I might have missed it but it'd be nice if this piece or any other web3 think-piece acknowledged the capabilities of tools such as Indieweb or the federated social web, showing the promise of distribution wholly without blockchains.
It is incredible how divisive web3 has made people. I don't think I recall anything quite like it. I think it is because:
1. It is primarily about politics rather than technology. Those in favour of web3 typically come from the right-libertarian camp, often with a strong dislike of government, banks, taxes etc., which those against web3 associate with anti-social ideas such as anti-vax, permissive gun laws, conspiracy theories and the like.
2. It is an existential struggle. Those in favour of web3 have a vested interest now and don't want to see the value of their coins and tokens fall, while those against web3 don't want to see the last vestiges of the free and open web as we know it destroyed by the tokenisation and monetisation of every interaction.
It is possible to be left-leaning, support regulation + taxes + social structures, and still be in favour of web3/crypto.
I agree #2 is a common issue, people become "maxis" of one protocol if they over-invest in it, or if they are holding it purely for speculative value.
To your last point: many in favour of web3 feel it is more "free" and "open" than advertising or subscription based models that extract tremendous value from creators (Instagram, Spotify, traditional art galleries, etc).
> while those against web3 don't want to see the last vestiges of the free and open web as we know it destroyed by the tokenisation and monetisation of every interaction.
i'm confused here. isn't the free and open web that we currently have already destroyed by monetization and data capture of your every click and move?
Point 2 is exactly right, and is partly why this is so piqued. Point 1 used to be correct until around 2019, when DAO governance (and to some extent NFTs) began to attract much more left leaning crowds.
Ultimately blockchains are frameworks for multiparty governance. The implementation doesn’t have to be terribly libertarian if you don’t want it to be, and the actual blockchain protocol is only part of what comprises DAOs. I’ve seen smart contracts with “C-suites” and with voting bodies. It’s political legos.
So Web3 is now really the home of techno political ideologues in the broadest sense. I personally don’t find the notion offensive because this is, in fact, what decentralization has always been about: creating more sophisticated power sharing structures in virtual space. We can disagree about the implementation details quite a bit, but reducing Web3 to coins is like reducing America to dollars: you can make some valid points but you’ll miss some salient details.
NFTs make a little more sense when you view them as existing within one of the Web3 political regimes. The basic bet is that the NFT registry of your choice will have some kind of political legitimacy in the long run. Whether that looks like copyright or DRM or bragging rights or something else is not clear. Most sane people I know are aware that it’s a bet on future value, and for now enjoy it as a social toy.
I think regardless of which 'side' is correct, it's really interesting that as a crypto enthusiast I completely and utterly disagree with your POV.
I (and many other socialist libertarians) are interested in privacy/decentralization, and see crypto, as a permissionless and decentralized system, itself as the last vestige of the free and open web. There's a very strong and thriving open source community/ethos in crypto, it's kinda built in by design.
I don't really care about the price of my tokens (I only have ETH and some ENS I got airdropped), as they have intrinsic value to me. Of course it would be nice to be rewarded for being early in a new tech, but I have no aspirations of being a crypto millionaire or making a bunch of money, I just think the tech is really cool.
> Those in favour of web3 typically come from the right-libertarian camp
While I agree, those groups are perhaps over-represented in web3 discussions, I don't think it's accurate to say web3 supporters are 'typically' right-libertarian.
When I first heard of Bitcoin I thought "cool idea but will never take off". Then with the ICO madness I thought "ok, people are idiots".
Now with DeFi, "Web3" and all these articles I'm starting to think the cliché "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win" may actually be true. Why are people spending so much time arguing against it if it wasn't significant? We see all these rational arguments and yet the industry keeps growing exponentially.
What is actually going on? Is this a pivotal moment unfolding right in front of our eyes without us seeing it?
Because it's a ponzi scheme that will probably end up getting to the "too big to fail" stage before the music stops. All of these new blockchain schemes like ICOs, NFTs and web3 are just a way to recruit new segments of the population into the crypto universe in order to pump up the value of crypto currencies.
I have friends who are artists and musicians who completely drank the koolaid and are convinced that NFTs and web3 will liberate them from poverty. They will repeat all of the talking points about blockchains but have no idea what a database is. I ask them to show me a web3 website and they can't name one, show me someone they know who buys NFTs and they can't name any.
