Web3 – An Arrogant and Treacherous Successor Doomed to Fail
g147.medium.com
g147.medium.com
With hindsight, the two technological breakthroughs that proved decentralized databases possible were Bitcoin and Zerocash. Bitcoin showed that state-machine replication (SMR) is solvable in a distributed, permissionless, partially synchronous setting with Byzantine fault tolerance. Zerocash showed that zero knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge can be used to ensure the confidentiality of transactions in this SMR setting.
The tech is improving rapidly and it’s pretty easy to see where things are going from here: soon we’ll have general purpose decentralized databases where data is open as open source code is open. In fact, state-of-the-art blockchains can be viewed as special (financial) purpose decentralized databases.
As to why decentralized databases are desirable: imagine if you could fork databases in a completely permission-less manner like you can fork code. This is how web development would look like:
You, the programmer, take a look at a public data schema (eg. a smart contract that implements the ERC-721 interface) and decide to build on top of it. Then, a user, who has already interacted with what you built on, decides that they like what you built and lets your app use their data. You, the programmer, can be sure that the data you built on remains available, and the user can be sure that they'll be able to port the data produced by your app into new apps.
Web X.whatever is not about content. Its not even about technology. That is why term has failed to stick each and every time. Business people looking to drum up VC need something like this because a simple catch phrase is easier to sell than a concept they have no hope of understanding or explaining.
Do you remember what Web2.0 was? Yes, this was a real concept, and yes it did succeed and proliferate. In short, Web2.0 was use of asynchronous HTTP requests from pages. At that time the technology was just XMLHttpRequest (XHR), but it wasn't about the technology. It was about what you did with it. If you cannot remember back to writing code for the front end web back to 2005-2007 when this first became a thing I don't expect this to make any sense to you because you have no context.
Back then the web was a series of HTML forms and/or static pages. That's it. Content could not change and information could not be submitted without loading a new page. XHR radically changed the experience and how users interfaced with data and how data providers interfaced with users. That change to the business experience was Web2.0. Back then it was a massive improvement, but then you also didn't have the world's largest frameworks to make it so slow and unoriginal.
If people want the Web3.0 moniker to stick to something then apply to something that radically changes how the user perceives the web. Crypto is not and will never be that thing. If VCs lack so much empathy they are bound for losses by shams and cons.
One example of what a Web3.0 could be is a streaming experience where pages load in less than 0.5 seconds (with full state management) and transmit/receive updates in near real time such that you only need a delay spinner for the extreme edge cases.
The biggest and most productive entities on web3 that have the most users are the ones that everyone has heard of: crypto exchanges, or in other words, permissioned, centralized databases. Everything else seems to be a sideshow as far as actual usage is concerned. How do proponents of web3 square this?
There are few crypto exchanges that are "on web3", like Uniswap, Curve, Balancer, etc. And they don't rely on a centralized database.
Web3 or whatever might not be the answer, but you have to ask yourself a question: what's the internet going to look like in 2030, when the majority of its traffic is non-western, and a massive share of all purchasing power resides in Africa and Asia?
Do you think by 2030, all global governments and their citizens will voluntarily give away control over what they can consume and create to Google and Apple? Are they going to ransom their digital economies to Apple's 30% tax?
Betting in favor of the current centralized western oligopolies is betting on the belief that the digital economy won't grow, and that there won't be a regulatory crackdown in countries with stronger technological capabilities.
In case you lose this bet, you have to ask: what's the alternative? Every large country making its own app stores and social networks? Or a decentralized variant that isn't completely controlled by a handful of western corporations?
It can go either way, but it's definitely not going to be business as usual.
I liked the term web3 somehow, but the more I read how people react to it, it might be already burned.
I hope that the terminology evolves, just as the space itself evolves as well.
Centralization works. You may not like it and you hope that developing world won’t either, but WhatsApps success sort of invalidates all your points.
Countries are fine handing over nearly all their data to whatever platform works best, because who wants less than the best?
India, for instance, had 250M internet users in 2015. That number is now nearly a billion. In nearly 25 years of the commercial internet, India could only bring 250M people online. Then it brought another 750M online in the span of just 7 years.
For the bulk of India's online population, the internet is still a novelty. A prime minister elected in 2014 - who claimed to be "tech savvy" - was 58 when the iPhone was released - not exactly an age where you "get" new technology immediately.
Now fast forward to 2032. A 65 year old prime ministerial candidate would have spent 22 years of his/her life in the smartphone world. The bulk of the population would have a decade's worth of experience of the digital world. Their understanding of the problems, risks, security issues, etc. would be far better.
