Welcome to Web 3.0
welcome2web3.com
welcome2web3.com
What's perhaps even more fun to think about is that somewhere in a lofty corner office at Instagram there's someone with a math or compsci PhD doing calculations to figure out exactly how much every Post, Story, Like and comment costs to post on Insta, and precisely how often an advert needs to be displayed to cover that. At least with micro-transactions there's no adverts (in theory I mean, of course there would still be adverts) and it's all very obvious how you're paying.
This is why cryptos are here to stay. The underlying technology is valuable and the problems it may have today can be overcome.
Software isn't some magic that can wish away its shorcomings.
Also, do you think the next instagram that will most like support its own crypto will allow you to switch to a different crypto?
ETA: the transaction cost is based on the cryptocurrency, so if now the cost per transaction is 1 cent then in 10 years it might cost 10 dollars if the value of the coin goes up.
Also, who cares if there are several cryptocurrencies? If they have good properties (fundamentals) and people find them valuable, why not?
The fact that they are unable to ignore them and continue to spread the same debunked nonsense tells you that it is not going away and it is getting boring.
Just look at the first few sentences:
> a slow distributed, append only spreadsheet technology which is destroying the planet we live on.
So Solana, Stellar and Algorand are destroying the planet?
> Blockchain isn't new. It has been around for as long as the iPhone. Look how much the iPhone has changed the world. Blockchains one claim to fame in this period is the creation of $5.2B/year ransomware industry, societal damage in the form of gambling and the loss of irreplaceable photos.
The internet isn't new. Its 'killer app' (The world wide web) came decades afterwards and it took decades more for adoption. I don't know why one would try to use ransomware on transparent and traceable blockchains these days, where everyone can see where it is going, unless you are using 'privacy coins' which those are getting banned due to regulations.
All of that did not stop Stripe to continue supporting cryptocurrencies for payments [0], did it? It's really getting boring repeating the same old arguments from critics like Stephen Diehl [1] who is unable to ignore the whole thing after his failed blockchain startup venture Adjoint. [2] That's why he is grieving and wasting his energy towards cryptocurrencies.
[0] https://stripe.com/gb/use-cases/crypto
[1] https://twitter.com/smdiehl
[2] https://twitter.com/dystopiabreaker/status/14701269278180679...
The Internet started in the mid 1980s and became available to consumers in about '89[0]. The WWW was created in '90. By '94 it was wildly popular. Netscape IPOed the next year, with millions of users.
Generously, you could call that about 5 years from public availability to cultural dominance. Bitcoin has existed for three times that, and still doesn't have a use case that Beanie Babies didn't have.
I'm a believer in cryptocurrencies - or, I should say, in decentralised digital cash. But people like you are hurting it, not helping it. We need rational discussion that can soberly evaluate the flaws of a given implementation, not unthinking heavily-emotionalised tribalism.
[0] Incidentally, David Chaum founded DigiCash, the first cryptocurrency company, the same year.
If you ask me, the story of the internet and cryptocurrencies seems pretty similar.
Aside from that, I very much agree with you. I think digital cash has great promise - I can't imagine Visa and Mastercard still being a thing in 20-30 years. Some implementation of digital cash - I happen to think Bitcoin and its current siblings are not fit solutions - seems highly likely to proliferate in actual means-of-exchange usage. (In plain English: for buying stuff at supermarkets.)
But I think people like the commenter above are the obstacle to progress. We need motivated but rational innovators, who can analyse solutions through clear eyes, soberly and without dysfunctional ego investment in one technology or another.
These weird crypto stans are not technologists, they're fanboys, they make real innovators look bad, and they retard real progress by dementedly screaming at anyone who makes cogent criticisms of a given implementation. Those critics are our greatest asset and friend, not our enemy.
You think the blockchain is going to give you a credit limit?
The time between the web opening and the end of the dot-com boom is about the same as the time between Bitcoin being announced and Ethereum going live, a period in which barely anyone used crypto and it had almost zero impact on the world. Even since then its wider impact is minute compared to what came from the dot-com boom.
> But people like you are hurting it, not helping it.
How exactly?
> We need rational discussion that can soberly evaluate the flaws of a given implementation, not unthinking heavily-emotionalised tribalism.
I have just counter argued my points made with real examples and evidence and the only person arguing with emotion are the creators of the 'Welcome to Web 3.0' page. And yes, I can even critique the aforementioned cryptocurrencies since every technology still always has it issues.
But just don't repeat the same arguments that I have just refuted. It is boring and I am only interested in looking for new criticisms. All my earlier points and questions about it being, slow, 'destroying the planet', etc still remain unchallenged.
Is it though? Valuable how? Has it been proven?
The core of the issue is that PoW is fundamentally a sort of algorithmic cancer that threatens to basically take over on the order of half of the worlds computational power to fuel worthless speculative trading. IMO there's an important argument to be had that trading on PoW blockchains should be outright banned. Yes, you can't get rid of it completely, but you can get the impact down to a manageable level.. like with cancers.
And yeah, then you have PoS and PoA blockchains. But it's yet to be proven that PoS provides the same level of security as PoW, and there's solid arguments that it never possibly could. PoA is fundamentally different from PoW and PoS, so you can argue whether it's even the same underlying thing. It's no longer truly decentralized. I think it could be very useful. It's just not as sexy and susceptible to fueling pyramid schemes, so it's less popular.
So to me it seems like we really don't know at all yet if the "underlying technology" is even providing a net positive value to society.
If the "underlying technology" here is trustless distributed blockchains (that is, PoA doesn't really apply), then I think there's an argument that the core of the idea is fundamentally broken. There is perhaps no such thing as a truly trustless system (for PoW/PoS blockchain, you're just converging on concentrating de-facto trust with a small clique of trading platforms and mining/wallet app developers), so maybe it's better to just be more explicit about where we're placing our trust (through solid cryptography if we can) and to make sure that those entities are democratic institutions worthy of our trust. But this quickly becomes a very deep and philosophical argument, so it's outside the scope of this comment.
I support further research and development into blockchain-related technology, I certainly think it could be truly valuable. But it's yet to be proven IMO.
Could you direct me to some of these arguments? My thought is the opposite, that something in the lines of PoS is more secure in the long-run because it tends towards decentralization. I guess the devil is in the details.
In order for validators to distinguish the main fork from any malicious long forks, they must start with a trusted checkpoint that's less than X days old, then sync at least every X days, where X is the unbonding period.
The "trusted checkpoint" notion seems to cause a lot of concern, but in my mind it's relatively harmless to just bake checkpoints into the client code (if done carefully - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29370309). Most clients already have some form of trusted checkpoints (even Bitcoin Core does, though they're deprecated), or at least a genesis block, which is effectively a checkpoint.
More here: https://eth.wiki/en/concepts/proof-of-stake-faqs#what-is-wea...
And some good discussion here: https://twitter.com/zooko/status/1045807027992182785
I'm pretty sure that's been said about email and its encryption/validation problem. And while it's still used, other products have come in and eaten its biggest market - asynchronous communication.
