But, aren't you folks web2? | Hacker News Reader

But, aren't you folks web2?

nadh.in

143 pointspawanrawal179 comments

For the first time my anger over crypto moves into genuine concern.

Is an entire generation of young people experiencing a kind of "pokemonisation" of crypto well into early adulthood?

In other words, is a generation of 20-somethings wasting the better part of that decade on this tech, in these scams?

If so, this feels new (?). We're not talking about the chain-letter crazes of the 20s/30s, the housewife pyramid schemes of the 60/70s, the ponzi schemes of traditional finance.

We're talking about a "pyrimidization" of technical skill acquisition itself, wherein we dont teach classical mechanics -- that's too "physics2" -- but crypto-mechanics which solves no problems of the prior, and charges.

If this is happening the issues around crypto are perhaps much more severe than I, at least, initially thought. Yes, $100bn will be lost in a vareity of scams deposited, in the end, into the accounts of charlatans, children and gurus. BUT, meh, so it goes.

But a cultural take-over of the technical skill space by a crypto religion is far more series and needs addressing ASAP. Someone needs to explain to the developing generation that this isnt the future.

I hang out in spaces for people entering tech, and I see the crypto advocates and grifters creeping in and around these spaces. It's extremely successful. Lately, I'm even seeing crypto grifts specifically aimed at people entering tech from non-traditional backgrounds, weaponising the language and discourse of diversity and empowerment to trick them into not just buying into the grift, but code the grift for them.

For someone entering tech, everything they see is new and exciting and mystical and hard to understand. Without prior context, it's hard to see why overengineered crypto nonsense is different from all the other overengineered nonsense they're learning about at break-neck speed. For many of them, the only reason to enter tech to begin with is to earn a decent living. They lack the technical background to understand if what they're being paid to build is a grift or a legitimate business, and in the current market, it's increasingly in their best interest to not understand the difference.

I believe we lost when we collectively accepted "software is eating the world" as an inevitable positive maxim of our reality. In retrospect, it seems self-evident that the end stage of this ideology-slash-self-fulfilling-prophecy is a socially-legitimized software-based "value" chain that ingests raw wealth and produces absolutely nothing of value.

I wouldn't really worry about people with a college degree. At one point or another you remember you classes on distributed systems and you realize the entire space is bullshit. I agree we'll see bootcamp grads and other people from non-traditional backgrounds get burned but it also gives them opportunities that wouldn't exist otherwise, so I'm not sure it's a net negative overall.

The much bigger issue lies within politicians, the media and the general public who still believe we should let the scams happen for the sake of innovation, despite zero evidence thereof. Sadly I think we need a few more catastrophic events like FTX before people understand there's nothing to salvage.

I'm not so sure about this. I don't have a college degree, but I don't think the issue with crypto/defi/web3 is a lack of understanding of distributed systems or cryptography. I'd say they're doing alright in the purely technical aspects, although I'm nowhere near an expert.

Rather, I think the fault lies in their understanding of economic and societal concepts: money, debt, what it means to own something. I think that their vision of the future, where every human interaction is mediated by a pseudo-economy, is fundamentally flawed, and that trust is a societal issue which cannot be solved by technology alone.

You need a reasonably good understanding of the technology to know what it does, what it cannot do, and most importantly, where it's useless.

Even if you know very little about the business domain and all its social/societal/political aspects (and I perfectly agree, most of these problems don't have technical solutions) the space is filled with charlatans who don't even understand what a blockchain is.

You'll see plenty of people pushing blockchains where they literally want a centralized DB with a PKI, since they don't need (and don't want) a trustless permissionless system.

You also see blockchains pushed in situations where the weakest link is the human interface that inputs data. Yet the oracle problem gets swept under the rug.

Finally you see vaporware projects that go against 40+ years of research in distributed consensus.

I need to give credit to Bitcoin maximalists, some of them are very vocal about the non-sensical blockchain solutionism.

I studied CS and worked at 2 FAANGS before joining Coinbase in 2020 then a blockchain layer 1 a couple of months ago. Coinbase made me multiple 7 figures on IPO day and even with the crypto crash my current job has a cash salary of $350k and ~$200k in tokens.

Yes the tech is not usually innovative or groundbreaking but nothing I worked on in my web2 career or college was cutting edge either.

When looking for a new job this year I got a l6 offer at meta, senior at apple, staff cloudflare and a couple of startup offers. Not only was the base pay significantly less, the tech and companies were boring, most required in office attendance.

So I went with a blockchain company because they were chill, fully distributed, pay was high, and work interesting (we use a lot of cryptography, I have 2 phd’s on my team).

Am I a cryptobro believing this field is the future? No it could all go to zero. Has crypto allowed me to retire and make more money than nearly every colleague in university and FAANGS? Yes.

In other words, “yes I’m helping grifters scam people, but it sure pays well.”

Pretty much. After watching the Sackler family escape with billions despite destroying America with opioids I’ve come to the conclusion that America is garbage and there is nothing important here except money. I’m securing my family and their future, nothing else.

But yeah crypto grifts sucks but my college roommate now works at Goldman Sachs, an old university TA works Exxon offshore drilling, a couple of classmates are African logistics specialists (acquire land at ANY cost including literally lying to poor peasants to sign over property) at Bain. Is there a ranking for better or worse?

All of capitalism and by extension society is rotten to the core.

This reminds me of the speech in The West Wing, where the president explains his reasoning for accepting the censure.

No one takes responsibility for anything anymore. We foster, we obfuscate, we rationalise. "Everybody does it." That's what we say. So we come to occupy a moral safe house where everyone's to blame so no one's guilty. I'm to blame. I was wrong.

If at the end of the day you can sleep well, more power to you! But things will continue to decline if everyone's only looking out for themselves.

I work in crypto (for a company that does market making) and I don't think I'm doing philanthropic work, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking it's any less ethical than working for MANGA.

Am I a cryptobro believing this field is the future? No it could all go to zero//

why it could all go to zero ?

anyone can say all these things

But Yao42 works at Coinbase, and I want to know his point of view on why he says this.

> I wouldn't really worry about people with a college degree. At one point or another you remember you classes on distributed systems and you realize the entire space is bullshit.

The number of people in the space with degrees from major CS programs suggests that we shouldn’t be confident about that. Smart people can talk themselves into a lot when there’s the prospect of being rich, and the poor architectural fit of blockchains for most application led means there are plenty of distracting hard problems to work on rather than question the entire system.

This number is relatively small in my experience. I work on data intensive applications so I guess my department shows some selection bias, but I have yet to run into an intern or junior who thinks blockchains are a solution to anything worth solving.

Are you sure that college degrees inoculate people against bullshit?

Of course not, I've seen crackpots at every level, especially PhDs/postdocs/professors when their lab's funding depended on exploring bullshit ideas.

However I see a strong negative correlation between CS literacy and gullibility regarding blockchains and web3. HN is a good illustration of this, crypto-cultists are always surprised so many people on here aren't buying any of it.

For what it counts, some crypto-grifters held a Bitcoin (ca. 2016, so before other crypto entered any form of public conversation if you weren't "too terminally online") presentation for an outside speaker thing at my uni. Out of general curiosity for the concept and a basic understanding of the technology, I went there.

It... frankly came across more like a cult induction. The speaker was straight up incoherent and seemed to advocate for some weird idea of bitcoin maximalism where in the future everything we did was about Bitcoin and how it's totally the future and babbled on about how we should all work at a crypto company when we graduated. I remember walking away more confused about the technology than when I entered and with a complete disinterest to work for that sort of company in the future, although some fellow students apparently really got into it, which is in retrospect kinda terrifying.

By comparison, the other speakers were much more interesting and useful, having a basic explanation about the design process of mobile development, showing the basics of how XSS works and talking about some of the challenges and technologies used when working with Big Data.

Very, very, very few people work in the cryptography or even blockchain aspects of any element of web3.

The overwhelming majority of dev in the space looks exactly like web2. You whip up an Express/Lambda/whatever API backend that (at it's most "blockchain") uses a library like web3.js to talk to a blockchain node from a commercial service provider via HTTP or websockets. More likely than that you go further up the stack and use a really easy to consume library[0] from your API provider and don't even really get exposed to the nitty-gritty blockchain methods exposed by a lower level library like web3.js. Literally import lib, provide your API key, and do things like:

  const nftsForOwner = await alchemy.nft.getNftsForOwner("0xshah.eth");

I find it fascinating to meet devs in the space who say they're a "blockchain developer" and after a tiny amount of conversation you realize there's no difference whatsoever between what they're doing and wiring up a backend + frontend solution to something like Square (or whatever).

So I agree with you completely - when these crypto companies or whatever start laying off left and right you can be certain the vast majority of the devs in the space can use what they've learned anywhere.

[0] - https://docs.alchemy.com/reference/nft-api-quickstart#alchem...