Already, the Indian government has announced plans to create its own mobile app store after protests by entrepreneurs against Google's app store fees.
This is only going to increase moving forward.
The government of my garden shed has announced plans to create its own mobile App Store, too, but so far uptake has been minimal. The move toward viable alternatives takes time, and the seven years you've allocated doesn't seem like nearly enough. 2030 is as far from now as we are from 2015, and things haven't changed nearly as much in the last seven years as you seem to be predicting they will in the next seven years. Past performance is no guarantee of future results... but they're an indicator.
Countries who don't like to play by the rules of US trade -- those who resist signing trade agreements and using our currency develop or attempt to develop alternatives, and if they lack the capability to do so, they turn to other powers (basically: China). Economic activity gets silo'd into blocs, depending on which large power you want to depend on. Some countries are very cozy to the United States and participate in its trade agreements, joint ventures, currency, etc. Some countries do not.
Internet commerce is not any different at all, and cryptocurrency does not change this one bit. For example, China notably separates its internet traffic from the United States by giving heavy advantages to its own enterprises and internet infrastructure.
No country at all runs their internet economy on some cryptocurrency or cryptocomputation stack. And they never will, no matter how "decentralized" it is. The exception, maybe, is North Korea. Cryptocurrency has allowed them to be sort of digital pirates through ransomware payments. And you can see why they do that (it's not because they're building a productive internet economy on cryptocurrency!) and what the result ends up being (nobody is collaborating on a crypto venture with North Koreans, despite the heavy flow of bitcoin in and out of that country!).
Yep. They won't. They will centralize control even more and things that are not as conducive for the ruling power will likely get delisted and deplatformed.
Which is precisely why building out the decentralized web matters. At the very least, there should be an alternative available to citizens. Even if its hard to access. The penalty for not building it out is walled gardens everywhere.
If it ends up being adopted by governments and companies, great. If it's just used by a bunch of nerds to send messages or money to friends outside the walled garden, then, too, it is worth building.
Surely, a reader of HackerNews would agree.
Crypto is just another variety of wall.
The current centralized corporate oligopoly may be terrible, but a crypto-underpinned "web3" would be even worse. Decentralization is laudable, but "web3" (taken to mean: some kind of blockchain / cryptocurrency bolted onto the web) doesn't solve any real problems that actually exist, and even if it did it still requires centralization in the form of exchanges to make it easy enough for normal users to interact with these things.
I don't know about Africa, but Asia already has a massive share of all purchasing power.
> Do you think by 2030, all global governments and their citizens will voluntarily give away control over what they can consume and create to Google and Apple? Are they going to ransom their digital economies to Apple's 30% tax?
No, they're going to build things like Alibaba and Tencent and hold that control for themselves. Which they did do.
> Betting in favor of the current centralized western oligopolies is betting on the belief that the digital economy won't grow, and that there won't be a regulatory crackdown in countries with stronger technological capabilities.
Crackdown on what? Speech or human rights or ...?
> what's the alternative? Every large country making its own app stores and social networks?
Well, they have largely done that, haven't they? The "X" in Musks's "X app" clearly stands for "Wish it was WeChat" with all of the social media, shopping, commerce, banking, and communication embedded in it.
> Or a decentralized variant that isn't completely controlled by a handful of western corporations?
This is also already happening, isn't it?
It seems like all of your hypothetical questions are already answered, and none of the answers are "Web 3."
It'll be Baidu and Tencent, but yes. This is already happening, and the internet is becoming more centralized, not less. Global traffic is balkanized, but it's split up among regional centralized controlling interesting, not no controlling interests.
> Betting in favor of the current centralized western oligopolies is betting on the belief that the digital economy won't grow, and that there won't be a regulatory crackdown in countries with stronger technological capabilities.
This is a false dichotomy. One need not bet for or against "current centralized western oligopolies" to bet against crypto fever dreams. One could assume that western oligopolies will be supplanted by eastern oligopolies, for example, or that the two will divvy up the market and coexist.
I would definitely bet in favor of large countries having separate social networks, because that's what we have now.
You seem to have a very western focus, and little to no understanding of how things are working in, say, China. Perhaps that's where you've gone wrong.
It even has a Google definition, to divide countries and make them enemies of each other.
Yet another victim of US imperialism. I weep for what was once a free and friendly nation. The kids nowadays are taught to hate their neighbors instead of learning how their parents or grandparents were part of a resistance that fought faschist Germany.
That's just an aside. Nothing to do with the topic. I will never forget how my niece walked home from school on a road that was bombed by freedom bombs by the USA 30 minutes later. Not a single soldier has stood trial. Sorry that just struck a nerve, balkanized... is a word.