Inertia's a bitch, and when you have millions of users, you can't change things willy-nilly. At least, not if you want the product to be viewed as legitimate.
The new thing is that we can now enforce invariants on state transitions in a decentralized manner for a limited set of applications (mostly financial).
With all the capital inflow thanks to the various crypto bubbles there is an insane amount of cryptography and distributed systems research going on to let us build general purpose decentralized databases in the future.
Once we get there, it’ll obviously change all of our assumptions about the internet which are based on companies controlling centralized databases.
I'm hosting cat photos for friends to view. There are no invariants. There are no rules. It's purely content I'm posting for other people to consume. It's no different than if I printed photos and mailed them to all the people.
Every financial transaction that requires settlement between institutions is a “coordinated mutation.”
And while it is true that financial transactions are often synced between institutions via a “batched mutation” approach (especially when coordinating settlement), the delay that batched settlement represents, and the complexity that it introduces to the overall system, is extremely costly.
This is one reason why blockchains have the potential to be extremely valuable—both from a utilitarian point of view as well as from a financial point of view.
Imagine if you could get rid of batched settlement between institutions, because you just didn’t need to do it anymore. What would that be worth?
Bitcoin transactions can take anywhere from 10 minutes to upwards of 16 hours for minuscule volumes of transactions. It's not solving that problem for certain.
> extremely costly
The cost is built into the transactions. Just like it is with blockchain transactions. Now then, which has higher per transaction costs?
As a factual matter, settlement costs are not fully embodied by transaction fees, and include such things as, for instance, financing and opportunity costs and the cost of supporting an organization that is more complex than it otherwise needs to be. If settlement delays were entirely eliminated, new business models would emerge that are not even possible under the current regime.
If the number of people needing to collaborate is arbitrarily large, and includes people who don’t know each other and don’t trust each other, then the only option for storing and updating shared state in a tamperproof and durable way is to use a consensus-replicated blockchain.
In fact, it is exactly what you and I are doing right now. In our case, though, we happen to trust Y Combinator to mediate our exchange.
If our exchange were hosted on a blockchain, we wouldn't need to rely on Y Combinator to keep track of the upvotes and the downvotes, and to preserve our comments in their original form.
Can you provide examples where trustlessness is really necessary?
But how do cryptographic signatures protect you from surreptitious deletions?
On their own, they do not. They are a necessary, but insufficient part of the solution.
The "magic" provided by bitcoins was the "proof of work" part - basically trying to create only one "real" trusted branch of the markov chain at any point in time. But that "reality" has been broken multiple times by both the miners and the programers with voluntary and involuntary splits, double spends, etc.
> A Merkle tree provides an efficient way to compute hashes (not signatures)
A signature is a hash, in that it is effectively unique for the content. It simply has the additional property of being generated using cryptographic keys, proving that not only is the hashed content what's expected, it was generated using the specified key.
Though if we really feel it's necessary, we could simply say "a merkle-tree like implementation that uses cryptographic signatures in place of a hash function".
Pedantry about the difference between hashes and signatures doesn't change the validity of the structure as a response to the original question.
Lol, this has to be ironic.
The responses to this story read rather like Facebook comments on controversial news articles - there's a bunch of comments claiming the website is a bunch of nonsense without actually articulating why that is the case, presumably by people who believe (or are invested in) crypto or "Web 3".
Can anyone give a reasoned argument to the actual benefits of Web 3, in contrast to what is currently not possible without the use of a Blockchain?
I think the last episode of Last Week Tonight really shed light on why Blockchain can't really solve real-world problems like that. The problem isn't a technical problem. It'd be easy to solve the problem of ticked distribution/resale without blockchain if the concert vendors actually wanted. But now Ticketmaster owns most of those, so you can't solve it easily even if blockchains would help anyway. And you really can't solve the problem of scalping without tying tickets/accounts to a verified national ID, which is a political problem.
I think blockchain is potentially a huge detriment to solving real-world problems.. because it tricks smart people into thinking "you apply blockchain, and then all these problems are magically solved", rather than actually working with other people on the actual social, economic and political problems we need to solve to make real progress.
Also since Ticketmaster merged with Live Nation it's not just ticket sales but also concert promotion and artist management, so even if blockchains were useful for ticket sales it would be hard to get traction because any venue which tried to cut them out would also find that a large number of popular performers wouldn't play at their venue:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/01/arts/music/live-nation-ti...
> I think blockchain is potentially a huge detriment to solving real-world problems.. because it tricks smart people into thinking "you apply blockchain, and then all these problems are magically solved", rather than actually working with other people on the actual social, economic and political problems we need to solve to make real progress.
This is a very important point, amplified by the built-in conflicts of interest caused by turning the tech layer into a financial instrument. Many blockchain proponents are capable of reasoning through complex problems but doing so means that they are guaranteed to be leaving money on the table compared to their less ethical peers and since the only way their tokens have value is by talking them up there's even a strong disincentive to acknowledging when other people are selling something they can't deliver.
I'm not sure I understand that.
You could tie it to something within a smaller group (e.g. tickets can only be transferred to people who have bought the bands album, or only to verified accounts that the vendor approves). I would also be surprised if there wasn't a ZK way of doing some kind of KYC like check that you are able to prove you have ID and tie that to an account _without_ making the link between the two public.
“You can sell to people who aren’t a member of a union.”
“You can sell to people who never donated money to the ACLU.”
“You can sell to people who don’t own a gun.”
Is that the direction we really want?
You could try to have a trusted third party verify ID and only allow registered accounts to participate in the resale market (Ticketmaster sells this service) but at that point the blockchain is, as usual, not adding anything other than overhead because the trust depends on that third-party and the venue's staff checking ID at the door (otherwise you'd find people on Craigslist paying people to register, get their ID checked, and letting the scalpers use their account).
The what would hold some value would be a combination of self sovereign financial services & Tim's "Social Linked Data"/SOLID.
The current Web3 wave just seems like a legal marketing scam (scam as in legal but zero ethics). It's just about pumping price's and intellectual masterbation (talking about things they never do)
It is however true that you cannot separate economic incentives from a platform where we want to see economic activity.
I currently think of the role of crypto in "web3" as a bit like dark matter in the universe, something that causes the web (universe) as a whole to resist centralisation -- by means of financial incentives. It doesn't have to be everywhere, but it has to be in enough places to resist the pull towards building megaservices like Facebook.
I'm very skeptical as to whether it's actually going to play out that way though.
Instead of going through offshoots trying to find the killer app, I'd much prefer to see cryptocurrency tech evolve in order to bring costs down. Take the base use case of keeping "bank account" records and run with it until it works (as of now, it does not). Out of the viable -- for my definition of viable -- cryptocurrencies out there, the only one I see moving in the right direction is Ethereum. They are taking their sweet time, though.
If a killer use case is needed, think micropayments: The ability to pay 0.1¢ to listen to a song, paying directly to the artist.
