Keep the web free, say no to Web3 (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Keep the web free, say no to Web3 (2021)

yesterweb.org

542 pointsmemorable391 comments

Discussed 5 months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29481120 (130 points/96 comments)

I can't really see which bits of web3 are meant to threaten the existing web, or are more dangerous to it than the existing threats.

The balkanization of the web seems like a threat that gets bigger every year. Surveillance gets worse every year. Regulatory attempts to combat certain kinds of surveillance do so by shifting the burden of "consent" on to users who don't understand what they're consenting to. Fewer and fewer people have any kind of "ownership" of the web in the form of personal servers, privately-hosted websites, independent self-managed communities, and so on.

Perhaps web3 could be a danger if it proposes unworkable solutions to those problems. Token economies and blockchains do give a kind of "ownership" and "participation", but the sheer volatility of the pricing of the goods, services and induced-scarcity "land" on offer makes it impractically risky or expensive for anyone who isn't running some kind of trading strategy.

There are lots of good critiques of web3, and good arguments against specific projects, features, or consequences it produces. "Keep the web free" is a fine idea, but I'm not sure that web3 is where the real danger comes from.

Agreed. To be a threat to the freedom of the internet, web3 would have to do something useful enough for people to actually want to use it. So far there is no evidence of that.

Also agreed - I don't think it would be a threat to the freedom of the internet.

Look, no one forces any of us to use the obnoxious websites. For many of them, there are alternatives (email), and for the worst offenders, abstaining is easy, and the only option (social media).

The old-school internet and web will always be available, ready to use, and superior in almost every way to the dumpster fire of modern websites.

Did anyone else experience a palpable feeling of euphoria when visiting OP's website? For me, it was blissful and uncanny. Here is a webpage with design pulled non-ironically straight out of 1999, which also somehow feels like it was made in 1999. Not a hipster's prerequisite "indie-web" presence, not an emulation or demonstration built in a framework -- a simple, flat-file webpage that speaks to the defense of the original web, and in the native tongue.

Perhaps we should encourage web3. After all, it is by virtue of this crisis that so many more people are realizing why even web 2.0 was mostly just a commercialization of web, and has changed us for the worse.

> Look, no one forces any of us to use the obnoxious websites.

Not really true. The network effect. You get to be isolated and lose your friends if you don't.

>> Look, no one forces any of us to use the obnoxious websites.

<Not really true. The network effect. You get to be isolated and lose your friends if you don't.

I may be misunderstanding your point (if so, my apologies), but if someone is a friend, an actual, real friend, not an online acquaintance, there are many, many ways to stay in touch and maintain those relationships that have nothing to do with online social media sites.

I'd posit that if someone is unwilling to interact with you because you don't wish to use the same social media site, they're not really your "friend," just an acquaintance on (or a shill for) some social media site(s).

People say this but that's not my experience. People just don't keep up by other means and some people just don't even have or use other means at all. In some places, Facebook is the entire Internet, for example. I have exchange student friends from all over the world and I would 100% lose contact with them if I left certain platforms/apps. This has no bearing on whether we have deep friendships (and sometimes more) or not.

>I have exchange student friends from all over the world and I would 100% lose contact with them if I left certain platforms/apps.

Then those folks aren't your friends. Feel free to disagree (as I'm sure you do), but if such folks actually gave a rat's ass about you, they'd use one or more of the dozen or so other ways to stay in touch should you leave such social media sites.

I can't (and wouldn't pretend to) speak for anyone else, but I want to be around folks who want to be around me. And not all of those.

tl;dr: If someone's "friendship" is contingent on the use of a particular website/app, then they're not really your friend.

I definitely disagree with you and you're being extremely condescending, patronizing and dismissive. Have some respect. You have no say in who my friends are and who cares about me. You have no knowledge about that. They definitely do care about me and I definitely do care about them.

I think you live in some kind of bubble where people have more choices than they do. You also forget that your friends would stop visiting you if they couldn't drive, even if bus, train and walking were available. That's just the way things are. People have lives and limitations, and that doesn't make the connections or exchanges between them any less valuable to any party.

>I definitely disagree with you and you're being extremely condescending, patronizing and dismissive.

Yes, we do disagree. But there's no reason to attack me for not agreeing with you.

I don't know you and don't care about you (except in a general, wishing all sentient life a positive experience, sense), nor do I care about your friends or family.

I related my experience and the views those experiences have engendered in me.

There was no intent to be any of the things you ascribe to me and it appears that you take offense to my point of view. Fair enough.

And since I want to be around folks who want to be around me and you're clearly not one of those, we can avoid the dishonesty of false pleasantries (which, it seems, you've already decided to do) and get on with our lives.

I wish you a good day and much success in whatever endeavours you undertake.

I mean, you were being a bit condescending? You're also quite wrong, in that you define "friendship" in a very strict way that doesn't comport with how other people use the term. It's quite possible to have friends that aren't close friends; people whom you have fun with, whose lives you would prefer to be able to know something about, but whom you wouldn't go out of your way to keep up with if it became inconvenient. These people still count as friends.

To put it another way, I have family I would lose touch with if I left Facebook. They're still family and I would still prefer to know if they graduated college or got cancer or died. Same with friends-who-aren't-close.

>I mean, you were being a bit condescending? You're also quite wrong, in that you define "friendship" in a very strict way that doesn't comport with how I use the term.

If we're diving to /. depth here (as you seem to want to do), I'll go with it.

There (see above). FTFY.

I’ll be honest, I’m not sure what you mean about “/. depth”, but fair enough.

>I’ll be honest, I’m not sure what you mean about “/. depth”, but fair enough.

/. == slashdot.org noted in the last decade for shallow discussion, infighting and poor quality discourse.

Hence the "FTFY."

Not attempting to continue our disagreement, just clarifying my earlier post.

Have a good day!

>They definitely do care about me and I definitely do care about them.

If you care so much about each other, then why would you lose your friendship if you dropped facebook?

I have never used social media sites like Facebook, and I have not lost touch with any of my friends.

Not even kidding, the postal service still works quite efficiently, and email is very useful.

Part of the problem here may be generational definitions. Perhaps I am wrong, but I think the definition of "friend" has changed quite a bit since the pre-web days.

All of these technologies are tools. If your friends are really friends, you'll use whatever tools you need, and even if significant time passes, you'll still be friends when you finally connect on the other side.

But a lot of people do use it?

> Agreed. To be a threat to the freedom of the internet, web3 would have to do something useful enough for people to actually want to use it.

That does not change the fact that Web3's main selling point is it's ability to eliminate their user's basic freedoms.

I'm not sure we can have it both ways. In other words, I'm growing in my conviction that freedom and privacy on the web require increased balkanization.

Neil Postman (of whom I'm a big fan, to put my cards on the table) wrote very helpfully about the concept of "filters" (that may not be his word) in Technopoly, and I've been thinking about the concept a lot ever since. Certain things are inadmissable in court, and that is true because otherwise you'll just have bedlam. The analogy doesn't hold perfectly, but the same thing is true of other situations where people gather together to communicate, whether in person or online.

The other thing that's required to avoid total chaos is authority, and I think it's a common trait to be dismissive of the value and purpose of authority in this context. People have been dismissive about authority since, uh, forever, but I think there's something about the promise of the internet that makes people think we have finally arrived at the point where it is unnecessary. (Think blockchains and crypto, for instance.) But it's not.

The sooner we see that authority isn't a bug but a feature and begin to build for it in our tech tools, the better.

Yeah, I'm generally of this conviction as well. Particularly looking at the Tildeverse (basically multi-user shell environments that usually loosely network with each other), there are definitely sysadmins in that environment but there are a couple things they do better than, say, Facebook:

1. They personally vet the people they let in to maintain the style of community they're going for.

2. If someone's a problem, it falls to the sysadmin or the people they chose as moderators to kick the person.

3. Anyone can start a tilde and network with the others, but this is done at a human level, meaning people need to actually -want- to network with you.

4. The size of the communities are kept human-scale. It happens that a tilde "fills up" and that people who want in just need to start their own, which is how the whole "tildeverse" arose: from tilde.club reaching capacity and enough other people liking the idea they decided to copy it.

I'm a big believer in this sort of federation approach to the internet in general. The clue is in the name: the "internet" is a network of networks, and IMO we shouldn't expose everything to the rest of the world, but only carefully curated gateways behind which the trusted network with admins who the curated community believes in can operate with less fear of bad actors (at some level we all know this already because this is how Instagram users behave, just at a social level instead of a technical level).

We’ll need to decouple “authority” from “income” in many venues, and that’s pretty hard.

A lot of people agree that moderation helps communities. That’s “authority”. But when moderators are employed by capital holders, the authority leaks up to the capital holders and you end up with different and thornier problems than chaos.

Fedicerse-like systems probably do better in this regard, but the community has to be convinced into paying for the moderator’s time and the system’s resources. Most people have had rhat trained out of them by free-to-use services.

I can imagine blockchain tech could support improvements in this situation, but it is not itself The Solution. People need to own and manage the solution, and to choose the appropriate tech to support their choices. Blockchain people need to stop trying to sell us on the tech being the solution.

For a very long time human beings talked to each other in groups that required no authority, only consensus; We've had a very hard time translating this online, karma, following, friending, subs and rules.. none of it is perfect. But adding an authority to dictate what is good discussion what is bad, comes with a host of problems in itself.

But i do agree that a benevolent dictator may be better than a functioning democracy, for a time.

This is highly presumptive. My experience as a human has shown me exactly the opposite. Humans are highly hierarchical.

So when a group of friends goes to the movies its always the same person deciding and not consensus?

No there is consensus, and it is real. But the hierarchies within that group (based on sex, ability, wealth, knowledge, etc) are also there and are also in play.

This is your big mistake: there is no “adding” authority. Authority is always there. I have started to think of it like the conservation of energy: it changes forms, but you can never get rid of it.

Hard disagree about authority being baked into platforms. Authority should be granted by the user using a social trust graph, with defaults in place for users who aren't savvy enough to manage their own trust.

Web3 as it is is impotent and useless. Yeah, that makes it harmless, but the idea behind it isn't.

The idea behind web3 is that everything lives "on chain" (the same way the idea of the Internet to some was that everything is "online"). This is not just a whimsical dream but a vital necessity for most of its promises to even function. Listen to crypto enthusiasts and you'll hear many scenarios which only work if this is already the case.

"Smart contracts" are useless for anything "off chain" because they can only interact within the chain. You can set up a smart contract to grant royalties off the trade of an NFT, sure, but if you mint an NFT of your book to do that you can literally still sell copies of that book "off chain" without triggering the contract (so you still need the entire legal apparatus of the centralized state dealing in fiat currency, which NFTs and crypto and smart contracts were supposed to replace).

You can see this play out in the (poor and thus cheap to invest in) African countries crypto enthusiasts have been trying to use as lab rats: universities issue their degrees "on chain", land ownership is tracked "on chain", and so on. If all legal documents and claims are replaced by tokens and smart contracts, you can circumvent laws because what's the point of having a legal claim if you can't enforce it because everything runs on the chain and the chain disagrees with your claim?

Even the enthusiasts of course forget to talk about how this makes every person incredibly transparent (no need to "dox" strangers, you can just track their transaction history and literally inspect their wallet to find out everything there is to know about them) and how it turns identity theft from an annoyance to something irreversible (because to the chain, every owner is the rightful owner) that can happen to you as easily as accidentally leaking your Facebook password. Yes, I know about tumblers but if you have to resort to money laundering tools to recreate any semblence of privacy I hope I don't need to spell out how this seems to be more about money laundering than privacy.

And this doesn't even go into how all the fabulous claims about NFTs in games are little more than microtransactions, lootboxes and DLC, how "play to earn" just replaces game mechanics with grind (or at best encourages literal ponzi schemes of renting out your account to allow other people to fight over scraps until the currency becomes worthless) and how none of the technologies involved are "new" or offer any interesting solutions to problems that actually exist outside crypto itself.

Oh, and of course on top of that every single crypto project is either a ponzi scheme (or pyramid scheme, or any of the dozens of variants of scams that are legally neither of those because of technical details but still function the exact same way) or a "rugpull" waiting to happen.

>"The idea behind web3 is that everything lives "on chain" (the same way the idea of the Internet to some was that everything is "online")."

That's interesting. For some reason I had imagined the umbrella of web 3 tech and protocols were somehow additive to what we have now. In looking at the Web3 Foundation's page I can see they have an entire stack defined but nowhere was I able to find where their "vision" for the web was laid out.[2] This seems kind of odd. Is this intentional or is this just not the right place to look?

>"Smart contracts" are useless for anything "off chain" because they can only interact within the chain."

Isn't this what "oracles" are supposed to do though?[1]

[1] https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/oracles/

[2] https://web3.foundation

> For some reason I had imagined the umbrella of web 3 tech and protocols were somehow additive to what we have now.

Because that's how it is sold. The tech is additive (though at this point hardly novel) but the value proposition boils down to "what if everything was a financial transaction".

> In looking at the Web3 Foundation's page I can see they have an entire stack defined but nowhere was I able to find where their "vision" for the web was laid out.

Yeah because the vision isn't particularly appealing to most people. The momentum web3 has is part astroturfed (i.e. wealthy investors leveraging their "fiat" fortunes to pump crypto currencies so they can cash out and VCs pushing their web3 startups for an exit) and part people buying into the hype without fully understanding the bigger picture and its ramifications.

> Isn't this what "oracles" are supposed to do though?

Sure, except they're vulnerable to manipulation (just search for "oracle" on https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ to see a number of noteworthy attacks).

The only way to fix the problems of blockchain technologies is to move everything on the chain. The reason crypto enthusiasts don't worry about the privacy implications is that it will still be possible to "buy privacy" and they believe they're going to make it big so it won't be a problem.

Thanks for the reply. The idea of an all transactional web would be horrifying.

I was curious about this: >"he reason crypto enthusiasts don't worry about the privacy implications is that it will still be possible to "buy privacy" and they believe they're going to make it big so it won't be a problem."

