My main concerns with Web3 are that it is "pay to play" in many aspects and it's less democratic than the existing Internet.
Sybil attack is the fundamental problem of the internet. (And proof of work was actually designed as a way to mitigate it)
The interesting thing about governance is that it existed before the term: In Bitcoin the community governs the direction of the protocol by directing their hash power, perceived value, and simple use of the network towards their desired fork. You can't do this with contract tokens unless you want to fork the entire Ethereum Blockchain for the sake of one DAO.
Despite this limitation, if DAO pay to vote schemes could be combined with 'vote with your feet' you could have the clean, efficient governance of a DAO with the fully actionable emergency escape (a fork) in case foul play is sniffed out.
Mirror (https://mirror.xyz/) is an interesting Web3 alternative to Medium. I think they have gotten a lot of the elements right. Blog posts are backed up to Arweave perma-storage and they have easy point and click integration for crypto donations (with automatic splitting for multiple authors), NFT auctions, and crowdfunding.
At any rate, I think decentralized social networks are still nascent and we haven't yet seen a break out success on the level of Discord or Twitter or Facebook, but I remain optimistic that it will come.
Proof of stake means the largest stakeholders can unilaterally reject transactions. Technically the chain could fork. Practically, convincing everyone to move to a new chain seems about as difficult as everyone moving off Facebook because a few people get banned.
Proof of work means the richest people can afford more miners and completely control the chain.
So where is the decentralization? The only realistic decentralization I can make out is that its possible to build alternative chains, but that very thing is possible today. Its possible to build an alternate payment processor or social network if Visa bans your business, the really hard part is building it and getting the entire ecosystem to actually use it.
> Proof of stake means the largest stakeholders can unilaterally reject transactions. Technically the chain could fork. Practically, convincing everyone to move to a new chain seems about as difficult as everyone moving off Facebook because a few people get banned.
> Proof of work means the richest people can afford more miners and completely control the chain.
> So where is the decentralization? The only realistic decentralization I can make out is that its possible to build alternative chains, but that very thing is possible today. Its possible to build an alternate payment processor or social network if Visa bans your business, the really hard part is building it and getting the entire ecosystem to actually use it.
On a POW system such as Bitcoin or ETH1, you'd need 51% or more of the hash power on the network, which is more than a hundred Google datacenters worth of hashpower, and you'd have to spend a vast amount of energy in order to execute the attack, and at the end of it all, the community would mount a fork and initiate a change that left your attack out of history. It is quite difficult to coordinate a vast amount of people to fork a major chain and have that fork be recognized as the New Bitcoin or the New Ethereum. That is where the decentralization comes in and where the guarantees of execution comes in. Blockchains are protected by cryptography and economics (game theory) as well as social consensus.
From V. Buterin: "Theoretically, a majority collusion of validators may take over a proof of stake chain, and start acting maliciously. However, (i) through clever protocol design, their ability to earn extra profits through such manipulation can be limited as much as possible, and more importantly (ii) if they try to prevent new validators from joining, or execute 51% attacks, then the community can simply coordinate a hard fork and delete the offending validators’ deposits. A successful attack may cost $50 million, but the process of cleaning up the consequences will not be that much more onerous than the geth/parity consensus failure of 2016.11.25. Two days later, the blockchain and community are back on track, attackers are $50 million poorer, and the rest of the community is likely richer since the attack will have caused the value of the token to go up due to the ensuing supply crunch. That’s attack/defense asymmetry for you. [1]"
[1] https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/a-proof-of-stake-design-p...
Other NFTs are fully on-chain, buy those.
This is such a weird argument to make.
We’re already seeing the same thing happen in web3. OpenSea can (and does) remove NFTs from its marketplace if it wants to. Like the web, there are other markets you can use, and you could even permissionlessly start your own, but you’d be giving up the attention that comes from using an established platform.
We already have all of that in the existing web infrastructure, and have had it since the very beginning.
I can spin up a HTTP server on a raspberry pi running in my basement right now and anyone on the internet can access it for free and without any hinderence.
With web3 there is gatekeeping and centralisation as I cannot spin up my own server any more without buying crypto and then paying someone on a centralised database just so that I can do everything I could do before for free on my own.
Web3 includes all of the previous web technologies and adds optional layers on top. It is a superset of all web tech. You can totally setup an HTTP server on a Raspberry Pi, that's totally still Web3, but good luck building a truly scalable multi-million user application and competing with AWS on that.