Here are some recent quotes from one of my friends:
"crypto is fairly new it’s quantum mechanics as well."
"NFTs make you a shareholder"
"yeah the Internet didn’t exist until people applied concepts to it as well. blockchain is a system where new concepts can exist on the Internet. "
"the meta data you're able to embed can be anything now so creators can make any type of art. whereas before it was just mp3 or MP4 but now u can monetize any type of digital content"
"You can protect your music or visual via an NFT and control the royalty split "
"Having the ability to retain royalties to creators is a feature we’ve never had we can sell links to exclusive bonus content, recipes, any idea whereas u post it on reg social media and it’s unprotected w no protection "
When I first learned of Dropbox, I thought that was stupid. A full 2 GB of storage for free online? How would they afford this? Turns out storage is cheap and more importantly it keeps getting cheaper over time. I am very willing to admit I was an idiot. However, that does not mean anything I say is stupid is NOT stupid. I still think NFT is stupid. I don't know how I can support cryptocurrency and not support NFT but I am sure people will laugh at me for not being practical for saying transaction fees should be as close to zero as possible if not zero.
> Is this a pivotal moment unfolding right in front of our eyes without us seeing it?
Yes I think so. I see parallels with the early days of the dotcom boom (mid to late 90s) when there was a mad gold rush by "entrepreneurs" for anything Internet or Web based, and a bunch of nerds (including me!) were scoffed at for twiddling with some computer and network based nonsense that was just glorified letters and phone calls and bulletin boards.
I think the current web3 craze needs its version of the dotcom bust for the fundamentals of the tech to be truly allowed to shine through, away from the current blaring foghorns of the snake-oil peddlers and scam artists and rug pulls.
At present, all web3 offers is various communities that come together around some sort of a totem (monkey pictures, lion pictures, "buy an old document", "play an mmorpg", "have a cryptocurrency-based TLD", whatever), but all these sound quite un-compelling to me personally.
I have no idea what form the core of this "web3" stuff will ultimately take, and I don't think the nascent Google or Facebook or Netflix or Amazon of this space exists yet, but I truly believe there's something in the works, that is being obscured by an unfortunate amount of noise.
Edited to add: I own exactly 0 of any cryptocurrency or NFT or ICO and don't even participate in those communities, and am in actual fact quite more anti-web3 (in whatever its current form is) than my tone above would indicate.
I see it less as some revolutionary moment or great sea change but more that people who already have and control wealth can move things in a direction that benefits them regardless of whether the rest of us will benefit or even care
As mostly tech workers, HN readers are woefully disconnected from the lives of everyday people who have been promised a path to if not wealth, at least some kind of comfortable lifestyle by working really hard.
And then the 2008 housing crisis happened. A massive betrayal by the government against its own people. Many people lost their houses, their retirement savings, and their investments. And who did the government bail out and prop up? The bankers, the elite, and the stock market. And this happens over and over again in countless banana republics across the world — the elite propping up the systems that support themselves and not really caring about anyone else.
So now, you have this massive movement against wall street (r/wallstreetbets & GME/AMC), the elite (Trumpism), centralized financial institutions (Bitcoin & DeFi), and the upper class of tech workers (web3). And you wonder why? People were promised a path towards wealth and have had it stolen away from them countless times. Now they are rebelling.
It doesn't matter if — technically & logically — Bitcoin, DeFi, and Web 3 aren't everything they're promising to be... People still need a place to turn to put their hopes that isn't the current system. They've just been burned too many times by it.
But none of this is going to work out in the long run... It'll be just like every other mania throughout history. Tons of investment, tons of apparent growth fueled by FOMO, and then a massive collapse when people realize no one actually cares about this stuff for its intrinsic value... But enough effort & pain & money will have gone into it by then that it will have created a nascent industry that will maybe, one day 10-20 years from now, take over the world and become the new normal.
TLDR: DeFi & Web 3 is an emotional reaction to a system that just doesn't work for most people, not the logical next step towards a better version of the status quo.
Bad solutions to real problems can still win in the market. The market's definition of optimal can be different than an experts. I personally think that Crypto DeFI is a sub optimal in many cases actively harmful solution to real problems that exist. This does not presume that it can't succeed anyway.