What would their solution be then? How would one buy privacy?

Using the digital equivalent of money laundering to hide their transactions and make deals off-chain by talking to people (or having their people talk to them). If you are wealthy enough you can afford whatever levels of indirection are necessary to retain your privacy.

>Web3 as it is is impotent and useless. Yeah, that makes it harmless

I would disagree. It's impotent and and useless, but also the basis for billions and billions of dollars worth of scams. That makes it not harmless, even if it is itself impotent. It's impotent for any useful work, but highly harmful in effect.

For me, the biggest suck to web experience since I first started using it back when MSN came out (90s) is every page prompting GDPR.

While the prompt is annoying the true culprit of ruining the web experience are websites trying to gather as much data as possible

which is due to the centralised framework which incentivises the web now.

Which is often immediately followed by a pop-up asking me to subscribe to get email updates. Curiously this prompt seems to occur before you've had time to read the first sentence of content.

Yes, it's pretty stupid. I don't know why anyone would subscribe to a newsletter before even knowing what it's about, they should do it once you've read the entire article.

I have uBlock filters to bin off these cookie popups, I'm amazed those irritating things ever became law without someone pointing out how completely futile alarm fatigue makes them.

Now if the GDPR could realistically do something about the tidal wave of spam I've got from pubs in random parts of England and Wales I happened to visit once while waiting for a train back when they were insisting on doing everything through an app that would be nice! I'm fairly sure most apps don't need to be apps at all, they could be websites if companies weren't desperate to inject analytics and yet another vector for spammy marketing into every interaction with them.

Wasn't the web way more balkanized in the past? Reddit replaced (ten?)thousands of individual (english-speaking) forums alone (many still exist, but are a dead shell without many users). YouTube killed almost all competitors. Facebook killed the smaller social networks and many websites of small companies. Most survivors of these "consolidations" were only protected by some kind of cultural or language barrier, like VKontakte or NicoNico.

Or do you mean balkanization by apps, replacing the web?

I wholeheartedly agree with the rest, though.

"Wasn't the web way more balkanized in the past? Reddit replaced (ten?)thousands of individual (english-speaking) forums alone (many still exist, but are a dead shell without any users)."

Before Reddit and web forums there was Usenet.

> Before Reddit and web forums there was Usenet.

Also, what killed Usenet was mainly the byzantine process of creating newsgroups (i.e., artificial barriers to entry), and how those who found themselves in charge of popular newsgroups tendes to be heavy-handed in how they viewed the role of censorship as beneficial (i.e., more artificial barriers to entry).

Now comes web3 and the only technical benefit that's being pushed is it's ability to impose artificial barriers to entry at a deeper architectural level.

Spam, and the inability to address it adequately, was a big part of what killed USENET. See Russ Allbery's legendary rant: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html

> Spam, and the inability to address it adequately, was a big part of what killed USENET.

Spam was a nuisance, but not a relevant or even significant one at a technical standpoint. Client-side spam filters and the flimsiest of moderation solved that problem.

Claiming that spam killed Usenet makes as much sense as claiming that spam killed email.

Spam accelerated the centralisation of email, certainly. Setting up your own server incurs problems in both directions, both deliverability and spam blocking.

What are you talking about? Email is definitely not centralized. At all.

> Also, what killed Usenet was mainly the byzantine process of creating newsgroups (i.e., artificial barriers to entry)

I don't buy it. The web forums that largely replaced Usenet also had significant barriers to entry; although you could get a PHPBB hosting account pretty easily you would then have to drive traffic to your site; people couldn't just add your site to their feedlist and see new posts automatically without "going there". And you had a much freer hand with moderation.

I think web forums won largely because they didn't require any client software - the barriers to entry for new users were non-existent. Maybe the moderation was more effective as well; I know some usenet groups had major issues with spam but that wasn't universal.

> I don't buy it. The web forums that largely replaced Usenet also had significant barriers to entry;

Not really. The fact alone that anyone could create their own web forum is already leaps and bounds ahead of what Usenet users could ever do.

Those interested in setting up their web forum had to endure the technical and financial hurdles of getting it and running just to sidestep the artificial and byzantine barriers to entry required by Usenet's self-described guardians.

Afterwards, services like Reddit and the like further simplified the process of creating a web forum, and thus virtually the whole world jumped onboard.

> "(...) although you could get a PHPBB hosting account pretty easily you would then have to drive traffic to your site*

There is nothing simple about setting up a full blown web server. Let's not fool ourselves.

This is something that some software engineers never done nor have experience in what is required to get it up and running from start to finish. This is certainly not something at the reach of any person with a hobby or even personal interest.

> There is nothing simple about setting up a full blown web server. Let's not fool ourselves.

But you didn’t have to. Shared web hosting sites had scripts to do all that for you more than 20 years ago.

The balkanization of the internet isn't having more websites on the internet. It is the internet splitting into multiple seperate internets that don't interact. Stuff like the great firewall, the sites that block EU IPs due to GDPR, and what Russia is doing are all examples of the balkanization of the web into smaller, more compartamentalized networksk.

What you are referring to is centralizarton/decentralization where the number of different sites/hosts goes up or down.

I am interested in Web3 if, and only if, it allows for people with specialized knowledge to benefit economically from it. For example, currently people are posting on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Reddit some insights. Who benefits from it? Microsoft (who owns LinkedIn), Meta, and Reddit. The profit margins are insane. If the same people, who usually don't care about becoming influencers could earn some extra bucks for posting good content, I am all in.

> I can't really see which bits of web3 are meant to threaten the existing web, or are more dangerous to it than the existing threats.

I’m not sure about dangerous or threatening, but virtually every “web3” product so far has come with a blockchain and token solution that makes it extremely expensive and prone to weird incentives like speculative investing and hoarding.

Look at any web3 style project from distributed file storage to virtual land sales and you’ll find the majority of participants in the ecosystem aren’t actually interested in using the platform. They’re interested in getting there early and scooping up as many tokens or coins as possible so they can flip them to someone else in the future. Actually using any of the NFT based systems can be shockingly expensive ($10-$100 in fees just to modify an ENS entry, for example) or involve a lot of weird financial quirks like a price that effectively varies wildly from month to month depending on blockchain congestion and speculative forces.

I agree with your description of the situation, but that is actually a good thing (for the internet). [1]

The reason everyone is doing speculative bullshit in Web3 is exactly why it isn't a threat to the internet. There is nothing useful that it has created. There is no reason for anyone who isn't trying to fleece bigger fools to buy into it. There is nothing that ecosystem does that's at all better than what we have today.

Web3 isn't going to replace the internet - all it has replaced is the penny stock scam.

[1] it's a bad thing for the participants in these schemes.

One problem is that if all the engineers are devoted to web3 nonsense, who is working on the real stuff? I know it’s not a zero sum game but at the same time we only have limited resources, and at a country-level scale the corporations interested in web3 employ a lot of engineers, at a scale where whatever FAANG is doing, the rest of the world is keen on doing.

I guess what I’m saying is web3 being terrible, scammy, and useless don’t strike me as reasons why it won’t supplant the web as it exists today. It could just win through attrition, as everyone interested in keeping the current web going retires and dies, as there’s no money in maintaining old systems; while those making fortunes off web3 scams are massively incentivized to keep the scam money flowing.

Are they though? How many people do you know working on shitcoins? How many people do you know working on real things?

For what it's worth, I do think this is (or was) a problem. For awhile late last year and early this year a large proportion of the people I saw leaving my big tech company were going into blockchain stuff.

I suspect the current correction will put an end to that though, which I must say seems like a good thing.

> How many people do you know working on real things?

Pretty much everyone I know working in industry is working on imaginary things like increasing engagement and aggregating data. They are doing this because FAANG want them to, not because this is critical work that needs to be done for society.

I anticipated this objection to my phrasing and I agree, but I couldn't think of another word to use :) Maybe "other" things would have sufficed.

I know exactly 0 people doing any kind of crypto work. I do know plenty that are in the ponzi scheme though.

> One problem is that if all the engineers are devoted to web3 nonsense, who is working on the real stuff?

Very few engineers are working on web3 nonsense.

> and at a country-level scale the corporations interested in web3 employ a lot of engineers

They're really not. Like, if you're defining "interested in web3" as "they have occasionally said the word 'blockchain' in an attempt to get some press", yeah, sure. But not that many large companies are actually putting significant resources into this. Of the really big tech companies... maybe Facebook is putting substantial resources into it, or has in the past? Though surely not a significant part of their total resources. The others, not at all, really.

I’m mostly forecasting in my comment based on what I’ve seen happen to the current industry. It’s completely centered around nonsense like “engagement”, and because there’s so much money involved it impacts the direction of the industry all the way down to education of school children.

We have students today who have no idea what a blockchain is, but they know they can make a fat salary working on it, and that’s enough for them to devote their career to the idea. They come to school demanding courses in blockchain, and so blockchain 101 is born. Then you need professors to teach it so you hire the blockchain researchers funded by Facebook, because they’re the experts. Next you have blockchain publications and conferences (it’s already started). Pretty soon the nsf starts funding blockchain research at the government level and your tax dollars are hard at work doing Facebook’s research for them.

Before you know, at a country-level you have devoted countless man hours and research dollars toward something no one except Facebook really wanted in the first place. That’s the way I see it going.

Eh, there've been technology fads before; they sometimes make it into universities, but rarely further. When I was in college, XML databases were very much the thing, and there was a whole optional course on them (which I didn't do). You don't hear much about XML databases these days.

(I think a couple of years before this, it would have been CORBA).

There are a lot of steps in the chain between what we have now and the end state you're afraid of, and none of them are certain. Maybe students don't believe they can make a fat salary working on blockchain technology. Maybe they're not successful convincing schools to offer courses in blockchain tech. Maybe Facebook researchers don't get hired by universities, and maybe academic research into blockchain tech doesn't take off in a big way. Maybe the NSF doesn't see the need to start funding blockchain research.

I can't tell the future, but given the current trajectory (like the recent big crash) I see at least a decent probability that web3 goes absolutely nowhere.

To be clear, I’m observing these things first hand as a professor. Students are asking about blockchain at info sessions more than any other tech. Many students see CS education as a fast track to blockchain tech, coins, and nfts they’ve been hearing turning people into millionaires overnight. That’s what they are interested in!

Parents want to know what blockchain classes we offer. And in fact we do have blockchain 101 and a single faculty member in the space, but there is a lot of pressure from market forces (influenced heavily by FAANG) to hire more.

Fair enough. I’ve been out of college for almost a decade, so I’m out of the loop with respect to what students want. I do suspect that unless crypto bounces back relatively soon some of that desire will go away.

I’m with you there and I’ve got all my fingered crossed.

I'm sorry but you do not get to arbitrate what engineers enjoy and choose to work on, whether that is web3 or something completely different.

This authoritarian approach justified "for the good of humanity" is dangerous. It actually makes me sad this comment is on "Hacker News". We should value tinkering and hacking on what we enjoy.

and this gets at what's really threatening about web3: it's an inherently libertarian technology and authoritarians on both the left and right of the cultural/political spectrum are terrified by that.

It's libertarian in the sense that the final stage of libertarianism is that the well-connected insiders get to abuse everyone else, with zero recourse against them.

In this sense, Web3 is a tremendous success of libertarian thought. No rules, no laws, and an absolute honeypot for hustlers, thieves, and fraudsters. Anonymous founders running off with the money, repeat fraudsters pulling off bigger and bigger heists, and money being poured into the dumbest schemes which, inevitably, end poorly.

I can't think of a better condemnation of libertarianism.

We shouldn't value net-negative tinkering, which is what pyramids and pump-and dumps are, so I would say that these engineers are mostly making the world a worse place.

However, I don't think most of the work that goes into internet companies at the moment necessarily makes the world a better place, either.

Have you checked POAP (Proof of attendance Protocol)? poap.xyz 5M mint, one the most used protocol, everything is free. Look for it on twitter and you will go nuts.

It's an ERC-721 compatible token, free to create, free to mint and collect

POAP stands for Proof of Attendance Protocol

— POAPs are NFTs that function of digital badges to prove you attended an event

— Using POAPs benefits event organizers by creating a direct line of communication with attendees, allowing more interactive, more responsive events and a more reliable way of building relationships with guests and followers

— POAPs benefit individuals by creating a completely personalized story of a person’s life, linking them with moments in time without sharing any data with big centralized platforms

Who cares?

(So that's not a dumb dismissal: no really, who cares? Who wants to do these things, what value are they deriving from it, why does the user want to bother with this overhead, and who pays for it?)

That sounds objectively much worse than what we have now.

> POAPs are NFTs that function of digital badges to prove you attended an event

Save your ticket stub. Buy a t-shirt from the event. It's not even valid proof if the event organizer can hand them out to anyone.

> Using POAPs benefits event organizers by creating a direct line of communication with attendees, allowing more interactive, more responsive events and a more reliable way of building relationships with guests and followers

How does an NFT work better than emails/organizing website?

> POAPs benefit individuals by creating a completely personalized story of a person’s life, linking them with moments in time without sharing any data with big centralized platforms

Oh good, so instead of posting things on facebook, now facebook can just read the public chain to get that automatically. Brilliant.

"That sounds objectively much worse than what we have now."

I love the nft haters who think they're sounding smart but sound like absolute morons to anyone who's done at least a few hours of oBjEcTiVe research into the space. And normally I'd take the time to educate but with attitude like this and a made up mind, nah hfsp.

I simply addressed each of the points using basic observations. I'm approaching this in a good faith as per HN guidelines.

It doesn't take hours of reading academic/white papers or hours of research to evaluate this at a surface level. (And if it does, why on earth would I trust it over traditional methods I can understand?)

If someone was trying to say a pile of dog poo was a great solution to the problems described, I'd say have the same response (granted a shorted one.)

If you want to people to actually use and understand and use this technology, then you gotta take some actions towards that. If you can't actually "sell" a fix to an actual problem using these objective facts, then maybe you should go back to the drawing board and come up with a better idea.