Based on what we've learned over the past few years, I'm not sure I believe that any more.
Without a central authority, there's no way to be confident that anything is "true". Partly because it's impossible to correct mistakes.
So you get NFTs of stolen art, because there's no authority to verify it.
You get ideas to "put real estate deeds on the blockchain" with no answer to the question "what if someone loses their private key?"
The only information that can reliably be handheld by such a blockchain is information that entirely exists within that blockchain - so account balances, but effectively nothing else.
Even account balances are a bad idea to do on the block chain. Ever had to dispute a credit card charge when you dealt with a sketchy vendor? Well too bad, all sales are final now in this new immutable world.
Not in terms of money, but in terms of freedom of speech without censorship and a controlling authority.
With no authority that decides whether I can send money to/receive from someone.
Especially living in a corrupt authoratarian system, even only those two outweight all the bad sides (tx fees, scalability, PoW environmental effects) for me. It does more good than it harms in the big picture.
More accurately, it could if it actually worked but since it doesn't all you're doing is paying more for lower quality of service. A key concept to understand is that when blockchain sales people say “no authority” they mean “except the miners, software developers, exchange and oracle operators, and the governments which have jurisdiction over them”. Just as real-world censorship is far more often based on after the fact consequences rather than preventing someone from speaking first, consequences can be applied retroactively to anyone who participates in illegal transactions and blockchains very helpfully publish a full list of transactions so the authorities don't miss anyone.
We're seeing this right now: technically, someone in Russia can make a Bitcoin transfer since the Russian government hasn't chosen to block the protocol at the network layer but when they do so they are finding that many companies won't participate in those transfers and since the history is public that can extend to any downstream transactions based on the transferred funds.
Critics like to say "it doesn't work", then the next day complain about how it enables a ransomware plague. You can't have it both ways. The fact is it clearly works.
This isn't to say it's magic; it doesn't protect you from bullets any more than it makes you coffee. It is not a magical unicorn; just finding a reason why there might still be censorship somewhere is not a valid argument.
Free speech laws work even if Facebook deletes your post, or you a fired, or sometimes someone doesn't appeal their conviction. Your argument about "miners, developers or exchange operators" existing is not any more valid than this one is.
> Free speech laws work even if Facebook deletes your post, or you a fired, or sometimes someone doesn't appeal their conviction. Your argument about "miners, developers or exchange operators" existing is not any more valid than this one is.
Free speech laws generally don't apply to private companies like Facebook, who are generally given a high level discretion for how they choose to run their communities. The same is true of a blockchain network: the implementers and operators set the policies and since these systems are based on money that generally means that you're getting the rules which the major players either want or are required to implement by the governments with jurisdiction over them. That last part is key to understand: maybe a protocol allows you to make a transaction somewhere but the cost/risk shifts considerably if the recipient knows that they won't be able to use it in most places and every potential buyer can easily tell that it's on a list of tainted tokens.
I see no evidence of this. Authorities have been going after crypto-currencies users very effectively ever since the early days of Bitcoin; from the first darknet market takedowns, to arresting people on LocalBitcoins because they didn't register as money transmitters.
It sounds like we agree on the limitations of a ledger, but saying it "doesn't work" simply because the physical world exists and governments can arrest you, attempt to track you, make rules for exchanges and merchants etc is nonsense. Of course they can.
They can equally block encrypted chat apps, VPNs, prevent device makers from allowing them onto the hardware, force backdoors, effectively threaten people who use them, or spy on your communications locally.
None of these things mean that encryption doesn't work, or that it isn't useful.
If you live in a relatively open democracy, the knowledge that your encrypted chat app could be attacked by the police isn't a huge deal because there's a legal process protecting you but that trade off changes considerably if you are at risk from a hostile government. Systems which require you to leave a public paper-trail for the authorities, for example, are too risky to consider and something more privacy oriented is still a significant gamble — especially since in such an environment it's likely that you'd be at risk simply having it installed on your devices unless you were certain that it made no identifiable network activity. If I lived in China now, for example, I would not want to risk having something like a VPN client or Signal installed on my phone if the police stopped me or started linking DNS lookups to ISP customers.
Sure, gas fees aren't that low to cover with "a little mining" but I'm sure there will be a middle ground between with more gas available for anonymous posting and optimizing gas use for these actions, with some volunteers over the world incentivizing free speech contract interaction with lower gas fees just like people volunteering to participate in Tor network.
While we're not there yet, I see it very hard to trace any transactions that way.
That last part seems like the key challenge to me: what you described isn't cheap and it only works to the extent that you can do business with people who aren't following KYC. That makes it more likely that the entire service will be tainted because the non-trivial cost means that people aren't going to use it if they don't need to.
The other problem is that durable records are inherently risky. Your use of such a system isn't just a question of whether someone can see the transactions immediately but whether it'll retroactively become de-anonymized — the public blockchains are right out there but if you're trying to use a private L2 system you now have another party you're placing a lot of trust in — not unlike the questions about how you'd be able to trust a VPN provider or Tor nodes not logging your traffic.
If participating in anything on this new internet requires money, the Bezoses and Musks will be able to do whatever they want while the normies will beg for scraps in this vision of the web.
Instead of fixing a corrupt authoritarian system, we'll just end up implementing digital neofeudalism.
This is already starting to happen with NFT games, where westerners keep Filipinos as indentured servants. [0] It'll only get worse from here if we don't stop it.
[0] https://reason.com/2022/02/01/the-biggest-nft-video-games-ec...
That’s actually a good point and Bitcoin/crypto solves this. Why doesn’t it stop there though, what does web3 solve?
You can imagine outlawing processing some crypto transactions in some area. Miners have no choice but to comply, leading to at least a fork and massive confusion, at most to actual enforcement of the rule.
Blockchains may be censorship-resistant, but humans are not rubber hose resistant.
It is not a geo-location issue. The enforcement measures in question either manage to control 50% of the hashrate or they don't. If they don't, the protocol will ignore their censorship. Yes, they could continue mining a minority fork chain, but you would need to convince Bitcoin-users and services to use the fork instead of the uncensored version. You could imagine this being done by force: ISPs block the download of the software, exchanges no longer trade it etc.
The point is merely: <50%, the power is not with the miners at all; it is the users that need to be controlled.
Not so far off 50+eps
For now. Governments are catching on, and since the transactions are public, they can (and are putting the building blocks in place now) easily apply the same regulations to international bitcoin transactions as they do traditional money transfers.
Basically, folks today are taking advantage of a blind spot in government oversight. They're aware of it and are removing that blind spot.
I heard an analogy at one point - governments are elephants. It's usually pretty easy to avoid being stomped on when you're small. But if you do get stomped on, you'll be utterly destroyed. Many governments have no problems with making examples of people.
NFTs are already centralized and primarily used as scams. If your non-scam NFT is blocked by OpenSea, it might as well not exist for the purposes of selling and re-selling.
Where NFTs are not used for scams, they're being implemented in a proprietary blockchain and used as a method of extracting more money from customers with no new benefits (it's not like customers can re-sell their NFTs; see: proprietary blockchain).
