It’s weird that this article waffles on about PCs and how the author thinks that’s a good analogy. It’s not very convincing because you could easily pick another technology pair and show it the other way (often worse is just worse).
But the thing that really seems weird is that all you need to do make it interesting is 1) define what you mean by web3 (it’s a slippery weasel word that changes meaning whenever the people using it needs it to) 2) define a few uses that are obviously better than the alternatives and justify them without hand waving (including explaining why what would appear to be fundamental show stopping flaws are not in fact that)
If you can’t do that (and no one seems to be able to) the maybe, just maybe, it is bullshit?
Me I d define web3 by referencing the websocket arrival that evolved from Ajax polling to have better data subscription and the rise of full js frameworks which transformed the amount of work clients do on web resources that sometimes couldnt be done by the backend (drawing a financial graph full of beautiful indicator and refreshing live for instance).
I can understand web4 could be self financing unstoppable web resources with no central authority able to close them but I dont see yet a proper use case beyond criminal endeavour. Plus, we're far from it, we'd need an organic transmission network that goes out of the traditional ISP system, like a global bluetooth peer to peer mobile network every phone contributes to in exchange for payment... that would be fast enough...
I don't really know much about web3 or what it will happen in the future, but these same debates happened ith other techs before which are now mainstream in a similar fashion as this here.
People like pointing out echo chambers all around while they are also in one.
Remember all the feathers ruffled with cloud computing? It just servers in a data center! Serverless? There are still servers! web2.0 s just ajax requests!
If people dump money into it, then something is likely to come out whether is better or not than what it was before. Maybe is worse, or maybe something will be built on top of it that will be better or some othere political event might make it relevant. Who knows
I think the PC analogy is solid. I think the observation that we need a way to permissionly interact with data is spot-on, and I agree that that could bring a second wave of value creation and innovation.
Think of having a Facebook-like social graph, not controlled by Facebook. Or a merchant aggregation system like Amazon's without Amazon. A system not driven by maximizing exposure monetization (via ads, paid placement, etc.) but by something like a Nash equilibrium that maximizes value creation for participants.
This is what I work on, and I think it can be done.
Maybe the onus is on the skeptics to conclusively prove that web3 is BS? Since none can effectively prove so, then maybe it is not BS?
The skeptics are always inventing new reasons why it will fail, and yet it's still here and bigger than ever, day after day, making the skeptics seems crazy at this point, pointlessly arguing for lack of use for something that is clearly useful, judging by the sheer amount of capital and development resources used, if nothing else.
I think that the original idea behind crypto is still the most interesting. It's programmable money. Large swaths of the finance industry exist to make money programmable. Why not build it into the monetary system directly?
The general historical trend is to make money more abstract and to be able to perform more complicated functions with it. But fundamentally money is a social technology that consists of three things: An abstract unit of value in which money is denominated, a system of accounts, which keeps track of the individuals' or the institutions' credit or debt balances as they engage in trade with one another and the possibility that the original creditor in a relationship can transfer their debtor's obligation to a third party in settlement of some unrelated debt. [0]
Crypto seems to satisfy the essence of that in a pretty cool way. DeFi projects are experimenting with the question of, "can we build the financial instruments and capabilities that a complex economy require on top of, and directly integrated with, this type of monetary system.
Like any technology that requires a large network of users to be valuable it has a difficult bootstrapping problem. But it seems to be gradually working its way to larger and more important transactional contexts. First with illegal digital marketplaces and now in countries with weak monetary system like El Salvador (and with unbridled speculation along the way).
Maybe all of the current crypto projects will fail but it will be interesting to see the nature of monetary systems in 10, 20 and 50 years from now. What aspects of these current experiments have been adopted?
> Put differently: it turned out that permissionless publishing alone was insufficient. We also need permissionless data.
Has the author ever heard of OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia, or a million other projects like them? I'm also not quite sure "permissionless data" is how I'd describe a database that stores tiny amounts of data at a massive cost. Pay-to-play is permissionless iif you have the money.
Wikipedia database is managed by the wikimedia staff. You have the permission to edit it for now but can not guarantee it will be make available always. This is what the author meant.
Since the ICO craze in 2017 I've seen countless ideas and millions spent trying to use blockchain and crypto for everything you could possibly imagine, and yet I don't see anything meaningful has ever came out of it, apart from get rich quick schemes, ponzis and some virtual novelty items.
Bitcoin has been around for 12 years, but in real life I don't know anyone who has ever used something crypto related for anything else than risky investment, or basically gambling. I'm very skeptical.
I've never met anyone who's ever used their stock certificates for anything other than speculation.