Or I guess just stay on your bubble and stew about it if that's what you want.

Great phrasing I saw: "In web2, the user is the product. In web3, the user is someone else's exit liquidity"

But haven’t we already been seeing that out of tech companies for the last, what? 15 years? So many companies are built from the ground up to be sold off once the user base crosses a certain threshold. Then it’s sold and either absorbed by a massive company or broken apart for its contents. So many founders build companies for the explicit purpose of build it -> sell it -> build next one. Staying power is barely a factor in that. It’s the buyer’s problem. You just need to convince them it can be done and it’s worth it.

Companies like Reddit are the exception to the norm in many ways. They’re almost this weird experiment in “what happens when a built-to-sell startup decides to stick around?” Hell they sold to Condé Nast and lived there for years as just a part of the portfolio. They were in the red for roughly a full decade.

That whole arc is weird now that I think about it haha

A good point. You could call all those "end of our incredible journey" posts "rugpulls", except the investment isn't financial but the investment of your data on a platform which gets deleted. There are a few extra steps in "Vine sell out and now all your vines are gone", but the overall effect can be similar. Founders cash out, users lose out.

Somehow it's difficult when people invest actual cash money, especially in large sums.

Man you are too right about the data rug pulling.

> token solution that makes it extremely expensive and prone to weird incentives like speculative investing and hoarding.

You just reminded me of EOS, which raised over 4 billion dollars and promised to run a 'world computer', that descended into a morass of speculation on everything up to and including RAM timeslot bookings on the system. I just looked it up, and a mere two years later the entity that had all the funds is doing something else, and the community announced the project a total failure.

The blockchain space really is stunning to behold.

it's not a total failure if something was learnt in the process. web3 proposes radically restructuring the web and possibly the economy more broadly, it shouldn't surprise us if it isn't done right immediately.

I imagine what was learned was along the lines of “don’t give 4 billion dollars to a company with vague promises about development but no concrete plans or legal obligations.

Or it should have been, I see little evidence of learning in this space.

This is a political problem seeking a technological solution. There are wires connecting my computer to yours, it's just a question of who owns them. Any technologically incompetent government can institute bad laws that damage the ability to use those wires in an empowering way.

If anything "web3" is a privacy nightmare.

Before platforms have to incentive you to use SSO and cookies to draw you in. now people are tagging NFTs with their address and act as SSO, reasonably anyone can pinpoint you with a few tech skills if such is the future.

Whatever you think the bad thing in "web2"(I hate this term) will happen and 100x in so called "web3" future.

A lazy article that recycles common web3 hate without showing any sign of understanding about the problems with web2, and the potential of web3.

I would agree that web3's potential hasn't materialized. Possibly it never will, but at least engage with some of the concepts.

Further, when you use Stephen Diehl as a source, you already lost. This guy has an unhealthy obsession with hating crypto fueled by his own crypto startup failure.

> an unhealthy obsession with hating crypto

Why is this unhealthy obsession so common on HN? Expressing some concern or doubt about crypto is perfectly reasonable, but it seems odd to me that a forward looking site that's tech-focused has such intense emotionality against crypto.

Purely on speculation and anecdotal pointers seen in my own social rings, there's a lot of "missed-the-train-dissonance" happening.

Many of the people in tech I meet, knew about Bitcoin very early. They even saw the potential. Some acted on that (with hindsight this may seem the "smart" move, but really, it was a gamble with lot of downside potential. Still is). Most did not -which actually, financially or investment-wise, was probably the smart move-.

Those people now must find ways to deal with this internally. The simple thing is to keep convincing yourself that web3, crypto, etc is bad - a conviction that isn't too hard to base in fact, really.

I gave talks in Bitcoin on tech meetups back in 2012. I've had numerous people from back then, tell me that they are really bummed that they didn't really believe me back then, to at least dabble around a bit with some spare change. Or just the tech. I strongly believe there are far more people in the tech scene who aren't this honest, not even to themselves, and instead strongly and loudly "hate" on all crypto.

Are you able to list any reasons why HackerNews dislikes web3, beyond “they have sour grapes because they missed the market.”?

There are many many reasons, and if you are unable to think of any then perhaps you are in a propaganda bubble?

I am. And there are a lot of good arguments brought up on why web3 is not delivering, a scam, cannot work, churning out C02 and so on.

But the many, lazy oneline comments, even on HN, like "Crypto is a scam" lacking any arguments, body or even basis, do show me an unhealthy amount of "hate" on HN.

I made several tens of thousands of dollars on BTC, buying a small stake when it was $10. I'm still HODLing some crypto though I've sold most of it, and I'm definitely one of the haters because it hasn't shown any evidence that any of it will ever deliver on its promises, and I've seen so many scams over the years. The whole ecosystem is just a mass of speculation and competing scams.

It’s not emotionality, it’s rationalism. web3 is a naked pyramid grift, and most people promoting it are hoping to get rich from the “greater sucker” or have been subsumed into a cult-type mindset.

HackerNews is a high-quality rational discussion medium. The problem is not with this community, it is with the propaganda bubble of web3.

Claims like

> web3 is a naked pyramid grift

are not fostering an intellectually honest and objective debate.

Sure, there are countless speculators. Agreed, many things are overhyped.

The underlying technology is still innovative and enables novel solutions.

>The underlying technology is still innovative and enables novel solutions.

The only situations where blockchain provides novel solutions is where you need something to be absolutely trustless, and even then the trustlessness is limited to things that happen on the blockchain. The moment the blockchain has to interact with the real world outside of the blockchain you get back to problems of trust.

The range of problems that such technology is capable of solving is incredibly small. 99% of problems that I see people claiming are "solved" by blockchain were already solved by a boring old normal database like Postgres, or a distributed database like CockroachDB, or a distributed consensus algorithm like Raft. All of which are several orders of magnitude faster and more efficient than using a trustless, distributed blockchain.

Please name a single real-world problem that you believe blockchain "solves."

Yes, let's have an intellectualky honest and objevtive debate about if the world is flat. No, stop wasting people's time and energy with your obvious pyramid scheme.

We don't need a debate. We know shit from shinola when we see it.

Even the speculation part, which admittedly is the vast majority of crypto activity, is not that easily dismissed.

The use case for speculation is making money. Making money is a pretty compelling use case. Most crypto traders are perfectly aware of the risks and play the game anyway.

I mean, the owners of this very site fund a thousand startups only to see 10 succeed. Pure speculation.

You just proved that it's low quality as well as irrational.

On a complex topic with an enormous scope, you claim to have an absolute and extreme answer, and present it as factual. That's pretty much impossible on any topic of high complexity.

You present zero evidence to justify such extreme conclusion. That's low quality and irrational.

To come to a high confidence conclusion on the whole of web3, one would have to actually read hundreds of articles at least, and spent significant time actually using the many products. I would doubt that you did so, and couldn't even pass the most basic test.

So you have zero evidence and presumably zero knowledge or experience. And you're the rational one?

> To come to a high confidence conclusion on the whole of web3, one would have to actually read hundreds of articles at least, and spent significant time actually using the many products. I would doubt that you did so, and couldn't even pass the most basic test.

But then, above,

> Further, when you use Stephen Diehl as a source, you already lost. This guy has an unhealthy obsession with hating crypto fueled by his own crypto startup failure.

Please get your story straight; all I am getting is ad hominems. If we are going that route, please provide me with enough reason to not believe that you are one of the hordes of bagholders who bought into a pyramid scheme covered in layers of jargon in 2021 and are now trembling with fear after losing half of your gambling money that you were promised will double in no time; and are now desperately trying to draw in new marks for your decentralized MLM by advertising and name calling on hackernews.

See how it works both ways?

What exactly isn't "straight" about my position on crypto? The only thing I'm saying is that for such a vast and complicated space, both the absolutes (100% bad, 100% good) are suspicious, intellectually lazy and likely made by commenters with near-zero knowledge or experience.

A character like Diehl is a "crypto is 100% bad" guy. Or more like 500% bad. It's a personal crusade. A crypto-bro shitcoin promoter is a "crypto is 100% good" guy.

I reject both positions and characters.

I regret to inform you that I own zero web3 tokens, nor do I have any other stake in any web3 project whatsoever.

I'm not here to promote or defend crypto specifically. I'm here to defend (in vain) nuanced discussion and seeking truth. We could be having this same discussion about "JavaScript sucks" or "Elon Musk sucks" and I would do the same thing: reject simplistic absolutes by people who don't even know anything about said topic.

> reject simplistic absolutes by people who don't even know anything about said topic.

Precisely. That is the whole point of what I am also saying.

Absolutist positions on either side: the "All crypto should 100% die" from the anti-crypto crowd and "All crypto projects will 100% take over the current system" by crypto-bros and maximalists are both wrong. If they were to 100% die, they would have banned all of them a long time ago and not all of these projects are guaranteed to succeed, they can also fail as well, even after regulations a few projects will succeed.

Given it is ridiculous to reject all electric vehicles because there are too many petrol and diesel vehicles currently burning up the planet, then it is also ridiculous to generalize and reject all cryptocurrencies because some of them use proof-of-work, even when not all of them use that.

I predict we will see the same arguments, refutations and we will continue to see this in the next HN post about something about crypto again.

Given the long and blemished history of failure, grifts and outright lies coming out of the cryptocurrency community, that is a ridiculous position.

Please stop wasting your time trying to defend cryptocurrency. At this point nothing you say will be believe because cryptocurrency bros have a long history of hype that goes nowhere. If you want to show the world that cryptocurrency is useful, go figure out a way to make it useful that doesn't involve breaking laws or wouldn't be better solved by using a DB instead of the block chain.

Spoken like a true intellectual.

But no, I will waste my time any way I please. Luckily that decision is decentralized.

I'm not even a crypto promoter nor do I own a single web3 token. I was defending nuance in debate, quite ironical that you double down in the opposite direction, but not unexpected.

> I'm not even a crypto promoter nor do I own a single web3 token. I was defending nuance in debate,

I didn't see any defense of nuance from you.

> I would doubt that you did so, and couldn't even pass the most basic test.

Here you don't add any nuance to the conversation, you just again attack people based on your assumptions about their level of knowledge.

> you claim to have an absolute and extreme answer,

I didn't see any such claim in the comment you responded to.

> And you're the rational one?

This is defending nuance? Or is this just an ad hominem attack?

> Spoken like a true intellectual.

Look, another ad hominem attack.

If you intent was to ask for evidence to back up those assertions, you did a very poor job of doing that in a way that promotes nuanced discussion.

Well, it's a garbage-in / garbage-out kind of thing.

You call my position ridiculous (without even understanding it). As is evident from your next point where you state I'm "defending" crypto. I've made it obvious multiple times that I agree that at least 90% of crypto projects fail and have no (mainstream) utility. The nuance I added is to not forget about that 10% and that regardless of success/failure, crypto in itself has interesting ideas.

Ideas that are fun to reason about as they touch many aspects: economical, philosophical, technical, political.

The only thing I said really is to be intellectually curious and to keep an open mind, and that this should be considered normal in a tech community like HN.

Even for the bad parts of crypto (the 90% speculation) I'd encourage intellectual curiosity, as it's driven by important macro conditions for young people. Why not try to understand that better?

For the above position you call me ridiculous and imply I'm a crypto bro. You continue that you will believe nothing that I will say. In a bad faith discussion like that, don't expect high quality replies. After all, you don't believe anything anyway.

> The nuance I added is to not forget about that 10%

which you won't/can't provide a single example of...

> be intellectually curious and to keep an open mind, and that this should be considered normal in a tech community like HN.

Being open minded is not about believing whatever people tell you, it is being willing to consider ideas you disagree with you. I disagree with you, but I am willing to consider your ideas. You refuse to provide any actual details or facts to support your claims and instead insist that I simply believe you because that would be "open minded", That isn't how it works.

> Even for the bad parts of crypto (the 90% speculation)

If you think that speculation is the "bad part of crypto" then you simply have no idea what you are talking about. The bad parts or the fraud, grift, extortion that pervade the industry and make up the majority of it's non-speculative uses.

I do believe there is some value in cryptocurrency but if I were to pull a number out of my ass it would be that way <1% of the valuation of the cryptocurrency ecosystem comes from non fraud/grift/extortion/laundering. I am hopeful that number will rise but things seem headed in the opposite direction.

web3 is being hailed as changing the world. So far all it has done is create countless scams.

However I am open to change my mind. Could you provide a single example of a popular and useful project that has been done using the revolutionary technology of web3?

Do you see any sense of irony here when looking at some of the crypto-proponents on this page arguing that the entire history of currency is bunk and can be discarded without knock-on effects?

> On a complex topic with an enormous scope, you claim to have an absolute and extreme answer, and present it as factual. That's pretty much impossible on any topic of high complexity.

This, on its own, is a pretty good reason not to trust a community that regularly messes up pegging stablecoins. I do not buy that purposefully making something complex is the same thing as making it robust. If anything, it's the opposite, complex systems are more likely to have fundamental flaws and are more likely to fall down and blow up than simple systems.

But if we are looking at complexity, current fiat currencies are already unbelievably complicated and multi-faceted. The way that inflation works, the way that currencies get issued, how trust in currencies grows, how countries coordinate and handle currency exchanges and debt, you could get multiple doctorates in every one of those areas. So if you're saying that GP is telling on themselves by dismissing cryptocurrencies out of hand because the math being hard means that quick dismissal of the social impact isn't allowed, how do you not immediately get really large red flags when you look at crypto-communities talking about how those economists are all just obviously wrong and crypto prices aren't tied to overall market effects, or that inflationary assets are just bad design, or that everyone's energy criticisms are just overstated, or that digital artists that hate NFTs just don't understand them, or that stock markets are exactly the same as cryptocurrency speculation, and so on and so on?