The only thing I potentially see as valuable from web3 is cryptographic customer identification - but this is something we've had for years (client certs), but which never took off. I don't see how "web3" will change that.
None of them are scams. I know many people who work on other NFT projects which aren't scam as well.
They are all on public blockchains, perfectly functional with relatively healthy communities.
I think you are cherry picking the scam projects by using the word "primarily". We hate scam projects just as much as you do, they damage the reputation and trust of whole ecosystem.
People can collect and trade items of virtually any kind that virtually represent anything digitally. They can also be programmed to perform tasks to do anything on the chain.
Basically it's creating a whole new platform that isn't controlled by anyone and everyone can contribute to it as a user or a contributor (NFT creator, contract designer etc) to suit different use cases.
Just because some actors use it to scam obviously doesn't mean that the whole ecosystem is bad.
There's no technical reason fiat money doesn't have this property. But societies everywhere, democratic or authoritarian, have decided that's a bad idea and have money laundering laws.
And why wouldn't they?
Digital assets shouldn't be controlled by authority as long as you aren't converting it to fiat. Then, (while I still don't support it, I get it) I understand if IRS takes a portion when you convert it to USD. But that should be all about it.
Crypto "world" should have a separate line with fiat world and fiat-controlling authorities shouldn't have any power there as long as someone doesn't convert their crypto to fiat.
Yeah. Why not try donating to NGOs through a bank account if your friend or penpal happens to be stuck in a sanctioned country? [0]
I also don't think merchants and businesses would like to tolerate the knowingly abused chargeback system which friendly fraud hurts both the customer and the merchants.
Cryptocurrencies completely eliminate that abuse. The user can contact the merchant for a refund instead of filing a costly dispute which the final decision always sides with the banks, who doesn't even know if it is friendly fraud or not, but takes the money anyway.
I can see them using it for Stripe or Coinbase Commerce.
[0] https://theintercept.com/2022/01/19/crypto-afghanistan-sanct...
So for a merchant, there are absolutely no problems in friendly fraud, failing cards in other countries, etc in Web 2 then? Especially sending money to people in sanctioned countries using bank accounts?
Of course one can use cryptocurrencies with Web 2. But try doing the above with the banks, PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, etc.
It seems that this is proof that cryptocurrencies not only can work together with Web 2 websites but they are also here to stay.
So that is not even utility then?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System
> can't you use IFPS without cryptocurrencies?
You can. And you should.
Cryptocurrency is a solution in search of a problem. Problem it purports to solve isn't something you can solve via software.
That problem being sending money wherever you want, which is eminently solvable with software (mostly because it is almost all software everywhere).
And, I'd even say it's three waves, the first being TBL semantic web, which predates bitcoin.
That's because last i checked (admittedly a couple years ago) their software was slow and ressource intensive. Which is quite the opposite of what you want for real-life network transfer software. Meanwhile stuff like syncthing seem to get bittorrent-like transfer just fine.
Dat/hypercore seamed less bloaty (again a while ago), i wonder what the solid projects in this area are currently.. (torrent-based network filesystems)
Web3 uses IPFS, the dependency tree is the wrong way around in your question.
Both predate the recent hype-wave.
The real issue with responses like this is that you can do anything with computers anyway. The blockchain basically gives you a
* Globally writable database
* With stored procedures
* And row level security
Now, you can always swap out that with a centralised service. Turing machines can do stuff and machines can talk to each other. Whether it's possible to build a technically equivalent thing is not really the important question.
What tends to happen though is that the underlying infrastructure if supported by a profit-making company is that it has its own agenda and desire to control access. There's no real desire for the base layer to be open, it's not profitable in itself.
One of the more appealing things to me in the area is that there's a lot of work with shared interfaces. Working with the ERC721 spec I can easily make a non-fungible token that refers to a ticket at a conference, or right to claim a financial security, or game item, or has a link to a wiggly line or whatever I want. Someone else can build an auction contract, and my nft will automatically work in it, as will anyone elses. If you have control of the NFT you can pick which auction type/contract/service you want to use. I don't (and shouldn't) care, that's not the part I build or manage.
Finally, "but can't you do it with postgres and ..." is true but there's a huge shift that's happened. Before, sure, I'd have to have built all this stuff on chain and have all of the complete pain-in-the-arse stuff to deal with that comes with crypto. But now that all exists.
So to make, say, an in game item that people can re-sell, swap, etc, instead of
* Make a website
* Setup the DB
* Manage user accounts
* Manage payment information
* Code the sales, auctions, etc
* Build the integration with my game & my API
* Manage and maintain the server
to do it the traditional way. To do it on chain I
* Create a trivial NFT contract
* Build the integration with my game & a generic API
That's it. All the other work, auctions, etc. has been solved and built already. User accounts are already managed.
You can always solve it another way. The more interesting question is in which cases should you solve a problem in certain ways? Not everything makes sense on chain, the database is slow and public (and even for very cheap chains comparatively expensive), and the stored procedures are extremely limited.
However some things can fit well - do you need to create some kind of economic incentive & want to let market forces control things (for example, filecoin and paying people for storage)? Maybe just creating a token on existing infrastructure will fit your needs. If it does, does it make sense to build even more things yourself?
Disclaimers - I am currently doing contract engineering in this area but am not looking for work, have only small holdings and am not here to shill for anything.
> * Make a website
> * Setup the DB
> * Manage user accounts
> * Manage payment information
> * Code the sales, auctions, etc
> * Build the integration with my game & my API
> * Manage and maintain the server
> to do it the traditional way. To do it on chain I
> * Create a trivial NFT contract
> * Build the integration with my game & a generic API
I don't understand this argument.
You describe step-by-step in a detailed way what would be needed to implement the usual way and then simply glosses over "build the integration with my game & a generic API". That is exactly the tricky part, isn't it?
The integration to your game also depends on your game having some kind of linking between the NFT and your in-game item (hence a database). It depends on the communication with this generic API being reliable enough so you can completely offload your load to that, if it's not reliable for that you'll need to create intermediate API layers to deal with these issues, and so on and so forth. Generic APIs are never really generic.
And this is the most beaten example already, what else can this provide apart from giving me ownership of in-game items?
Trivialising the work of "build the integration with my game" as something that "just happens" is a naive way to shove the hard work unto a trivial step.
Handling and managing money transactions to run an auction sounds very much like a tricky part, there's a lot of regulation I'd be getting involved in going down that road.
Building the integration with the game doesn't sound hard, no, and it's the same either way. Authenticate, call API to check ownership - beyond that it's down to your game. (edit - to be clear here, the API already exists, I'm not saying "build a generic API" but "use an existing, highly interchangeable service")
The point here is that that side is identical in both cases.
> The integration to your game also depends on your game having some kind of linking between the NFT and your in-game item (hence a database).
I'm not sure what you mean, this can be as simple as a hard-coded list in the game, it doesn't have to be a shared database.