My company put me on a "web3" project recently, and as someone who has done some kind of web development, at least at the hobby level, since 1999, I can tell you that there's quite a bit of difference with web3. I think the web skills from a decade ago translate better to web-dev today than web-dev today translates to web3 development. With web3 you have to consider the different ways to get on-chain data, and the state is all on the blockchain. Testing is a nightmare and the tooling around development and deployment are still immature.

And that's before even getting to solidity or other languages you use for the "backend"

Sounds like you've been at this since I have (mid-late 90s as well)!

I somewhat agree with you on the state of tooling compared to web dev today but I'm not sure it matters or is terribly relevant to the point OP is making. I've been in this space one way or another for five years so prepare for a (somewhat anecdotal) "dump" that you may (hopefully) find useful for the new project that you've been put on. You mentioned Solidity so let's assume an EVM compatible chain and ecosystem.

At this point I'd call anything actually on chain the "back backend". Of course Solidity is the smart contract language but due to costs, speed, etc of the chains themselves the data is all over the place... That's how we've ended up with things like The Graph[0], Ceramic[1], etc. As you've likely already experienced interacting with the chains themselves in any capacity is remarkably creaky hence the plethora of somewhat ironically centralized API providers and solutions with many layers of insane amounts of code and backend infrastructure to make things actually work for anything beyond a toy (like the various Alchemy APIs I provided an example of). This is before you get into anything like IPFS, Filecoin, etc but once again the typical interaction with these is via heavily abstracted libraries and HTTP gateways that do their best to look like any other web2 service.

Smart contracts, by their nature, are rarely written and rarely deployed. If you look at some of the biggest "apps" in the space smart contracts represent a tiny fraction of the amount of dev work compared to the overall solution. Take OpenSea (as one example) they've deployed a smart contract twice in five years of operation AFAIK. If you look at their frontend and API docs it becomes clear really quickly they've done a lot more work in areas that at the risk of deploying "No true Scotsman" I would say at least 95% of the dev work in web3 is effectively web2.

Now that we're talking about smart contracts, the stakes are so high there is actually a fairly robust amount of tooling IMHO. Maybe not robust compared to the state of 30 years of web development but between OpenZeppelin[2], Hardhat[3], Truffle[4], etc there's a lot out there. From everything I've seen in the space over half my decade by the time you import a bunch of OpenZeppelin contracts there's almost always very little Solidity left to be written. As traditional cryptography devs have learned "writing your own crypto" is almost always a really bad idea.

If you were to look at LOC for anything in the web3 space my original point is backup up by the data. Metmask is used by 30 million people and it's all web dev (backed by an Ethereum JSON-RPC[5] interface hosted by MetaMask sponsor Infura by default)... The rest of any user facing application is your frontend pulling in ethers[6] and MAYBE a bog standard web2 service/microservice backend. Then you're off to the races. There is SQL, NoSQL, etc all over the place in web3.

From my personal experience and everything I've seen I'd venture to guess that maybe 1/50 devs in the space ever touches Solidity (likely much higher). Everyone else is doing what they've always done by reading the docs for whatever JS/TS libraries they're using. I've personally worked on many projects where web2 devs became "web3/blockchain devs" in an hour - to my original point of saying you're a "blockchain developer" because you're using ethers is really funny to me. My overall point being (and to assuage the concerns of OP) the vast majority of devs that start in web3 feel right at home in web2 and vice-versa.

I know exactly one dev who I would call a serious "blockchain developer". They came from a web dev background and they're all in on Cardano which meant picking up Haskell (which would send most web devs running for the hills). If a dev were to start with Cardano + Haskell I have no idea where they would end up if they left "blockchain development".

[0] - https://thegraph.com/en/

[1] - https://ceramic.network/

[2] - https://www.openzeppelin.com/contracts

[3] - https://hardhat.org/

[4] - https://trufflesuite.com/

[5] - https://geth.ethereum.org/docs/rpc/server

[6] - https://www.npmjs.com/package/ethers

Thanks for the very in-depth reply. I've only been doing it for ~5 months now, so definitely consider myself a "junior" in the space.

What we've done is fork a popular defi protocol (think AAVE/Compound) that consists of >10 core contracts, plus additional for markets, and made a few changes. Then deployed a few custom contracts as well. I've written ~100-200 lines of solidity that are on mainnet now, the rest, as you say, are snapping together Openzeppelin legos.

We're not using The Graph for our frontend (yet) though I think we want to in the future.

Our current stack is Hardhat (with ethers) for both deployment and testing, and react + typescript + react-query on the frontend.

We're able to get contracts deployed on a hardhat node or goerli pretty quickly now, but, for example, if deploying to goerli, the 200-300 transactions for the deployment process take ~1 hour to send through, so it's really just where we deploy right before we release (in addition to testing on a fork of mainnet).

The tooling here is all kind of new though. Example: if I want to fork mainnet, test an upgrade, and then test frontend changes which use that forked net, as an account which I don't have the key for, I just.. can't right now. Hardhat lets you impersonate accounts which is amazing, but no frontend wallet lets you send unsigned transactions using an impersonated account (which effectively uses provider-managed signers).

The "best" way I found to do this is forking an open-source browser wallet extension, hacking it a bit, and hardcoding the account I want to send the unsigned transaction for, to the hardcoded local RPC endpoint, which requires an extension reload, and is still finicky.

Eventually I think the tooling will get there, but for right now it still seems fairly immature to me.

When I graduated, mobile was the big thing.

That's old now.

So, what to do to make a name for you?

What big new field is there where you don't have to compete with people that have 10 times the experience than you?

Independently of what you think web3 might solve or doesn't solve, it's still just programming. Someone learning cryptography and coding will get a job in other places.

I'm not sure what you mean by "make a name". As a dev I never needed to make a name, I just acquired skills that were useful for businesses (or my own business) through building applications. How you compete with people with 10 times the experience than you is through a lower salary, as always.

I agree that "web3" skills are programming, and some of it is actually quite challenging and involves more computer science than your average web or mobile app, so I don't think web3 programmers are lost by any stretch of the imagination, even if that ecosystem collapses, they will be reabsorbed into the broader software industry.

React/javascript is still a moving target, so a junior will easily catch up with someone with 10 times more experience

I'm beginning to feel the same about mobile, though I think the rate of change in iOS is at least slower than the memes[0] about JS-framework-of-the-week.

I started iOS development with ObjC with manual reference counting; saw big and helpful changes with literal syntax and subscripting, ARC, and storyboards; I switched to Swift when it got OK; and now everyone seems to be going "storyboards and MVC are lame grandpa ways of doing things, let's use reactive asynchronous stuff everywhere!"

I'm starting to feel old, and it's not just the half dozen individual grey hairs.

[0] in the original sense of the word

Yea, nobody is using phones anymore... LMAO it's all figured out

Like how in 1995 desktop PC applications were all figured out. The web all figured out.

That's a hopeful upside, that, say an 18 is learning data technology, programming etc. via crypto.

My concern is whether that's what they are learning; too early to tell, of course.

One thing I'm also thinking is that crypto functions like "wokeism" in the sense it seems a parallel right-wing version of the same kind of cultural reformation.

At the same time large retail biz profess their diversity credentials, their heads of research explain how crypto is on some timeline. At the same time a 20yo engages in activism for X, another engages in crypto for Y.

Do we need to "end the patriachy" or "put metriocracy on the blockchain" ?

My concern isnt just the skills issue, but also, everything bound up in the culture around it.

I think we're seeing Tech get to a level of cultural prestige that invites on-mass young-buyin, and mass cultish movements. No doubt finance experienced similar in the 80s.

But, I think, as finance people eventually learned to inculcate some level of cultural scepticism; tech seems it has yet to do so.

In otherwords, we're unprepared for this coming's generation having bought into a tech-culture landscape which is composed of scams.

Not saying I disagree with your concerns.

But didn't Banksy say something similar about young artists being funneled into the for-profit corporate propaganda machine, trading their art skills and unique perspective (and expression of their interpretations) of the world at large, for a corporate paycheck?

“The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.”

Seems like every generation will need to battle with selling out, no matter the industry or era. But that being said, the web3 stuff feels pointedly scammier than even mobile/ social (which critics skewered even as it was burgeoning/ proliferating when it did, and people still rightfully criticize it today).

–––

edited for posting wrong Banksy quote

> For the first time my anger over crypto moves into genuine concern. Is an entire generation of young people experiencing a kind of "pokemonisation" of crypto well into early adulthood? In other words, is a generation of 20-somethings wasting the better part of that decade on this tech, in these scams?

I'm a middle aged developer who spent pandemic time in "web3" (ugh) dev discords and stuff.

There are scammers, sure, but mostly there are a lot of young people who are learning tech in an environment that feels fun and rebellious and honestly a little like the old internet in a way. There is a lot more happening than just people building magic ponzi boxes. It's hard to feel anything but positive about seeing people excited about learning JS or OCaml or Python or Processing.

That said, truly don't understand "web3" and this obsession with things being on a blockchain. It feels like people don't know their Internet history and also I don't understand why DWeb/indie web and web3/blockchain people are fighting since I think they'd be stronger together.