The idea of cryptocurrency proponents saying, "wait a second, this system is complex, we can't just dismiss it out of hand" just seems like it's missing a tiny bit of self awareness. Cryptocurrency by and large is a dismissal of complex systems and was primarily made and popularized by people who looked at economic/currency theory and thought, "yeah, I can do that, how hard could it possibly be?"

I'm not talking about the technical complexity of crypto. I'm talking about statements that cannot possibly have a binary answer, as any reasonable answer lies on a spectrum.

You can apply that to any complex divisive topic. Even harmless ones...

"JavaScript sucks"

Position 1: JS is pure evil, it should be eliminated or even banned. Position 2: Everything should be built in JS, no matter the problem.

Both positions are absolute and extreme. They should both be distrusted as absolute statements tend to be false by default. In the rare case where they are true, extraordinary evidence needs to be presented and the commenter needs to be extremely knowledgeable and experienced on the topic at hand.

Applied to crypto, a statement like "web3 is a scam" should be translated to:

"I don't know anything about web3. I've never read any whitepapers. I've never used any of its products. I've never engaged with the community. I don't stay on top of news. Yet I did hear it is bad so I'll just parrot that and present it as fact."

I mean, look at the original article: "keep the web free".

...which incorrectly assesses how "free" the current web actually is, but aside from that: what part of web3 is taking away the current free web? Does the author think that web3 will uninstall the HTTP protocol? There is no threat, it's entirely imagined.

> "JavaScript sucks"

This risks falling into a tautology. The reason why it's naive to completely dismiss Javascript or to use it for everything is the same reason why it's a complicated topic -- because there are a lot of obviously useful applications, a lot of obvious flaws, because it managed to win marketshare over alternatives in a practical (not just speculative) way that led to genuine improvements to a lot of products that we use. Not to mention that a lot of incredibly smart people have ended up with nuanced takes that go in both directions.

If what you mean by "complicated" is "this is inherently nuanced", then saying "complicated things are inherently nuanced" isn't really saying anything. It's just saying that nuanced things are nuanced, it isn't proof or evidence of anything about Web3.

If you're not talking about the tech and systemic complication, then the question is whether or not Web3 really is actually complicated in the specific way you are using the word -- ie, is it actually a nuanced topic, or is it mostly a buzzword that companies like Facebook have latched onto?

And it is important to ask that question. Most things are useless, Javascript is the exception. If somebody comes up to you and tries to get you to learn a new language, you want to be immediately asking, "who else uses this? What evidence do you have that this isn't a scam?" And if that's not your default reaction, you'll end up buying into a lot of questionable technologies and frameworks that are error prone or that have bugs.

> as absolute statements tend to be false by default

This is also a little bit over-literal. Absolutes tend to be rare, yes, but that does not mean everything is always in the middle of two extremes. Sometimes it's off to the side, sometimes something is mostly useless but has one or two small ideas.

Even something like Theranos, there are lessons you can take away from that company about marketing, there's some degree of nuance there -- but it was still very definitely a scam and still very definitely did more harm than good. Crypto does not need to be entirely useless across the board or have no good ideas at all in order for Web3 to be a scam.

And again, going to the above point, if you go into every opportunity or proposal that someone makes online as if it's probably got a roughly equal number of good points and bad points, then you are going to get taken in by a lot of scams. If you demand extraordinary evidence in order to not trust someone, then you are ripe picking for Internet scams.

Is it OK for people to point at technologies like Google AMP or DRM and say that they should be rejected or that they're bad for the Internet?

> what part of web3 is taking away the current free web?

Web3's lack of threat to the open web is largely predicated on the fact that it's mostly useless and that it won't take off in a serious way. But if a lot of Web3's applications (NFTs, crypto-based voting, code-as-law, etc, etc) did take off, the negatives would outweigh the positives that did exist.

I don't think that's an absolute statement either, I'm not saying there's literally nothing good about Web3, just that the negatives very solidly outweigh the positives and the concept of universal commodification of all digital representation, IP, and content is mostly the opposite of what most open web proponents want.

This is not just cherry-picking examples either, I'm not saying that because one or two specific Web3 games are bad that the entire ecosystem is bad. I'm saying that the actual underlying ideas are bad. As you so correctly mention there are very few absolutes but in general the commodification of individual actions in a game is toxic design and should be avoided -- it shouldn't be the standard that we build a market on. In general, taking fungible game assets and making them non-fungible and limited makes games worse. There are some very rare exceptions, but they don't justify remaking the market to accommodate them.

Likewise, when we look at company plans around the Web3 metaverse, many of those plans are by design purposefully turning away from a lot of the things that would make a metaverse interesting in the first place -- they're prposing strict control of IP, scarce assets for things like land. It would be toxic and negative if those ideas took hold, and the only reason why they might not be dangerous is because it is unlikely that Web3 is going to play out the way that those people want.

> There is no threat, it's entirely imagined.

Again, do you see any irony in saying this after you just complained about people making absolute statements? When a significant chunk of proponents for the open web are saying that Web3 is toxic to the open web's ideals, does that give you hesitation, or are you saying you've read more books and spent more time researching software freedom than these people?

"It's just saying that nuanced things are nuanced, it isn't proof or evidence of anything about Web3."

Web3 deserves this nuance for its enormous scope and rapid pace of changes. There's hundreds if not thousands of projects, so it's pretty much impossible to make any absolute statements about it. Even more so when the typical commenter has never even interacted with any of it.

You could fairly easily prove that 90% of crypto projects fail, but so do > 90% of startups. Do startups suck altogether now? Another nuance is failure versus scams. Whereas 90% may fail, that doesn't mean 90% are a scam. There's lots of scams, but also just really bad ideas. A scam and a bad idea are not the same thing.

I think you take the JS example a bit too literal, or maybe it was a poor example. My point was that anything of significant complexity tends to not have absolute binary answers. You can apply to JS, political ideas, almost anything.

As for the open web, in a way it's dead as it is. All attention and monetization lies in the hands of a handful of companies. I don't see how any web3 project would threaten the current status quo.

If NFTs become mainstream...so what? You're not forced to buy one. Same for crypto gaming. If it doesn't make sense and make games crappier, it will be widely rejected.

> You could fairly easily prove that 90% of crypto projects fail, but so do > 90% of startups. Do startups suck altogether now?

90% of them fail, and you should be very cautious about investing into them or relying on them. You should be altering your behavior in a market where the majority of "products" fail. You should be approaching everyone who comes to you with their startup idea at least initially as if their startup idea is probably either bad or a grift -- and you should dismiss them unless they come up with evidence that makes them worth paying attention to. You should not accept complexity as an argument to invest in a company.

> My point was that anything of significant complexity tends to not have absolute binary answers.

I think my problem here is that it feels like you're equating "there's not an absolute binary answer" with "you can't dismiss it". And I don't think that's true. There are lots and lots of proposals and ideas people have that are not uniformly 100% bad that still should be dismissed out-of-hand absent some kind of tangible evidence that they're good.

This is a skill that people should practice because nuanced things often fall apart horribly. Remember that nuance is a continuum, the only two options aren't "binary good/bad" or "impossible to tell". Sometimes (often) things are mostly bad in obvious ways, and usually things that are worth paying attention to have at least a few obviously good qualities. Learning how to say, "okay sure, maybe there are one or two interesting things here, but it doesn't look like they matter" can save people from a lot of headaches -- particularly in the tech sector where people are inundated with frameworks, and products, and profit models, and "revolutions."

> As for the open web, in a way it's dead as it is.

Once again, I'm really glad we're being nuanced about things.

I don't agree that the open web is dead, and I do think that's a pretty un-nuanced take, but I do think that the open web has a lot of problems and that they are important to solve. The thing is though that the core ideas behind NFTs/crypto-gaming/identity-management/etc exasperate the same (real) problems you're looking at with the modern tech/web landscape. It's not just that they aren't good solutions, they are a more concentrated version of the web's current problems.

The biggest corporate proponents of Web3/metaverse products are envisioning a world that (despite being placed on the blockchain) is still effectively more centralized and more commoditized than the current world, and where the majority of funding, consumption, and creation happens under the supervision of people who bought in early to a set of scarce deprecating resources. That's bad for everyone if it does happen.

Luckily, it's probably not going to happen, because it turns out that NFTs are not really a great tool to build that dystopian world either, and a lot of the people trying to corporatize the Internet are (in my opinion) probably going to eventually figure out that there are easier ways to do that than with NFTs and smart contracts.

But that's kind of the optimistic take. If the articles and think-pieces from companies and investors with actual money and products in this space are indicative of their plans, then their plans are bad and shouldn't be realized. To say that no one will force you onto to Web3/NFT platforms if they do succeed is naive; these people are pretty straightforward about the fact that they want people to be forced onto the platforms and they want their platforms to be the dominant way that people interact with digital "assets". Scarce digital assets are a great way to encourage the exact same consolidation that we see today.

Many of the most interesting proposals in the Web3 space don't work unless they become dominant platforms in their respective industries. Certainly once we get to the societal applications that get proposed in these spaces, stuff like voting on a blockchain doesn't work unless it's the only way to vote. Thankfully, the optimistic take is that it's very likely never going to get there because the majority of the crypto market is about speculative investing, not changing the world.

----

And just to restate one more time, if it bothers you to hear someone say that the majority of cryptocurrency right now is a speculative bubble and the majority of it isn't fulfilling any real purpose -- it should also make you really nervous that crytocurrency itself was built out of a belief that the dominant expert narratives about monetary policy and asset management were just straight-up wrong.

If I take your complexity theory at face value and if I really buy into that model for how to think about complexity, then there really isn't a lot of reason to believe that a bunch of VCs, Internet hackers, hobby investors, and Anarchists know more about monetary policy than the Fed. Monetary policy is enormously complicated and constantly moving. Part of the reason why it's hard to take "it's complex so don't dismiss it" seriously is that if I agreed with that take I still wouldn't really see that as a defense of cryptocurrency.

If a bunch of non-experts, even tens of thousands of them, get together and make hundreds and thousands of projects, but the vast majority of them are predicated on the idea that traditional ideas about finance are wrong and that a bunch of people who have never gotten an economics PHD know better, then all you really have is tens of thousands of people who are themselves ignoring complexity.

So the only thing that I think makes sense is to examine Web3 based on the actual claims it makes, and those claims seem pretty bogus to me as someone who has been involved in trying to make the web open for a pretty long time. And they seem bogus to a lot of other experts who care about free culture and free expression, experts that I have over time learned to somewhat trust. Which doesn't mean that there's literally nothing good about Web3, but it can be as nuanced as it wants on the edges while the majority of it still consists of bad ideas, grifts, scams, and pure speculation. And unless those edges get a lot more prominent really quickly, then it's probably a good idea to dismiss the whole thing and let the good ideas come back in another medium or form that doesn't have quite so many toxic attributes.

I am all fine for anyone to disagree with cryptocurrency projects and the idea of putting everything on-chain or a social network fully on-chain is also a bad idea which I also think that makes no sense. But the extreme idea of banning all of them or thinking all these projects will survive or using a false generalization towards all cryptocurrencies if one of them has an inefficiency in its consensus mechanism, then this is where I disagree with that.

It's interesting to see on a site that calls itself 'Hacker News' where the whole point is being curious about upcoming startup projects or technologies.

Theranos turned out to be a scam with many investors losing their money, does that mean all startups are scams? No. So given that many companies like Stripe, MoneyGram, Namecheap, etc have re-entered into cryptocurrencies, perhaps they are also aware that some of the ones they have chosen to use have a use case?

The number of people with genuine belief in web3 is SWAMPED by people hoping to make a quick buck from the “greater fool”’

Unfortunately it’s a “curate’s egg” situation, and anyone genuinely promoting web3 is indistinguishable from the grifters.

For somebody with such an unhealthy obsession with consensus based trust, you're certainly disturbed by the consensus on Hacker News that cryptocurrencies are a scam, and the widespread and uniform distrust of people who shill them.

What's so bad about consensus and trust, again?

Is the only kind of consensus you trust the kind of consensus that's arrived at by burning tons of coal?

To be fair, HN discussions are prone to sybil attacks, of which cryptocurrencies are not.

My hate is based on how useless it is and how completely goes against the ideas being claimed for it.

It is capitalism at its maximum exponent and the only thing that managed to do is more wealth concentration (of USD BTW)

> how useless it is

Very often on HN, we see new stories about how Payment Provider X stole $$$ from some individual/group/business, ruining their lives. Or we see governments blocking bank accounts from doubleplusungood protesters.

I cannot understand how people see this kind of thing happen all of the time and then rationalize that there's no conceivable use cases for crypto.

There's also stories about lost wallets, crypto scams, contracts gone wrong, damage to the environment, shortage of chips and graphic cards, and so on.

To put it short: web2 is bad, web3 is worse.

First, regarding unhealthy obsession I was referring to this Stephen Diehl character. Everyone's free to dislike or hate crypto, but most ordinary people would express that opinion and carry on. That's quite different from making it your life mission and devote all your energy to it. I find that obsessive and suspicious. Like a crusade.

As for this community, I too find it disappointing how it engages with the crypto topic. I understand that crypto gives plenty of reasons for skepticism. I personally share the opinion that > 90% of it is garbage without utility.

And yet still I think there's room to intellectually engage with the good parts. Even parts that are good "in theory" at this point. Even more so when it's so common to bash "web2" tech monopolies.

I do get it though. Crypto is huge, complex and fast-moving. To get a deep and nuanced understanding of it means investing a huge amount of time without a tangible reward. Hence, people resort to simplistic binary conclusions. It's terrible or the future, there's no middle ground.

It's even worse when a topic gets politicized and becomes part of the culture war. A lot of brands are looking to experiment with crypto but are walking on egg shells or have to retract plans as to not offend the Twitter mob.

Is Elon Musk a Disney-style billionaire villain or our savior? It can be only one of those two options, such is the way of the world right now.

This idea of obsession is funny. Like you keep asking if I want to play your carnival game and every time I say "no" and you can't get me to say "yes" so your solution is to follow me around asking "why are you so obsessed with me?"

What does this even mean? Who follows you around?