> It depends on the communication with this generic API being reliable enough so you can completely offload your load to that
Sure, but they really are quite generic - you can swap them out for one another easily, they implement the same interface for this kind of work. There's subtle differences when it comes to more complex cases but "read public information" isn't one of them.
> Trivialising the work of "build the integration with my game" as something that "just happens" is a naive way to shove the hard work unto a trivial step.
What about this do you think is going to be the tricky part? Authenticating the user? Checking if that account currently owns the NFT?
What makes you believe there won't be regulations on trading NFTs in the future? The moment NFTs become an instrument for money laundering you're going to end up with the same KYC regulations as any other financial instrument. There is nothing in NFTs that protect companies using it to be above regulations. They simply don't exist yet which doesn't mean they won't ever come. There is money in this, there will be regulations and major companies will have to abide by them.
> Building the integration with the game doesn't sound hard, no, and it's the same either way. Authenticate, call API to check ownership - beyond that it's down to your game. (edit - to be clear here, the API already exists, I'm not saying "build a generic API" but "use an existing, highly interchangeable service")
> What about this do you think is going to be the tricky part? Authenticating the user? Checking if that account currently owns the NFT?
I don't know, I don't work on the space. Leveraging from my 20 years of career I'd say that it's never trivial to integrate with a 3rd party for any kind of complex business logic.
Like never in never ever, I've never seen it be just a case of "call this API, save some data" and that's why I have this instant reaction that you're glossing over a part that isn't that trivial. Even if the APIs exist, are generic, etc., integration is the hard part.
Even more reason for me to not want to be involved in the actual trading part.
> There is nothing in NFTs that protect companies using it to be above regulations.
Sure! The crypto-bros are wrong that there aren't/can't be regulations on these things, as are those complaining it's an unregulated area.
> I don't know, I don't work on the space. Leveraging from my 20 years of career I'd say that it's never trivial to integrate with a 3rd party for any kind of complex business logic.
This isn't complex business logic, that's my point. There's _already_ a standardised API. As I've said, there are annoying differences, but they are for more complex use cases and "read public data" is about the simplest there is.
To break it down a bit more, you utilise two key things. One is the standard API that all nodes have (https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/apis/json-rpc/) which acts the same for the use case here. There are public ones, you can pay a company to run one and you can if you want run one yourself. The end user can be free to swap between any of these.
The interface there isn't so nice, as you can ask for data stored somewhere, but finding exactly what address to read isn't that nice. Helpfully it's extremely generic so you can use a library to help with that step. You would do something like this in python:
web3 = Web3(node_provider_url)
my_contract = w3.eth.contract(abi=my_abi, address=my_contract_address)
print(my_contract.functions.my_read_only_function().call())
That's it. You're pulling from a shared database.
I hope that helps explain it a bit more - the API/backend stuff is generic and doesn't have to be run by you. However the only real external piece here is the storage layer - you're still in control of the data structure & functions (you write the contract). You're not relying on a third party to manage a "game item" API and hoping they don't change it, if you use a third party here it's about paying someone to run an open source project for you on their hardware.
There is a fairly specific kind of game where anything like this would even be useful and arguably it is impossible for the practice to not be predatory anyway. It is difficult to imagine an entity that would do this without also wanting the kind of complete control that a blockchain supposedly exists to avoid.
From there, implementing "Player X has given item Y to Player Z" is pretty straightforward. It's even built into most RPG multiplayer games by default, unbound to any form of external payment.
Multiplayer games also add event logs - creating a immutable record of all inventory changes - just so customer service (CS) can do their job. For example, in Everquest, GMs (aka CS) were able to see that yes, indeed, a player did get the drop from the dragon, even though it later glitched out of their inventory, and re-gifted the item to the player.
So, for a single game, a blockchain only adds a second, delayed (and relatively expensive, since it requires extra compute resources to create) record of events that are already recorded.
But OK if you want to break it down more:
* Have the user prove they own a specific account (https://walletconnect.com/ I would guess would be a simple approach to this)
* Make a REST API call to check if they own the item (edit - to clarify, the API already exists, you just need to do a single get request)
* Set local flag in game to say "yes they own the item"?
What more detail would you need?
Implementing the weapon. Paying for that implementation.
Concrete example: I buy an NFT for a sword in World of Warcraft. I want to take it with me to FFXIV. Now FFXIV has to implement the sword. Its looks, its behaviors, its power, in a completely separate engine and world.
They - Square Enix - also probably have to pay Blizzard for the trademark and copyrights to the sword. Yet when I buy the sword that money goes to Blizzard, not Square. So... why would Square do it?
Plus, implementing a "yes, person with email address N owns sword X" rest API is pretty straightforward. You could even implement public/private key signatures for authentication of the receipt. It just would be stored in someone's email inbox instead of the chain.
Implementing an in game item? That's already part of your game, right?
> Paying for that implementation.
You can buy an NFT entirely on chain, that's surely not in doubt.
> Plus, implementing a "yes, person with email address N owns sword X" rest API is pretty straightforward. You could even implement public/private key signatures for authentication of the receipt. It just would be stored in someone's email inbox instead of the chain.
Yes, I totally could re-implement all of these things. I could handle payment info, get people to manage their own public/private keys using my own implementations and have them copy & paste it from an email (?). I'm not sure I follow the flow there where people copy keys from emails into my game and how duplication is stopped but it sounds like an awful flow.
My point, as I tried to emphasise, is that I can get those things without building them. They already exist if I manage that part with an NFT.
So the question has increasingly become (as the field matures) - why build it myself? Why not use existing, working infrastructure?
> Concrete example: I buy an NFT for a sword in World of Warcraft. I want to take it with me to FFXIV. Now FFXIV has to implement the sword. Its looks, its behaviors, its power, in a completely separate engine and world.
I've not said anything about sharing between games, and the complex part of that is identical whether it's with crypto or not. What the global shared database part solves is that either game can easily check, if this was something they wanted to do.
Nah, not for the usecase of moving items between games - one of the biggest features touted by NFT enthusiasts.
But that aside...
> get people to manage their own public/private keys
For a receipt, the individual users don't need keys. For proof of ownership, that ship has already sailed off into the sea of fraud and pyramid schemes, and we don't expect to see it again. When people are trying to sell NFTs of artwork to the original artist (aka blackmail), you know it's jumped all the sharks.
> They already exist if I manage that part with an NFT.
Most of this already exists in a system regardless. Adding a rest endpoint on the top of a database entry is usually pretty trivial - especially for something as basic as "retrieve and display this row in the DB" - and "already exists" in the form of libraries. And by using a blockchain as a database, I'm actually adding a lot of complexity to my system.
> Why not use existing, working infrastructure?
One, the existing and working infrastructure already exists. All the elements of a purchasing stream are implemented as libraries.
And it's not as if you can stop caring about how money flows, because there are laws that require you to do a lot of bookkeeping and pay taxes on that money (no matter the form the transaction initially took).