However, I have participated in a multisig that controls six figures of funds with a handful of strangers on the internet. I have used my governance tokens to vote on DAO proposals regarding new product lines and features. I have created and sold NFT artwork. I have registered a domain name and set an immutable record on a smart contract linking to a website and an Ethereum wallet. I have used it for logging in to software. I've built software that gates access based on ownership of a particular NFT. I've stored data on Filecoin and archived it on Arweave. I've borrowed money on-chain. I've commissioned artwork and paid in ETH. I've bought gold with Bitcoin. I've helped raise a million dollars for charity with a major celebrity. I've contributed to Gitcoin grants for public goods software funding. Your skepticism just closes your mind and blinds you to what's possible.
It's a long article which says that Web3 is a database which nobody owns followed by a lot of hand-wavy stuff that you see everywhere else.
The worst part of this is that I feel like I could get dragged into this. That at some point I'll have no choice but to start digging into this and dedicate time to other stacks because the money behind Web3 succeeds in shoving it down everyone's throats.
This is someone talking about technology fixing problems, but ignoring the messy real world. For example, we have repeatedly seen how governments can control things which "nobody owns."
Another item which stood out was the idea of Web3 taking back control from the big tech companies. But if they are monopolies, then shouldn't it be the government which takes them down?
People sometimes claim that there's a generational divide in crypto adoption — younger people "get it" while older people (those who came of age with the early web) are stuck in their ways.
But there’s a large group of older people who cling to crypto because they think it'll make their ideas sound relevant again. While appearing "disruptive", the crypto space actually privileges those (generally older) folks who already have money to burn (like the Winklevoss twins, whose payout from FB provided more money than they could ever spend on themselves in one lifetime).
What I'm trying to figure out about blockchain in general is how people think it will avoid the inevitable consolidation that efficient economies drive towards. A few examples:
- In the early days of the automobile there were hundreds of car companies. Now there are essentially what, 10 worldwide?
- In the early days of personal computing there were hundreds of competing platforms, PC brands, etc. Now there are essentially what, 10 worldwide?
- In the early days of the internet there were hundreds (thousands?) of dial-up and last mile internet providers (sometimes literally some person in your neighborhood with a T1 and modems in a garage). Now there are what, 10 in the US?
- In the early days of the internet there were hundreds of web hosting companies, e-mail providers, etc. Now almost all of the internet runs on what, three?
These examples go on and on (mobile devices, cell providers, pretty much anything and everything).
Point being it's extremely unlikely (to me) that as the immutable blockchain ledgers all of this is built on grow endlessly (storage, compute, bandwidth, etc) and attempt to scale to any meaningful application, transaction rate, etc beyond the toy level it's at now "decentralized" will almost certainly turn into a handful of power players that can bring the advantages offered by massive economies of scale.
I don't agree with some of your examples but setting that aside, all of what you mentioned are economic products and services. Crypto is neither. Without crypto you have cash, credit card, debit card, prepaid card, gift card, paypal, ecash, applepay, western union, money gram, epay and a myriad of other non-crypto payment methods that are based on central bank currency. They did not consolidate. Or look at currencies in general, every country has one by design.
Also decentralized does not mean that there are no hubs where decisins and power is concentrated, it simply means there is no one center. Much like how people say the US is democratic because you have two parties to choose from instead of just one like China. I do think perect decentalization is egalitarian in that all important decisions are 51% majority consensus with every vote having equal weight. However most practical decentralized systems are distributed with the capacity to be fully decentralized.
Crypto currencies that will last long term will reflect a demand for specific payment needs. To use your example, we have lesser number of PC makers because they all make similar varieties of PCs. With payment systems you have ACH,SWIFT,card payment (instant), cash (anonymous),etc... there will be cryptocurrencies that will reflect popular payment and speculative investment needs for the long term.
I'm not a web3 evangelist but I feel the need to say, all of these examples are the result of incentives. Dig into "theory of the firm" it is a very poorly yet somewhat understood set of principles. If you can construct a system with incentives that make consolidation more costly you can by and large prevent it where you want to prevent it. Of course, there are still things that are more efficient after consolidation, there are things you wouldn't want to disincentivize consolidation in, and carefully designing incentives is a lot like preventing security exploits: you have to think of everything to prevent an unwanted outcome, but all you have to do is miss one thing and you get unwanted outcomes.
> When (now Sir) Tim Berners-Lee invented the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) he unleashed what we now think of as permissionless publishing.
1. Retconning
2. As always, web3 and crypto is the next WWW, and the next Internet, and the next car, and the next wheel. Even though literally all signs are pointing to it being the next Juicero or the next Enron.
> We also need permissionless data. Why do we need this? Because otherwise we are left with a few large corporations ... We of course know where this winds up and that’s why pretty much everyone hates their cable company and their electric utility.
That's quite a logic leap. We need permissionless data because that's why everyone hates their cable company.