> I personally share the opinion that > 90% of it is garbage without utility.

> And yet still I think there's room to intellectually engage with the good parts.

Then please provide some examples. Over and over here on HN we ask what is Cryptocurrency good for besides speculation and breaking the law that wouldn't be better solved by using a DB instead of a block chain? Oddly enough nobody seems able to answer that question. If 10% of projects are the "good parts" it shouldn't be that hard to find a few examples.

I'm not here to do your homework. What stops you from looking into this yourself?

Look at the top 50 tokens, read their whitepapers, connect with the communities, try a few apps and make up your own mind. You may very will still come to the conclusion that it's worthless, but at least you'd then have an informed opinion.

It's actually a fun thing to do, this exploration. Even if you dislike it. It's intellectually stimulating.

> I'm not here to do your homework.

That's funny, I thought you were here trying to argue that cryptocurrency has a legitimate purpose. I guess being asked for a single example to back that up is too much.

Instead you just imply that because I disagree with you that I am uninformed. Good luck with that, you won't convince anyone.

Funny, your thinking is wrong. I'm not here to promote crypto. Which you would have known if you had bothered to comprehend my comments.

messages on the btc or eth blockchain or arweave are more durable and uncensorable than messages on social media.

international transfers now cost less than 1% instead of 2-5%. since we have stablecoins, there's no crypto volatility. (use usdc or dai, not usdt or ust)

nfts enable collecting generative art, and galleries make the art viewable anywhere with an internet connection. being able to sell the art is what allows artists to make a living.

What's the potential of web3, and how does it solve the problems of web2?

>at least engage with some of the concepts.

What's so telling to me is that in posts like yours, it is never said what the "concept" that's so good actuallay is. Please enlighten me

Random thought - is Web3 a real danger to the currently existing web, where "real" means "plausible" rather than just "possible"?

I'm asking because every Web3 project I have seen so far has collapsed after getting just enough speculators (and therefore money) to make a nice rug pull/attack, but well before gaining any significant traction of non-paying users that are there to use the platform rather than speculate. It seems to me that it's completely unsustainable to keep a Web3 project running long enough to even gain these users in any way.

It seems to me that Web3 is, so far, only providing us with three things: the first is a way to speculate, the second is a way to waste our electricity, the third is laughing stock via https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ which only sorta sweetens points number one and two.

Are there any notable exceptions to my above observation? Am I wrong in some more fundamental way?

Regarding point 2, not all blockchains use the useless calculation of hashes as a method to establish trust.

This comes up everytime someone mentions the energy waste, so please answer one simple question: Which web3 services that are CURRENTLY online are not based on proof of work?

It's not like they don't exist, they just have a lot of problems scaling to capacities that are in any way meaningful.

Might you or someone else say what or where the bottlenecks are that prevent these from scaling?

The biggest challenge in general is that the approach of storing every transaction forever leads to petabytes of storage. And you can't expect a decentralized system to require petabytes of storage.

I apologize if this a naive question but Proof of work is also decentralized no? Why does Proof of Stake incur these scaling limitations but Proof of work does not?

Both do.

Can you elaborate? The person I was replying to indicated that the problem was one of storage however the only scalability problems I have seen written about have been around transaction processing.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem

Not every node has to store every transaction ever. Nodes can prune old state

https://www.projectserum.com/

I'm not pro web3, but it didn't take much effort for me to find an example.

Any Ethereum L2 that commits transaction bundles to the mainnet, plus anything on Binance's EVM chain, Cardano, Solana, Polkadot, Avalanche... They're all proof-of-stake or not based on PoW.

And, Ethereum will transition to PoS by this year, ideally in August. All of the popular nine Ethereum execution/consensus clients should be ready for the merge, and mainnet has already been test-merged five times successfully.

The first existing PoW testnet will be merged on the first week of June. After that, there's two testnets remaining that will be upgraded (Ropsten -> Goerli -> Sepolia), and then it's time for mainnet.

Interesting. Never thought that Eth will actually transition it’s consensus method. So that means there’s hope for Bitcoin to do the same some day.

> Ethereum will transition to PoS by this year, ideally in August.

I feel like every year is the year when Ethereum will finally transition to PoS, but it never happens.

The difference is that this time we actually have testnets already running the full Proof-of-Stake code, most recent news on this front is that the Ropsten testnet will merge on June 8th, that's a huge milestone considering Ropsten is like _the_ testnet if you're developing for the EVM, and is only slightly younger than the ETH mainnet itself.

Name another year that has had feature-ready clients across the board, with a working merge transition mechanism implemented across all of them. The proof-of-stake chain we're merging to was launched in December of 2020, and has been running since, with almost 400'000 validators currently.

It's like The Year of Linux Desktop

Bit harsh when many software projects in the world are delayed. Ethereum was released in 2015

I've seen stories detailing how they were ready to switch to PoS by "the end of the year" as far back as 2017. Ethereum has been PoW for it's entire existence, and has also been promising PoS for almost 3/4 of that time. It's not impossible that this time it's really true, but I'll believe it when it happens.

Cardano, Solana, Polkadot, Avalanche, Ropsten, Goerli, Sepolia, Iota, Algorand, Iota...? You're all making fun of me by making up funny words now, don't you?

No, just kidding. To be fair, I wasn't aware that there is SO MUCH going on in the crypto space that I have never heard of. But these (as far as I can see) are different blockchains, not actual sites that a user can use do do useful stuff or access useful information.

That's why I was asking for services - to my understanding, just creating a new coin does not make it "web3".

These are all chains that support smart-contracts, meaning that services can be built on top of them! I don't know much about the DeFi ecosystem on other chains, but all of them should have at least _something_ going on.

None of them have critical mass because none of them are scalable.

So no, actually, they don't have very much going on at all.

It's trivial to solve one single aspect of the much larger problem by deciding to punt on solving other extremely crucial aspects, like scalability, or decentralization.

Polkadot is actually a layer 0 and does not have smart contracts. Parachains, like Moonbeam, are your layer-1's that provide smart contracts.

Avalanche is also layer 0.

Not an expert, but as far as I know IOTA and NANO as two examples.

Algorand, Cardano

Yeah, the alternative is called proof of stake. Now please explain to me how "having a lot of money means you get more control and more money in the future" as a system is in any way adhering to the promise that crypto will disrupt the existing oligopolies and bring power back to the people (unless you define "the people" as "other billionaires who missed out on being part of the current tech oligopolies and want to be Caliph in the place of the Caliph).

Now please explain to me how what you wrote doesn't apply to PoW.

It does. What's your point? The only difference is proof-of-work measures it more indirectly by letting rich people compete in how fast they can burn cash rather than just flaunting what they have. Both are bad.

My point is.. it does. I can now see that I've misinterpreted your post, apologies.

>is Web3 a real danger to the currently existing web

Are cryptocurrencies a real danger to regular currencies? Are NFTs a real danger to tangible items? Are DAOs a real danger to actual corporations? I'd answer all of those questions with a hard NO.

Cryptocurrencies will obviously be forgotten, especially in their current iteration.

But the climate and energy impact is not that easy to set aside. The article itself mentions one of the many consequences could be flooding the termination points for underwater sea fiber. So while web3 isn't a threat to the web itself by superseeding it, it's a threat to its existence (and a whole lot of other existences).

Too many fools losing too much money is a threat in itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_Civil_War

Which metrics would suggest people might forget bitcoin? (much less, make it obvious they will forget about it).

The fact that it's all useless.

That hasn’t stopped anybody so far - what makes you think it’ll stop people in the future?

>The fact that it's all useless.

But Bitcoin is definitely not useless. I can use it to buy drugs, guns, child porn and other important commodities.

I don't know what you all are so terrified of, but the false narrative is just silly. I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve, but fiat has continued to dominate the currency of choice for the black market and crypto's illegal transaction volume may even be declining, not increasing

https://www.forbes.com/sites/haileylennon/2021/01/19/the-fal...

>I don't know what you all are so terrified of,

Who is this "you all" to whom you're referring?

I'm not "terrified" of cryptocurrency. No, I won't buy guns or child porn with it, but probably drugs. And that's a good thing.

>I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve

I achieved exactly what I attempted: to reply to the parent[0] of my comment with my thoughts.

Do you suspect that I have some nefarious goal to destroy blockchains/cryptocurrencies through tongue-in-cheek replies on HN? If so, that seems a little paranoid. But I don't judge.

Please carry on.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31478624

I'd recommend finding a healthier hobby than making sarcastic comments that could easily be interpreted as an attempt to defraud crypto holders as gun, child porn and drug buyers. How would you like it if you invested in some new asset class and alongside serious accusations of enabling child porn support, people frequently made 'tongue-in-cheek' comments about you supporting (indirectly or otherwise) child porn with your investment?

I get it, this is just a deep thread with a one-off comment, not the biggest deal, but it's certainly annoying trying to attempt honest conversation about crypto with comments like this.

>How would you like it if you invested in some new asset class and alongside serious accusations of enabling child porn support, people frequently made 'tongue-in-cheek' comments about you supporting (indirectly or otherwise) child porn with your investment?

But those are documented use cases for cryptocurrency. If you don't approve of such things, so be it. It doesn't invalidate other uses (hodling, etc.) for cryptocurrency (in this particular case, Bitcoin).

>I get it, this is just a deep thread with a one-off comment, not the biggest deal, but it's certainly annoying trying to attempt honest conversation about crypto with comments like this.

Now I'm confused. Firstly, this was (I thought) a thread about the (non)uses of Web3, not cryptocurrencies or blockchains in general.

I'm sorry my assessment of the consumer uses of Bitcoin rankles you. That said, Bitcoin is used for some "unsavory" stuff isn't news, nor is it (as you pointed out) specific to Bitcoin.

Please do carry on, as it's your best bet to counter my evil plot to destroy Crypto/blockchain with occasional HN comments, in my grand plan for world domination.

If those infrequent (primarily because this isn't a primary interest of mine) comments are so hurtful/dangerous to you, please go ahead and downvote me and/or ignore me.

At the same time, I'd prefer it if you didn't doxx/SWAT me or firebomb my house.

I have no control over what you (or anyone else, for that matter) think, do or say, nor am I interested in such control, so I hope you're rational enough not to do the latter, although the former is, IMHO, a normal and reasonable response to irritation/disagreement.

Good luck. I hope everything works out the way you want.

Are you serious? You sound like a parody.. a parrot of the false political attacks on bitcoin. Are you literally an ignorant bigot or a troll?

>Are you serious? You sound like a parody.. a parrot of the false political attacks on bitcoin. Are you literally an ignorant bigot or a troll?

Are my examples[0][1][2] not documented uses for Bitcoin? Note that I was responding to someone who claimed Bitcoin was useless. It is not.

Yes, there are other uses for Bitcoin (Hodling, mostly), but from a consumer standpoint, illegal stuff is what most of us would likely use Bitcoin for.

Troll? Not sure what you've got your panties in a bunch about here. Everything I mentioned is documented as true. And I don't really care how you (or anyone else) feels or reacts to what I have to say.

As such, that it bothers you says more about you than it does about me, IMNSHO.

Bigot? How do you get there?

   Bigot(n)
   a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his 
   or her own opinions and prejudices especially : one who 
   regards or treats the members of a group (such as a racial 
   or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance
   (Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bigot )

Please explain how that could apply in this context.

So no. Not a troll or a bigot. You (at least it appears that way) seem to think that I disagree with you and, as such, made a personal attack on me. What gives? I didn't attack you or anyone else. I merely stated some facts that debunked GP's assertion that Bitcoin was "useless."

Again, your (apparently) angry reaction to factual statements says more about you than about me.

I hope you have a good day and have a chance to relax and reduce your stress levels, which seem pretty high ATM.

[0] https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/feds-arrest-36-people-...

[1] https://decrypt.co/42614/police-seize-millions-crypto-cash-d...

[2] https://futurism.com/the-byte/bust-child-porn-site-bitcoin-p...

> I can use it to buy drugs, guns, child porn and other important commodities.

> Are my examples[0][1][2] not documented uses for Bitcoin?

The exact same thing can be said about literally every currency in use today.

> illegal stuff is what most of us would likely use Bitcoin for.

> would likely

You are full of shit. Since you love citing sources, please provide the source that proves this claim ^.

> that it bothers you says more about you than it does about me

You are spreading misinformation in the worst way - mindlessly parroting trolls and deceitful politicians.

> Bigot? How do you get there?

Did you not state that the only legit use of bitcoin is criminal activity? Does that not insinuate that bitcoiners are a bunch of no-good criminals and/or gamblers? That's pretty in line with bigotry. "They're all a bunch of criminals" is the same behavior you see from a lot of other groups of bigots.

> angry reaction to factual statements

Not angry.

Let me state some facts: The absolute most disgusting criminals in the world 1) Breathe oxygen 2) Drink water 3) Use cell phones 4) Use websites

Does this imply that oxygen, water, cell phones, and websites are only useful for criminals?

>Did you not state that the only legit use of bitcoin is criminal activity? Does that not insinuate that bitcoiners are a bunch of no-good criminals and/or gamblers? That's pretty in line with bigotry. "They're all a bunch of criminals" is the same behavior you see from a lot of other groups of bigots.

I neither said nor implied anything of the sort. Nor was anything along those lines intended. There's no subtext or nefarious/disparaging implication either.

That you interpreted my statements that way says much more about you than it does about me.

How does that old saw[0] from the bible go? Ah yes:

   The wicked flee when no man pursueth.

That's the vibe I'm getting from you, along with a little bit of the Shakespeare[1]:

   The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Who'd a thunk it, eh? A little literary flourish in response to (unfounded) ad hominem attacks. Good on me.

Have a good day and I hope you have an outlet for that stress and anger. It's not very becoming.

[0] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs%2028&v...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_lady_doth_protest_too_much...

Define your time horizon. Currencies will disappear - whether it be in 10 years, 50 or ... let's be ultra-conservative: a few thousands years.