Why not use a blockchain as a distributed DB? Because it's slower and more expensive. Because it provides no functionality you don't already want or need to have locally, especially when we're discussing a game.
In other words, NFTs - from a company's point of view - provide the same benefits and detriments as a normal event-stream DB, but it's slower, more expensive, and it includes transactions from every other company using that blockchain.
> What the global shared database part solves is that either game can easily check, if this was something they wanted to do.
Why would the first party need to check an external database, when their game engines literally require them to implement it internally?
Why would a second party check the external database when there are licensing issues that require them to talk to the first party in the first place?
Web3 incorporates this ownership. While Web 2.0 was about writing something to the internet and the World Wide Web was about reading something on the internet. It's a further iteration which just makes sense.
I only really see a use when mapping to an actually digitally scare good, say an IPv4 block or a domain name. But that's it really. Maybe some gacha/collectible games, but that's iffy.
Have you read the list of restrictions Ubisoft has for their NFTs? Do people really own those?
Even today, there are 3rd party websites that let you play Magic online with other people, but you get to play with any cards you want which removes a certain aspect of the meta game.
As long as I owned the NFT on a decentralized blockchain, any 3rd party could verify my ownership and let me use those cards.
I really don't get this argument at all. I bought an in-game mount for World of Warcraft as a NFT, WoW shuts down, where the hell am I going to use the in-game mount again? A shitty game that tells me "your WoW mount works here as well!"?
It really feels it's all a preparation for the "metaverse" bullshit.
A token representing a Magic card doesn’t need any association with the art on that card, it just needs to exist so anyone can verify that I purchased that card (and therefore the ability to use its mechanics) from WoTC. A 3rd party game that allows me to play Magic can verify the NFT card ownership and can use it’s own art or no art at all, just like they do today.
The only difference is that today’s 3rd party Magic sites don’t have verified ownership of cards so everyone uses the most expensive cards.
Yeah, someone else can create a new game and say "we accept the NFT items from Defunct Game X", you are still completely under the control of whomever is providing you the platform for these in-game items to actually exist. If that platform is taken away you just have some bits of data pointing to other bits of data with no meaning and no value at all...
They can still have meaning (we know what item it was); whether there are people who would value the pure notion of owning such a digital item in the absence of concrete functionality is indeed the question that NFTs explore/raise.
We have of course been able to buy and own more or less exlusive licenses to digital goods for a long time now. The video game market is now larger than the music and film industries combined and quickly becoming entirely digital.
And if it's own work and the more literal form of ownership rather than just a license to it, these rights are well protected in law and don't really use to become a problem? Unless you live in a state with state-sponsored copyright infringement, but these would absolutely not respect NFT's and proofs of ownership either.
But if you for some reason need to support the specific case of proving original ownership, NFT is a technology that can help although I think this is becoming a too niche use for a widespread internet-wide revolution. It's still digital which can be made into perfect copies and I think this alone reduces the appeal even if it would come with a sticker that validates the product. At least it does so for me. Sure it's "useful" kind of like how an MD5 sum is, and now we get even further along the way than that but... it's still digital goods with everything that implies...
It doesn't even do that. See: all artists whose work was stolen and sold as NFTs
It's essentially the opposite of what HN is for.
But..
a) who said that the point of web 3.0 is building social media platforms?
b) people in favour of blockchain tech already know that there are use cases that don't make sense to build on Layer 1 blockchains such as ETH, which is why there are numerous Layer 2 solutions being researched right now.
Bitcoin is destroying the environment while providing no real decentralization since most people don't run their own clients. Other shitcoins are either outright scams or vulnerable to client forks like when Vitaly stole 150 million dollars.
After not actually solving currency, cryptobros moved to selling random pixels and now want to make the web an even worse place.
Not everyone wants that.
> What's the author trying to get out of making something like this?
You'd be surprised, but not everyone is trying to run a get-rich-quick scheme.
- Crypto is destroying the planet (it's not). A lot of people get irrationally mad about anything that causes any damage to the environment these days. Climate change is an incredibly important issue but the activism side of it is filled with a lot of crazy people and they've latched on to 'crypto' as bad when most don't know a thing about it.
- Jealousy. A lot of people got very lucky and very rich through crypto. They have so much ETH that can spend the equivalent of a persons expected lifetime earnings on a picture of a monkey. That's infuriating to a lot of people so much so they'll create websites that lack truth and nuance just to feel better about themselves.
It's understandable, but it's sad. Instead of HN being full of posts with people trying out new tech for the fun of it, we get endless miserable tirades from people trying to suck the joy out of life.
The word “equivalent” is doing a lot of work here; because if what you purchased was the nominal “rights” to a URL that may or may not 404 at any moment, you haven’t done anything worthy of jealousy.
Also, at the risk of breaking the HN rules on allegations of astroturfing: the whole narrative of “regular joes got super rich off this” is as turfy as it gets. I’ve looked at wallet balances, I understand a handful of these people exist. But I’ve never met one, and I doubt you have either. Some people win the lottery, too; I’m not losing sleep over it.
Maybe I'm not explaining it clearly enough. The jealousy isn't that you've been rich enough to buy a picture of a monkey. It's that you have so much 'money' that you can spend it on something so stupid and not even care. And the fact that you've gotten that money by doing something so seemingly stupid and worthless in the first place. That's pretty infuriating for a lot of people.
I also didn't mention 'regular joes'.
Also, most cryptocurrencies in fact do commit towards warming up the planet for no benefit at all. Don't know why you deny this.
Why do people need to be quiet for you? There's plenty of media I don't want to read and I don't read it. I don't try to silence it because it upsets me.
>> everything ever built by that scene needs to somehow make or cost money in some form or another, and that's a telling sign for me.
Making money directly by creating or building something was the norm until we started paying for it with our data. Paying for things directly and compensating creators doesn't seem like a bad thing to me.
>> Also, most cryptocurrencies in fact do commit towards warming up the planet for no benefit at all. Don't know why you deny this.
I don't deny it but it's much more nuanced than that. As a society we do A LOT of unnecessary things which contribute to global warming and we don't get upset about them. Get off your computer. Stop watching TV. Stop using electricity. We could all get upset at each other or we could work towards solutions that solve the problem and allow us to maintain our current lifestyles with only minor modifications. The people screaming that crypto causes climate change are the same people who think the trees they're planting are the solution to it. In reality it's a much more complex problem that's going to be solved by the people that are too busy working on the possible solutions to waste time screaming. It's not black and white.
Yeah that's so irrational to get mad when something bad happens.
An example of a real value proposition of web 3.0 is spam protection and reduction of fake reviews. Much like how bitcoin itself cannot be counterfeited, utilization of the blockchain enables some guarantees in a digital world of endless copying.
The only thing I got from it was that the creator hates crypto bros so much he's willing to spend hours on end making an app to demonstrate why he's right.
How? It just costs money now.
Entities that want to spam and fake reviews, usually have money.
In fact, the more money someone is willing to throw at it, the more reviews they get to post. In fact, with enough resources, genuine reviews (which I would be reluctant to give as a user, as they cost additional money) can be comlpetely drowned out in this scenario.