The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and Austro-Hungarian Empire into small nations in the Balkan Peninsula from 1817 to WWI was caused by US imperialism?
Yeah, having all transactions traceable on a public ledger is surely 'useful' for criminals, scammers, etc for everyone to see once it hits the exchange. /s
This is not 2009.
Other sources, more devoted to "this is good for crypto, actually" say the percentage is tiny-tiny, apparently by counting every transfer between any two addresses, including several that might all be related to a single real-life transaction. They seem to also have a pretty high standard for what they count as "illegal activity." Even so, they'll admit it's at least $14 billion of activity in a year.
0. https://bitcoinafrica.io/2020/03/04/crypto-illegal-activity/
1. https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2022-crypto-crime-repor...
Yet in the same source:
> The main problem for drug dealers using crypto is to turn their income into cash. This move remains complicated and insecure. Most cryptocurrency exchanges have instruments to define whether a transaction is coming from a suspicious source like the darknet. The rise of Monero use in the online drug market will hinder such tracking. However, for the reasons listed above, crypto is unlikely to completely replace regular cash in drug sales in the foreseeable future.
This doesn't refute my point of this activity being traceable as soon as it hits the exchange. Even if the cryptocurrency is a privacy coin, many exchanges have delisted such coins, making it extremely difficult and quite terrible for criminals and scammers to cash out into fiat without them leaving a trace and the authorities subsequently identifying and catching them afterwards.
> They seem to also have a pretty high standard for what they count as "illegal activity." Even so, they'll admit it's at least $14 billion of activity in a year.
$14 billion in illicit transaction volume out of $15.6 trillion in overall transaction volume at the time of the report is tiny, but is still a problem, but with most of the transactions being traceable for the authorities / exchanges to catch the criminals and scammers.
I mean, compared with the trillions of illicit funds freely moving around by the banks, it seems criminals and fraudsters still benefitted more from that whilst the banks would rather pay the fines than solving the problem.
[0] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/fincen-fil...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/business/fincen-banks-sus...
"
There are many reasons contributing to the failure of Web3 but the most fundamental ones –
Sophisticated & Tedious Development
Self Governance & Lack of Compliance
Built upon Delusions & Lies
Not better than its predecessors in anyway
Prone to all kinds of Cybersecurity issues that can’t be eliminated
"
>The term "Web 2.0" was coined by Darcy DiNucci, an information architecture consultant, in her January 1999 article "Fragmented Future": [...]
Then Web 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, 9.0, 10.0, and 11.0 immediately followed in a quick succession over a few short years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_3.0
My web goes to 11, so I stopped paying attention after that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMSV4OteqBE
Web 3.0 sounds antique!
If you ride a fast motorcycle and fall off because you were speeding, it's not really the fault of the motorcycle, is it?
Yes, it is the fault of the motorcycle. You can "fall off" a motorcycle because of the design of a motorcycle, and it's something that doesn't happen with a car. Cars have risks when speeding as well, but they're different, and lesser, because of the protections afford by the car itself.
It's like you're subtly trying to highlight how terrible crypto is, but not realizing it.
Let's expand the decentralized web without building a crypto wall around it.
If we're equating motorcylces to crypto, then as a motorcycle rider, I can assure you that motorcycles are amzing, not terrible.
I wouldn’t call it victory yet. We still have years of figuring out which blockchain, DEX and DeFi models work and which will fail, most of this new tech is only a couple years into development. But the long term 10+ year vision seems clearer.
This has different risks and trade-offs, obviously, but users who opted for Uniswap instead of FTX as their crypto exchange are probably pretty happy with their decision.
There are many users who just want to hold crypto and perform basic lending and exchanges, and would be willing to spend fractionally more in gas fees to achieve this with higher security guarantees.
Everybody at Barber CEX got a surprise head shaving the other week, meanwhile Barber DEX is still cutting people's hair normally even though it is more expensive and harder to find.
Also, thank you Stripe. 'For locking my whole account account without any reason' [2] [3] [4] [5].
[0] https://twitter.com/flipper_zero/status/1567194641610465281
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33348913
[2] https://twitter.com/zhovner/status/1384568453844066305
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28085706
> People who think a single-sign on is somehow a good thing.
I would love to see this expanded on… I stopped reading after that.
https://sis.binus.ac.id/2022/07/21/the-differences-between-w...
For SSO, the link does a good job presenting various pros and cons. I don’t think it backs up the articles dismissal.
How so? If you're saying that this is the one single reason, then you have to support it with evidence.