The system is rigged by old generations heavily invested in tradfi, but give it a few generations and things will radically change ... which might be arguably irrelevant on your own time horizon, fair enough

> Are cryptocurrencies a real danger to regular currencies?

Yes, absolutely.

> Are NFTs a real danger to tangible items? Are DAOs a real danger to actual corporations?

Agree on these - hard no.

>Yes, absolutely.

If you mean "digital currencies", then I would be inclined to agree (though it will probably take a lot longer than people think). But existing cryptocurrencies or even future ones built on blockchain and POS/POW? Extremely unlikely.

Ethereum name service (ENS), which ties a wallet to a human readable domain name.

What does the adoption look like and what are its perspectives for future adoption? It seems to me that it's as popular as Handshake right now, which is not popular at all.

a couple hundred thousand people use it

That tells us that ENS, Handshake, etc are the only 'NFT' project(s) so far that has a use case for web3. Handshake is also part of this as well and the CEO of Namecheap is somewhat convinced on that.

Only a few useful projects will survive.

have you heard of POAP?

non-financial & fun

ENS is much more broadly adopted than Handshake. Pretty much the entire Ethereum ecosystem has standardized on it.

> the second is a way to waste our electricity

I wonder how much electricity has been wasted on cat videos...

There are all sorts of wastes - the process of waste in attempting to find (R&D) a good crypto, should lead to a net gain in the long run. Cat videos, not so much..

There are a zillion wasteful activities. I think what gets me, and where the arguments sometimes seem disingenuous, is that in cat videos, the energy waste is "accidental". Both the provider and consumer would readily see it reduced, and in fact optimization happens constantly and mercilessly. Providers typically expend effort to reduce energy expenditure, especially in mature fields, as it represents real cost to bottom line.

In proof of work crypto though, energy expenditure is by design / intentional, and not only that, but designed to consistently increase.

That feels any comparison between POW crypto to anything else not even apples and oranges, more like car accidents and nuclear weapons - one is an accident, the other is designed to nuke you.

Cat videos provide tangible relaxation and a way to rest in between other tasks, whereas any Web3 endeavours in the "crypto mainstream" I have seen so far have been purely speculation vehicles disguised as something useful.

Cat videos are not purposefully distributed uncompressed, in ultra high definition resolution, with extremely high frame rates, including enormous amounts of extra redundant padding, with 24 hour and longer durations, so they take as much time as technologically possible to download.

Cat videos also aren't completely useless: they make people happy. Shitcoins hasn't done anything but scam people and contribute way more CO2.

Okay, let's do a bit of math.

Each year, Bitcoin produces ~37 megatonnes of CO2 per year (https://www.downtoearth.org.in/blog/environment/as-cryptocur...), and i won't consider any other cryptocurrency.

Now, let's assume for a moment that every single youtube video is a cat video, since i found nothing about how much people watch these. So 10 megatonnes of CO2 per year (https://www.wired.co.uk/article/youtube-digital-waste-intera...).

Obviously this is very unfair to cats. But even if that were the case, with this calculation being _really_ biased for crypto, it's still very bad.

Howaboutism seems to be a core crypto tenet, until someone comes back with a response like this. I also keep hearing "how much energy does the legacy banking system spend"... to which the only real response is: for the value it provides humanity, very little, unlike the top cryptocurrencies.

The "legacy banking system" you are referring to is probably something similar to the ECB or the FED. Only 13% of the world population live under a stable financial system or democracy. So please check your financial privilege.

if you have to resort to telling someone to check their privilege you've already run out of arguments.

I mean am I wrong? I'm assuming you are from the US, Canada or Europe when you say central banks have a net positive impact on society so I can presume you are clearly speaking form a point of privilege. You've never suffered through strict capital controls and hyperinflation. You can participate in any investment scheme without the need to supply spurious amounts of impossible documentation. You are not sanctioned. You may even have born in the right place. Am I wrong? Doesn't that sound like privilege to you?

It's one thing to say "the x you're talking about only applies to some small percentage of the overall global market".

But if you're worried about people's privilege you're missing the point and thats what makes you wrong, because nobody with any intelligence responds to 'check your privilege' with anything but derision. focus on the argument with your own logical persuasive argument instead of accusing your opponent of some sort of original sin.

shouting "check your privilege" at the end of a crypto argument isn't checkmate, rather it reduces your argument to one of nonsense. Discuss ideas.

I just re-read this and the english is terrible, i guess i was tired or something. The point still stands though.

> Are there any notable exceptions to my above observation? Am I wrong in some more fundamental way?

Do you see web3isgoinggreat reporting about [0][1] or perhaps [2] or even [3] and maybe this [4]?

As soon as the speculation calms down and the regulators limit these random DeFi projects there will be these projects like the ones I listed that will be still around that won't be 'wasting electricity' and have a valid use case rather than being a random DeFi token project clobbered up as a exit scam which is what you see that is widely reported and filtered out by web3isgoinggreat.

Sorry, but as long as these companies have re-entered into the same cryptocurrency industry, it is really not going to completely 100% guaranteed go away, unless you ban it all; which that is not going to happen.

The reality is, only a few projects will survive.

[0] https://skiff.org

[1] https://skiff.org/blog/skiff-x-ethereum-naming

[2] https://stripe.com/blog/expanding-global-payouts-with-crypto

[3] https://ir.moneygram.com/news-releases/news-release-details/...

[4] https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/octo-034-27apr22...

Thanks for the insight, it's valuable.

> As soon as the speculation calms down and the regulators limit these random DeFi projects, there are projects that will be still around that won't be 'wasting electricity' and have a valid use case rather than being a random DeFi project clobbered up as a exit scam which is what you see that is widely reported and filtered by web3isgoinggreat.

I want to believe in what you say, but at the moment I simply can't. Maybe in a few years, if what you describe actually happens, I'll be able to see this matter differently.

The only hint of a real product here is using crypto to bypass exchange fees and border controls of international money movements. Those fees exist for a reason (volatility risk), and there is no reason to believe the crypto version would be different. Those controls exist for a reason, and there is no reason to believe governments would allow "legit" regulated companies like MoneyGram to bypass them.

I took a look at skiff and it seems to be a regular email client that has support for the Ethereum Naming Service. If you take away the electricity wasting ethereum network you're left with an email client - which is honestly great - but decidedly not web3.

It is Web3. You can still use it even if Skiff servers shuts down. By using and supporting ENS, there is no lock in to Skiff servers. That is the whole point of it.

> If you take away the electricity wasting ethereum network you're left with an email client - which is honestly great - but decidedly not web3.

Not quite. It is not just an email client, it is an end-to-end encrypted workspace as well and everything is open source. As long as they still have ENS working with it and wallet logins, it is still Web3.

> As long as they still have ENS working with it and wallet logins, it is still Web3.

ENS inherently relies on ethereum. Take away ethereum and you take away ENS. Do that and you take away the only blockchain related part of Skiff. Do that and it's no longer Web3.

There are so many examples. Some of the most popular web3 applications have only gained more momentum over the last few years, and have growing user bases. Examples are: Uniswap, Compound Finance, Maker DAO, Aave, Curve Finance, Tornado Cash (which is incredibly useful for preserving privacy), and more. They actually provide a service people care about and use. I agree they are still at a small scale compared to traditional web applications, but I personally know people in developing countries that rely on stablecoins to survive, such as DAI, use Aave to take out loans, and Tornado to preserve their privacy from tyrannical governments.

The most interesting part is reading comments in HN. Obviously the interest of the average HN reader is different from the one from a developing country. And yet again different from our influencers (aka politicians) dictating policy - who have obviously a very biased interest in tradfi.

I’m fairly unexperienced in web3 world, but aren’t the aforementioned services are just financial services that are promising greater results than the traditional finances, due to volatility of the crypto market and missing regulations?

Web3 by itself is not a real danger because anyone who looks at it objectively can see that there's nothing there worth working on.

What does make web3 a real danger is the amount of money behind it. VCs and wealthy tech influencers and billionaires are pushing it because it's an easy way to scam retail investors out of their money in ways that would get the SEC breathing down your neck if crypto and web3 weren't largely lawless territories at the moment.

In a lot of ways the aspect of the web that web3 actually builds on is the lawless "wild west" spirit that legislations have been finally trying to clamp down on in the past decades. The only technical innovation happening in it is the equivalent of software patents for existing technology but "on a computer" (or in this case "on the chain").

Even the crypto enthusiast tech nerds cheerleading the technology because they currently (or initially) make money by sitting comfortably near the top of the pyramid scheme will likely be screwed over and lose everything eventually, but until then they're going hand in hand with the grifters who know better than retain any actual stake in the ecosystem by the time it collapses.

There are legitimate ways in which the web would benefit from being more decentralized. Democratizing domain distribution away from money-printing machines like ICANN, freeing user's data from the walled gardens like the fediverse tries to do or Tim Berners Lee is trying to do with Solid.

But these legitimate grievances have been co-opted by the blockchain crowd in order to legitimize their grift/solution in search of a problem, bundling it all into the term web3, so they don't need to justify their part of the whole thing, and can lure in new suckers to sell crypto to by draping it all in this air of revolution and societal progress, conveniently allowing them to dismiss anyone calling out their bullshit and get-rich-fast incentives as "anti-progress".

Blockchains are just another kind of centralization, a single central source of truth that nobody can update without convincing/paying a whole bunch of others to do it for them. Conceptually bundling that together with actual decentralized technologies like DHT, IPFS and other P2P systems is doing a disservice to those that are actually working to make the web a freer place, and not just get rich quick.

> Blockchains are just another kind of centralization, a single central source of truth

If you really believe this, you don't understand blockchains. They are the exact opposite of that. A decentralized, distributed, immutable, censorship-resistant, trustless, permissionless ledger. You don't need centralized authorities, and you don't need to trust anybody. You don't need anyone's permission to participate, and nobody can keep you from doing so. Moreover, the data is immutable and extremely safe, as it is replicated globally.

Where almost nobody can store and process the whole chain so everyone uses a centralized exchanges and a single company that provides an API to see what happened on chain?

In practice, web3 is just as centralized as web2, but with less privacy.

you act as if everything about web3 has to be solved right from the starting gun to have any legitimacy :) there are many different competing consensus mechanism and the balance of trade-offs is still playing out.

The old "it's so new, you expect too much" argument that I have been hearing for years.

How about instead of lauding web3 as being so great for decentralization ... you wait until the ecosystem actually increases decentralization.

Cryoptocurrency advocates have a long, long history of making empty promises that are never filled.

Nobody expects every problem to be solved instantly, but it would be nice if atleast one was solved every once in a while.

Indeed- there were a good number of useful "Web 2.0" sites available out there widely being used before someone came up with the term.

> almost nobody can store and process the whole chain

Maybe if you’re talking about Solana?

Projects that actually take decentralization seriously (like Ethereum) ensure that you only need consumer hardware to run your own node, and even an archive node with full history is attainable. Plus they have proposals in the works to prune old state.

>Projects that actually take decentralization seriously (like Ethereum)

Etherum that is centrally controlled and split after giant scam stole like half the tokens in a "bug", hence why we have pre-split etherum classic. The fact that you think etherum is decentrialized speaks volumes

There is nothing about blockchains that requires them to be decentralized, trustless or permissionless. This is a common misunderstanding of blockchains.

A blockchain without those properties might as well be a SQL database.

I think the web is quite safe from being disrupted by incoherent crypto utopians.

I'm more than happy to let the web3 people make their point; or not. I'm not sure there is any. The way that would happen would be by delivering something that people actually want to use. People vote with their feet on the web. A lot of weird and wonderful stuff gets used. And some other stuff never gets used.

All this web3 stuff reminds me of the capital S Semantic web that was fashionable 15 years ago. Never really happened. Some people got obsessed with sparql and that was about it.

Never be sure about any technology not being disrupted. I laughed at the idea of web-based calendaring in 1998, and look where we are today. Good thing paper calendars still exist.

Personally, I am perfectly fine with my still-existing Web 1.0

I think your viewpoint is perfectly rational and healthy. Be very skeptical but willing to let others do their thing and possibly build something that can prove their worth to you over time, or not.

The outright hatred, attempting to ban, and not even being open to potential use cases (especially if it's not directly useful to them, then it therefore must be useless to all people) that's present in so many people's comments on here gets very tiring.

I expect the hatred from other sites, but here is supposed to be about showing off or discussing the potential for new and weird and possibly not yet proven tech, or at least it seemed that way for just about everything other than crypto on here.

The number of software projects I've been hired to work on in the corporate and startup world that ended up getting completely scrapped before release or failed to get traction once released and then quietly died within six months -- resulting in me feeling like my company wasted a lot of time and other people's money -- is probably more of my professional career than not at this point. But if the crypto world has any of that, it's therefore useless and evil and must be eliminated.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember a while after the Web2 craze, the Web was incrementing several times a year, at least.

Because my Web goes to 11!

Did I miss something, or hasn't the rest of the World Wide Web already moved far far beyond Web3, a long long time ago?

Am I misunderstanding it, or is "Web3" meant to sound charmingly retro, with that "Internet Explorer 3" ring to it?

What's the Web3 crowd going to re-invent next: XMLCoins, in ActiveX wallets, powered by Server Push, decorated with Under Construction animated GIF NFTs?

The web isn't free. It is bought and paid for mostly by advertisers. I have seen web3 as a way to democratize the operation of services/apps people use and depend on.

Literally, if there was some decentralized advertising network, that paid for web3, it would be literally no different than it is today except maybe the people making money in the middle would be taken out.

It's interesting we haven't been able to create better financing models for the web than ads.

Sure, some sites have other models. But ideally you would like something as simple as putting a small ads banner on your website, without the inefficiency of wasting (website display) space, and integrity violations.

Edit: I'd be happy to transparently pay a small sum to each website I visit. If it was easy and and cheap.

An interesting feature of ads financing is that it is "progressive". The more money you have to spend, the more you are likely to spend on the advertised products. This effectively becomes a kind of price discrimination. But that's difficult to achieve with a "per view" price on a website.