All this talk about Web3 and I still don't know what it is. Show me some normal, non-tech people who use this fancy web3 tech? Show me some critical human need, like food, energy, or housing that is powered by this fairy tale? What capability does it enable? What can I do, as a normal human being who needs food, air and shelter, that I couldn't do without web3? Whose grandfather or grandmother uses some web3 app without realizing it?
People compare the Internet to web3, but it is a false comparison. All of the above questions could be answered by the Internet -- everyone and their grandmother relies on the Internet in some way, directly or indirectly, to power their basic human needs. When my grandmother goes to the grocery store to buy milk, she uses the Internet without realizing it. And this was true from the very early days of the Internet. Not so for this mysterious "web3".
>People compare the Internet to web3, but it is a false comparison.
Forerunners to the modern Internet were useful from the get-go. ARPANET was designed to share data and compute resources between government and university labs. Two years after ARPANET came online, the first email system was developed on it. ARPANET had actual value and use cases immediately, and kept adding more.
If we're comparing the development of the Internet to that of web3 (or whatever they call blockchain technology these days), then it's safe to conclude the latter has very stunted development.
> All this talk about Web3 and I still don't know what it is.
> People compare the Internet to web3, but it is a false comparison. All of the above questions could be answered by the Internet
Imagine that today is 1994. Now replace the word web3 in tour first paragraph with the word "internet", and read it again, as a person living in 1994. How many critical human needs was it meeting, and how many grannies were using it then?
(As an aside, how many critical human needs are satisfied by video gaming? Why does a tech phenomenon need to satisfy a critical human need to be viable and interesting?)
The introduction to TFA does one of the best jobs I've seen of explaining this. If that doesn't make it clear to you what it is, I am not sure what will.
Web 3 is a marketing term by some people who have built a system that is still at least 3 years, if not perhaps 10 or more years, from being anything remotely resembling "web" scale, where several billion non-technical people can just push a button on some website and "be" on the Web 3.0, which mostly just works. It's a cynical play to position themselves as the Next Inevitability simply by grabbing the next number before anyone else and planting themselves down in your mind as being The Next Number, because 3 inevitably follows 2. They'd like to borrow that inevitability in your mind.
It won't work. Web 2 doesn't have enough hype (that cycle cycled a long time ago) for anyone to get too excited about updates on the term. But it may establish itself enough as "3" that the net effect in the end is to kill the Web (Number) naming scheme. That'll be the biggest thing it accomplishes.
Marketing can do a lot but it can't literally just name things into existence like this.
This comment is strictly about the terminology. The tech is what it is, but at the moment, I don't even see what I'd call a prototype of any "Web 3.0" deserving of the name. It is still at best in the benchtesting phase. I couldn't explain anything currently called Web 3.0 to my non-computer-technical but generally-computing-savvy father, let alone the general public, and most of what I've tried out of the "Web 3.0" straight-up didn't work when I tried it.
All best wishes to people working on this and I don't mean this to be a discouragement per se (unless you are working on this and do mistakenly believe you're on the verge of breakout... sorry, you're a long ways from that, I'm just the messenger here), there's interesting things going on and a lot of silly things going on, just like you'd expect from the very early bench-test phase, but that's where you are. You're not in a position to be claiming to be an inevitability.
"Web 3.0" isn't. The more likely "Web 3.0" is, sad to say, the Metaverse, if companies can work out some way of carrying over the "linking" concept and sharing space in there. That, to be honest, isn't very likely either, but it's comparable in probability to any of these "web 3.0" technologies actually making it to web scale, i.e., both very low. (In the Metaverse's case, the reality is that it'll be at least a decade at a minimum before you can just "decide" to be something and find that it carries over everywhere. Look at the direction the increasingly sharded streaming space is to get a clue about what the reality will look like.)
In this latest round of defensive anti-web3 posts from established technologists, I've been looking for mention of Tezos, CleanNFTs, HEN, Cardano, Algorand, Hedera, Harmony, Dragonchain, etc. but instead get tired critiques of BTC, ETH, and OpenSea that have been made over and over for years now.
Yeah, Bitcoin/Dogecoin and Ethereum aren't viable, but what about the newer/better tech?
But what about existing and proven technology that has been around for decades? This whole "web3" thing seemingly focuses on problems nobody has, cares for, or can be solved with what already exists in far more efficient ways.