Personally, I think the Fediverse and IndieWeb are in a much stronger position. Key thing to watch: does Mastodon manage to ride the wave created by the Twitter collapse and become a socially relevant force? Even in some small communities?

I'm much more bullish on small communities talking to each other with open source software (Fediverse) than magical crypto schemes that require deep economic expertise to design properly (which nobody on the project ever has).

I do think Podcasting 2.0 is a neat idea. There's room in this world for micropayments. I just don't want it to be pervasive and I'm exhausted from the stream of scams.

I had an interesting discussion with a young "developer" studying in "cyber-security". The guy was clearly out of his depth, and had a little idea about Internet security themes. He was struggling about finding an internship. I told him the market is still hot for tech people and security in general. His answer? "It's hard for me because I'm a person of color". I was a bit shocked there. He was just a bit browner than me, and far from black.

It's going to be an interesting generation...

"person of color" vs "white" isn't the same as colorism, it also includes other racial markers. Melania Trump is darks than many "black" "people of color".

What the hell is this comment? And top comment on HN, what?

If the technology is useful it will be used. If it's not it will die on its own. You can NOT police technical skill.

What kind of mentality is this...?

What technology? What use? The piece starts with a relatively straightforward value play being cast as not web3 enough. What even does that mean? And we are not supposed to talk about it, just let it crash around us like a wave?

I am directly addressing

>But a cultural take-over of the technical skill space by a crypto religion is far more series and needs addressing ASAP.

The technology is blockchain, and the skills are writing/reading smart contracts, developing websites making use of Wallets, and everything else that anti-crypto folks keep screaming "IT'S USELESS, USE POSTGRES INSTEAD". If that is true, then the ecosystem will die on its own.

The fact that Web3 is being banged on ad-nauseam as a marketing buzzword, muddying the waters to the point that no one is sure what the hell Web3 even is, does not undermine the technological foundation, which is blockchain. Again, if blockchain IS useless then it will die off, but ... Bitcoin is still going strong a decade in, despite all the bullshit that surrounds it, and is likely impossible to kill off completely. That alone has merit, IMO. Of course, you are free to disagree.

You can talk about it, but actively advocating that "cultural take-over of the technical skill space" needs "addressing" is complete and utter insanity. Blind hatred. You people have become as religious as crypto folks, except in the opposite direction. I've seen people advocating about blacklisting people who worked in crypto/web3 as well.

You are completely losing it. I am honestly worried.

People criticize technology all the time on this forum. Is this pointless because useless technology would die on its own anyway? Maybe eventually, but only after wasting resources.

I whole fully agree with you. That being said, this last sentence…

> Someone needs to explain to the developing generation that this isnt the future.

I think crypto is much more like pokemon than "the internet". Much more like "coin collectables" of the 80s, than financial derivatives.

It's an attempt to destabalise domestic and international economic and financial systems that if ever even got close to being useful, would immediately be shut down.

The moment I can walk into a random shop and buy a chocolate bar with cyrpto is the moment the whole system will collapse.

The more people go work on cryptocurrency, the less competition for other tech jobs.

Capitalism means that the best and the brightest are working on what makes the most money not on what society needs.

However one should not overstate sociopaths. Lots of people are still going into healthcare or teaching because there's more to life than money.

Healthcare and teaching are seeing severe attrition.

The tragic irony is that many of those teachers’ pension funds were the very ones making it lucrative for sociopaths to build crypto companies by blindly throwing money at them.

I definitely get the whole “web3” is useless argument for a lot of the cases it’s been proposed but like any new technology I think it may find valid use cases somewhere down the line.

One of the few uses for which I am interested is “web3” identity - being able to keep ownership of my identity/credentials. Using, for example, a wallet to sign a message proving I own an address, I can build apps that don’t require me to store any passwords (and not rely on a “trusted” 3rd party to do so either). My app can just store the wallet address (like a username).

To build on this, if that wallet has data associated with it (“assets” it holds) for example, an ENS name, my app can pull that data directly from the contract onchain - instead of showing a public key I can show the users chosen display name, avatar, etc

I’m an old school dev and I wrote off “crypto” for many of the same reasons a lot of you have stated but I have realized there are some interesting cases that could emerge from its usage. Zk (zero knowledge proofs) as a means of reducing the amount of PII data that needs to be exposed to random parties also seems to have some good use cases.

Alas “value” aka money being associated with the usage/tokens makes the landscape much harder to navigate and much more prone to exploitation.

I dont think web3 has really made any improvements in this area, so you got to ask what's different now.

Using public keys to log into things has been forever. It caught on with ssh (1995), it failed with client-certificates aka mTLS (1996).

Zero knowledge proofs also havent really caught on. And its not a new idea. The Fiat–Shamir heuristic is from 1986.

Anyways, i dont really think web3 has added anything. Most of these technologies are at least 25 years old and have not caught on. If it hasn't happened yet, i dont think crypto will change that.

Key-as-identity has a lot of problems and I don't think that model really works for most use cases. On the other hand I'm optimistic about being able to rework identity in the spirit what poster above describes. I've been around long enough to see the long arcs of experimentation and refinement that happen before technologies reach adoption. As an example widespread adoption of end-to-end encrypted messaging, biometrics, and hardware roots of trust took a while but that's here now in ordinary consumer gear. I could have looked at low adoption of PGPfone and and drawn the conclusion that encrypted video would never work but that would have been wrong.

> Zero knowledge proofs also havent really caught on. And its not a new idea. The Fiat–Shamir heuristic is from 1986.

There's been a lot of advances in recent years in ZKPs, accompanied by a lot more interest. Fiat-Shamir is still used to turn interactive proofs into non-interactive, but the state of the art is far beyond just doing that. zk-SNARKs are less than 10 years old, zk-VMs are becoming more common, and the ZPrize competition is yielding some big steps forward in implementation performance. Probably blockchain applications are a major reason for recent increased interest and commercial R&D, even though that's not where the academics see the main applications.

If you're interested, the zkproof.org conference is currently still going, and the sessions can be watched live:

https://zkproof.org/events/workshop5/

I like that concept of crypto being used for identity purposes. Sure there have been solutions like that for a long time but the difference here could be a much simpler way for average users to jump in. The technical knowledge needed to generate pgp or ssh keys is much higher than using a web UI to create a crypto wallet. A crypto wallet does sound similar to existing solutions like Open ID Connect but I think the difference here is a crypto wallet is decentralized vs. OAuth based flows typically have trusted secrets between centralized systems. A decentralized way to verify identity/avatar/username could be useful for some industries, possibly avoiding having to build user identity mgmt into a small/indie software project.

I think web3 will hold some promise if/when technical people develop some standards around using it vs. the marketing/finance folks pumping whatever scheme they are attempting.

> The technical knowledge needed to generate pgp or ssh keys is much higher than using a web UI to create a crypto wallet.

Aren’t they all essentially the same? As in you can do any of those using the same library?

The main problem is nobody is throwing big piles of money at a ssh keygen API but a wallet generator, who do I make the check out to?

I think the problem with web3 as identity is that there's... no real advantages to this.

Public and private keys have existed before if you want to "own" your identification; you can run gpg or ssh on your computer right now, generate a public and private key pair and all you need to do to now verify that a message is from you is to send that public key to someone else and let them verify a message you signed with the private key.

Assuming your key has enough bits in it when generated, it probably won't be broken until long after you're dead or you'll have (more likely) moved on to a new pub/privkey pair.

You don't need a blockchain for that, it just... works. We don't generally do it that way because it's a fairly cumbersome user experience for people (making the PGP signing experience better is where imo real gains can be made if you want to focus on this area of identity verification, it's absurd that no modern email client for example has made this easier), but for those cases where you really need to 100% confirm that it's you, pub/privkey works just fine as a system.

Heck, you can even generate a pretty nice avatar if you wanted. All that avatar is in the end is a serialization function to display it as an image. Public key blocks are ugly, but when you for example look at SSH, randomart works just fine for validating that the keys match visually and nicknaming SSH keys is as old as time. Randomart maybe is output only a programmer could love, but a visualization of a key isn't new and there's probably some innovation to be had by improving the experience of sharing those keys and actually having randomart resemble actual art.

There's also the fact that... most people don't require that amount of no trust. I can think of a few niche cases where absolute zero trust verification is handy, but when you get to those cases the absolute last thing you want is for their existence to be publicly readable from a blockchain, which will always be the ball and chain on the leg of "web3 technology" (which as the post notes, there's barely any explanation as to what that actually means since it's just a mishmash of technology that seems to be "existing technology but we strapped it to a blockchain for some reason").

So even when it comes to identity verification, it's still mostly just... snake oil really. It's making and pushing around a cart on square wheels while huffing at those with round wheels for "not getting it".

I think the OP is missing what those kids actually desire when they say web3 - self sovereignty.

They grew up in an era where a few big tech companies control most of their experiences, and you're completely locked into them unable to escape even if you hate the platform because that's where all your friends are.