Why would I ever build a business around an Ethereum smart contract when I could just write a normal contract, and then I know the courts will enforce it even if one of my business associates tries to pull a fast one?
If it's about the precise coding of constraints and all that, you can easily write a legal contract that specifies that the piece of code should be followed. Ask wall street derivatives traders if they have any issues with making paper legal contracts arbitrarily mathematically complex. It works fine for them.
And yes, you can write normal contracts and get the courts to enforce it. But what if your customers are in India or Vietnam or Tibet? Under which jurisdiction will you attempt to enforce the contract?
The entire critique rests on the thesis that the world will always be the way it is - dominated by a handful of western (mostly American) corporations who will get to dictate what billions of people in the rest of the world consume, create, and share.
The reality is that the non-western part of the internet is already larger, will grow even larger, and it needs tools and products that are built for its scale and diversity. Whether that's Web3 or Web2 or Web2500, it doesn't matter. What does matter is that more and more countries will seek to yank back control from western corporations (like India making its own national mobile app store).
I, for one, will cheer on anything that challenges the FAANG oligopoly.
If you'd started with the disclosure of your money-colored sunglasses, you'd have saved everybody here the time of reading your comments.
0. https://twitter.com/SuburbanDrone/status/1524870565806366730
If not, then why should a scam on a blockchain be evidence that that blockchain itself is a scam?
There's little indication the crypto ecosystem is inclined to do the same. See, for example, Tether's continued core role despite years of lying about audits and getting caught cooking the books for their attestations.
Yeah, 'Days since a car did not crash into another car. hence why all cars are dangerous and will never take off over horse and carriages'. - Car skeptic.
By now there should have been a worldwide 100% complete total ban on crypto a long time ago, just like the usage of Tor. Why didn't this happen? It's simply due to the fact that it is close to impossible to ban all of it. Regulators and crypto skeptics already know this, and instead both crypto supporters and skeptics will compromise and enforce regulations on cryptocurrencies, exchanges, etc.
Hence, only some cryptocurrencies, exchanges will survive past regulations and will continue to be widely used. I'm afraid crypto is here to stay like it or not.
This feels like asking someone to prove a negative by providing singular examples.
I’m still looking for an example of a web3 product that is more usable, more beneficial, and more attractive than the centralized equivalent. So far the only real benefits appear to be decentralized censorship resistance and, arguably, the unnecessary tokenization that allows early adopters to get wealthy based on speculation of future functionality.
Streaming services were literally among the last websites to come to ride the tail of the the web 2.0 craze. Online communities were the poster children for web 2.0, and search engines arguably relied on the same technologies as web 2.0.
Why is it that every person that writes about web3 totally fails to understand the actual technical distinction or history of the "transition" between web 1.0 and web 2.0?
2) Web2 was the fruit of web developers and silicon valley finance
3) "Web3" was the product of MBAs and finance bros
You can see what's wrong with Web3. Silicon valley finance just wanted to get rich quick too, but they at least had to go through technology and programmers to get there.
"Web3" was pushed by MBAs/Wall Street (at best) and shady crytpo finance bros (at worst), and had little in "new technology". The technology that WAS used came from the Web2 era with bitcoin.
The real "next web" is in things like Mastodon (and Bittorrent and MAYBE some cryptocurrencies around distributed storage). Community or emergent things. Web1 was like that. Web2 was less so, and Web3 almost not at all.
What made "web3" actually stick a bit in the zeitgeist was the emergent nature of Bitcoin. It was distributed, networked, it didn't have controlling company, or even any real celebrity originator aside from the pseudonum "Satoshi Nakomoto".
Web1 was the maturation of TCPIP, networking, and basic text documents
Web2 was a powerful standardized browser and more general purpose UI/computing.
Web3 the hype was distributed and encryption, but has failed to produce utility to the average person, or even the average developer.
Web2 only hit its stride in the post-dotcom crash when the money got back out. In a way, the dotcom boom funded the real Web2, then the crash weeded out the get rich quick people, and Web2 was built on the hardened survivors.
Maybe "Web3" will similarly survive and thrive from a crash that weeds out the scammers.
please do not introduce anymore confusion by misnaming these concepts.
It’s like you’re promised a grand night at the opera and the bus takes you to a roach-infested casino. “Music? We don’t need it, the slot machines make enough sound. Now are you going to buy some tokens?”
IPFS is a fundamental web3 tech since it's inception, even it's creators from Protocol Labs say so. Just because you like it more than blockchains doesn't mean it's not part of web3.
IOTA uses hashgraphs.
ArWeave uses blockweaves.
IPFS uses DAG.