There is no inherent fake news protection, just like pointers don’t validate the underlying data.
Would someone who has a monetary incentive to comment pay to do so?
What users do when seeing comments from accounts that have lower signals of quality is up to the user to decide. If they would rather listen to voices from unverified accounts over ones that have higher signals that's for them to ultimately choose. No one will be required to necessarily lock up capital to comment, and no one will be required to only look at comments from those who locked up capital.
This is just an example I thought up of on the spot, but I believe there are people who actually did a much deeper dive into these concepts.
Is the opinion of some tech bro in the Bay Area making six figures really worth a hundred times as much? Do they have a hundred times as much to say or are they a hundred times as insightful?
Or maybe, just maybe, tying all participation to a monetary transaction is an incredibly classist thing to do that will shut out vast portions of the world so the rich and privileged can feel "free".
We already have a solution to this problem: It's the internet as it is right now.
To be fair, hating crypto bros is a really good way of life. Mostly because crypto bros have never once in their life been right.
Web 3.0 and web3 are very different ideas.
I followed O'Reilly's Web 2.0 with great interest as a user of Flickr and Delicio.us, read about but didn't really get the whole Web 3.0 semantic web stuff, later learned how to program and much later still, learned about web3. If anything, it's my former language teacher side leading me to be irked by the Web 3.0 / web3 confusion.
Honestly, your comment is needlessly hostile and offensive.
We're exactly at that period with web3: haters gonna hate and early adopters will be rewarded.
Yet I still think benefits and the potential impact (which is not theoretical, just needing a bit more mass adoption to take off) greatly outweigh the negative sides.
Just because Blorkchains can solve a given problem, doesn't mean it's the best, or only solution. One could design a notetaking app using remote controlled combine-harvesters that mow the notes into prepared fields of wheat serving as storage media, and camera drones to read the information back. Doesn't mean it makes sense to do so.
On the other hand, I still believe my example about freedom is still a perfect use case of it and I don't know other ways of doing it.
This is a thought terminating idea, as much as I like TS. There is a good reason why people dislike it. Maybe consider understanding their points
Criticizing is okay, there's a lot to criticize about crypto. But I see a rush of hatestorm on crypto everyday here on HN which I frankly think pointless.
TCP/IP over smoke signals would make a great RFC in a couple weeks. ;)
I like the idea, I'm just worried about the CO2 released.
Then again, if the alternative is tons of bird-cr&! everywhere, it may be the better way.
The most glaring error is the assumption that non-essential user actions/content would be stored on an L1 blockchain. L1 is expensive, a settlement layer for things requiring maximum security. It's absurd to store tweets or likes to tweets on it.
Tweets could go to L2, and likes to tweets could be centralized, for simply not being valuable enough to store on a blockchain. Or, one could conclude that perhaps a social network may not be a good use case for the blockchain entirely, or only parts of it, like media and decentralized identities.
Not a single thought is spent on potential positive/new use cases. For example, it would be trivial for users producing high quality content or even NGOs to get a revenue stream consisting of micro donations. As an alternative to the ad model. And this concept of connected wallets can work across applications.
It would directly cut out the middle man. Similarly, as much as NFTs are frowned upon, for some independent artists they offer new possibilities (with proper anti-fraud mechanisms). Having them deeply integrated on social networks and any other connected apps may provide many new opportunities, especially if the metaverse ever takes of (I have no idea if it will).
I agree with the sentiment that web3 still has to prove itself in a big mainstream use case, and there's lots of ifs and buts, but "omg sending a tweet costs $2"...is incorrect, cynical, anti-intellectual and closed minded. A cheap shot.
Personally, I think a social network cannot be decentralized. Not because of the financials, instead because of the censorship problem. It would soon turn into 4chan or worse, and pressure to remove harmful or downright illegal content would ultimately kill or suppress the network in a way that defeats the point. A more fruitful way may be what Twitter is doing: integrating some web3 aspects into web2.
"Web2" makes us think that we can delete whatever we post, or what we send is not going to be stored. And we believe it because it is technically possible, even though we don't have any way to double check.
If a service claims that you can delete/hide whatever data you uploaded on the blockchain, you'd be able to verify it and not only trust them. And if you are told that using this service, there is no way to delete it, and that anybody can see it, you might avoid doing something that you'd have done with web2 and regretted later.
The web3 dream of nothing is ever deleted is going to have to hit the brick wall of reality that we as a society agree to follow laws that explicitly allow deleting and removing content. You need a judicial solution to change that, not just a technology one.
Can a judge order you to do something that is not possible? For example, if you were offering an end-to-end encrypted messaging service, can the judge order you to provide a decrypted version of a user's correspondence?
> The web3 dream of nothing is ever deleted is going to have to hit the brick wall of reality that we as a society agree to follow laws that explicitly allow deleting and removing content. You need a judicial solution to change that, not just a technology one.
Yes, I think that's why Balaji Srinivasan is talking about "network states", and "layer 0" (the ideological and legal layer) of cryptocurrencies.
Certainly. Here’s a relevant explanatory comment that I wrote a couple of years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23632398.
Contempt of court is an exceptionally powerful instrument. If the law says you must remove things on request, what were you doing putting stuff in a place that you couldn’t remove them? And if the law says you must provide such-and-such information to the police on presentation of a court order, “I can’t because I designed it so I couldn’t” is not an acceptable defence. So far, these things have been flying under the radar for the most part, but it wouldn’t take much for them to be explicitly banned on the grounds that they make it impossible to comply with law.
Given that the the two most important features of a blockchain are decentralization and immutability how would any service ever be able to guarantee me that? That implies they own the blockchain, in which case it's just a slow database.
Web3 seems to work the opposite way. The tech works like that, so the world better adapt to it.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but for once I'm happy that it's not technicians that make the laws.
It sparked an emotion and for me that makes something art.
if this is true then "web3" is inevitable.
new paradigms are self evident, self-fulfilling and don't need to be constantly shilled like "web3". its obvious the whole thing is totally contrived and unnecessary.
I still think about that guy.
* can only be accessed through centralized DNS and Cloudflare (with no alternative way to get the front-end, e.g. ipfs, a git repo, or even a zip file with static assets that can be run locally)
* content only hosted on centralized server (unsplash.com / googleusercontent.com).
No sane person (even and especially the most ardent web3 proponents) would be proposing storing raw images on a blockchain for a use-case like this. There are far more suitable decentralized and/or distributed solutions for content distribution.
This is a strawman if I ever saw one.
https://web3.foundation/about/ (w3f skews heavily towards polkadot parachain solutions but look beyond the bias in their examples and it's quite representative)
http://piped2bbch4xslbl2ckr6k62q56kon56ffowxaqzy42ai22a4sash...
The web evolved constantly from birth and became more interactive over time.
I always hated that silly “web 2.0” branding.
Seriously though, this is just a cheap shot at the web3/cryptography/cryptocurrency/de* space.