Web3 is where you can have one digital login owned by you that you can use for many services and you can easily move somewhere else if that service turns evil.

It's hosting your own website vs having a page on Facebook. It's being able to trade any digital with friends without having to be locked into one platform. It's having all your likes and personal preferences carry with you between services.

We had more of this in the early days of the internet, but people just graduating don't remember this, they just know an internet of walled gardens they want to escape from.

I think that's a valid concern, but it's not clear that the web3 companies are even trying to solve it rather than replace other companies. We've seen so many times over where the “decentralized” system relies on a handful of companies to function and they always seem to be pushing their own site rather than you hosting yourself.

Maybe a new college grad doesn't remember the 2010s but almost all of these companies have executives, board members, and VCs who were there at the time, and I think it's telling that you very rarely hear anyone discuss what lead to so much centralization and the systems they propose are clearly going to suffer from the same problems if anyone starts using them seriously. This isn't a novel observation or especially hard to find good discussions about so it's hard to avoid the conclusion that they're not looking for it because there's no profit in it.

> I think the OP is missing what those kids actually desire when they say web3 - self sovereignty.

You might be right, but do they actually achieve this?

> It's hosting your own website vs having a page on Facebook.

I mean, running your own E-Mail or Mastodon instance is self sourvereignty in the way you propose. But I've never heard anyone claiming this to be web3.

They're presumably building a new company so it's about the direction that company is taking, not what already exists.

Is the company trying to lock users into their platform? Or are they building open APIs, allowing users to easily export data, integrating with open technologies (ENS, Arweave, Login with Web3 etc)?

Everything you mention is just adding crypto scam to existing tech. We have OAuth, we don't need "Login with Web3." We have DNS, we don't need to introduce Ethereum to it.

I think this is why the whole web3 things seems like a scam to me, proponents are telling people such things didn't exist before FB et al, and that's just BS.

I suspect it's more about monetising every little interaction on the web, every click will cost you a penny, micro transactions taken to the next level.

Self-sovereignty was web 1; you could run your own webserver and e-mail server from a broom closet.

Web 2 was the walled gardens, in part due to facebook et al, but in a big part due to min/maxing and malicious actors; spam e-mail is why you can't run your own mail server anymore, SEO spam and the simple fact the internet is infinitely larger now than in the 90's is why your homepage isn't found anymore.

Web 3 is billionaires and would-be billionaires trying to make (fiat) money from solved problems. It may be decentralized (in theory), but that doesn't make it self-owned & operated. You can't run your own blockchain (it requires participants after all), so you have to join someone else's (walled garden) blockchain. In theory you can convert fiat to crypto and vice-versa without a middle person, but in practice you need an exchange.

In theory, web 3 is the great emancipation from everything, in practice it isn't.

But escaping the walled garden shouldn't be a synonym for cryptocurrency scams.

As far as I know, you don't need cryptocurrency to participate.

Lens Protocol, a web3 social media platform, just requires you to have a wallet.

Huddle01, a web3 Zoom alternative, even works without a wallet.

Radicle, a web3 GitHub alternative, works without a wallet.

IPFS, works without a wallet.

And gasless transactions are a huge topic these days. Improving UX and onboarding to web3 by lowering the barrier.

Self-sovereignty is an excellent goal, and it is true that something is lost when all of us use the same email service providers and social media sites and so on.

Web3 is unnecessary to achieve self-sovereignty, and is not going to help with any of that. It's a money-hungry fever dream by crypto maximalists and would damage the open web as much as the current status quo, while not actually fixing the current issues.

Yes that's the lie web3 sells, just like the perfume beer company and the company says drinking their swill will make women want to have sex with them.

Isn't it happening all the time? Web3, crypto, AI, kubernetes, microservices, docker, server side rendering, SPA, react, graphql, backend in frontend, DevOps, DevSecOps, fullstack, mongodb, new features in mongodb that mimic sql, Restful, mobile, django/rails, agile, kanban. Some of them make sense, some of them make sense for some of the people, some will be forgotten from history. And those forgotten, will reemerge as a newfoundland

I understand this kind of reply, which seems very common. With AI, people say, "That's just what we do!" --- and likewise: No.

I've always really struggled with this category of reply, and I'm trying to figure out why.

I think it's because I can sense that some ideological battle has been lost, that the person giving this reply has bought into the (charitably) "hype framing" that disingenuous advocates have set up.

It's a very exhausting kind of reply, since it takes forever to reply to. You have to explain all the ways X isnt like Y. And to a person who has quickly adopted a pathological framing of the issue.

No really, because it's easy to point to many useful applications of AI, microservices, docker, SSR, SPA, react, GraphQL, etc. Even crypto. On the other hand, web3 applications virtually don't exist, so it's quite something to pretend that your application should be web3 as many now do.

Some of these things are not like the others, Some of these things just doesn't belong

As a Newfoundlander and developer, I think we have enough Newfoundlands already :)

This blog post already puts way more thought into whatever "web3" is than web3 advocates do. Everything must be web3 because web3 is cool, it's the future, it's got electrolytes, it's what plants crave. It's a meaningless cargo cult.

It's a bit of a straw man.

Just because web3 includes many things, doesn't mean it's meaningless. Even if it makes the term harder to grasp for outsiders.

I would be wary of groups that rely in a strong in-group/out-group separation, where the outsiders can't understand the truthfulness and inherent value of an ideology relying on a complex web of interrelated concepts, while the insiders, who are deeply invested in both time and money into this ideology, treat it as self-evident.

I'm way ahead of you people, I'm already on web4. web4 is a revolutionary technological paradigm that will completely change not only people's use of technology, but entire societies, unlock better forms of governance and agriculture and make human dignity and basic income an immutable right.

Join me in creating tomorrow.

I just rewrote web4 in Rust. Come join me instead.

My experience has been the opposite, last year a speaker came in (some high up business guy, can't remember the details) and briefly mentioned blockchain. He did a show of hands for who had a favourable opinion on blockchain and no one put there hand up (20-30 people).

This was in a GameDev club at university in the UK. I wonder where all these web3 advocates are coming from, maybe it is just a loud minority, or maybe that fact that they're game developers makes a difference.

Game devs definitely are much more aware that their consumers don't buy into the crypto scam. I've seen way too many NFT and crypto bros in the UI/UX/Design field.

Yes, there are a lot of scams in the crypto space.

Yes, the terminology and hype make the SOA craze look like a toddler's tea.

However, don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Some of the underlying technologies are valid, valuable, and might just play into whatever is in the future of the networking.

The technologies I am talking about are:

* Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs)

* Distributed Ledgers

* Abstracted distributed filesystems such as IPFS, BlockSpace,etc.

* Prediction markets with virtual currencies (I like virtual currency over cryptocurrency, though I know no one else uses it)

* Decentralized identifiers

* Decentralized and distributed communication

* Smart contracts

* Blockchains (for things other than a financial bank)

Many of these are already in use. A PGP key is a decentralized identifier, for example, as is a self-signed certificate you load into your browser for TLS auth. WebAuthn and friends are the next step for those types of identifiers.

Torrents and other file sharing systems have used DHTs and merkle trees before Bitcoin even existed. XMPP had decentralized and distributed communication.

I'd argue that smart contracts are new, though they're not inherently linked to currencies necessarily. I don't know any practical use for them outside the cryptocurrency/NFT/blockchain speculation niche, but they're a cool invention.

The prediction market that these new currencies have created are little more than the latest version of a tulip mania.

These monetized cryptography projects often manage to combine very cool software design elements but they rarely come up with something new that's useful outside of their business model.

> I'd argue that smart contracts are new, though they're not inherently linked to currencies necessarily. I don't know any practical use for them outside the cryptocurrency/NFT/blockchain speculation niche, but they're a cool invention.

I think the fuddy-duddy web2 folks call those lambda cloud functions or something like that.

Except in web3 land you pay per execution while the web2 peeps charge per, umm, execution?

Though they’re obviously different because the smart contracts can change the state of the blockchain while lambda functions can only modify their own database.

And a smart contract can act as an oracle to the outside world while lambdas are restricted to web2 APIs.

Most of those, and all of the useful ones, aren’t cryptocurrency technologies and were in use beforehand. When cryptocurrency salespeople complain about negativity it is in many cases because they’re pitching a system which shows no awareness of the problems encountered a decade or more before.

Now, maybe there’s some value in a prediction market which uses its own currency but that’s again not exactly revolutionary and a bit limited to build an entire field on.

>> "Now, web3 is a broad wildcard term that seems to revolve around a large number of concepts including decentralisation, self-sovereignty, privacy, free speech, censorship, security, BigTech, BigGov, democracy, human rights[3], monetisation, royalties, art, trust, digital rights, ownership, assets, property, proofs, cryptography, wallets … all somehow connected to a blockchain. One would be hard pressed to think of another technology term that refers to so many diverse, deeply interesting concepts."