But, SMTP, just like Mastodon, isn't decentralized, it's just distributed.
I don't think your definition of Web3 is generally agreeable.
I was on web3 conferences and met all the creators of these technologies that consider themselves web3 but aren't considered web3 by critics of web3.
What should I make of it?
If the creators of non-cryptocurrency projects don’t like that definition, maybe they should be angry at the crypto grifters and make a clean break from them? But I suppose they’re not going to do that because they also want to get rich from retail investors buying their token one day.
Counterexamples: lens.xyz, farcaster.xyz, urbit.org
By the logic of web3 critics, everything they consider 'good' isn't part of web3.
If Urbit is now a flag-bearer for web3, I don’t think the aforementioned mother-in-law will have to worry about trying to understand this stuff during her lifetime.
Didn't know that. I just read that some people here were like "I really wanna try Urbit".
> Not just “we’re still working out some of the details,” but literally none of it exists.
and
> flag-bearer for web3
These are projects that are attempting solutions. I wasn’t claiming they work, but they’re figuring things out and seeing what needs to be rebuilt to get a working social model on top of web3.
Someone posts child porn. Now everyone hosting that decentralized data is literally distributing child porn, and they can't stop without deleting the service from their device.
Some people are thinking that maintaining a safe haven for child pornographers is a small price to pay for absolute digital freedom. They are the reason that things like this will never work.
It feels like it was created for the purpose of distributing CSAM.
Moxie had a much more in-depth technical appologia for that. Here is a counterpoint for why decentralization is really important for the world:
https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram...
Web3 is fake/staged, but everyone participating in Web3 either knows this, doesn't know this, or pretends not to know this.
It's a bunch of bullshit, mixed with many slick ideas.
I believe in web3, but I also believe that art NFTs and crypto bros running grifter companies like MtGOX and FTX give it a bad rap.
Luckily, the ecosystem is now big enough that you can avoid that crap pretty easily.
It’s not centralized, but the players are incredibly good at moving in lock step together.
This is most obvious on Twitter, where one of the loudest crypto/web3 cheerleaders will introduce a new idea and within hours all of the other loudest crypto/web3 accounts are Tweeting some variation of the same thing.
The whole industry isn’t centrally coordinated, but they’re all reading the room and playing whatever game seems to be getting traction on a given week.
... and Poloniex and 3AC and Bitconnect and Terra and Celsius and Quadriga and BTC-e and and and...
The scams in the ecosystem outweigh the good by 100:1 or more. It doesn't matter how big it is if all of it is crap.
Could you elaborate on what definition of Web3 you believe in?
specifically it comes to the stack
web 3 application: free static frontend website, 3 variables in a smart contract deployed for 50 cents, a funnel consisting of a single call to action which is a payment, where the profit is immediately fungible and not blocked anywhere
this is applying web 2.0 principles but simplifying them to such convenient extremes that its pretty obvious why developers keep choosing it and bringing their whole communities over there
have you seen a backend interview stack for any web 2.0 organization. have you seen the funnels for any web 2.0 organization, any SaaS product? have you seen what accepting payment is like, and actually having money you can use elsewhere? its all so much more complicated for less upside
There's a reason why payment processing is complex and IMO to a large degree it is because it's more than just moving some numbers in a database.
My thoughts are that accepting crypto for payments for a SaaS product or tangible good sold online has nothing to do with Web3.
To expand on that, a merchant that chooses not to use a payment processor that provides recourse also has nothing to do with whether they let you pay in crypto, and also nothing to do with web3, as there are payment processors that accept crypto and provide the consumer recourse.
so don't use those services? you also might find what I consider to be web3 pretty interesting
there’s usually a smart contract involved and a website that is just a GUI to interact with that smart contract in a way that makes it nearly impossible to make mistakes, with the service you want access to delivered immediately. Much more like an internet vending machine than anything else. (comes with its own problems though, phishing, backdoors, things to verify)
It's kind of crazy to think that smartphones' inability to hold open a TCP connection (and thus the desire for UDP) are managing to ruin the entire (non-commercial) web.
Obviously.
There are also DAGs (IPFS), hashgraphs (Hedera, IOTA), blockweaves (Arweave), and probabl many more alternatives to blockchains to power DApps.
Not the post, I respect & understand the opinion. It sucks that the initiative of creating a deflationary currency started this massive wave of people thinking that they're smarter than whoever invented Bitcoin in the first place. Everybody bought in to the hype but nobody wants to invest the time into understanding how the actual technology works.
"In fact the entire Blockchain arena is filled with either delusional or degenerate people who are inexperienced &, in no way, better than their predecessors."