> prior to the Bitcoin Paper we literally didn’t know how to have permissionless.
1. We did.
2. Retconning yet again. Bticoin paper is literally this:
--- start quote ---
A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online
payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a
financial institution.
We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network.
--- end quote ---
The etire paper mentions permissions or permissionless exactly zero times.
> It is difficult to overstate how big an innovation this is.
Yes, you have. Yoi have just significantly overstated how big it is.
> As such Web3 can, if properly developed and with the right kind of regulation, provide
Ah yes, regulations. Which, if I remember from just a few paragraphs above "then leads us to all sort of regulatory contortions aimed at rectifying the power imbalance but in practice mostly cementing it. "
> And if widely adopted Web3/crypto technology will also start to improve along other dimensions. It will become faster and more efficient.
And that will surely happen just because you say it will happen. Also because innovation I guess?
> And much like the PC was a platform for innovation that never happened on mainframes or mini computers, Web3 will be a platform for innovation that would never come from Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc.
Innovation never came from Juicero either. Somehow, your web3 is surely the next Internet, and not the myriad of failed "innovations".
> No single entity or small group of entities controls it
In practice they will. The moment +50% of miners agrees on any transaction, regardless of it happening - it will happen. So having +50% of Bitcoin miners means you control the Bitcoin market. And we're back to square one.
Edit: Fine they only control current transactions, but forking as a solution to this implies the current network won't be able to just join and takeover a new bitcoin fork. Which is highly suspect.
99% of the foundation of crypto seems to be grift. Just waiting for the bubble to pop when they run out of suckers. Lets see how much their ugly JPEGs are worth then.
The author makes a great case for creating protocols such as http and xmpp and the like, which as protocols, are decentralized already.
Why add magic number guessing for financial gain to something like a photo sharing platform?
Maybe your answer is micro transactions, but then how do you protect consumers from fraud and abuse with reversibility and dispute resolution? This seems like a feature and not a bug of our current financial system.
Things like Patreon and Kickstarter exist already and seem to do a fairly good job of this. Why do we need all of the downsides of cryptocurrency to do something that already works well for billions of people?
Ok, so how is this remotely the same as PCs being cheaper? Well because to some people this matters a great deal. Why? Because much of the power held by large companies (and by governments) comes from the fact that they operate and control databases.
What a naive and short sighted world-view this is, it's almost grotesque. No company or government derives its power from holding a big database. By the same argument it would follow that Venezuela must be a really wealthy country because it's got lots of oil. And it's the same kind of argument as saying Stripe or Paypal or some other Fintech got big because they had the idea of "enabling payments on the internet".
Power is derived from getting others behind a cause and then executing on it. That's it.
Web3 is 'the future' if you're invested in crypto.
If you're not (or have been and got out), then it's nothing but the delusion of a sect of believers who want to wish it into existence.
Being invested fundamentally changes the way people think and allows them to come up with any justification for their investment. It's not just crypto, but pretty much everything else where people expect easy returns at the expense of other people, nature, other countries, the future, etc.
There is nothing special or magical about this technology. Just because it uses an immutable data structure called 'block chain' and cryptographic hashes left and right, doesn't automatically make it useful or needed. In fact, the opposite is true due to the POW being a race to burn as much (mostly) coal for the benefit of very few.
The fact that the vast majority of crypto enthusiasts, who have absolutely no idea how it works and what it represents, decided to part with their fiat in the hope that money grows on Merkle trees and pushed the price to astronomical levels does not validate the technology itself, but rather is an example of human psychology and greed at work.
I hope the whole crypto delusion crumbles as quickly as possible before it takes down the whole world economy with it. Or maybe that is exactly what must happen so that the world wakes up to reality. Maybe that is the whole point of it.
>> Web3 is 'the future' if you're invested in crypto.
While investors for sure talk and promote their bags, I do think this statement of yours is overly cynical and ignores the fact that professional educated investors also invested in the first place because they truly believe it is the future.
A16Z and USV, for example, could certainly be wrong about web3. But they are both some of the best early stage investors of all time, and have consistently had a thesis about the future, bet on it in face of ridicule, and been proven right in the end.
I frankly think both A16Z and USV genuinely believe in the future of this technology, and betting billions on it reflects that, and is not some cynical pump n dump scheme.
And given their history of being correct versus the average HN commentator, my money is on them being right.
Do you think not being invested and watching the value grow 500x over the past few years leaves you embittered and too pessimistic to see the value? Or is it only the one side of the coin that clouds judgement?
For fairness then I think we should consider that everyone that is anti web3 and has no crypto might have too much Google and FB stock according to your logic?
For all your trivia recitations you failed on a crucial point.
> POW being a race to burn as much (mostly) coal for the benefit of very few.