I think one of the problems is that the the more grandiose an ad gets, the harder it is to block.

Very few people have a problem with a small unobtrusive banner that's essentially an image and a link to some site. But filtering that away is trivially easy.

The ads we all hate, the 40-mb-of-JS-evasion-code monstrosities, the 'we actually compete against the CIA' data broker ads, the all-screen-flashing-ads, the 'watch this video first' abominations - those are comparatively hard to filter.

> democratize the operation of services/apps people use and depend on.

This is called "federation" and "peer to peer" and it already existed before "web2" and it mostly died because it was too much hassle for most people to bother with.

Are you suggesting that since it's been tried and failed there's no possible future or technology that might enable democratization of these services?

Both federation and p2p still require some kind of centralization, currently. Furthermore, there is no decentralized governance nor incentive mechanisms. "Web3" is simply bringing a decentralized approach to p2p, governance and operations. Doesn't necessarily mean a token that is traded on an exchange. But what blockchain (and more importantly the consensus models) bring is the ability to create a decentralized FaceBook, WhatsApp, Insta, etc. allowing anyone participating in the operation of the network and anyone able to consume the network without anyone profiting in the middle. I think where opponents get hung up is the incentive mechanisms. Today the good is so overshadowed by the scam/bad. But if you want a good example of a shared utility build on blockchain look at Helium.com. It is a global wireless network operated by people that host their own hotspots--a true utility model. When you look at some of the services we use on the web, they are utilities and there are real value in both delivering them and consuming them. This is where web3 is trying to tie that all together so some giant company isn't in the middle monetizing both sides.

> some giant company isn't in the middle monetizing both sides.

It seems with Helium, it's not some giant company in the middle monetizing both sides, but the fiat/HNT exchanges that are doing that.

That didn't happen in a vacuum.

Certainly, P2P services with federation require more people to put in effort, and for those that require each user to be their own node, unless they're designed to be very easy to set up, they're likely to fail to reach most regular people. This was part of the problem with the last wave of them, and could at least have been mitigated by better design on two fronts (first, designing the structure of the service such that it allows individual clients to connect to decentralized nodes run as servers, similar to Mastodon; second, designing the user setup process to make it easy to discover such nodes that fit with how you want to use the service).

But even with those drawbacks, some federated services were starting to gain some traction a decade or so ago. They died because the big players decided they wanted to own everything, and pushed their own services (see: all the various proprietary messaging services, etc).

Personally, I see decentralized, P2P, federated services as a necessary antidote to an Internet increasingly dominated by large corporations with a deep interest in harvesting your data. The problem is how to get there.

Please clarify. I thought each Internet subscriber pays for the Internet with their monthly recurring charge to their ISP. The "web" is the network of world wide web (www) sites using http/https protocol on the Internet, many of whom use no advertising (news.ycombinator.com that we are all on for one). Yes there are extensive advertiser-funded services on the www, but many use paid models for premium services to remove advertising (e.g. YouTube Premium). I agree with your idea that "web3 as a way to democratize ... services/apps". There are no advertisers on my Bitcoin full node, for which I pay the Internet access fee every month.

Each subscriber pays for access to the Internet with their ISP fee. However, operators of www sites incur costs that they need to recoup, and that also needs to come from somewhere.

The main problem today seems to be that the average Internet user (look beyond the HN/techie bubble) prefers free services with ads to paying a fee. They know about the evils of Internet advertising in broad strokes, and they consider it a good deal.

Until this changes, all attempts to "replace" the Internet are dead on arrival. In the olden days of www, the number of users was so small that you could host your own site out of hobby and incur negligible costs. If you "replaced" the Internet, all the monthly active crowd from all the social media would flock to the "replacement" with similar demands (sharing photos, videos, livestreaming, etc.) and then again it's time to pay the piper.

"The main problem today seems to be that the average Internet user (look beyond the HN/techie bubble) prefers free services with ads to paying a fee"

Is that true? Do more average Internet users prefer free services where their data is being sold or where there is advertising? Any citations on this? On average, what percentage of users on leading sites pay a fee to remove advertising?

I must confess: I'm a big time "cryptobro". I really think Bitcoin was revolutionary, and I still see enormous value in it. Some other projects, like Zcash and Namecoin, are solving some real problems, too.

But pretty much everything that's been coming under the Web3 umbrella is, in my opinion, a load of bullshit.

Since you mentioned Zcash and Namecoin, do you have an opinion on ENS, Aztec Protocol, and zkSync? They are trying to solve the similar problems that projects you mentioned do, and somewhat fall into Web3 umbrella.

ENS does aim at the similar problem, but I'm not sure if it's any better than Namecoin. There's this writeup [1] comparing ENS with NMC and Handshake (yet another similar project, with its own chain) and as far as I can tell, ENS doesn't really add anything new to the game, while it has some major inconveniences if you want just the name resolving and nothing else (which seems a pretty realistic scenario to me).

I haven't looked into zkSync or Aztec just yet, but I'm assuming those are dealing with the same problems as Zcash, but on the Ethereum chain? If this means you can just throw in some generic ERC-20 token and get a zero-knowledge version of it (like what z-address is to t-addresses in Zcash), that's pretty cool.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/handshake/comments/lo894k/differenc...

I think ENS is pretty cool. People criticize NFTs a lot because you don't actually own anything (and I agree, especially with the JPEG NFTs). But with ENS it's the other way around. You can actually OWN a domain, unlike with registrars where you are at their mercy.

HN's constant unsubstantiated, unimaginative, and irrational hate towards anything crypto related is the reason I almost never frequent this site anymore. If you're going to write a critique, at least put some effort into it.

When the first bullet point of the article is "it's being driven by predatory marketing tactics", it's already clear that this is merely a hit piece with an agenda.

Anytime one is critiquing a futuristic idea that sounds outlandish, they should first stop to ask themselves if they're really given the concept a fair chance. Every major technological revolution was initially considered outlandish and criticized by the mainstream - calculators, computers, the GUI, the internet, cars, planes, remote work, etc.

I'm not saying that web3 is the next evolution of the web. But this article is a very elementary take that suggests the author has no understanding of web3 and hasn't made any effort to.

Not at all, that's just what it is to non-enthusiasts. If you lose interest in HN because HN likes to dump on crypto, that's fair, but that's a you-problem, not an indicator of HN losing quality.

It's pretty simple really: crypto is a solution to a problem we apparently don't really have. If you find the problem it solves, HN won't discredit that, the opposite is the case. Many people here would like to be enthusiastic about crypto, we're just not given any reasons for it.

What HN rightfully discredits is the cryptosphere, because for every thoughtful person driving progress forward, there appear to be hundreds, if not thousands, of scam projects trying to separate idiots from their money. There is nothing respectable about such a space, so don't expect the public, and this includes the hacking scene, to be infinitely open minded about it, if you're not bringing substance to the table. That response isn't hate, or irrational. The planet is burning and crypto enthusiasts are contributing a significant share to that, I feel exactly zero incentive to applaud these efforts.

> crypto is a solution to a problem we apparently don't really have

Crypto allows for decentralized money that one can self-custody and send/receive without going through any centralized government/bank authority or middleman. If you can't even admit this most basic use case of crypto, then either (1) you know nothing about the thing you are criticizing (2) you have an agenda.

> not an indicator of HN losing quality.

You are case in point to HN losing quality.

How about instead of commenting on stuff you know absolutely nothing about, take a second to actually do some research and learn about what you're criticizing. You're at best wasting other peoples' time, at worst spreading misinformation.

>You are case in point to HN losing quality.

I've done my homework on crypto, why are you insinuating otherwise/go ad hominem?

>Crypto allows for decentralized money that one can self-custody and send/receive [...]

I'm very aware of that. Apparently, that's a problem we do not have, or people would actually use crypto as money. Ten years later, that's not happening, or show me the supermarket where I can pay for stuff in btc, or where I'd want to do so given gas fees. Money that can't actually replace "fiat" isn't money, it's an abstract investment.

Look, I'm not playing crypto-expert here, but I definitely know enough about the field to be allowed to answer to your comment, and I find your attitude to be way out of line.

That's quite a strawman. That crypto isn't used for buying groceries doesn't mean crypto isn't being used as money. Crypto technology isn't even good enough yet to allow for these kind of usage (small payments).

The bitcoin whitepaper itself mentions that fiat is good enough for most cases.

You might not have any use case for crypto. Maybe most people in your country don't have. But that doesn't mean it has no use cases, or it's not being used.

If you wanted to send 500 dollars to me (I live in Argentina), the easiest (and probably cheapest) way would be via crypto (USDC, USDT, etc).

>Crypto allows for decentralized money that one can self-custody and send/receive without going through any centralized government/bank authority or middleman. If you can't even admit this most basic use case of crypto, then either (1) you know nothing about the thing you are criticizing (2) you have an agenda.

I can already do that. The question isn't "whether or not there are use cases for cryptocurrency", but rather "what are the use cases for 'Web3'" which you haven't addressed at all.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't hate cryptocurrencies. I just don't have a whole lot of use for them and, at based on the "use cases" of Web3 in this discussion, even less use for such "applications."

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, what is a useful application for "Web3"?

I'm not being snarky, I'm just not aware of what, if any, value, "Web3" could provide. Perhaps you could enlighten me?

I don't think I understand what the long term goal of Web3 is supposed to be. What structures are we going to see? In the end, we're all humans. There is this new structure in this internet, but no matter how decentralized this will be, power structures will emerge, and lots of politics is going to happen - not from the outside, but from the inside of Web3. Then what? There will be communities, we need to communicate, find agreements, follow individual interests and protect the weak. How is this going to look like, and why should this work? We're already trying to organize ourselves in Democracies, where - in theory - everyone has a voice. What's the "macro vision" of Web3? Is this somehow a layer on top of our society? Is it a parallel world? Some kind of Dark Net? 4chan on Crypto-Steroids? Would anything like that be ... good?

Very good questions.

People promoting their 'Web3' utopia should better study sociology, psychology, politics and history first.

Even if there was anything remotely realistic and practical technologically, those attempts will not work any better than communism or anarchism, because all of those fails to acknowledge the way that humans work.

It's a bit of a stretch to call the current "web2" free.

This nothing about the internet is free people pay in one way or another (i.e) data farming , targeted advertising etc

>It's being driven by predatory marketing tactics

Most of the web is done the same way. All web1 and web2 company valuations were nuts. It was a ponzi that was regulated by the SEC. Whenever a new technology like this hits the market, there will be low-effort ponzis.

>It's impossible to fully understand without complex technological and financial knowledge

Do you understand how SWIFT works? Do you understand how Twitter works? The user experience will hide the complexities over time.

>It is actively harming the environment

Ethereum, which powers the vast majority of web3, is moving to Proof of Stake, which is a system that will reduce the environmental impact by ~95% soon.

>It caters to early adopters and whales

You can't get rid of first movers advantage. That's probably a law of nature. The first systems to exploit a new platform have unfair advantage. That doesn't mean we should stop creating new platforms.

>It profits off of artificial scarcity

I don't think that the scarcity of NFTs is artificial. What the popular conception of image-based NFTs are monetizing is attention, which is a scarce resource.

The more attention an image NFT receives the more it is worth. If an NFT receives zero attention, it is worth essentially zero.

This is just the first time we've been able to productize that attention and be able to trade it as a unit.

>Investors are banking on Web3 and they really don't want to be wrong

This was true of web1 and web2. Were they a mistake? This is also true of almost every single product you use in your daily life. This is not an argument. Having investors is not a bad thing. Profit is not a bad thing. An investor making money means that they properly allocated resources. That is a good thing.

I heard web3 is community owned state, which is the first reasonable argument for anything different than web2.

Others host community state (Facebook) but sell your data to advertisers. Web3 is a way for you to pay for or earn state on a computer/storage/ether owned by those using it.

It is still fuzzy, but the first compelling reason I can relate to.

community owned by people who already own most of the land, lol.

What is the point you are making? Assuming by land you mean some sort of currency on said compute system.

Web3 data is mostly open access, so your data is gifted to advertisers instead of being sold.

I think this comment assumes web3 is done. The end goal is some middle ground between ease of use and some level of privacy that no one person controls. (other than you)

> Web3 is a way for you to pay for or earn state on a computer/storage/ether owned by those using it.

You can already buy a server or rent one with any of a large number of hosting companies.

Web3 is just a worse way of paying for it that enabled scammers, grifters and is unstable due to rampant speculation.

Agreed, for those who are technically inclined. One could argue its why facebook and twitter exist. Was too difficult or expensive to make your own / host your data.

I am not advocating for web3. I am saying its some middle ground at a new shot to not give all your data to someone who says this will host your data for 'free' vs an easy (to be seen) way for my stuff to be hosted with some type of payment from me in exchange for someone not abusing it. I know that is a tall orders, but from what I have seen that is the pitch for web3.

It has only gotten easier to host your own content or find someone to pay to host your content. Web3 does nothing new here and doesn't actually help. What web3 does is take people's desires for those types of solutions, and turn them into a way to scam people out of money.

If you want to make it even easier to control how your content is hosted, join one of the many open source projects that are building free tools that make things easier.

Edit: While I not the biggest fan of WordPress on a technical level, that piece of open source software has done far more to democratize the ability to host your content on a platform you control than the entire Web3 ecosystem put together.

uhm... I studied and worked on authentication protocols, and I worked with a company that was into web3 (though I did not work on that part directly)

...so I might have a few insights.

while the (small) article shows only common arguments, and while I agree on those, we need to distinguish a bit the technical part with the financial part.

Technically, web3 is merely authentication with a public key. That's fine. Good, even (if only people used hardware keys instead of software keys, sigh).

I mean there is always the little catch that to actually verify stuff you need either 300+GB of data or you need to trust a webserver (thus breaking the whole point of web3), but details and details.

But the big problem is tying your identity to your financial. That to me is a deal breaker. Lost keys? lost money. Stolen Key? stolen money. To actually work with web3 you need to put your keys in every stupid little service, since we use basically only software wallets at best, and most are integrated in your application be it banking or gaming.