What makes Ethereum not viable? If you refer to the article you linked, the PoW network will be merged to the PoS network launched last year by June 2022. The first public merge testnet actually launched today! [1]
Not to derail the conversation, but Hedera really doesn't belong with the others because the foundation behind it can revert/censor transactions on the blockchain at will. I'm not saying it doesn't have a use case, or that it's not going to be successful, just that it doesn't really belong in this conversation.
This article defines what web3 IS then criticizes it. If web3 were only blockchain it might be forgiven but IMO it is about a lot more like IPFS, no-trust networks, peer-2-peer computing, etc.
This article therefore makes some points while missing a lot more.
This is a good example of knowledge rot. The author used to be an authority in the field of IT, but has a mid-level understanding of blockchain tech and almost zero understanding for blockchain culture.
For example "With a blockchain based system all these protections go away because there is no “undo”. If you have your life’s savings in Bitcoin and someone gains access to your key, those coins are gone and you are shit out of luck"
This is a great passage. If you do have all you life savings in one hot wallet, then you are ngmi. If however you have a small proportion of your networth in a hot wallet and it gets compromised, no problem, you didn't even lose something. You just paid a small price for a failing a gullibility test and probably gained some experience.
The author's tendency to overprotect people corresponds exactly to the criticism of the "accredited investor" status. Of course some investments are risky if you go in with 100% or more of your capital. This problem is solved by asset allocation, not by grouping and denying people based on their networth.
Additional request: If you are aware of any organization monitoring "experts" who are allowed to advise the German parliament, please mention them.
I don't trust myself to manage a bitcoin wallet. How is this ever going to displace boring centralized banking? If someone uses my credit card without my permission, that's not my responsibility. That's a big feature.
“I understand that especially creative people are desperately looking for ways to make a decent living and selling NFTs looks like a very simple way to make some serious cash. I get it. We need to find a mode of life that allows people to work on their art or whatever else they want to do and still be clothed, fed, sheltered and otherwise taken care of. Comfortably.”
...
“Take a second to support tante on Patreon!”
ITS RIGHT THERE, Patreon is working just fine to keep a lot of creators paid with no ultra-inefficient distributed databases or cryptocurrency or whatnot. Just some profoundly unsexy credit card/PayPal/stripe transactions.
Problem is that you can get booted of those platforms and payment processors. Or they unilaterally change their terms of what kind of content creators they want on their platform (a la onlyfans wanting to distance themselves from sexual explicit content)
>ITS RIGHT THERE, Patreon is working just fine to keep a lot of creators paid with no ultra-inefficient distributed databases or cryptocurrency or whatnot. Just some profoundly unsexy credit card/PayPal/stripe transactions.
It works 'just fine' until you say something that someone doesn't like and then you're wondering how stupid was to entrust all your future to a platform that has no problem baning you because Mastercard or Visa said they would like that. Just like youtube works just fine until one day your adblocker doesn't work because Chrome has full market control and you see that youtube is unusable without it. etc.
I have looked at a lot of Patreon pages and almost of all of them the creator is making $10 - $400 a month (usually a guesstimate based on tiers and subscriber numbers). This is great in terms of an additional revenue stream, but it is no Medici family patronage.
I like the design of the website, too bad the content is so dumb. How are you not tired of regurgitating the same FUD for 10 years? If you don't like crypto that's ok, its not for you, just don't buy in and leave us alone.
No new ideas. Another megaphone to the common ideologies that go against Web3 that are so widespread as deprived of critical reasoning.
Hacker community used to be about more than this.
Trying to write an apparently neutral point of view with a condescending tone that carries a lot of negative weight towards a tech subject reeks of mold.
Thanks daddy.
Thanks school system.
Thanks commonly accepted society roles.
Now let me tinker with tech... it might just change something in the future.
A lot of you guys have no idea what you're talking about. If you're on hn and salty you missed blockchain until now, don't start thinking about writing a blogpost on it. We have enough of these, and they are all the same. If you get it, you get it. If not, you'll just be left behind (maybe your shitty blogpost will sell as an nft one day)
[+] [-] riffic|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] astoor|4 years ago|reply
1. It is primarily about politics rather than technology. Those in favour of web3 typically come from the right-libertarian camp, often with a strong dislike of government, banks, taxes etc., which those against web3 associate with anti-social ideas such as anti-vax, permissive gun laws, conspiracy theories and the like.
