Ask HN: What's the Future of Web3? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's the Future of Web3?

There was a time, earlier this year, when everyone I knew was talking about NFTs and the decentralized internet. Companies, conferences and even VC firms specializing in the future of internet sprung everywhere, even here in my small north african country.

Cryptocurrencies are, at least from what I can see, are losing steam. The collapse of FTX, and apparently other exchanges to follow, has proven to be shocking enough for some people to have second thoughts.

In the midst of all of this, where does the web3 stand? I admit that I know so little about this new tech/paradigm that I have to google it whenever I have to speak about it, so maybe all of this has no impact? Does it even matter?

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The only people I hear talking seriously about Web3 are non-tech people. The tech people I know all seem to collectively think its BS.

It's a cool marketing phrase that probably won't come to anything. I'd be happy to be proven wrong though as web evolution will always be interesting.

My bet is that "web3" will be another old buzzword that no one will care about in 5 years.

I feel the same. It's like the tech community likes to stick to one fad at a time and then moves on to next big fad. WTF does Web3 even mean. I have no clue.

TIL: I am 5 years ahead.

At least it will be the butt of jokes in engineering meetings then.

> Cryptocurrencies are, at least from what I can see, are losing steam.

Not the first time that's happened. This is like the fourth or fifth crypto winter in the past ten years or so. It will probably start coming back in a year or two.

As for Web3, there are people still quietly building out there. I think it's still pretty early, much like there wasn't much infrastructure around bitcoin three crypto winters ago. People just kept building around it, and some of those things eventually became a big deal as people slowly started accumulating coins again.

I could be wrong about the latter. Web3 might have just been a flash in the pan, although I suspect smart contracts are here to stay in some form (if not under the term 'Web3').

But I'm pretty sure crypto is going to have another bull run in the next couple of years. Maybe bitcoin won't get back up to it's current ATH of $68k, but I suspect it will at least 2x or 3x where it's at now again.

Unless something like WWIII kicks off in the next couple of years, then none of this will matter anymore.

I suggest you read Tim O’Reilly’s “What is Web 2.0” post first [^1]. Most of what you mention hasn’t progressed beyond that. To be clear, Web3 is MBA/“crypto”bro snake oil sold to an audience looking for a quick fix. Don’t fall for the scam. XR, blockchain, decentralization, distributed computing, etc. will continue to progress on their own.

[^1]: https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.ht...

If by Web3 you mean decentralized networks, then I'm not sure it has much of a future. I'm not sure why we thought there was. We've had decentralization since the dawn of the internet, and it never took off.

My view is that decentralization is not the panacea it's being claimed to be. Humanity is not inherently trustless and we naturally want to hold something or someone accountable when things go wrong, and if we think this is solvable by complex technical transparency, we've missed the whole field of UX and why Apple is so successful. Do you really think the average person cares about a decentralized version of Instagram? Even in networks that seem decentralized, a lot of times scalability issues can only be solved through centralization.

Beyond that decentralization is naturally against the establishment, and the establishment won't go down with a fight. The only future decentralization has is if the establishment keeps getting weaker.

If you mean anything else by Web3, I'm not 100% sure. I have no idea what the term means tbh. It's being used to peddle a whole host of things.

I also think Web3 assumes that we've finished being in "Web2" whatever that even means. I guess Web2 is really the emergence of cloud computing, SaaS and mobile computing networks. I'm not sure that's quite over. I'm not really sure we need to evolve this. Or does Web2 mean big web companies who sell ads? If that's what it means, we can deem these companies (e.g. Google) as necessary infrastructure and regulate the crap out of them. The problem with these terms is they're just meaningless mumbo jumbo mostly created by people who have no depth.

Web 2.0 brought about the foundation of web applications we have today. I think it is a prime opportunity for the technical folks involved to set aside the financial elements as part of a way to get rich, kick the marketers and finance people out of the room and think about what technical standards could be developed strictly for web browser/web application use cases and build out those standards with reference implementations.

Anything that people come up with will surely be met with "you could already do that with X" types of arguments. We have so many examples of pre-existing ways to solve problems, like the plethora of JS frameworks. Blockchain and/or smart contracts might provide new ways to solve existing problems in a way that provides more value to people or an improvement on existing solutions.

Web3 still seems pretty cool to me from the outside looking in. If the web3 app actually does something, crypto prices going down is not a bad thing just makes everything cheaper.

Speculating on price has never been super exciting to me (no judgement, just not my thing) but building apps out of it is pretty appealing. That's still perfectly possible today.

Sometimes it's during the down cycles like this that the cool stuff gets founded / built.

Web4

i figure it's terrible for people and the planet, so will stick around way too long.

as for crpyto, as long as it helps oligarchs and less successful criminals to continue criming, it will stick around.

i watched this video earlier and thought it was too generous to web3:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGsllEF7w_g

i rarely agree with libertarians, but this one article i read yesterday sounded reasonable -- in short, the super-high growth era of high tech is over:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33581828

it reminds a bit of what some physics-knowledgeable people are saying -- modern day physics is basically at a natural human limit of sorts -- progress is going to be very slow from here on out.

i think there are all sorts of fun and awesome tech things we can do, but for various reasons - state capitalism/war/US hegemony, and others - we choose not to do them. instead, we do war tech, and the VCs are left to figure out which publicly-developed technologies they can most effectively privatize for profit - thus, largely useless, at best, tech like 'web3'.

How about decentralizing by bringing the data back home?

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