Compare to web 2.0 which simply referred to moving from pages that needed an entirely new load to do anything to pages that updated dynamically with a newly-standardized piece of functionality. Web3 has been overloaded in the same way most fake medicines have been. Web3 is essential oils for gullible nerds.

Web 2.0 was more about letting users creating the content not about SPA, Web 3.0 about the semantic web that never came to be except some niche areas, and now rebranded for crypto :P

Maybe my memory is fuzzy, but 1.0 was all about people making the content. Or at least promising content with under construction GIFs. Everyone had a guestbook on their page. Some people even had forums and/or a blog. Everything/Nothing (E/N) pages were all the rage.

I'm in the web3 space for one year now, after working in "web2" for over 10 years.

My impression of it is that people that didn't ride the rollercoaster of the dot-com era see it as their chance to get something similar.

Everything is a bit more chaotic and you get better payment than in similar "web2" jobs.

What do you see it as?

Are you just in it for the money?

If I am a software developer hating software development who would like more money, do you know how I can learn web3 development with the goal of getting a job?

There are really interesting use cases of "Web3"

As an example, consider domains.

Ethereum Name Service domains are currently one of the most popular. If you use these domains, you instantly have access to the 10,000,000 people using MetaMask, and the 50,000,000 people using Brave Browser. They're actually very powerful when considering the centralization of normal domains.

They allow you to create decentralized domains that are

- Easy to remember

These are better than onions because they're easy to remember. There's no centralized host that can try to change the address to trick other people.

- Censorship resistant

I don't think people here are unaware of how domain seizures have impacted services. The domains are controlled by records on a blockchain.

- Controllable by a single person or smart contract

Domains are controlled by private keys or smart contracts. A small group of 10 people could democratically control a domain when they don't trust each other. A DAO could control vote out the CEO that controls where a domain points, and elect a new CEO. There's lots of use cases here.

-----

I could write more, but I'm just trying to show that it provides use cases that Web2 does not currently.

And as with anything web3/crypto, this example falls apart completely when you need to consider the reality of domain squatting, trademark issues, domain name theft etc. Cases where you need somebody (e.g. a court) to overrule code-is-law and thus invalidating the entire premise of putting it on the blockchain in the first place.

Why does a decentralized protocol need to be amenable to these disputes? Saying “we will have a jury of appointed authorities to manage disputes” defeats the point, and is what ENS tries to avoid.

If apple.eth is held by a squatter, should courts be able to override the protocol to send it to trademark holder Apple? In the end this can get resolved by regular dispute mechanisms but without compromising decentralization and integrity of the protocol.

> If apple.eth is held by a squatter, should courts be able to override the protocol to send it to trademark holder Apple?

If the holder is using it maliciously to scam people by tricking them into thinking it's the real Apple, then yes! In that situation, revoking their ability to use the domain is a much better outcome for everybody except the scammer.

> In the end this can get resolved by regular dispute mechanisms but without compromising decentralization and integrity of the protocol.

But the Ethereum Name Service does not have any such dispute mechanism, by design.

ENS avoids this dispute mechanism by design, to avoid the need for a central third party.

> If the holder is using it maliciously to scam people by tricking them into thinking it's the real Apple, then yes!

Try applying your logic to Twitter and its current situation. Is it a good thing that accounts impersonating others are being suspended from the network?

Mastodon does not have this same centralization, so @teraflop@teraflop.xyz could impersonate your @teraflop@teraflop.com account. There is no centralized entity that controls the whole Mastodon and ActivityPub network, which I think is a good design decision for a less centralized protocol.

And see my sibling comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33626408

Local namespaces are fine, even desirable since very few names are globally unique.

The problem with ENS is that it apes the federated DNS design without the oversight mechanisms. In the example you gave, an impersonator is subject to the rules of their Mastodon instance and the operators can handle things like lost credentials or an account compromise, and if a particular host is not a good custodian many people will block the entirely. ENS has none of those corrective mechanisms and I suspect that they’ll slowly be added over time to get usage.

I could be wrong, but I do not believe ActivityPub spec actively outlines suspension rules, instead letting servers decide how to moderate their content. Same with clients on top of ENS and the blockchain.

These moderations already exist on services built on top of ENS, like tornadocash.eth.limo which fails to resolve because the .limo domain is following US sanctions.

> In the example you gave, an impersonator is subject to the rules of their Mastodon instance

Just to point out, the impersonator can self-host, so Mastodon protocol has no course to expel them except for each other instance to suspend the impersonator one at a time, or to come to consensus on large blocklists.

> If apple.eth is held by a squatter, should courts be able to override the protocol to send it to trademark holder Apple? In the end this can get resolved by regular dispute mechanisms but without compromising decentralization and integrity of the protocol.

How exactly do you think this works? With DNS, there's a trusted third party who can help recover from errors — if you lose access, you might have to prove your identity but it's not a hard process. If someone squats your domain or steals it when they compromise your computer, the registrar can sort it out or will respond to a court order.

With ENS, the answer is you're screwed if you lose the key or whoever has it currently isn't responsive. Maybe you can track them down and get a legal action strong enough that they honor it but that's a lot more work and has a lot more failure modes which look like the apple.eth service having to move to apple computers.eth because the system is designed to fail hard. Very few people are going to want to build on something like that because it means that even a trillion-dollar corporation is one phish away from a massive disaster.

I understand how DNS works. The design goals of ENS are not the same as DNS. There is no "trusted third party" in ENS because the system aims to be trustless, decentralized, ownerless, and censorship-resistant. Even in extreme scenarios like a US sanction, tornadocash.eth domain is still functioning[1] but tornadocash.com has been revoked by Google registrar[2]. Not everybody in the world feels that the current US government administration should be able to dictate and censor worldwide internet protocols in this way.

> Maybe you can track them down and get a legal action strong enough that they honor it

That's fine, it's how our legal system works. Using a bank as an example: they can eject you as a customer if you do something they think is criminal, even before you have had a fair trial that might prove you innocent. ENS and crypto both ask: what if you create protocols where users actually do have complete ownership over their assets, and no single entity has more control over the ledger than another?

[1] https://etherscan.io/enslookup-search?search=tornadocash.eth

[2] https://www.whois.com/whois/tornado.cash

I’m aware that it’s a thought experiment but it’s weird to have that combined with unhappiness that few people are using a system which is designed to prevent real world problems from being solved.

I’d also lay off the marketing-speak and think about what tangible benefits ENS provides in your example: yes, tornadocash.eth resolves but most people cannot use the service safely and even your link shows the content as blocked – not exactly a meaningful anticensorship advance.

If you were actually concerned about censorship, an expensive service which leaves a public audit trail for prosecutors would not be the optimal starting point.

The real world problems are still being solved, just off-chain. I made a similar example with Mastodon: no central entity controls Mastodon, so x@x.com and x@x.xyz might be owned by different people, one impersonating another, and you can't just "complain to Mastodon" to fix it.

Tornado cash: the domain is still resolvable to an IPFS hosted website[1]. As far as ENS is concerned as a name service and URI resolving mechanism, it is working great. This doesn't mean the smart contract that facilitates tornado cash deposits is working that well: if the US says you will be criminalized for touching a smart contract, then nobody will want to touch it, and tornado cash depends on many people using it to provide anonymity.

> If you were actually concerned about censorship, an expensive service which leaves a public audit trail for prosecutors would not be the optimal starting point.

If you are referring to tornado cash, I think you are mistaken.

[1] https://twitter.com/liamzebedee/status/1578127982173908992

> The real world problems are still being solved, just off-chain.

This is incorrect and the example shows why:

> I made a similar example with Mastodon: no central entity controls Mastodon, so x@x.com and x@x.xyz might be owned by different people, one impersonating another, and you can't just "complain to Mastodon" to fix it.

In this case, it might not be a problem — many people share the same names and a decentralized system supports that in a way which a centralized system like ENS does not. If it is a problem, you can complain to the operator of that particular instance and if it's an actual crime their domain registrar or hosting company, etc. If you lose your credentials or someone steals them, you can use the same mechanism to correct it.

In the case of ENS, you not only do not have any of those mechanisms but the system is designed to prevent them. If you lose control of your keys, you lose your name for ever. If someone squats on your name, there's no third-party to turn to short of filing a lawsuit and hoping that the person complies with the eventual outcome.

Re: Tornado cash, that's kind of the point – the smart contract is risky for people in multiple large economies to touch, and IPFS is no more resistant to take-down notices than any other distributed hosting option since it's built on top of the normal internet and governments have plenty of experience contacting network owners. Having the name up gives you something more reputable looking than using a DNS TLD under a different legal authority but it's not meaningfully making the system more available.

The fact that I can still access tornado cash website through IPFS and dAppnet does imply it is more accessible and censorship resistant. We are talking about ENS pointing to an IPFS website here, not the smart contract addresses that the ENS points to.

In mastodon, if the impersonator is self hosting the impersonating domain, your only solution is to complain to the registrar or try to get support from other instances to block the domain. The same mechanisms of getting clients and servers to block requests happening in the censor resistant protocol does happen in ens and crypto based systems, if criminal behavior is involved or heavy moderation is wanted.

