001020032031/http://msdn.micro...
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20010112015900/http://msdn.micro...
Can you be more specific about "the platform string"? Where is that being loaded from?
The java code I saw back when this story first came out was looking at a string that the runtime itself generates, and the string it would have generated at the time was something like "NT (unknown version)".
I ended up spending some time playing with Fission Drive[2] and looking at their Guide[3], and just generally reading their dev[4] and marketing materials[5].
Anyway, looking at the Web5 site, it seem to strike some of the same notes.
I'm not affiliated with or participating in Fission or the Web5 projects in any way, but am working as part of a different team developing an open protocol for decentralized storage, which is focused on incentivized data durability.
[1] https://www.thestrangeloop.com/2022/a-distributed-file-syste...
[2] https://drive.fission.codes/
[3] https://guide.fission.codes/
1. A completely centralized data authority (in this case, Bitcoin). 2. User's running their own infrastructure.
"Put everything in one giant bucket, and make users 100% responsible for managing that bucket without any room for error" is not a workable path forward.
Developers may love this type of approach, and appreciate the advantages it would offer, but it's too much to ask of my 70 year old mom or 11 year old nephew.
An easier approach would be Passkeys and localStorage transferability between domains, or export feature on sites.
Like all the roll-your-own security success stories. =D
They say design —art, really…— trends tend to come back after a while (usually decades), and this is a cool example of early re-imaging the inception of computers.
Since the early days of mass internet, it seemed obvious to me that there was a need to "translate" into the digital world the legal principles that we enjoy in the physical world.
Concepts like the privacy of a "home", of "mail", the need for warrants to reach any private item, or general manners like not snooping too intimately over a customer in a shop (you may watch what they do, where they go etc., but probably not strip-search them to the bone, at least not all of them all the time).
That's why instead of going straight into tech, I studied law to have a shot at one day solving this problem, among others. We're talking constitutionalism, indeed property rights, and a slew of red lines to draw in digital terms (the sec community knows what "boundaries" mean as far as preserving the integrity of a person or system is concerned: big tech happily triple-violates those boundaries, not on occasion but as a business model and moral ethos).
The inception of "social networks" a decade later only confirmed my initial worries, especially given the psychological profile of their executive leaders (they should know, as I do, that being socially weird means you probably shouldn't decide how people get to live their social life. Just sayin').
The real battle is ahead, it'll be played in congresses and courts around the world come a generation of digital natives in power (my guess is millennials, but history is being stalled by the oldest generations alive-and-well in human history, as you all know; so the beginning of a "legal update" process that should already have been done by now is probably still a good ten-fifteen years away).
The tech part is trivial. There are 1,001 ways to implement privacy-abiding systems, should we choose to.
You are right. Web3 is just useless tokens and speculation, there aren't any actually useful projects.
My point is really that people say no token is useful but they only know about 10 out of 10,000. Imagine only knowing about 10 failed startups and then proudly claiming: the business model is broken!
Bitcoin also has its own limitations compared to smart contract platforms. And not everyone is cool with buying the bags of Michael Saylor and Nayib Bukele.
We have multiple social media platforms and multiple search engines. We can have many cryptocurrencies.
(web)(2)(web)(3) = (web)(5)
[SNIP]
(web) = (5/6)
Nailed it.
Er.. Or web = 0.
Hmm.
And I've already called dibs on Web8
> Web3 critic @jack and his team at @TBD54566975 are out with their alternative vision for a decentralized internet: Web5.
It's all based on bitcoin as the foundational timechain that periodically locks in state changes.
As bitcoin is the most immutable database to ever exist in human civilization, it only makes sense to use it rather than try to spin up some new network.
Web3 is proposed as building on a slew of disconnected, smaller blockchains with feeble security guarantees. There's a strong profit incentive to go this way because early investors can pump and dump the tokens on these alternative blockchains. But it's fragile and doesn't scale well because it's so disorganized.
Web5 is proposed as building non-blockchain decentralized and censorship resistant systems, using the extremely secure bitcoin blockchain as it's only foundation. They're not trying to put absolutely all data on the base blockchain, which is incredibly inefficient and will never scale. They aren't issuing new tokens that insiders have privileged early access to.
Web3 is a scam. Web5 is an attempt at the real deal.
> The term "Web3" was coined by Polkadot founder and Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood in 2014, referring to a "decentralized online ecosystem based on blockchain."[1] In 2021, the idea of Web3 gained popularity.[21] Particular interest spiked toward the end of 2021, largely due to interest from cryptocurrency enthusiasts and investments from high-profile technologists and companies.[6][7] Executives from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz traveled to Washington, D.C. in October 2021 to lobby for the idea as a potential solution to questions about regulation of the web, with which policymakers have been grappling.[22]
Edit: I think this discussion is quickly losing it's value and turning into a debate about definitions. But overall I'm just not sure if I agree with Jack Dorsey alienating the entire Web3 community when his vision aligns so closely. I understand being put off by the more scammy parts of crypto, and that is something that crypto has to address, but the majority of Web3 is full of developers honestly working towards decentralization and personal ownership. If Jack Dorsey and Web5 wants to cut themselves away from that community, I guess we'll see how it works out for them
If the companies making money (Google, FB, etc) on users Data aren't making money, then we have a Catch-22. Users can have their data, but there are no viable services around to be profitable enough to operate.
Jack is making a big deal out of something b/c he's trying to make a legacy beyond the dumpster fire that is Twitter, or a fancy looking cash register system.