Comment by abiro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abiro | Hacker News Reader

Web3 refers to the emerging shift in internet value chains from permissioned, centralized databases to permissionless, decentralized databases where users own their data. The driving force behind Web3 is that we can now enforce invariants on state transitions in a permissionless, decentralized manner for a limited set of applications (mostly financial). For an even more limited set of applications, we can also enforce invariants while preserving the confidentiality of transactions.

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 3 has been defined as all kinds of nonsense for the last 15 years. The first time I heard this was the semantic web and almost immediately business tried to redefine that term to some conglomeration of social media and advertising. Crypto isn't even decentralized, its distributed, which is the source of the sham.

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.

I am sure people would like the permissionless, decentralized databases if they didn't come with microtransactions that promise early adopters large gains at the expense of later users, like... a glorified ponzi scheme.

I think what gets me is that nobody ends up actually doing this.

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?

I'm not aware of a centralized exchanges "on web3". Can you point to? Companies like Coinbase, Kraken, Binance are not "on web3", if that's what you mean.

There are few crypto exchanges that are "on web3", like Uniswap, Curve, Balancer, etc. And they don't rely on a centralized database.

This is a great summary. Many of the critiques I've read here criticize the early users of the technology, which is like blaming cars when the blame should be on bad drivers.

The main problem with it is that "web3" is a technological answer to what is not a technological problem. Aside from IP assignments, the internet is inherently decentralized as it is. It's just that people don't choose to use it that way.

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