So much this!

How do you deal with domain squatting or trademark violation?

The current system does this well because of identity and web3 doesn't have any answer to this.

Also I can host my own DNS server with my own domain name all decentralised without crypto scamming.

Some challenges arising out of human-meaningful names that any registry of names needs to tackle:

- Inclusivity for future generations. Early adopters should not crowd out late adopters of all the desirable names

- Community ownership or geographical indications or false advertising (eg: DarjeelingTea.com should only be owned collectively by farmers in that particular region)

- Prevention of abuse or trademark violations (eg: Nestly should be able to sue and win the case on merit against somebody who registers nestlekillsbabies.com)

"nestlekillsbabies.com" wouldn't be a trademark violation. If anything, it'd be libel, but the defense there would be either a) truth or b) protected opinion.

> How do you deal with domain squatting or trademark violation?

In practice, it rarely works. Only big corporations have money to actually sue and win these cases. They usually prefer to pay however.

Same with regards to other reasons people give for lack of adoption of crypto alternative.

For example, lack of reversal and dispute handling is cited as the major reason why crypto currency isn't used for payments. That's just not true.

UPI in India does not have ability to reverse transactions either. So does not countless p2p payment systems. UPI alone processes billions of transactions weekly.

I think all these high level concerns aren't the reason for lack of adoption. They might indicate lack of corporate adoption but at the core level, I would think lack of a widely used consumer DNS like 8.8.8.8 and 1.1.1.1 is a bigger hurdle. Both of them won't resolve ENS and any other crypto based alternative.

Your average person is never going to run their own local DNS resolution node and switch it in their browsers.

In iOT and smart devices like TV, DNS is often hard coded so impossible to change.

> UPI in India does not have ability to reverse transactions either. So does not countless p2p payment systems. UPI alone processes billions of transactions weekly.

There's a dispute mechanism which will eventually be escalated to a bank which does have the power to revert transcations https://www.npci.org.in/what-we-do/upi/dispute-redressal-mec...

Same with "countless p2p systems" because the majority of them are just an intermediary between banks. For example, here's Swish from Sweden: https://www.swish.nu/faq/private/i-accidentally-swished-the-...

There's very limited area where banks can refund the transaction where they are at fault. It is not reversal.

For reversing, they have to contact the receiving bank and person to send back the money which in case of scam is low. You can do that with crypto too. Contact the person and ask them to send the money back.

You also need police report and the sum has to be big enough for them to bother.

> There's very limited area where banks can refund the transaction where they are at fault. It is not reversal.

If we're talking in general, no, banks can revert transactions when you pay for something and that turns out to be a scam, or goods/services are not delivered.

I don't know how it works in the case of P2P transactions, but I expect many of the protections to still apply.

> For reversing, they have to contact the receiving bank and person to send back the money

> You can do that with crypto too. Contact the person

There's a big difference between a bank contacting another bank to revert an incorrect or frauduent transaction, and trying to contact a stranger to send your money back.

> You also need police report and the sum has to be big enough for them to bother.

Compare this to crypto where if your money's gone, your money's gone, regardless of the sum or the intent.

The topic was UPI. Not general.

You can ask bank to reverse card transaction and certain form of transfers but for UPI, there is no automatic reversal. Your bank needs to contact other bank after receiving police report to freeze the account and then sort it out. The scammer will take out the money before that or move it.

It is not reversal and it is not an option in practice unless the amount is very big which is rare for P2P. There is an upper limit on transactions enforced on UPI.

The point still stands that reversal is not a significant problem for adoption when it's such as an edge case. UPI added dispute handling standard process only after it was processing more than billions of transactions monthly.

There is something else holding crypto back from being used for payments.

I work at one of those "big corporations" and we buy our scam domain takedowns from a firm that specialises in that. It costs us €200 per domain.

Are there really 10M active MetaMask users and 50M active Brave users? I mean, that's a lot. Twitter has ~200M daily active users and it's a service everybody knows.

I've installed both products maybe five years ago, tried a few things and gave up, and there's no incentive in sight that would make me use them again. I suspect they're still counting me as a user on the brave web3 frontier because I have some wallets whose private keys I've lost ages ago.

Brave Browser states 50M monthly active users [1] and MetaMask states 30M monthly active users. [2] The Chrome extension shows 10M+ [3] which is the source I used. It seems like Daily Active Users (DAU) is more often used than Monthly Active Users (MAU), so I maybe should have stated that in my comment.

[1] https://brave.com/2021-recap/

[2] https://decrypt.co/95039/metamask-consensys-30-million-users

[3] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/metamask/nkbihfbeo...

Ok, thanks, that's useful! I'm glad Brave is doing well. It's not a product for me, but anything that reduces consolidation in the browser market is welcome.

To my knowledge, the Chrome Web Store user count represents the number of users with the extension installed who have opened Chrome in the past 7 days. So the 10M+ number for MetaMask includes everyone who installed the extension but isn't actually using it.

(The MetaMask reviews are pretty interesting reading. "I lost $3k", "I lost $6k" and so on.)

> To my knowledge, the Chrome Web Store user count represents the number of users with the extension installed who have opened Chrome in the past 7 days. So the 10M+ number for MetaMask includes everyone who installed the extension but isn't actually using it.

It's active by default on all websites. As long as it is active, a user can resolve linked ENS domains.

Right — I actually forgot we're talking about ENS, not wallet users.

The 60M+ user base for ENS-enabled browsers is a genuinely impressive number. But at the same time it's about 1.1% of the world's total internet users. In terms of reach, it's basically like making your product a desktop Linux app — it might be the right choice for some niche, but not for any mass market.

For the actual ENS lookup, I presume Brave and Metamask actually call a service like Infura? It feels like that's a step back for decentralization compared to plain old DNS.

> The 60M+ user base for ENS-enabled browsers is a genuinely impressive number. But at the same time it's about 1.1% of the world's total internet users. In terms of reach, it's basically like making your product a desktop Linux app — it might be the right choice for some niche, but not for any mass market.

It took time to for ENS to build this userbase and it had to start with nothing. I don't know what the final result will be with this, but I think this is a good starting point.

> For the actual ENS lookup, I presume Brave and Metamask actually call a service like Infura? It feels like that's a step back for decentralization compared to plain old DNS.

Yes. It seems like many people who are creating in this space do not actually care about decentralization.

The internet has mostly existed in peace with the governments in most democratic countries. Though, at the same time, I think even with Tor, the average person in China probably struggles to get around the firewall.

It's possible to set the RPC node for MetaMask and Brave browser. There are also extensions on GitHub that resolve from a local node. Though, this solution is probably too unrealistic for the average user. I think in the past I've seen discussions about querying nodes directly, but, I'm doubtful there's going to be more solutions soon.

Plenty of people, myself included, use Brave as a privacy-focused web browser without using or caring about any of its crypto features. Hell, I've been using Brave for years and I'm still not even sure what its crypto features are.

As someone who has worked within this industry, I absolutely hate these terms. Throwing things on a blockchain is a mile backwards for most use cases.

> Throwing things on a blockchain is a mile backwards for most use cases.

But the buzzwords. Think about the buzzwords.

> web3 is a broad wildcard term that seems to revolve around a large number of concepts including decentralisation, self-sovereignty, privacy, free speech, censorship, security, BigTech, BigGov, democracy, human rights

That would cover Mastodon, right?

And mastodon is not web3, in fact doesn't want to be associated with the term "web3", at all.

Mastodon is not decentralized, it's federated.

So no, it wouldn't fit any common definition of web3.

> Mastodon is not decentralized it's federated

Are you saying that this federation is not a form of decentralization?

I'm pretty sure that Mastodon is not centralised like Twitter is.

This is akin to the pedant/trolls who usually pop up and say "the USA is not a democracy, it's a republic!" in conversations that compare the USA's regular elections to dictatorial autocracies.

https://act.represent.us/sign/democracy-republic

Federation is a very weak form of decentralization.

In practice, many federated platforms turn into cartels of giant centralized providers. It's better than Twitter, but not something I'd call decentralization.

Is there a form of decentralization not prone to this?

Blockchain certainly seems to trend towards "cartels of giant centralized providers".

> Federation is a very weak form of decentralization ... not something I'd call decentralization ... is not decentralized

Uh, OK; this is not all the same claim.

> In practice, many federated platforms turn into cartels of giant centralized providers

Sure that's a worry; for example: email is global, so lets all use GMail. git is decentralized onto GitHub and a few other providers. I think that this tendency is not just a mastodon thing, and is a separate and wider concern though than "it is not decentralized".

I thought a bit more about it.

I stand by my statement that federation is not decentralization. Federation is a pre-requisite for decentralization, but not a sufficient criterion. (I said weaker form, what I meant to say was necessary condition)

Federation gives you an opportunity to develop a decentralized ecosystem...but that depends entirely on how users use the platform, or what rules the platform enforces.