POW is a consensus mechanism that secures the entire Bitcoin network. At times that has represented over one trillion USD worth of value. The benefit of Bitcoin's consensus is to all the money locked up in it, without it, or even if the profit to hack Bitcoin were only slightly marginal, the whole thing would fall apart, almost one trillion in value.
It is not for the very few that consensus mechanisms reward, it is for the whole network (in the ideal case). So in a way, when Bitcoin is driven to astronomical prices, and the incentive to break into it becomes irresistible to the most powerful people in the world yet they still cannot accomplish it, it does validate the technology.
I just find it a little concerning that there are people out there, who are blindly following this Web3 "trend" by spending their money on digital "art".
For the average person, there is no real use for Web3 because there is no actual definition for it.
My impression is that Web3 is being praised as decentralized, yet it is people with a lot of money who are the one's regulating the pace right now.
And that is a tad bit concerning to say the least, because if I invest millions into something (whether as an individual or a VC) - I'd like to feel a sense of "ownership", otherwise that money could have been spent helping real causes.
I'd go as far as saying that for most people, including those entrenched in spending their hard earned money, the word Web3 is immediately associated with NFTs, not the actual blockchain technology. And that says a lot.
Publishing a website is not permissionless. You have to get a public IP address and register a domain name with an ICAAN provider, and various ISPs have the power to block your site. Actually promoting your site, scaling your site, integrating with common services, require more centralized servers, they're just just more implicit and you can choose from multiple providers (e.g. AWS or Azure). But you can choose to post to Facebook or Twitter.
The problem isn't centralization. It's centralization through a company which exerts too much of its own influence and censorship and monetizes your usage for its own benefit. Plenty of centralized databases allow free speech and don't seem to monetize your data: look at HN or if you're more radical, 4chan.
Idk if all centralized services are doomed to be corrupt so decentralized is the best we can do, like all monarchies are doomed to be corrupt so democracy is the best we can do. But unlike monarchies that hasn't really been shown. Maybe if someone invents a more efficient way to serve decentralized data the web will transition, but until then most decentralized services are most useful only as a backup to centralized services.
A constant crypto-person refrain seems to be, essentially, “technology X was quite bad, yet hyped, at first (there is a tendency to overstate the badness), and then took over the world, therefore crypto-stuff, which is quite bad, yet hyped, will naturally also take over the world.”
Counterpoint: remember 3D TVs? Or those chatbot things that briefly received all the VC money a few years back?
It's a rule of mine to avoid any financial area that looks, acts, and talks like a mania after reading Charles Mackay's "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)," which I discovered at random in a strip mall bookstore in Rhode Island. Reading it saved me over $300,000 dollars before the dotcom crash because I sold everything and got out (my timing was very lucky.)
Crypto, NFT's, blockchain & web3 are currently in a mania phase so my 2022 resolution is to aggressively ignore them so I don't get sucked in before the inevitable correction. I can't afford to be stuck with a pile of tulip bulbs.
So what you are saying is that the internet should be built on a model where people can upload children pornography or propaganda from state actors and nobody can do anything to stop it? Thanks I pass. I'm also curious about how to provide distributed storage that competes with google in terms of size, reliability and performance.
The fun thing about cryptography is that allows building internet services that can beat the blockchain. There is nothing preventing you from creating a service where people upload encrypted stuff that is only associated to a key id. In fact there are already services that kind of do this.
This is a common misconception. Web3 mostly exists off chain. Storing everything on the blockchain would not only take a lot of space (and thus be extremely expensive) but also be horribly slow. Web3 apps generally use the blockchain more as an audit log. There's a reason most of the web3 apps crypto believers give as examples for web3 apps that actually work are trading apps.
FWIW I think most people base this of a misunderstanding of how NFTs work based on the claims around it: NFTs prove ownership of a hash. That hash is associated with a URL. That URL points to a JSON document. That JSON document points to the NFT art piece (i.e. the "JPEG"). If the service hosting the JSON document (or the service hosting the art piece) goes away, the hash becomes a simulacrum, an identifier with no identifiee. It still indicates ownership but only to those who already know that this is what it does. There can be JPEGs on the blockchain (and allegedly there is already CSAM on at least one of them) but due to the size constraints this isn't how things usually work.
This isn't even getting into multi-layer approaches which came about because while web3 is built on ETH, actually doing anything with the ETH chain is extremely rate limited and has extremely high transaction costs, so other chains have been built on top of it that as I understand it just bulk commit hashes of snapshots or something to it.
FWIW the "first you download the Internet" solution already exists and is called IPFS. There is also a solution called Freenet that focuses on anonymity and avoiding censorship. Predictably the biggest problem with downloading the Internet is that you unknowingly (or knowingly) start collecting illegal content like CSAM, which may be a serious crime depending on where you live.