2. It is an existential struggle. Those in favour of web3 have a vested interest now and don't want to see the value of their coins and tokens fall, while those against web3 don't want to see the last vestiges of the free and open web as we know it destroyed by the tokenisation and monetisation of every interaction.
[+] [-] mattdesl|4 years ago|reply
I agree #2 is a common issue, people become "maxis" of one protocol if they over-invest in it, or if they are holding it purely for speculative value.
To your last point: many in favour of web3 feel it is more "free" and "open" than advertising or subscription based models that extract tremendous value from creators (Instagram, Spotify, traditional art galleries, etc).
[+] [-] volkk|4 years ago|reply
i'm confused here. isn't the free and open web that we currently have already destroyed by monetization and data capture of your every click and move?
[+] [-] pfraze|4 years ago|reply
Ultimately blockchains are frameworks for multiparty governance. The implementation doesn’t have to be terribly libertarian if you don’t want it to be, and the actual blockchain protocol is only part of what comprises DAOs. I’ve seen smart contracts with “C-suites” and with voting bodies. It’s political legos.
So Web3 is now really the home of techno political ideologues in the broadest sense. I personally don’t find the notion offensive because this is, in fact, what decentralization has always been about: creating more sophisticated power sharing structures in virtual space. We can disagree about the implementation details quite a bit, but reducing Web3 to coins is like reducing America to dollars: you can make some valid points but you’ll miss some salient details.
NFTs make a little more sense when you view them as existing within one of the Web3 political regimes. The basic bet is that the NFT registry of your choice will have some kind of political legitimacy in the long run. Whether that looks like copyright or DRM or bragging rights or something else is not clear. Most sane people I know are aware that it’s a bet on future value, and for now enjoy it as a social toy.
[+] [-] qquqq|4 years ago|reply
I (and many other socialist libertarians) are interested in privacy/decentralization, and see crypto, as a permissionless and decentralized system, itself as the last vestige of the free and open web. There's a very strong and thriving open source community/ethos in crypto, it's kinda built in by design.
I don't really care about the price of my tokens (I only have ETH and some ENS I got airdropped), as they have intrinsic value to me. Of course it would be nice to be rewarded for being early in a new tech, but I have no aspirations of being a crypto millionaire or making a bunch of money, I just think the tech is really cool.
I wonder where the divide comes from?
[+] [-] pcthrowaway|4 years ago|reply
While I agree, those groups are perhaps over-represented in web3 discussions, I don't think it's accurate to say web3 supporters are 'typically' right-libertarian.
[+] [-] egypturnash|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kiro|4 years ago|reply
Now with DeFi, "Web3" and all these articles I'm starting to think the cliché "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win" may actually be true. Why are people spending so much time arguing against it if it wasn't significant? We see all these rational arguments and yet the industry keeps growing exponentially.
What is actually going on? Is this a pivotal moment unfolding right in front of our eyes without us seeing it?
[+] [-] m_ke|4 years ago|reply
I have friends who are artists and musicians who completely drank the koolaid and are convinced that NFTs and web3 will liberate them from poverty. They will repeat all of the talking points about blockchains but have no idea what a database is. I ask them to show me a web3 website and they can't name one, show me someone they know who buys NFTs and they can't name any.
Here are some recent quotes from one of my friends:
"crypto is fairly new it’s quantum mechanics as well."
"NFTs make you a shareholder"
"yeah the Internet didn’t exist until people applied concepts to it as well. blockchain is a system where new concepts can exist on the Internet. "
"the meta data you're able to embed can be anything now so creators can make any type of art. whereas before it was just mp3 or MP4 but now u can monetize any type of digital content"
"You can protect your music or visual via an NFT and control the royalty split "
"Having the ability to retain royalties to creators is a feature we’ve never had we can sell links to exclusive bonus content, recipes, any idea whereas u post it on reg social media and it’s unprotected w no protection "
[+] [-] pooper|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shrikant|4 years ago|reply
Nobody actually knows yet.
> Is this a pivotal moment unfolding right in front of our eyes without us seeing it?