Decentralized platforms are always federated, and on top of that have strong fault-tolerance, redundancy and democratic control mechanisms. This may be enforced by a protocol, or it may also be enforced by the people (the latter is highly unrealistic because human trust doesn't scale)

So I'll revise my statement to: Mastodon is not decentralized by default, but at least it is federated.

This.

Mastodon basically shards data via instances. If someone shuts one down, the data there is gone.

Plus, it's not permissionless. Most instances are invite only.

> Plus, it's not permissionless. Most instance admins first check if they like your face before you get in

Is this really a blocker? If your face is really that objectionable, you can buy your own mastodon-as-a-service for single-digit dollars per month. (1)

This doesn't seem at all "centralised" to me.

1) https://masto.host/

You can do all of that and then talk to yourself because no one will federate with you.

If you're really objectionable, no one will listen to you.

Sounds more like a feature than a bug to me. And still not centralised.

“New subscriptions are closed”.. guess business has been good the past few weeks.

> it wouldn't fit any common definition of web3.

To be clear, in my opinion, in summary, mastodon = "twitter without the centralised company", and web3 = "useless crypto shit".

So I don't need or want mastodon to "fit" web3. I'm just pointing out that the above proposed definition of web3 can't be right, as it fits something that thankfully isn't and doesn't aspire to being web3.

It's true that it doesn't fit the common definition of web3 but that's because it doesn't involve blockchains. Since anyone can implement the protocol and use it without the permission of other users, it fits any common definition of decentralization.

I have the opposite experience. I haven't heard tech people talk about any hype new thing in years, but heard many non-tech people get into Crypto to try to get rich or tax evasion.

A couple of years ago I was hearing sometimes hype about AI, but now it seems to have cooled down a lot. Or hype about the cloud, microservices, IoT, Kubernetes. All of those seem to have cooled down too and all I see now is skepticism about them or they being used in limited project with limited objectives rather than as an objective in itself that will save us and bring a new Golden Age.

So I would argue that we are in a techno-depression or at least a techno-reasonable period, rather than on a techno-hype period. I may be wrong and this may be my limited environment.

I wouldn’t say AI hype has cooled down; things like Stable Diffusion, Dall-E, large language models, etc. have captured people’s imagination about AI. If anything, it seems like a lot of the crypto hype has been usurped by AI as the market slumped (and as GPUs became affordable again)

I agree that Kubernetes isn’t as hip as it used to be, but that’s mainly because it’s already ubiquitous in enterprise. It lived up to its goal, it doesn’t need the hype.

You can just check out the gartner hype cycle (scroll down to the image):

https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/what-s-new-in-artificial...

Quite a few technologies will soon pass the trough of disillusionment and A LOT are right before the peak.

MongoDB is web-scale.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdnDXsqiPYo

Funny, I just compared mongoDB to web3 today:

https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=33621496&goto=item%3Fi...

I remember when mongoDB came into existence and I feared that my skills in the beloved SQL would become obsolete. And at exactly that time I joined a new project that was just migrating from mongoDB to Oracle SQL.

Classic. Reminds me of this:

https://github.com/robmerrell/hipsterdb

Having a web3 startup is just as inane as having a mongodb startup. Those technologies don‘t make anything possible that wasn‘t possible before.

In any case: We are talking about this buzzwords for ~8 years now. Is there a list of useful web3 offerings by now? Any heavy hitters, killer applications? Anything besides wacky money making schemes like virtual sneakers?

> Having a web3 startup is just as inane as having a mongodb startup. Those technologies don‘t make anything possible that wasn‘t possible before.

This is not true. The blockchain was/is a genuine technicalogical advance. It makes things possible that weren't before. From Wikipedia:

"The implementation of the blockchain within bitcoin made it the first digital currency to solve the double-spending problem without the need of a trusted authority or central server."

Now it's certainly true that, just like MongoDB before it, overzealous people are trying to capitalize on the fad and insert "blockchain" into places where it doesn't make any sense. But there's a very important distinction between that and your statement.

That's like saying that it's a technical advance if I make an engine powered by burning dollar bills. Yes, technically it's a thing which did not previously exist before but people do not have the problem of solving double-spending without trusting third-parties. People have problems like paying rent or selling things online — and it's quite conspicuous that when you ask Bitcoin users what they use it for other than speculation, you almost never hear an answer where you couldn't swap PayPal into the same sentence interchangeably. Now, at some point it could be cheaper but that's hardly the revolutionary advance promised in the marketing literature.

The only practical thing I can think of is things where businesses have to cooperate on something and pay a third party some amount of money to be the trusted ledger.

Like, for example, partnerships to exchange customer loyalty points. But even that has perils, as you could set an exchange rate but somebody has to administer/manage that. And once you're back to a managed ledger, you might as well use contractual terms for trust and a database since a blockchain isn't adding much value.

I have always wondered if people not able to quote/define the thing they are talking about is a negative or a positive. As with web3, as with AI, as with monopoly, as with censorship, as with Metaverse, and so many things in the last 10 years itself, and if I dig deeper, would find similar stuff in previous decades too.[1]. Most marketing terms are designed and chosen to get an emotional reaction out of people, not convey something exact or accurate. Judging it for accuracy is sort of missing the forest for the trees. Asking a layman what "<<any movement slogan>>" means and then saying it's bad because some people can't explain the terms of the movement is a widely used strategy. I am not defending web3, just that the angle of attack is somewhat misdirected itself. I would also argue that it(not being able to explain correctly) is a net positive, because the fact that it resonates signals a pain point .

In Web3's case, it does not signal they are excited about web3 or crypto or blockchain. It signals that they are frustrated by the current order, the incumbents, and they want change, and see web3 as a gateway to that radical change. It may or may not bring out an actual change, thats not important in this context. It's about whether they are sufficiently disillusioned by incumbents to believe in a new thing as a solution to things wrong with the world. Whether or not things would change is the next step, and admittedly a pitfall of many of these campaigns in the past. I am not optimistic about it working, though I think lack of clear solution does not indicate a lack of severity of the problem.

In a way, climate change is moving in the same direction. [2]

[1]: Omitting the whole redefining of gender and sexual orientation for obvious avoiding-culture-war reasons.

[2]: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1585935772565258240

it's an actual plight on the industry. There's now even universities who teach these nonsensical web3 courses that look more like influencer training than computer science. Just out of interest I attended a "web3" conference months ago and that's literally all it was. Hucksters, grifters, social media personalities, bizarre companies where you can't tell what they do even if you talk to them for an hour, and so on.

It makes one embarrassed to work in the field and you really have to ponder how much damage this does in the long term when vital talent is drawn away from engineering and the sciences to this grift.

My kids (now late high school and college) grew up with the smart phones & social media companies. They’re pretty angry about it. Companies who’ve been so fast & loose with their data and their humanity & personage.

So while a lot of wwb3 conversations are about get rich quick crypto schemes, I think the more interesting conversations are about new models of data ownership.

Web 1 was communication via protocol. RSS & email. Web 2 was communication via ad-funded platforms. I hope we find our way back to open protocols with transparency around where & how our data is used and shared.

The Fediverse could be the solution.

It is kind of Web2.5 because your identity is tied to the traditional DNS system. But if decentralized domains become a thing, that would automatically make the ActivityPub protocol offer decentralized identities.

While the current state of affairs is mostly swindlers, ponzi schemes, and problemless solutions, I do believe that distributed ledger technology can and will fundamentally change many things in society that have been working “fine” for thousands of years.

“Fine” in this context meaning with extreme inefficiencies and the use of coercive force and institutional violence.

Distributed ledgers can replace institutional violence and coercion with algorithmic finality. We just aren’t ready yet, and if there is anything that people don’t like to do it is to give up their power to inflict violence on others.

Evolutionary monetary policy can potentially create deeply democratic societies while discarding much of the overhead normally associated with political office, enforcement, revenue collection, and more.

Unfortunate, that’s not really visible in the crypto sphere right now, because the projects working on this are not spending millions on PR trying to get rich.

If there is anything you take from web3 or whatever is that it is a scam.

For decades there is no use case whatsoever and it's just full of grifters trying to get rich.

I would like to challenge these grifters to name a legitimate, functional and valid use case that isn't speculation based or a scam that is part of web3.

ENS (Ethereum Name Service), Filecoin and Arweave decentralized, long term, content addressed data storage, POAP (Proof of Attendance Protocol), Sign In With Ethereum (using ETH public key for auth), USDC (digital USD, redeemable by a U.S. regulated bank, tradeable and programmable in smart contracts), zero knowledge strategy gaming like Dark Forest (https://zkga.me/), etc etc.

It's a very new space so there is a Cambrian explosion of ideas. I get that it's very hard to sift through and as an outside observer it's easy to focus on the failed evolutionary paths, but in situations like these, it will be only obvious in hindsight which applications turned out to be most useful to people. Even "speculative" or financial use cases are valid. Speculation is an important part about how markets function.