That vision of Web3, "Just put everything on the blockchain" is doomed to fail and I don't know anyone who ever seriously proposed it.
Blockchains are best suited for data subject to manipulation, i.e. data in which there is profit to alter. If we were to naivly build "Web3" in theory with this in mind, then the majority of activity would be peer-to-peer, federated, or partially centralized, while the exchange of security credentials would take place on an efficient broadcast layer.
The trick is to do as much off chain as possible - and if trust becomes an issue, develop a minimally on chain scheme. Its still early days, if you ask me how exactly this looks in 20 years I couldn't tell you.
Not sure why you’re downvoted because this is a legit question. Even if web3 is build on a large number of blockchains, you still need whole blockchains downloaded in order to be trustless. Currently probably only a tiny percentage of crypto users have downloaded whole blockchains, and instead defer to third parties.
Web3 will handle IP address and DNS storage, sale, and search using basically NFTs on the blockchain. Meanwhile, HTTP content hosting will still be kept separate (maybe IPFS, maybe something centralized depending on the need).
Current example: NFTs typically store metadata on the blockchain and the content in IPFS.
> some proponents who present web3 as bringing about a libertarian nirvana.
What bothers a lot of us isn't the libertarian nirvana ideal, it's the fact that most loud proponents have a financial interest and stand to gain by increasing adoption, even if only temporarily. Even if they truly believe the technology is pointless and has no future, they are incentivised to pretend that it is revolutionary in order to increase the value of their investments so they can offload their holdings. This makes it difficult to trust anybody writing positively about cryptocurrency-related topics. It's like knowing a manufacturer pays people to write positive reviews about their product and then suddenly seeing lots of blogs and comments raving about how great the products are with little justification.
If you can separate the distributed database technology from the financial speculation then I will be a lot more enthusiastic about it. However, without the get-rich-quick aspect I suspect such a technology won't get nearly as much excitement overall. Mastodon and Diaspora are already working examples of decentralised social networks and this article doesn't state what advantage web3-based products would have over them and people generally don't seem very excited about them.
[+] [-] almost|4 years ago|reply
But the thing that really seems weird is that all you need to do make it interesting is 1) define what you mean by web3 (it’s a slippery weasel word that changes meaning whenever the people using it needs it to) 2) define a few uses that are obviously better than the alternatives and justify them without hand waving (including explaining why what would appear to be fundamental show stopping flaws are not in fact that)
If you can’t do that (and no one seems to be able to) the maybe, just maybe, it is bullshit?
[+] [-] qaq|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xwolfi|4 years ago|reply
I can understand web4 could be self financing unstoppable web resources with no central authority able to close them but I dont see yet a proper use case beyond criminal endeavour. Plus, we're far from it, we'd need an organic transmission network that goes out of the traditional ISP system, like a global bluetooth peer to peer mobile network every phone contributes to in exchange for payment... that would be fast enough...
[+] [-] i_hate_pigeons|4 years ago|reply
People like pointing out echo chambers all around while they are also in one.
Remember all the feathers ruffled with cloud computing? It just servers in a data center! Serverless? There are still servers! web2.0 s just ajax requests!
If people dump money into it, then something is likely to come out whether is better or not than what it was before. Maybe is worse, or maybe something will be built on top of it that will be better or some othere political event might make it relevant. Who knows
[+] [-] sbazerque|4 years ago|reply
Think of having a Facebook-like social graph, not controlled by Facebook. Or a merchant aggregation system like Amazon's without Amazon. A system not driven by maximizing exposure monetization (via ads, paid placement, etc.) but by something like a Nash equilibrium that maximizes value creation for participants.
This is what I work on, and I think it can be done.
[+] [-] jakupovic|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] myownpetard|4 years ago|reply
The general historical trend is to make money more abstract and to be able to perform more complicated functions with it. But fundamentally money is a social technology that consists of three things: An abstract unit of value in which money is denominated, a system of accounts, which keeps track of the individuals' or the institutions' credit or debt balances as they engage in trade with one another and the possibility that the original creditor in a relationship can transfer their debtor's obligation to a third party in settlement of some unrelated debt. [0]
Crypto seems to satisfy the essence of that in a pretty cool way. DeFi projects are experimenting with the question of, "can we build the financial instruments and capabilities that a complex economy require on top of, and directly integrated with, this type of monetary system.
Like any technology that requires a large network of users to be valuable it has a difficult bootstrapping problem. But it seems to be gradually working its way to larger and more important transactional contexts. First with illegal digital marketplaces and now in countries with weak monetary system like El Salvador (and with unbridled speculation along the way).
Maybe all of the current crypto projects will fail but it will be interesting to see the nature of monetary systems in 10, 20 and 50 years from now. What aspects of these current experiments have been adopted?