If your app is such that it relies on user-generated content, it wouldn't be Web3 for you to host it exclusively on your Pi, because the users generating the content would not own it, or have guarantees that the data on the Pi was not being manipulated or misused by you. The key idea of Web3 is user ownership and community ownership.
> With web3 there is gatekeeping and centralisation as I cannot spin up my own server any more without buying crypto and then paying someone on a centralised database just so that I can do everything I could do before for free on my own.
You can set up your stack however you like. You don't even have to be using cryptocurrency for payments to be "Web3". You could, for example, allow someone to login with their Ethereum wallet and use their ENS domain name as a username in your chat app rather than adding Google Auth. That doesn't even require a transaction on the blockchain, it's just verifying a cryptographic signature.
You're basically describing OpenID, which predates cryptocurrency by several years.
That being said, I think EVM-compatible wallet login will be stickier and have broader network effects as there are exclusive services you cannot access without it (unlike OpenId, which is merely an alternative to other logins).
There is also a major economic incentive to build user-friendly wallet experiences (such as Rainbow, Argent, and Dharma mobile apps) as well as browser plug-ins (Metamask, Coinbase Wallet, etc) and hardware devices (Ledger, GridPlus, etc) and I think that ecosystem of competition is going to produce some big UX wins that OpenId will never really be able to compete with.
Websites intentionally switched to passwords because it was easier for users to understand. Web3 offers no breakthroughs here.
An Ethereum wallet linked with an ENS domain name is: 1) human readable 2) has an on-chain history that is verifiable and reviewable (important for establishing reputation in social applications) 3) benefits from UX improvements in Ethereum wallets, such as Argent's social recovery feature (https://www.argent.xyz/blog/argent-secure-decentralised-ethe...) as well as secure hardware wallets (which address the concern about losing a cert) 4) builds on the network effects of EVM-compatible wallets which makes the experience more familiar to more users 5) can integrate other features such as ENS-linked profile pictures, NFT verification, payments, crypto-based crowdfunding and donations seamlessly 6) user-owned
Can also drop the ENS altogether and embrace anonymity if the user or application desires. Still benefits from most of the above.
Aren't most NFT assets hosted on cloud platforms? OpenSea on GCP for example
OpenSea uses GCP for hosting. But OpenSea does not own your NFTs nor choose where NFTs are hosted. OpenSea does use GCP as a caching layer for NFTs, since it's not scalable to fetch from thousands of different sources at load time.
An NFT is created by deploying a smart contract, and the creator of that contract is free to choose how that asset is hosted. Some NFTs are made entirely of on-chain (typically SVG) assets. Some choose IPFS and post the verifiable hash of the file on the blockchain (much smaller footprint and particularly important for large files). IPFS content must be pinned or hosted in order to guarantee availability and a lot of projects will rely on Filecoin or Arweave for decentralized archival of these assets. They may also host a pinning service on one of the big 3 cloud platforms for additional availability and responsiveness. In that case, even if the content was booted from the cloud co's site, the community could easily fall back on Filecoin or Arweave pin and move their content to another caching layer, with users having guarantee that the data matches the IPFS hash. And then again, some NFT projects do centrally host the content and metadata, and do so intentionally so that they can add interactivity or upgrades. For some NFTs, that's perfectly fine. It really depends on the goals of the creator. Not everything has to be perfectly pure. It's a spectrum of choice and optionality for users and makers. If you only want to purchase decentralized NFTs, then check the baseURI and contractURI of the contract (https://etherscan.io/token/0x1CB1A5e65610AEFF2551A50f76a87a7... as an example).
Well, right up until their ISP blocks your website. Or the DNS root removes your record.
No, web3 has "make as much money as possible" at its core - any of those other tertiary values are expendable in the name of getting rich. The trillion dollar companies also only care about getting rich, but they at least produce useful products, unlike the cryptocurrency ecosystem which is overwhelmingly made up of scams and vaporware.
I can't justify an internet that hinders the free flow of information.
> I am openly ignorant of recent innovations and make statements demonstrating I believe they don't exist.
Never change, HN.
You could say that Web3 is WebBourgeoisie.
I can participate/play in my democracy with little to no cost. Unless you are arguing time (~20 minutes/year) commitments to vote?