The Third Web
tante.cc
tante.cc
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.
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).
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?
why? it seems to me that these new digital lands that are currently being dreamed up will be right next to the old-new ones of FB/Instagram/Google+. The old-old ones are either still where they used to be (eg. old school forums, IRC, blogs).
web3 at this point is basically a big sign put up next to an empty desert claiming "the future is built here" with a few shoddy tents selling wallet extensions for browsers, which you need if you want to buy sandcastles from the strange circus folks over there, between those dunes littered with old collectible cards.
if people who currently spend most of their time on "social media" start to spend some/all of their time in web3 land, that still doesn't mean much for the true old-old parts of the web. most users already have no idea of what the web was like ~20 years ago.
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 (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?
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.
Granted, there's a few problems with the federation system (mainly that finding an instance whose admin you agree with can be daunting; Mastodon being a clone of Twitter and all its flaws; etc.) but I don't think they'd be solved by adding blockchain technology.
Second of all, the crypto 'community' is not one giant community with homogeneous ideas, there are many who scoff at being bankrolled by big business and venture capitalists. I can't imagine anything less 'big business capitalism' than a system where no one entity has any control, and where users have the ability to democratically control the services/protocols they use.
There's no requirement to participate in 500000% APY LP farms or buying a bunch of meme coins and shilling VC funded ponzi schemes to be a fan of crypto. Critique that BS all you want but it's not everything.
I would consider myself a socialist libertarian and a fan of crypto. The best part of being free and open source is that we can always come along and make better software and better ways of organizing ourselves. Personally I see DAOs and zero-knowledge proofs as the most important uses so far, I think there's a lot of really cool potential there for organizing systems in ways that weren't possible before.
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?
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 "
and the ponzi scheme argument is very tired. there are far better arguments against crypto at this point if youre going to be on the anti train.
Many of us have a practical attitude which is effectively that the technology has massive potential, and at the same time, that it's probably overvalued for the current state of technology.
Of course, overvalued is subjective. It could all still amount to nothing, but it could also replace tons of legacy/traditional infrastructure and systems, and/or create a new global financial layer based on currencies whose supplies can't be manipulated by governments. The valuation is of course massively coupled to the perceived potential and the varying levels of conviction speculators have in it, which incentivizes a lot of disingenuous behaviours.
The only exciting potential use case of crypto that I've seen so far are DAOs, but I'm not convinced that there's any reason why they need to be on a blockchain instead of postgres or sqlite.
You have an easy way to win the argument, a simple proof by example will be enough to prove me wrong. So please list the amazing scientific breakthroughs or concrete examples of web3 tools that my mother could use.
my main argument with your arguments is that close mindedness and flippancy doesn't get us anywhere.
OK, what are they?
I definitely agree that a TON of the crypto space is super scammy, and think it's an absolute shame, I don't blame anyone for being scared off.
The advantage it has over IPFS is guaranteed permanence and the incentivization is core to that functionality.
Mostly it is Ethereum which is the prime enabler of all of the things you listed above. ICOs, Tokens, DAOs, NFTs, Web3 and expensive gas fees. All of it.
Every, single feature it has introduced has created tons of scams in the crypto universe with the users who are new to this are none the wiser.
This is why we need a crash to get rid of the crypto hype-squads and focus on actually useful blockchain projects that are fast, scalable, cheap, affordable and are regulated which make it harder to create such scams that Ethereum consistently enables.
Cryptocurrencies that do not fit in future regulations will simply not survive. Especially the meme-coins.
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.
But responding to your "but I truly believe there something in the works, being obscured by an unfortunate amount of noise": One passage of the article that really struck me was this one:
> When an engineer looks into a problem, they will at first gather the requirements. What does the system they need to build need to do and how and for whom etc. Afterwards they will look at existing technologies and see which technology and platform fits best to the requirements.
Notice how that implies the availability of "existing technologies" such that the engineer can choose whichever "technology and platform fits best to the requirements". There is a circularity to this argument! How do any of those existing technologies come to exist if all engineers are merely choosing existing technologies upon which to build the thing that meets their requirements?
I'm still incredibly unsure about this, but I think the scriptable blockchains (ie. the ones that aren't Bitcoin) could well be the "existing technology" for some set of requirements (either in the future or in the present but in a way that is unclear) that I lack the vision to see.
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.