[0] Money: The Unauthorized Biography
[+] [-] pudo|4 years ago|reply
Has the author ever heard of OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia, or a million other projects like them? I'm also not quite sure "permissionless data" is how I'd describe a database that stores tiny amounts of data at a massive cost. Pay-to-play is permissionless iif you have the money.
Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.
[+] [-] throway453sde|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mad182|4 years ago|reply
Bitcoin has been around for 12 years, but in real life I don't know anyone who has ever used something crypto related for anything else than risky investment, or basically gambling. I'm very skeptical.
[+] [-] chrisco255|4 years ago|reply
However, I have participated in a multisig that controls six figures of funds with a handful of strangers on the internet. I have used my governance tokens to vote on DAO proposals regarding new product lines and features. I have created and sold NFT artwork. I have registered a domain name and set an immutable record on a smart contract linking to a website and an Ethereum wallet. I have used it for logging in to software. I've built software that gates access based on ownership of a particular NFT. I've stored data on Filecoin and archived it on Arweave. I've borrowed money on-chain. I've commissioned artwork and paid in ETH. I've bought gold with Bitcoin. I've helped raise a million dollars for charity with a major celebrity. I've contributed to Gitcoin grants for public goods software funding. Your skepticism just closes your mind and blinds you to what's possible.
[+] [-] corobo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gexla|4 years ago|reply
The worst part of this is that I feel like I could get dragged into this. That at some point I'll have no choice but to start digging into this and dedicate time to other stacks because the money behind Web3 succeeds in shoving it down everyone's throats.
This is someone talking about technology fixing problems, but ignoring the messy real world. For example, we have repeatedly seen how governments can control things which "nobody owns."
Another item which stood out was the idea of Web3 taking back control from the big tech companies. But if they are monopolies, then shouldn't it be the government which takes them down?
[+] [-] chrisco255|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|4 years ago|reply
Someone suggested it is because they have invested heavily in ETH mining.
[+] [-] muglug|4 years ago|reply
But there’s a large group of older people who cling to crypto because they think it'll make their ideas sound relevant again. While appearing "disruptive", the crypto space actually privileges those (generally older) folks who already have money to burn (like the Winklevoss twins, whose payout from FB provided more money than they could ever spend on themselves in one lifetime).
[+] [-] OtomotO|4 years ago|reply
Relatively young, not at all into crypto, due to environmental reasons
[+] [-] dehrmann|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kkielhofner|4 years ago|reply
- In the early days of the automobile there were hundreds of car companies. Now there are essentially what, 10 worldwide?
- In the early days of personal computing there were hundreds of competing platforms, PC brands, etc. Now there are essentially what, 10 worldwide?
- In the early days of the internet there were hundreds (thousands?) of dial-up and last mile internet providers (sometimes literally some person in your neighborhood with a T1 and modems in a garage). Now there are what, 10 in the US?
- In the early days of the internet there were hundreds of web hosting companies, e-mail providers, etc. Now almost all of the internet runs on what, three?
These examples go on and on (mobile devices, cell providers, pretty much anything and everything).
Point being it's extremely unlikely (to me) that as the immutable blockchain ledgers all of this is built on grow endlessly (storage, compute, bandwidth, etc) and attempt to scale to any meaningful application, transaction rate, etc beyond the toy level it's at now "decentralized" will almost certainly turn into a handful of power players that can bring the advantages offered by massive economies of scale.
[+] [-] badrabbit|4 years ago|reply
Also decentralized does not mean that there are no hubs where decisins and power is concentrated, it simply means there is no one center. Much like how people say the US is democratic because you have two parties to choose from instead of just one like China. I do think perect decentalization is egalitarian in that all important decisions are 51% majority consensus with every vote having equal weight. However most practical decentralized systems are distributed with the capacity to be fully decentralized.
Crypto currencies that will last long term will reflect a demand for specific payment needs. To use your example, we have lesser number of PC makers because they all make similar varieties of PCs. With payment systems you have ACH,SWIFT,card payment (instant), cash (anonymous),etc... there will be cryptocurrencies that will reflect popular payment and speculative investment needs for the long term.
Heck, I would even speculate in a crypto lottery!
[+] [-] betwixthewires|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmitriid|4 years ago|reply
1. Retconning
2. As always, web3 and crypto is the next WWW, and the next Internet, and the next car, and the next wheel. Even though literally all signs are pointing to it being the next Juicero or the next Enron.
> We also need permissionless data. Why do we need this? Because otherwise we are left with a few large corporations ... We of course know where this winds up and that’s why pretty much everyone hates their cable company and their electric utility.
That's quite a logic leap. We need permissionless data because that's why everyone hates their cable company.
> prior to the Bitcoin Paper we literally didn’t know how to have permissionless.