We're still short and always will be of the vision and endless possibilities of zombo.com

This concept of web3 makes no sense to me. It seems like these are "regular" concepts with blockchain shoehorned in. For instance, I see some web3 messaging thing and it always fails to explain why the blockchain is there for. Sometimes it feels they create a problem only to justify adding crypto to it, when it could be pulled out and replaced with "traditional" tech, but I guess that wouldn't make gullible investors to part with their money?

What am I missing?

In France, you can often pick up free "newspaper" at train stations. One of them "20 minutes" begun, from time to time, to print a special "20mint" (think 20 min_t___) edition talking about web3 and cryptos. This, plus other advertisement, makes me afraid that it will increase the impression for people who are a bit less tech savvy that web2 is has-been and web3 the future...

"Wow you guys are still doing $old_marketing_buzzword? Why aren't you doing $new_marketing_buzzword."

This is nothing new. The same played out with agile/waterfall, rails/django/node/whatever, and many other technologies. The key takeaway is that young people are suggestible and fall for marketing.

Marketing is what you impress upon people, not what you define. The mechanism of marketing is very powerful force, and we have been a part of it, if we realize it or not. People have used the marketing tool successful to shape generations of humans.

web3 is marketing. It hasn't failed because we are still talking about it.

We live in a cyberpunk dystopia without cool gadgets. Corporations have hijacked most of the institutions and are selling populations of people as 'userbases' to each other in order to harvest for data and attention. Web3 is a line of flight.

When I attended Web Summit last year, this was the most common thing the 20 year olds would ask at any of the bars. Are you web3? If not I don't want to talk to you ... And I was just thinking - "Well, I don't even..."

Why were 20 year olds in bars?

So currently my understanding is that web2 tech doesn't scam people and everyone trusts. Web3 are the people that do scam people, using tech that nobody trusts.

I believe the real problem is the black and white view of everything. Combined with the obsession to label things.

In a sane world, we would look at things based on their value and merit, using whatever makes sense. Whether that be web2/3 or some other buzz world tech.

"In the web3 crypto world, big venture capital is the biggest champion of decentralisation, self-sovereignty, free speech, and anti-BigTech efforts?"

This is a function of a hostile SEC and regulatory regime to the concept of decentralized fundraising. Everyone is afraid of being labeled a security. Most recently, LBRY, a decentralized YouTube-like startup that seemed to have their heart in the right place and built a functional product, was declared to be a security. But no one in government went after SBF's FTT token, which was being not only securitized but used as collateral to cover billion dollar holes in their books.

In 2017, many projects raised ETH in the form of ICOs. A lot of projects went bust. But a few turned out great, including Filecoin, Chainlink, 0xProtocol, Gnosis, and others. A retail investor in these did extremely well, earning 10-100x or more in some cases. But the 2018 bear market coupled with a reinvigorated regulatory regime dictated that projects could only safely raise via traditional VC model. This is all because of so-called "accredited investor" laws in the US that dictate that one must have a $1 million net worth or earn more than $200K a year to be considered accredited and eligible to participate in fundraises.

I think the wealth based requirement for fundraising is ludicrous and it deprives retail investors of potential life changing returns. Wealth based tests for legal privileges or rights ought to be illegal. A 100x return on investment can change someone's life. It can give someone a real chance at accruing wealth for themselves. But the current structure is designed so that progressive rounds of rich people participate in a series of fundraising, which dilutes the shares so much that by the time a company goes to IPO or a protocol releases a token, the max value has often been extracted.

After viewing Sequoia's puff piece on SBF and FTX, and the sheer number of players that invested hundreds of millions without any kind of due diligence into security models or client account protection frameworks, you have to wonder what purpose these accredited investor laws serve. Many wealthy players demonstrated brazen stupidity and blind trust. Many retail investors, meanwhile, called out the FTX scandal and were lambasted for it.

I'm old enough to remember the Web 2.0 moniker in the early 00s. The idea was similarly generic, but mostly dealt with the theme of user generated content powering advanced interactive applications with often realtime features that didn't require refreshing the page.

Web3 is and always has been about the idea of user and community sovereignty over the content that is generated. I view it as a natural extension of the web, and even though blockchain is one useful tool to achieve this, it's not the only tool. I think this movement is bigger than VCs, and I think the long term implications have yet to be felt, as everyone is still dealing with crude early iterations of the concept. It will continue to evolve, but it's not going back in the genie bottle. I'm never going to tire of the idea of having sovereignty over my money, my content, my social relationships, or my privacy.

"Web 2" provides tools for "user and community sovereignty", indeed that was "web0".

(Which also, by analogy repeats the 'adaptive front-end' trend whereby web2 had to reinvent scaling pages to fit screens that was already native to web0).

The trend of returning to "web0" has always been present, and likely always will be. It doesnt require new technology. It requires people to want to pay the implicit transaction and communication costs (time, skill, etc.) inherent in that, original, vision of the web.

To "bring back web0" one only needs to peel back everything else and provide simplified interfaces, etc. to using it. These do exist. But of course, they arent popular.

Blockchain is popular, and that is as far away from this spirit as you can get. It's a trick. A con. A technological sideally full of people with knives. Decentralisation is already how everything is built.

Crypto is a means of rent seeking on the worst possible version of that you can imagine.

Blockchain is one technology that has a myriad of use cases. One of the critical ones is value transfer infrastructure. You cannot "decentralize the web" if you cannot monetize it in a non-censorable way. Otherwise you get situations like Paypal, which recently added a $2500 threat to its TOS that if you speak incorrectly, they will fine your account. Or the Canadian trucker protest earlier this year, where their bank accounts were frozen because tyrants run the world right now. You cannot have real freedom without the ability to transact freely.

You also cannot fund decentralized infrastructure, like data storage nodes, without creating decentralized, permissionless incentives to run and operate file storage hardware. That's where token incentives come in. It's not rent seeking, it's effective

Tell me how you would effectively archive censor-resistant data without blockchain? How could you guarantee that a file was stored and available for many years and do so such that no central party could arbitrarily take the content down?

> How could you guarantee that a file was stored and available for many years and do so such that no central party could arbitrarily take the content down?

As far as I can tell there’s no guarantee that blockchain data will be available without people actively sharing it…which makes it absolutely no different than something like BitTorrent which, ironically enough, is exactly what people who want their data to survive being taken down use to ensure it doesn’t go away.

Those big leaks of government data? BitTorrent.

Those digital libraries of questionable legally? BitTorrent.

> I think the wealth based requirement for fundraising is ludicrous and it deprives retail investors of potential life changing returns.

Unfortunately, they are more likely to suffer life changing losses.

I’m no fan of big government but a simple analysis shows that these requirements are in place specifically to protect people from the kinds of shenanigans that are rampant in the cryptocurrency sphere.

It’s almost like these sorts of things happen so often to basically financially illiterate people that the government finally stepped in and did something about it. Probably be better to teach financial literacy but that’s a bridge too far, the politicians wouldn’t be able get away with half the stuff they do.

This is not a commentary on the article itself - I don't have an opinion on it.

Most people who have experienced the pre-2000s web can tell what Web 2.0 was. It was a cultural shift in how apps were designed and used, and while the term was vague you could actually tell the difference as a user (eg: encyclopedias v/s wikis). At that point people were similarly critical of the term Web 2.0, and they weren't entirely wrong. The underlying tech wasn't all that different - but the product certainly was.

Web 3.0 as an idea is even bigger than what Web 2.0 was. It is fundamentally different in every way; the tech, the money, the trust, the product. Web 3.0 might fail, but only because it might be a radical idea ahead of its time; not because the term is meaningless.

The technical foundation of Web 2.0 was simple: interactivity afforded by XMLHttpRequest. I have to see one yet to formulate what the hell Web 3.0 is under the hood, some definition a la "web but on blockchain" doesn't have enough meat on the bones.

Just wanted to say that. Web 1.0 was plain HTML. Web 2.0 brought interactiveness via AJAX. It's quite simple actually.

AJAX was certainly a part of it, but it was also more than that. For example, wiki vs encyclopedias - early wikis made very limited use of AJAX, if at all.

Web 3.0 (Semantic Web) already failed a decade ago. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_3.0

So it annoys me that this new, unrelated thing has stolen its name.

Though you it could certainly be argued that due to failing it didn't deserve a major version number.

Fair point. I'm referring to whatever is implied by Web 3.0 today, discounting the misappropriation of the item.

Web 3.0 is not the same as web3.

Yes.

Gosh, it's not that complicated. They're just asking if the product is company-owned or community-owned. That's the distinction between web 2 and 3; just like the distinction between web 1 and 2 was whether the content was authored by the company or the community; cf. encyclopedia britannica vs. wikipedia.

And yes, you can't just go from one to the other, it's a completely different way of running a product.

Please remind us of a successful web3 project that is “community-owned”.

All the high profile ones so far, end up centralizing power and wealth under a handful of people.

it’s like an ESOP[1] re-imagined for owning core infrastructure

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_Stock_Ownership_Pla...

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