Except for the 1% of products/services that people recognize do have value even after the collapse. What percentage of YCombinator start-ups make it? What's the percentage if you include all rejected applications? What's that percentage if you expand it to "web2" companies that didn't bother to apply to YCombinator or failed before they even got to that point? Or from a more historical lens, what percentage of companies survived the dotcom crash? It's likely that most of the web3 products you see today will inevitably not survive.
I would guess the percentage that survives a massive crash will be 1 or 2 orders of magnitude lower for web3; especially considering web3 is in its infancy. But the number of ideas/products could be higher for various reasons. Until regulation catches up, the number of scams will inevitably be higher as well. The ethical parts of web3 should welcome regulation even though other parts of it never will and probably will never be forced to (depending on where they live).
The narratives that web3 is going to "take over the world and become the new normal." or that it;s all just going to go to zero are 2 extreme views. It's a set of technologies that will find it'sb(large or small) niche and do well there; everywhere else, the advantages that centralization brings will enable those central solutions to win.
Additionally, what percentage of YCombinator start-ups that make it rely exclusively on infinite investor money?
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".
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.
> 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?)
Imagine today is 2013. Now replace the word web3 with the word Juicero.
Somehow every single crypto project is always, without fail, the next Internet. And not the next Juicero or ET: The Extraterrstrial video game
But it's not a specific crypto project. It is a paradigm within which various different services are being built. Comparing "web3" (whatever it's supposed to mean) with Juicero or even with Google, for that matter, makes no sense. You could compare "web3" with "software as a service", I suppose. Or with "containerization", or "devops".
(Although my original point wasn't about predicting internet-like success for web3; but just saying that the criticism based on the number of grannies using a certain new technology, or the number of people it is lifting out of poverty at any given moment, is misguided; we are still at a very early adoption stage, which may or may not go anywhere.)
And the paradigm is, of course, the Internet. Not, you know, Juicero.
And yet, you have no problems comparing blockchains and crypto to everything successful, world-changing etc.
The internet was competing with physically produced and distributed media and information. But web3 is competing with the internet. So...
What is web3 better for than the current internet?
ps. I am an extreme web3-is-blockchain skeptic.
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.)
Maybe you don't understand it well enough? I've successfully explained crypto/web3 to my otherwise "mostly tech-illiterate, has his iPhone font at 200% with all default customization, doesn't work in the tech field or anything adjacent, still asks me what a computer scientist does" father and he seems to understand it pretty well.
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...
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.
Depends on whether one sees the enclosure of social and digital Commons as a problem. Folks like Bruce Schneier [0] and Cory Doctorow [1] have been ringing alarm bells for years on "digital feudalism": despite FOSS and federated alternatives, 99% of us choose to pledge fealty over our digital lives to a small handful of centralized firms.
These aren't always bad trades: tech giants tend to be very good at what they do, and I don't begrudge any consumer their individual choices. But the centralization of power, the "dark patterns" of user manipulation, the social externalities of engagement algorithms, the risk of one's digital identity vanishing for no reason at all: I don't think these are "problems nobody has".
Insert the obvious caveats on techno-utopianism and con-artists: we should have healthy skepticism towards crypto-tokens and the "web3" buzzword-du-jour. But as we look back at the successes and failures of "web1", the notable absence of any form of user-sovereign (a) identity, or (b) value transfer, is a tragically glaring omission (if forgivable: they are non-trivial problems!). This vacuum opened up the space for private capture, from Google SSO to Venmo.
It remains to be seen whether any of the players in "web3" can deliver the goods on actually out-competing Metcalfe monopolies [2]. But I'm glad the effort is being made (and not just as get-rich-quick schemes: there are a surprising number of left-anarchists and mutualists working in the DAO space).
[0] http://en.collaboratory.de/w/Power_in_the_Age_of_the_Feudal_...
[1] https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-...
Traditionally, many have solved for this by founding/working for government-registered companies and building proprietary software that's sold for government-issued notes.
Now there's an alternative to that pattern.
Maybe you could revise it to "The problem it solves is making money without the government knowing what you're doing" but that seems like the type of statement that would attract tax cheats, ransomware distributors, and other criminals, and it's also not really true of cryptocurrency anyway; most governments have already made moves to regulate cryptocurrency.
They're alternatives, with trade-offs. The problem with rat poison and most blockchains are the environmental externalities.
This article therefore makes some points while missing a lot more.
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.
Credit card chargebacks can be a feature and they can be a nightmare + all CC interactions definitely come at a 2%-3% cost to the merchant. Just providing the consumer perspective doesn't help the discussion at all.