1. We did.
2. Retconning yet again. Bticoin paper is literally this:
--- start quote ---
A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.
We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network.
--- end quote ---
The etire paper mentions permissions or permissionless exactly zero times.
> It is difficult to overstate how big an innovation this is.
Yes, you have. Yoi have just significantly overstated how big it is.
> As such Web3 can, if properly developed and with the right kind of regulation, provide
Ah yes, regulations. Which, if I remember from just a few paragraphs above "then leads us to all sort of regulatory contortions aimed at rectifying the power imbalance but in practice mostly cementing it. "
> And if widely adopted Web3/crypto technology will also start to improve along other dimensions. It will become faster and more efficient.
And that will surely happen just because you say it will happen. Also because innovation I guess?
> And much like the PC was a platform for innovation that never happened on mainframes or mini computers, Web3 will be a platform for innovation that would never come from Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc.
Innovation never came from Juicero either. Somehow, your web3 is surely the next Internet, and not the myriad of failed "innovations".
[+] [-] Ygg2|4 years ago|reply
> No single entity or small group of entities controls it
In practice they will. The moment +50% of miners agrees on any transaction, regardless of it happening - it will happen. So having +50% of Bitcoin miners means you control the Bitcoin market. And we're back to square one.
Edit: Fine they only control current transactions, but forking as a solution to this implies the current network won't be able to just join and takeover a new bitcoin fork. Which is highly suspect.
[+] [-] hermitcrab|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alex_young|4 years ago|reply
Why add magic number guessing for financial gain to something like a photo sharing platform?
Maybe your answer is micro transactions, but then how do you protect consumers from fraud and abuse with reversibility and dispute resolution? This seems like a feature and not a bug of our current financial system.
Things like Patreon and Kickstarter exist already and seem to do a fairly good job of this. Why do we need all of the downsides of cryptocurrency to do something that already works well for billions of people?
[+] [-] rsp1984|4 years ago|reply
What a naive and short sighted world-view this is, it's almost grotesque. No company or government derives its power from holding a big database. By the same argument it would follow that Venezuela must be a really wealthy country because it's got lots of oil. And it's the same kind of argument as saying Stripe or Paypal or some other Fintech got big because they had the idea of "enabling payments on the internet".
Power is derived from getting others behind a cause and then executing on it. That's it.
[+] [-] delegate|4 years ago|reply
If you're not (or have been and got out), then it's nothing but the delusion of a sect of believers who want to wish it into existence.
Being invested fundamentally changes the way people think and allows them to come up with any justification for their investment. It's not just crypto, but pretty much everything else where people expect easy returns at the expense of other people, nature, other countries, the future, etc.
There is nothing special or magical about this technology. Just because it uses an immutable data structure called 'block chain' and cryptographic hashes left and right, doesn't automatically make it useful or needed. In fact, the opposite is true due to the POW being a race to burn as much (mostly) coal for the benefit of very few.
The fact that the vast majority of crypto enthusiasts, who have absolutely no idea how it works and what it represents, decided to part with their fiat in the hope that money grows on Merkle trees and pushed the price to astronomical levels does not validate the technology itself, but rather is an example of human psychology and greed at work.
I hope the whole crypto delusion crumbles as quickly as possible before it takes down the whole world economy with it. Or maybe that is exactly what must happen so that the world wakes up to reality. Maybe that is the whole point of it.
[+] [-] berberous|4 years ago|reply
While investors for sure talk and promote their bags, I do think this statement of yours is overly cynical and ignores the fact that professional educated investors also invested in the first place because they truly believe it is the future.
A16Z and USV, for example, could certainly be wrong about web3. But they are both some of the best early stage investors of all time, and have consistently had a thesis about the future, bet on it in face of ridicule, and been proven right in the end.
I frankly think both A16Z and USV genuinely believe in the future of this technology, and betting billions on it reflects that, and is not some cynical pump n dump scheme.
And given their history of being correct versus the average HN commentator, my money is on them being right.
[+] [-] echopurity|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] djohnston|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timdaub|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattwilsonn888|4 years ago|reply
> POW being a race to burn as much (mostly) coal for the benefit of very few.
POW is a consensus mechanism that secures the entire Bitcoin network. At times that has represented over one trillion USD worth of value. The benefit of Bitcoin's consensus is to all the money locked up in it, without it, or even if the profit to hack Bitcoin were only slightly marginal, the whole thing would fall apart, almost one trillion in value.
It is not for the very few that consensus mechanisms reward, it is for the whole network (in the ideal case). So in a way, when Bitcoin is driven to astronomical prices, and the incentive to break into it becomes irresistible to the most powerful people in the world yet they still cannot accomplish it, it does validate the technology.
[+] [-] skilled|4 years ago|reply
For the average person, there is no real use for Web3 because there is no actual definition for it.