Yes I think so. I see parallels with the early days of the dotcom boom (mid to late 90s) when there was a mad gold rush by "entrepreneurs" for anything Internet or Web based, and a bunch of nerds (including me!) were scoffed at for twiddling with some computer and network based nonsense that was just glorified letters and phone calls and bulletin boards.
I think the current web3 craze needs its version of the dotcom bust for the fundamentals of the tech to be truly allowed to shine through, away from the current blaring foghorns of the snake-oil peddlers and scam artists and rug pulls.
At present, all web3 offers is various communities that come together around some sort of a totem (monkey pictures, lion pictures, "buy an old document", "play an mmorpg", "have a cryptocurrency-based TLD", whatever), but all these sound quite un-compelling to me personally.
I have no idea what form the core of this "web3" stuff will ultimately take, and I don't think the nascent Google or Facebook or Netflix or Amazon of this space exists yet, but I truly believe there's something in the works, that is being obscured by an unfortunate amount of noise.
Edited to add: I own exactly 0 of any cryptocurrency or NFT or ICO and don't even participate in those communities, and am in actual fact quite more anti-web3 (in whatever its current form is) than my tone above would indicate.
[+] [-] royaltheartist|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] panphora|4 years ago|reply
And then the 2008 housing crisis happened. A massive betrayal by the government against its own people. Many people lost their houses, their retirement savings, and their investments. And who did the government bail out and prop up? The bankers, the elite, and the stock market. And this happens over and over again in countless banana republics across the world — the elite propping up the systems that support themselves and not really caring about anyone else.
So now, you have this massive movement against wall street (r/wallstreetbets & GME/AMC), the elite (Trumpism), centralized financial institutions (Bitcoin & DeFi), and the upper class of tech workers (web3). And you wonder why? People were promised a path towards wealth and have had it stolen away from them countless times. Now they are rebelling.
It doesn't matter if — technically & logically — Bitcoin, DeFi, and Web 3 aren't everything they're promising to be... People still need a place to turn to put their hopes that isn't the current system. They've just been burned too many times by it.
But none of this is going to work out in the long run... It'll be just like every other mania throughout history. Tons of investment, tons of apparent growth fueled by FOMO, and then a massive collapse when people realize no one actually cares about this stuff for its intrinsic value... But enough effort & pain & money will have gone into it by then that it will have created a nascent industry that will maybe, one day 10-20 years from now, take over the world and become the new normal.
TLDR: DeFi & Web 3 is an emotional reaction to a system that just doesn't work for most people, not the logical next step towards a better version of the status quo.
[+] [-] zaphar|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unboxingelf|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] maxwell|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] _xnmw|4 years ago|reply
People compare the Internet to web3, but it is a false comparison. All of the above questions could be answered by the Internet -- everyone and their grandmother relies on the Internet in some way, directly or indirectly, to power their basic human needs. When my grandmother goes to the grocery store to buy milk, she uses the Internet without realizing it. And this was true from the very early days of the Internet. Not so for this mysterious "web3".
[+] [-] the_snooze|4 years ago|reply
Forerunners to the modern Internet were useful from the get-go. ARPANET was designed to share data and compute resources between government and university labs. Two years after ARPANET came online, the first email system was developed on it. ARPANET had actual value and use cases immediately, and kept adding more.
If we're comparing the development of the Internet to that of web3 (or whatever they call blockchain technology these days), then it's safe to conclude the latter has very stunted development.
[+] [-] azangru|4 years ago|reply
> People compare the Internet to web3, but it is a false comparison. All of the above questions could be answered by the Internet
Imagine that today is 1994. Now replace the word web3 in tour first paragraph with the word "internet", and read it again, as a person living in 1994. How many critical human needs was it meeting, and how many grannies were using it then?
(As an aside, how many critical human needs are satisfied by video gaming? Why does a tech phenomenon need to satisfy a critical human need to be viable and interesting?)
[+] [-] PaulDavisThe1st|4 years ago|reply
ps. I am an extreme web3-is-blockchain skeptic.
[+] [-] jerf|4 years ago|reply
It won't work. Web 2 doesn't have enough hype (that cycle cycled a long time ago) for anyone to get too excited about updates on the term. But it may establish itself enough as "3" that the net effect in the end is to kill the Web (Number) naming scheme. That'll be the biggest thing it accomplishes.