FTX was a fractional-reserve bank built on buying and selling a resource designed to replace fractional-reserve banks. It's no surprise that this is how it turned out.
This whole 'decentralized wealth' thing isn't THAT difficult - get a good wallet, purchase some BTC from a friend or exchange, and transfer it into that wallet. Rinse, repeat. Don't keep your money on an exchange. Don't throw your money at pump-and-dump schemes. Don't measure your gains and losses based on what the stock market tells you, capitalism is in its late stages and government bailouts won't keep it floating forever.
Sidenote - nobody has really defined what web3 is or isn't yet, maybe Tim BL has a definition you'd like more: https://solidproject.org/take3
It's funny to see this critique pop up in various places completely unaware of the fact that capitalism has more or less been dead since the 1940s. The Great Depression was the end of them as a dominating cultural force and they've been replaced by a managed-everything; a management class.
So when you speak of capitalism only existing in its current late stage because of unsustainable government bailouts, you're really referring to the managed world we've lived in since the New Deal which began not only the popular things we all know and associate with it, but it also massive introduced corporate governance, a managed economy, more and more government institutions/regulations/departments/etc.
We still have some rare examples of swashbuckling capitalists shaping the world to their vision (see: Elon Musk) but they are very unpopular with the managerial class because of that (see: Elon Musk).
Free market economy is the only way I see us cooperating on a global scale though, its hard to imagine otherwise - that's why I support Bitcoin
How are you socialist? You’re talking about the free market. Most likely you’re a modern right wing libertarian.
I'm sure there are thousands of people who have spent far more time working on and thinking about bitcoin than the person who invented it.
I'm more saying that people like Buterin saw it gain popularity and imagined that they could do better instead of standing behind it as a unified front. Maybe I'm biased, though
Web3: you stop paying a network, your data stays online. Either because it's permanent by default (blockchain, blockweave) or because people deem it interesting and pin it (IPFS)
Seems like a fundamental improvement to me.
Web3 - stores a few text files and rotten hyperlinks to jpgs of (if you're lucky) poorly-drawn apes and (if you're unlucky) rugs, while setting billions of dollars on fire.
Your assumptions seem to be based on the (rather specific) use-case of art NFTs. They got quite some hype, but to be honest, I didn't get them either.
FTFY.
Also, nothing stops you from storing the critical data in S3 too. I wouldn't bet what will last longer as a permanent storage.
2. Dropbox and Drive are cheaper and better. S3 is cheaper.
2. And gone if you stop paying.
2. No, it'll just be gone if crypto crashes enough and the miners sell or turn down their hardware (Probably precipitated by some fraud in some other part of the ecosystem unwinding).
There's a reason nobody has built the next Dropbox on Filecoin. [1]
[1] I mean, you can do that, if you have Einstein hair, and your goal is to grift dumb VC money, but you're not going to put together a better product.
Are Filecoin nodes all hosting files for free? I can put a terabyte of files on there and it'll never go away?
https://coloradosun.com/2022/11/21/brush-eastern-colorado-se...
> Two school administrators on Colorado’s Eastern Plains were accused of possessing child pornography when they investigated a school sexting case last April. No one said the men were trying to distribute the images or had bad intent. The girl in the photos and her parents begged police and prosecutors to drop charges against the men. But one of them, 32-year-old Bradley Bass, is facing up to 12 years in prison and the possibility of being branded a sex offender. He’d have to give up his career in education, and wouldn’t be able to parent his toddler and baby boy.
> Bass violated a Colorado law that says even unintentionally possessing explicit images of kids is akin to having child pornography. Even parents could be prosecuted under the broad language of the statute.
That's not gonna be a fun collision between technology and the legal system.
A seamless on-ramp from a bank account to a crypto wallet will really change the way we pay for things online. I believe this on-ramp is coming with CBDCs.
Edit: HN is hopelessly anti Wayne Gretzky when it comes to crypto :D
Edit 2: I should have mentioned 'online'
Modern credit payments from a consumer standpoint is tap a card or a phone on a reader.
If you're claiming that there are vendors giving a 2.5% discount for using crypto for anything, you've got some evidence to produce.
P.S. It's not always 2.5%, either. Could be 1.5% at scale.
Or more, yes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OxtTGml564 that said technically Visa will punish you by removing you from their network for doing this.
For real, who has issues paying with a CC at a register? Or contactless payments?
Don't crypto payments like bitcoin take a bit to go through? Like longer than you'd want someone tying up a cashier line?
What? Why? Here in Europe, you can just pay with SEPA direct debit. You don't need credit cards or paper checks to pay for stuff, neither in the meatspace nor online. The only thing services like PayPal are good for is fraud protection (for both sides).