My impression is that Web3 is being praised as decentralized, yet it is people with a lot of money who are the one's regulating the pace right now.
And that is a tad bit concerning to say the least, because if I invest millions into something (whether as an individual or a VC) - I'd like to feel a sense of "ownership", otherwise that money could have been spent helping real causes.
I'd go as far as saying that for most people, including those entrenched in spending their hard earned money, the word Web3 is immediately associated with NFTs, not the actual blockchain technology. And that says a lot.
[+] [-] armchairhacker|4 years ago|reply
The problem isn't centralization. It's centralization through a company which exerts too much of its own influence and censorship and monetizes your usage for its own benefit. Plenty of centralized databases allow free speech and don't seem to monetize your data: look at HN or if you're more radical, 4chan.
Idk if all centralized services are doomed to be corrupt so decentralized is the best we can do, like all monarchies are doomed to be corrupt so democracy is the best we can do. But unlike monarchies that hasn't really been shown. Maybe if someone invents a more efficient way to serve decentralized data the web will transition, but until then most decentralized services are most useful only as a backup to centralized services.
[+] [-] rsynnott|4 years ago|reply
Counterpoint: remember 3D TVs? Or those chatbot things that briefly received all the VC money a few years back?
[+] [-] mwattsun|4 years ago|reply
Crypto, NFT's, blockchain & web3 are currently in a mania phase so my 2022 resolution is to aggressively ignore them so I don't get sucked in before the inevitable correction. I can't afford to be stuck with a pile of tulip bulbs.
[+] [-] diegocg|4 years ago|reply
The fun thing about cryptography is that allows building internet services that can beat the blockchain. There is nothing preventing you from creating a service where people upload encrypted stuff that is only associated to a key id. In fact there are already services that kind of do this.
[+] [-] enisdenjo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hnbad|4 years ago|reply
FWIW I think most people base this of a misunderstanding of how NFTs work based on the claims around it: NFTs prove ownership of a hash. That hash is associated with a URL. That URL points to a JSON document. That JSON document points to the NFT art piece (i.e. the "JPEG"). If the service hosting the JSON document (or the service hosting the art piece) goes away, the hash becomes a simulacrum, an identifier with no identifiee. It still indicates ownership but only to those who already know that this is what it does. There can be JPEGs on the blockchain (and allegedly there is already CSAM on at least one of them) but due to the size constraints this isn't how things usually work.
This isn't even getting into multi-layer approaches which came about because while web3 is built on ETH, actually doing anything with the ETH chain is extremely rate limited and has extremely high transaction costs, so other chains have been built on top of it that as I understand it just bulk commit hashes of snapshots or something to it.
FWIW the "first you download the Internet" solution already exists and is called IPFS. There is also a solution called Freenet that focuses on anonymity and avoiding censorship. Predictably the biggest problem with downloading the Internet is that you unknowingly (or knowingly) start collecting illegal content like CSAM, which may be a serious crime depending on where you live.
[+] [-] mattwilsonn888|4 years ago|reply
Blockchains are best suited for data subject to manipulation, i.e. data in which there is profit to alter. If we were to naivly build "Web3" in theory with this in mind, then the majority of activity would be peer-to-peer, federated, or partially centralized, while the exchange of security credentials would take place on an efficient broadcast layer.
The trick is to do as much off chain as possible - and if trust becomes an issue, develop a minimally on chain scheme. Its still early days, if you ask me how exactly this looks in 20 years I couldn't tell you.
[+] [-] shrimpx|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yazaddaruvala|4 years ago|reply
Web3 will handle IP address and DNS storage, sale, and search using basically NFTs on the blockchain. Meanwhile, HTTP content hosting will still be kept separate (maybe IPFS, maybe something centralized depending on the need).
Current example: NFTs typically store metadata on the blockchain and the content in IPFS.
[+] [-] cillian64|4 years ago|reply
What bothers a lot of us isn't the libertarian nirvana ideal, it's the fact that most loud proponents have a financial interest and stand to gain by increasing adoption, even if only temporarily. Even if they truly believe the technology is pointless and has no future, they are incentivised to pretend that it is revolutionary in order to increase the value of their investments so they can offload their holdings. This makes it difficult to trust anybody writing positively about cryptocurrency-related topics. It's like knowing a manufacturer pays people to write positive reviews about their product and then suddenly seeing lots of blogs and comments raving about how great the products are with little justification.
If you can separate the distributed database technology from the financial speculation then I will be a lot more enthusiastic about it. However, without the get-rich-quick aspect I suspect such a technology won't get nearly as much excitement overall. Mastodon and Diaspora are already working examples of decentralised social networks and this article doesn't state what advantage web3-based products would have over them and people generally don't seem very excited about them.