“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.
sci-hub is not legal in most jurisdictions despite its immense positive benefits. Since being deplatformed, their primary means of receiving donations has been crypto.
Then there are the unplatformed (from a global transactions perspective), where the cruel realities of poverty, scams and fraud means the majority are punished as collateral damage for the actions of a minority. Poverty means a cost benefit calculus has deemed fine-grained distinctions are not worth it. I can understand the justifications but still feel it as deeply unfair.
When social media are used to highlight and organize protests of corruption, extra judicial killings and more, governments will ban social media and block the financial accounts of anti-corruption organizations. Coupled with being in countries where global transactions are already high friction, crypto provided real benefits.
A non-crypto example is having to use VPNs to access certain university websites because its administrators subscribe to a lazy service that has blanket banned IPs from certain countries.
Not unlike Tor, it's one of those things whose main use is by criminals in sane regimes but a high positive option in despotic or oppressive ones.
I don’t think so. Most NFTs I’ve seen are not for art that would get booted off Patreon or DeviantArt. Is the additional complexity and weirdness and loss of legal protections worth the extra hassles that crypto brings even when existing payment workflows work well - I say no, but we’ll find out.
But I also feel I might value it more than you? As it depends on where you're coming from. There are parts of the world (like where I live) where there is no meaningful sense of legal protections or rule of law. Things hang together because people are in general, not that foolish or malicious.
The added complexities, risk, instabilities can be more worth paying given for example, heavy inflation (for such people participation is not speculative as price stability is more important than rise) or friction in global financial transactions.
Uh, how do you think Pornhub accepts payments? Crypto has been the only option for paying for Pornhub Premium for several months now.
(I know this because I read a news article on it, just to be clear)
Edit
Sorry, ACH is also an option, my mistake. But Pornhub Premium's sign up page says they don't accept credit cards.
Edit: and it doesn't mention crypto.
It would be interesting to know what percentage of their users use each payment method.
That being said, it's getting better quite quickly and you're now seeing big tech players like Stripe enter the market.[1]
[1] - https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/13/payments-giant-stripe-says...
Crypto's terrible payment UX makes it practically unsuitable for porn companies because it makes everybody use centralized intermediary instead of using the crypto itself directly.
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/ethereum-hack-blockchain-for...
sidebar but onlyfans banning porn may have just been a genius marketing move that made them a household name - a porn site banning porn, what late night host could resist?
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.
I think this demonstrates the massive gap between crypto people and the general public. If you already have all of the crypto stuff set up, secured, understood, in the right cryptocurrency, and ready to go then it can be a quick transaction (after waiting for the transaction to clear).
But for the average person, the overhead of diving into the cryptocurrency world is far more than "in seconds". It also comes with a lot of fees and issues at every step along the way. Sending BTC or ETH to someone is actually a very expensive endeavor right now, often more than just the $5/month Patreon tiers. And then there are transaction fees along the way to buy into crypto, and the recipient has to cash out the crypto, pay exchange fees, and deal with taxes.
In the theoretical all-crypto world where everyone agrees to use some future perfectly efficient, decentralized blockchain, this might make sense. In the real world, it doesn't hold up at all.
My mother, who is only slightly technically inclined, who knows how cash and cards work (for her), would not be able to set up a cryptocurrency wallet, secure it, understand it, and use it, "in seconds" or otherwise "immediately".
This is the #1 biggest hurdle cryptocurrencies still have to solve.
And if the response is "well cryptocurrencies aren't for people like your mom", then cryptocurrencies have no benefit other than as a novelty.
it's ok to say "this is really for younger people and future generations".
For creators trying to make a living, they still need a bank account to extract the money from their crypto wallet if they want to use that money to pay rent and buy groceries, and volatile currencies with high transaction fees like Bitcoin are a really bad choice for that; stablecoins may be an option there eventually but it's still unclear to me what benefit those provide over cash for the small-time independent creator.
> With crypto, you can create a wallet in seconds and immediately start accepting payment.
And how are you going to use that to buy groceries or pay rent?
The big American chain supermarket near my home has a crypto ATM at the front, next to the shopping buggies. So I guess you could get cash that way and buy groceries.
Rent? Good luck. Every building has its own methods, customs, and policies, even within a single company; and I've never seen one that takes crypto for rent.
This is a half truth sure you can do that but if you ever want to use your crypto for anything legitimate you need to go through the whole KYC bullshit. That means there are now countless crypto exchanges with a copy of my passport, and they seem to get hacked a lot. I only had to do KYC once to get and use my credit card.
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.