So much of what we see in the US financial industry and the workarounds created to bypass their bullshit - anything from "payday loan" places advancing money for a paycheck over paychecks or rent checks themselves to Bitcoin to bypass transaction fees - is just not an issue here. Our wages get automatically deposited into our bank accounts, rent gets either automatically sent by your bank or drafted by the lender's bank, and any kind of card transaction is capped at 0.2 (DC)/0.3%(CC) [1].
[1] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2015...
I am fascinated by the ridiculous claims that this somehow makes things hard.
... and pay a lot of interest to their banks as a result. Here in Europe, we don't need to pay interest for credit cards or worry about paying CC bills on time to avoid them, as we have strong consumer protection laws in general and SEPA direct debits can be clawed back no-questions-asked for three days.
How many people have the financial discipline or the financial education? Banks are making a truckload of money on that not being the case.
... and when you talk about "experience", what do you mean here? I doubt there's a much slicker payment experience than Apple Pay when a vendor supports that, and I'm also pretty sure that my disputing a transaction with Chase is better than an equivalent crypto experience.
I bought a subscription to a tool called Icy.tools a while back. The sign-up process was as follows:
- Click the "Sign-Up" button on the website - Click the "Sign" button on the web wallet pop-up. - Click "Pay" on the next screen - Click "Approve Transaction" on the web wallet pop up.
That's it. No forms to fill. No emails to share. No credit card info to fill up. An equivalent non-crypto experience would be Sign-up > Share email > Verify email > Fill payment details > Enter OTP on credit card website
Apply Pay Express Transit payment flow for e.g. the subway: touch phone to sensor and go.
I use Sign In with Apple[0], and it's literally a single click which hides my email, and one more click with biometric confirmation for payments. That's... one fewer click than crypto, and was easier to set up than your crypto wallet, without putting my funds at risk.
I have to use my physical card maybe once every 2 months/once per quarter as an anti-fraud step. My phone contactless pays for everything, and anything it can't (like a car or whatever) I can do sub 2 hour but in practice instant bank to bank transfer.
Moving money instantly and without transaction costs is a decade plus ago solved problem
And the other commentor is right, using credit cards in any non-american country is super simple and completely without hassle. Same with sending money to anyone I know, I just need their email address or phone number. Happens in seconds, is completely safe and ensured and best of all, reversible if there is a mistake.
Where? Having lived in various cities in Europe, Asia and Australia, I can assure you, Visa and Wise and Remitly is still taking from half to 3 percent of all your transactions.
Web 1.0 and 2.0 were created by engineers to solve problems. Web 3/3.0 was invented by finance bros to disguise their various scams as the next technology revolution.
Web3, not Web 3.0, not the same thing at all, the latter is the next incarnation of Tim Berners-Lee's vision for the web and has nothing to do with finance and crypto bros.
It's important to make the distinction because 3.0 is actually important.
They really don't even distinguish between Web3/3.0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3
Anyone here like using PayPal? What if instead you had the equivalent of cash that you could use on the internet?
Web3 is attempting to create an economy decoupled from existing currencies (fiat). Unlike a country seigniorage determined ahead of time, and is publicly visible for all to see.
If the idea of creating an internet native economy with its own currency and financial tools is not intellectually stimulating to you, then look elsewhere instead of completely hating on the space.
Yes there are scams; no that is not why the tech was created.
That's the sales pitch, but the implementations all require basically anonymous, unaccountable intermediaries that are trusted.
That is in effect what your statement is implying.
I’ll preface this by stating: running financial experiments on retail investors is immoral and likely criminal.
That being said, how many failures did Goddard have before his first successful liquid rocket? A lot!
He was ridiculed in newspapers, touted as crazy, and seen as a failure by a broad community.
If you’re interested, pay a visit to NASA’s Goddard Space and Flight center (named after the father of modern rocketry).
Why should failures of the past (most of which were human folly or greed) inhibit us from innovating our way to the future?
Crypto isn’t actually trying; the intermediaries that need to be trusted are fundamental to the concept, despite the sales pitch.
If you want to direct commerce without trusted intermediaries, just do that, it’s called barter and it works in certain circumstances.
The “problem” crypto pretends to solve is that turning that in to monetary exchange that is, replacing at least one part of that direct exchange with a fungible token traded not for its own direct utility but instead optimized for use in exchange with third parties for other goods and services, makes it suddenly rely on trusting external actors and social systems, but that isn’t a solvable problem, it is unalterably inherent in the very concept of monetary exchange. All any system can do is obscure that, reducing the probability that the trust extended is warranted.