Marketing can do a lot but it can't literally just name things into existence like this.
This comment is strictly about the terminology. The tech is what it is, but at the moment, I don't even see what I'd call a prototype of any "Web 3.0" deserving of the name. It is still at best in the benchtesting phase. I couldn't explain anything currently called Web 3.0 to my non-computer-technical but generally-computing-savvy father, let alone the general public, and most of what I've tried out of the "Web 3.0" straight-up didn't work when I tried it.
All best wishes to people working on this and I don't mean this to be a discouragement per se (unless you are working on this and do mistakenly believe you're on the verge of breakout... sorry, you're a long ways from that, I'm just the messenger here), there's interesting things going on and a lot of silly things going on, just like you'd expect from the very early bench-test phase, but that's where you are. You're not in a position to be claiming to be an inevitability.
"Web 3.0" isn't. The more likely "Web 3.0" is, sad to say, the Metaverse, if companies can work out some way of carrying over the "linking" concept and sharing space in there. That, to be honest, isn't very likely either, but it's comparable in probability to any of these "web 3.0" technologies actually making it to web scale, i.e., both very low. (In the Metaverse's case, the reality is that it'll be at least a decade at a minimum before you can just "decide" to be something and find that it carries over everywhere. Look at the direction the increasingly sharded streaming space is to get a clue about what the reality will look like.)
[+] [-] jamiethompson|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxwell|4 years ago|reply
Yeah, Bitcoin/Dogecoin and Ethereum aren't viable, but what about the newer/better tech?
http://blockchain.cs.ucl.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/UC...
[+] [-] YorickPeterse|4 years ago|reply
But what about existing and proven technology that has been around for decades? This whole "web3" thing seemingly focuses on problems nobody has, cares for, or can be solved with what already exists in far more efficient ways.
[+] [-] 0x64|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://hackmd.io/dFzKxB3ISWO8juUqPpJFfw
[+] [-] evergrande|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pcthrowaway|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmitriid|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Sloppy|4 years ago|reply
This article therefore makes some points while missing a lot more.
[+] [-] pengwing|4 years ago|reply
For example "With a blockchain based system all these protections go away because there is no “undo”. If you have your life’s savings in Bitcoin and someone gains access to your key, those coins are gone and you are shit out of luck"
This is a great passage. If you do have all you life savings in one hot wallet, then you are ngmi. If however you have a small proportion of your networth in a hot wallet and it gets compromised, no problem, you didn't even lose something. You just paid a small price for a failing a gullibility test and probably gained some experience.
The author's tendency to overprotect people corresponds exactly to the criticism of the "accredited investor" status. Of course some investments are risky if you go in with 100% or more of your capital. This problem is solved by asset allocation, not by grouping and denying people based on their networth.
Additional request: If you are aware of any organization monitoring "experts" who are allowed to advise the German parliament, please mention them.
[+] [-] recursive|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] desireco42|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] egypturnash|4 years ago|reply
“I understand that especially creative people are desperately looking for ways to make a decent living and selling NFTs looks like a very simple way to make some serious cash. I get it. We need to find a mode of life that allows people to work on their art or whatever else they want to do and still be clothed, fed, sheltered and otherwise taken care of. Comfortably.”
...
“Take a second to support tante on Patreon!”
ITS RIGHT THERE, Patreon is working just fine to keep a lot of creators paid with no ultra-inefficient distributed databases or cryptocurrency or whatnot. Just some profoundly unsexy credit card/PayPal/stripe transactions.
[+] [-] mhitza|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LewisVerstappen|4 years ago|reply
Why don't you take a look at https://www.patreon.com/policy/benefits? Millions of creators are disenfranchised by Patreon.
Also, you need a credit card / bank account to accept transactions from Patreon.
With crypto, you can create a wallet in seconds and immediately start accepting payment.
[+] [-] nathias|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ozten|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nyolfen|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] mattwilsonn888|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Lamad123|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nathias|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HugoDaniel|4 years ago|reply
Hacker community used to be about more than this. Trying to write an apparently neutral point of view with a condescending tone that carries a lot of negative weight towards a tech subject reeks of mold.
Thanks daddy. Thanks school system. Thanks commonly accepted society roles.
Now let me tinker with tech... it might just change something in the future.
[+] [-] deft|4 years ago|reply