And if you are afraid stuff will be unreachable for some people, the default for the podcasts are 40 sats/min (0.02 cents/min) atm. An yes, it is still difficult to get money into a Lightning wallet, I hope that will change.
These inventions only add to the freedom of creators to make their creations available under their own terms.
[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/castamatic-podcast-player/id96...
Edited: Typo
No more dependence on payment providers? True per minute payment? Near 0 fees?
Most places have ways to exchange cryptocurrencies offline (using cold wallets), so this is already not the case. If you are lucky you can get a lot of things you need without transferring the money into another currency at all, which is the ideal scenario.
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Hmm,
Meet the new web. Same as the old web. I'll pass. Thanks.
EDIT: I guess I didn't see it was joke site, because the web technology is also a joke. Oh joy!
If anything, web3 is more like the old internet without the web.. Distributed as in, everybody has a server in their pocket. It's your data, and you decide who has access to it.
That sounds nice. But what I read, web3 is intimitaley related to blockchains. I doubt that blockchains are necessary to obtain decentralisation and data ownership.
Sure, except everybody has access to read the blockchain.
I thought it was sarcasm
> Looks like you have run out of imaginary crypto coins. I guess that means you won't be able to participate on the internet until your next payday. Sucks to be you!
roflmao
I'm talking about Gaming of course. Web3 and blockchain are actually making some cool thing possible like this: [0]
crypto was ruined speculators and will find no saviors from them. but trusting all crypto as speculation is just as speculative
Also this was not about monetization, it's just about the costs of simply using the blockchain.
There's a lot to satirize about Web 3, but not a great implementation here.
don't brush the valuable uses cases away. guaranteed immutability, integrity, and even anonymity, all of that through trustless networks that guarantee incentives for the maintainers of those network can't honestly be so narrowly represented.
Fun preview though of what will be mistakenly built on networks such as Eth that is nowhere near scalable for this kind of use case.
pathetic.
I am fine with VCs dispensing with some of their exorbitant profits to random people who are making "web3" technologies. Actually 1B is too little, i was hoping at least 200B of wealth would be redistributed randomly in this manner. Capitalism needs exploration , not just exploitation
I 've stopped believing all the hype after people started buying decentraland plots for real. Now this is a model that is very well researched and exploited by second life for 20 years, (sorry kiddos it's happening again[1]). People who really care about metaverse living should go ask Philip Rosedale, not the random assortment of wannabes on twitter.
FYI modern chains cost less than a fraction of a penny to interact with (Avalanche, Matic, ICP) and some don't even require to pay anything (Ceramic). All these tired complaints are getting addressed and development is moving fast, it's about time the anti-web3 crowd catches up to it.
Also, I'd like the author to make welcome2web2, with popups, paywalls, ads and sudden user-hostile feature removal or UI redesigns meant to maximize profits... although it would be a pointless exercise, as one would just need to browse the web as usual to experience it.
Oh right, to make money.
I'd be glad to pay a penny (or a fraction of it) for each comment on HN or whatever and have it fund the network (server hosting, staff, etc). Much better than the current alternative.
Really? You'd prefer to pay for every single interaction on the web rather than be served an ad that you can block by the way anytime?
What about people that don't have the luxury to throw away their money like that, should the internet exclude poor people from participating?
This comment I am making is not worth $.000000001 USD, it is worth exactly zero in whatever currency you want to denominate it in. $0 BTCH, $0 ETH, even $0 Zimbabwean Dollars. Take your pick.
It might even be worth a negative amount of currency since it is a mostly pointless comment and anyone who reads this has kind of had their time wasted. That is practically most of what is online IMO and why micro payments are an idea that have not and never will take off.
Of course that expenditure has to be reasonable, ideally $1/day for intensive use or something affordable by everyone or trivially subsidizable, either externally or by participating in the network.
Costs ballooning out of proportion would be a problem of course, but the decentralized nature allows developers and users to move to another data provider once it proves it costs too much to operate (as it happened with Ethereum).
If your use-case requires some form of transfer, or proof of ownership of digital assets then blockchain is usually the most appropriate.
Most things branded as web3 aren't. Especially the recent bubble of art NFTs. That does not mean that the concept is pointless.
http://piped2bbch4xslbl2ckr6k62q56kon56ffowxaqzy42ai22a4sash...
If a website turns their UX user-hostile for whatever reason, one can simply build an alternative UI that interacts directly with the distributed data.
Oh, so web3 is for niche hobbyists?
How can average user trust that the data on these alternative UIs isn't being manipulated?
How long you think it will take until big sites would routinely do small tweaks to their databases/structures to systemically break these alternative UIs?
More so why would any of these for profit websites, like Youtube, even have a presence on web3?
Social trust networks -- they get recommended by friends or shared online by someone you trust.
> How can average user trust that the data on these alternative UIs isn't being manipulated?
Those same social trust networks -- someone realizes what's going on and shares it, people start telling other people to stop using it. There's no technological solution to prevent technological abuse -- the abuse can be built into the system, after all. Half the warnings about "stop using this site" are warnings about a first party UI -- "Facebook is reading your messages!" or "Youtube is hiding dislikes!" or whatever. Social networks (as in, networks of people, not websites) are the only way this sort of knowledge is ever spread.
> How long you think it will take until big sites would routinely do small tweaks to their databases/structures to systemically break these alternative UIs?
Not long, of course. I'm not sure if this is an argument in favor of Web3, though, since that can work the same way -- a startup needs to move fast and frequently change things to iterate, which means they will be changing the data representation on the blockchain frequently (going forward, of course they can't change past blocks), which means alternative clients will need to keep up with those data changes same as with API changes on a normal website.
> More so why would any of these for profit websites, like Youtube, even have a presence on web3?
? Web3 is just as for-profit as the normal web, if not more since every database interaction is monetized? YT and the like aren't on it because there aren't that many users.
And that won't even fix things like Youtube hiding dislikes or Facebook reading your messages. Even if your TotalyFreeYoutubeWithNoAds.com delivers on what it advertises you still need to interact with Youtube's APIs and if those don't deliver out dislikes then there is nothing you can do about it apart from creating your own parallel database with dislikes, but then you can only show the ones that come from your instance of Youtube and not ones that come from actual Youtube or from FreeYoutubeNoAds.com.
I haven't yet seen a single reason why normal consumer would use web3 over web2. Why would I pay for the privilege of responding to you or for downvoting bad ideas? Only response is "magically overnight all web2 websites transfer over to web3", but you have to be really out of touch with reality if you think that will happen in the first place and if it happens actual enthusiast won't create replacements for free on web2.
Web3 is literally just another cryptobro scam like NFTs and it is sad that anyone falls for them.
Have a good time at court I guess ?
Also, look up open-source. Your mind will be blown.
And why wouldn't we see this on the web3?
For one when was the last time you saw a popup? Probably not within the last 20 years.
Isn't everything in web3 by default behind a paywall?
What prevents a web3 website from changing it's UI?
web 3.0 is fakery