If you google decentralized service in an incognito tab you’ll see why people ask this. The rest of the world gets Wikipedia articles about engineering distributed systems (like database clusters) and distributed consensus (like raft). Since that’s (probably) not what you mean, I submit that as the person using a standard term in a non-standard way that it’s on you to define it.
You are asking it bad faith hoping I was a cryptobro. It’s an obvious red herring and I’m not feeding the troll.
Questions have been asked, and vitriol has been your only response. Who’s actually the troll, one wonders.
Speculating on 'crypto' can indeed be considered nonsense.
Owning your identity (instead of Google) and being able to communicate and send money directly to your peers for almost free (instead of Facebook / Twitter controlling who youcan communicate with, and Visa / Wise.com taking a chunk of all your transactions) is a MASSIVE deal.
The second isn't as much of a killer app as you think to normies, and neither is the first.
I don’t live in the US and I assure you Visa is still a very big part of daily life in all of Europe, Asia and Australia.
Web3 is the crypto nonsense that the article talks about, which has almost nothing to do with the web. Web 3.0 is Tim Berners Lee's vision for a decentralized web:
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/04/web-inventor-tim-berners-lee...
I think it's an important distinction to make. Web 3.0 is noble in its vision and intentions, while web3 has been the crypto industry's attempt to get folks interested in their tech with a buzzword that sounds like it's the next hot thing.
The Web 3.0 consortium will need to revive "Semantic Web", or some derivative, to distance themselves from crypto.
TBL is not the central arbiter of web 3, in much the same way he didn't have anything to do with the coining of web 2.0.
I don't consider gambling a good thing just because there are millions of gamblers. I feel the same about cryptocurrency.
How is using a decentralised Zoom alternative like Huddle01 gambling?
How is using a decentralised Pusher alternative like Push gambling?
I agree, that in the last years most web3 apps focused on financial/blockchain specific use-cases. I also agree, that many of them had quite dubious claims.
But that's not all there is and I think, that won't be the reason it will gain mainstream adoption.
Maybe, the Internet Archive is a better example millions of users?
Seemingly, the Internet Archive and Protocol Labs are bros.
https://blog.archive.org/2021/04/01/filecoin-foundation-gran...
But yeah, I know, no true Scotsman.
With close to a zero balance (but not quite zero) to pay transaction fees, you can do peer to peer encrypted messaging without central arbiters.
With close to a zero balance (but not quite zero) to pay transaction fees, you can send vast quantities of stablecoins to the otherside of the world - that said a web3 skeptic may consider stablecoins to be a cryptocurrency (there's arguments either way, they're tokens but not minted via proof of stake) and capitalisation is an issue.
Edit: reply to peoplefromibiza, who made some good points, due to rate limit:
> wallets are a cryptocurrency concept
yes, agreed. But they do a lot more than let you speculate on cryptocurrencies. Right now I'm working on wallet for people who have zero interest in speculating on cryptocurrencies.
> you can do the same thing with a client certificate
yes agreed. You can think of web3 as a better PKI. I do.
you can do the same thing with a client certificate, boom, you are who the cert says you are.
yes, agreed. But they do a lot more than let you speculate on cryptocurrencies. Right now I'm working on wallet for people who have zero interest in speculating on cryptocurrencies.
> you can do the same thing with a client certificate
yes agreed. You can think of web3 as a better PKI. I do.
interesting point.
from a UI perspective, it's kinda true.
could have been their killer app, if the whole ecosystem thought about it, but in the end it's been just a byproduct of something that proved zero usefulness and even the "better PKI" argument it's been somewhat replicated by letsencrypt for HTTPS and it will for everything else when a sufficient number of users will show interest for it.
You are free to think that, but most folks' use of the term relates strongly to cryptocurrency.
Most people have no idea what web3 or web 2.0 is. But yes, the common definition is the decentralised web. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3
The web3, Web 3, Web 3.0 naming ship has already sailed and was successfully hijacked by the Ethereum crowd. The semantic web was close to non-existent to begin to take off with that name, hence the reason why it lost quickly.
Quite frankly, that is too bad and the damage is already done.
It started with ssh. Once keys were exchanged, you did not have to trust the infrastructure providers anymore. You knew whom you are talking to and that the communication is not tampered with. Similar with https.
A recent development is that ActivityPub profiles have private keys and publish their public keys. So if you run your own Fediverse node, you already are in control of keys that identify you as you.
I think this trend will continue to slowly put the social graph into the hands of the people.
You can't just say "MyFoo stands for good things, look there's a good thing over there, therefore MyFoo is working".