Some use services like metamask that are... browser only. chrome plugin browser-only. so you have to hop through things to use a normal application and constantly switch to your...browser, which by itself is the biggest attack surface in the current world.

There is no keys-with-money/key-for-authentication, there is no key revocation, main-key/subkey, monthly-spending-limits or anything. We could have gone with some small gpg-like web-of-trust for each key to revoke, substitute or compartmentalize the purpose of the key. But no. Absolutely nothing. And the bigger the project, the more static and adverse to change it is (hello bitcoin, still at 4-7 transactions/sec?)

So while I would welcome a key-is-your-id kind of web, as a security researcher I have to say that this model looks like it's built for you to lose control as easily as possible, which makes it a deal-breaker imho. The truth of course is that there is no conspiracy, just that nobody is accountable, and that looks like work, so nah, we ain't got time.

Edit: typos

> Technically, web3 is merely authentication with a public key.

I thought "web3" meant "something, something, blockchain"?

it's kind of a lie.

The blockchains are huge and slow.

So all it means is that you have a public/private key. You end up sending and receiving money by signing stuff you don't really verify, and trust some other 3rd party website for any chain verification.

So you have a private/public key, and the rest is website. You don't really do anything on the chain by yourself

From my perspective, as a developer that reads a lot I have of course read about web3 but in the same time I barely know anything about it and I think I know a lot more than the common lay man.

If I were to mention web3 to my family or my gf they would have no idea what I was talking about.

I pretty much convinced that web3 will never be anything real because of this reason alone. It's just a fluff word that bears no real meaning, it's also too complicated so that most people won't care or know what it is about, not even developers.

To be fair, in that you are using them as non-techie examples, your gf or family don't know what web2 is either.

With the big difference that if they use those technologies incorrectly, nothing bad will happen. If people use web3 incorrectly they may loose all of their money they have invested in it.

The majority of the people don't know how IP, TCP/IP, routing, or HTTP works too, yet they probably perfectly use it (indirectly) every day.

People don't need to know how technologies work in order to use their applications in daily life.

I mean look at Apple and iPhone: it makes complex technology simple and only us techies here know how all those bits, silicon, and radios work to some extent. >99% of the users just use it with zero technical knowledge.

Same is for blockchains/smart contracts/web3: as they become more user-friendly, regular folks (NOT us the HN community) will be using it with ease and convenience.

Okay sure, but I have yet to meet anyone in my life, developer or not, that actually uses any cryptocurrency stuff in a larger extent that to buy some on some exchange and keep it in their exchange wallet.

I see a lot of hype about it, but very little actual use. It has been the case for cryptocurrencies since they arrived basically and not much have changed for the last 10 years.

I guess that is no proof for things never happening but it's still very complicated to simply use and buy some crypto if you don't want to trust a exchange like coinbase. You still need to understand at least the basics on how cryptocurrency work and I at least have a lot of people in my life that will never do that.

I have not met a single soul IRL that have ever used a smart contract and honestly to me as a dev "smart contracts" seem very bad since you cannot update them afaik so if you make a mistake that's gonna be permanent. It's like an unmutable code base which seems like the worst idea possible to me.

But to be fair I live in a modern society that really doesn't have the need for it atm. I can see the use of stuff like that in countries where everything is corrupt, with insane inflation etc.

Straight to the point: I live in one of those corrupt societies (Turkey).

Too much government control and I honestly don't feel safe for my money and crypto is a safe haven. Having lived through an oppressive regime for years, I'd support anything that takes power and freedom from authorities back to the people (at least to an extent).

For example: PayPal is blocked in my country and I was able to use Ether to buy a tshirt (and there weren't any other options of payment other than PayPal and crypto). It was actually a better UX than I've expected: it said "send this amount of ether to this address" in the middle of the screen and once I sent it (and it was confirmed) everything was smooth. I could also donate to Ukraine instantly in war.

About smart contracts: yeah a smart contract's code itself can never be changed (for a good reason) but if you need it, there are upgradeable smart contracts:

Basically your initial smart contract is just a proxy with a "pointer" to another smart contract that has a owner-invokable function to change that pointer (which can be changed because it's a state value, not hardcoded into the contract code). That proxy delegates all function calls to the pointed contract and after initial deployment you deploy the actual "implementation" contract and set proxy contract's pointer to the neely deployed contract and it works (See OpenZeppelin's Upgradeable contract class). There are a few caveats like not changing property declaration orders and (obviously) deploying your contract as upgradeable in the first place?, but that's generally it.

While immutable code could be a disaster, it holds value for the core values of blockchain: even I (as the creator of the contract) can't do anything malicious after deploying the contract. Everything that the contract can do is open in the public. Of course nasty bugs have been very costly, but as static analyzers become better and auditing/security practices become more solid, we'll have less disasters and more benefits of the immutability which provides perfect transparency with no trust (as in: no need to trust).

> Too much government control and I honestly don't feel safe for my money and crypto is a safe haven. Having lived through an oppressive regime for years, I'd support anything that takes power and freedom from authorities back to the people (at least to an extent).

That I can completely understand and is what makes me not totally negative towards crypto related services. There is a lot of people that live under oppressive regimes around the world. If we could use technology to create something completely decentralized that would be unstoppable even by lawmakers that would probably be net positive since it gives power to the people.

I get that smart contracts holds such a value, but there is very little benefit for me at the moment since I trust that the government won't mess up my finances (other than taking a lot of it by tax) but it's nice that there is another option.

I have to say that I see a lot of negative development even in my country in general (especially related to free speech) so putting some money in crypto may be worth it long term. I already have some bitcoin and some eth. I have a hardware wallet but I haven't really used it to anything else than bad speculation which I have now lost 50% of its original value because of the dip.

Yeah. I wish we lived in a world with no corruption but it's in the human nature and we need to accept it as we can't change it.

Crypto is a general stance against this by ideology but I wish there wasn't corruption and scams in crypto too.

"Web 3" to me is that when I "get a like" on Twitter, it is not an entry in their database. But a signed message "I like post <hash> /signed <someone>". Where <hash> is the hash of one of my tweets.

So I can keep this "like" and not be seperated from it by Twitter kicking me off their plattform or mingling with the like in any other way.

I don't see anything bad about it.

That use-case doesn't need the double-spend protection, so it doesn't need blockchains.

I'm seeing lots of "web3" use-cases proposed that are just plain old public key cryptography, but people think that reusing wallet's private key somehow makes it new and magical.

How else would you create a decentralized, distributed, immutable ledger of likes (or other events) in a trustless, permissionless, uncensorable, fault-tolerant, and consistent way?

Exactly like cryptocurrency, but without the planet-incinerating part that selects the longest chain. If you treat "like" as idempotent, then you don't need double-spend protection, so you don't need to select the longest chain.

In trendy terms, like IPFS where you pin your own signed like messages.

Note that identity verification, forgery prevention, and distribution of messages are done using "web2" technologies, even in blockchain systems. The hard part in blockchains is literally only the double-spend protection, so if your problem is not about spending money, they do nothing.

So if a blockchain was leveraging a proof of stake [1] along with zero-knowledge rollups [2] for scalability/ compute you would have no arguments for it? In that hypothetical example it seems like a much better alternative to IPFS with no moral qualms.

1. https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms... 2. https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/scaling/zk-rollups/#....

From the environmental perspective PoS blockchains are acceptable (merely very slow and inefficient rather than outright planet-eating). They're still pretty dystopian long term, since they're fundamentally plutocratic and naturally leading to an oligarchy.

Ethereum PoS is perpetually "almost there" like Star Citizen and the Year Of Linux Desktop. I don't think anything they say matters until they actually shut down the PoW system (which I don't think they can).

Either way you will still have to pay gas fees to the staking overlords for the permission to do anything on the blockchain they control. I'd rather have a federated/self-hosted system, and drive it down to as close to free-of-charge as possible by improving its efficiency.

Do you have any specific questions or concerns about how they are going to shut down Ethereum's PoW system?

I've been following development very closely, and to me, the process is pretty straightforward. They've already run the process several times successfully with production data in shared development environments.

And what good is the ledger if the vast majority of users interacting with it do so through very centralized, very old fashioned platforms controlled by a single entity?

I think the important question is: why would we need to?

web3 is not a “technical” thing, “distributed ledgers” etc. It’s a get-rich-quick thing, at the greater fools expense.

I suspect you are aware of this.

Eh. There is really nothing there. Just ignore web3 peddlers and move on. It’s not really “dangerous”, it’s just newest MLM under the Earth. There was Amway and Rainbow and scientology and Herbalife; now we also have crypto.

The only thing that makes me angry is how many jobs are in this nonsense. Just look at the job market anywhere… half of the job openings are just The Blockchain.

We don't see Amway or Herbalife job openings everywhere, yet crypto job opening are everywhere as you said.

Maybe that's because crypto isn't an MLM like those, but provide real value, perhaps.

>Maybe that's because crypto isn't an MLM like those, but provide real value, perhaps.

That's as may be. But at least in this disucssion, no one has provided even one example of "real value" provided by Web3 "applications." What might something that does so look like?

Note that I am specifically referring to Web3 and not blockchains or cryptocurrencies.

Have we reached peak Web3 hate yet? Feels like every day an article hits the HN front page.

Well, have we reached peak Web3 yet either? /s

I wouldn't classify the article as hatred.

They're making fair points, explaining their arguments rationally.

If criticizing became hatred, the question is:

How do people involved in a space like crypto, supposed to bring freedom to individuals, become averse to freedom of speech?

> They're making fair points

Yes, on the surface, but they cherry-pick arguments and conveniently jump over the interesting alternatives.

> It's impossible to fully understand without complex technological and financial knowledge

Sure, now ask your mom how Web2 works. How does a phishing website work using web1 tech? I'd say anything under the hood for non tech people is close to magic. But that's not an issue, they don't need to know everything starting from how DNS routing works, but the article somehow suggests that they do.

The only fair point here is that it's indeed more complex.

> It is actively harming the environment

So, what about the projects that don't use PoW?

> It profits off of artificial scarcity

Ummm, this is the point of NFT, this bangs an open door.

By fair I mean debatable. Fair for a discussion. It's not garbage non-sense or gratuitous offenses. Certainly not hatred.

I'm very cautious about wording related to classifying speech. There's too much interest in curtailing it based on subjective perceptions nowadays.

> Have we reached peak Web3 hate yet?

Yes.

They know they cannot stop the web3 nonsense, which is why everyday they post these complaint posts all the time and it is really futile.

What is really going to happen is similar to what the SEC and other equivalent regulators already did with ICOs and they will just classify them as securities. Even when they did that, we still have the scams, pump and dumps and VC insiders dumping on retail as a way to escape the ICO ban.

It is not going to go away completely as the article is suggesting, but the regulators can start with putting an end to what the VCs and insiders getting tons of exchanges to list tokens they've invested in and dump on retail.

Nope.

The nore revolutionary potential that something has, the more hate and oppression it will face, especially from less open-mindeds and conservatives.

More people hating it is the validation of what it is capable of: a free and a truly semantic and transparent Internet that incentivizes actions correctly.

And the more hatred it gets (edit: proportional to downvotes), the more powerful it will become in the end. And we all know who wins at the end.

>And the more hatred it gets (edit: proportional to downvotes), the more powerful it will become in the end. And we all know who wins at the end.

And "If you strike me down now, Darth, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine."

Storing (whistled?) information (that some people might want to suppress) in a blockchain based 'web' seems like a good idea. It sounds like it wants to make removal of published information next to impossible. Is that a bad idea? Is that a thread? Can it be used for large file sharing? :-P

Or did I completely misunderstand the concept?

You understand the concept correctly. This is one of Web3‘s great advantages, and it‘s already being used to circumvent real-world censorship and information decay. Also it prevents problems like dead links and expired domains.

HN likes to hate on everything crypto. Not sure why.

> Can it be used for large file sharing?

Yes. See Arweave, for example.

How is it working? Who will host the terabytes of content is this really take off? Who will pay for it? Sure it’s easy to host a blockchain on a number of computers when it’s small, but if it really become THE source of truth, then you need actual $$$$$ to keep it alive.

I hope you still see this, it took me a few days to get back to you.

> Who will host the terabytes of content […]

Those people [1], among others. You too, if you want. The great thing is that you don‘t need to store the entire weave to participate. If you store only 10TB, you will earn rewards at roughly 10TB/72TB = 1/7 efficiency.

> […] if this really take off?

Arweave has taken off, and the weave size is already above 72TB. [0]

> Who will pay for it?

The uploader. You pay for 200 years of storage AT CURRENT COST upfront. The trick is that this is not paid out immediately. Instead, an endowment is created, which pays for the continued storage over time.

Under the very conservative assumption that storage costs decrease by about 0.5% pa, this endowment will shrink over time, but never be exhausted (because storage gets cheaper over time). Essentially it is exponentially decaying. [2]

[0]: https://viewblock.io/arweave/stat/cumulativeWeaveSizeHistory

[1]: https://viewblock.io/arweave/nodes

[2]: https://www.arweave.org/files/arweave-lightpaper.pdf

From what I understand it’s still very expensive to store anything more than a few kb on the Blockhain as it’s distrbuted. So you still need a platform that will store the actual content and reference the transaction. In the end, it’s like web2 to me, if you kill the host / platform, you still have the blockchain but you lost the content.

I don't see a real need to campaign against web3 being the unusable dumpsterfire it already is. There is no practical broader usecase actually being adopted by masses. Just a medially inflated niche of people speculating in shit. I think itll Show itself Out producing a few people that cashed out well

I've been a fan of cryptocurrencies since 2010 and these days basically no one who puts money into it knows how it works. People are putting there entire life savings into it, and they have no idea what it is.

There is so many clueless people who hope to get rich by getting in before something takes off that even the dumbest of things is a thing these days.

Just as an example, let's look at NFTs. People are buying NFTs for insane prices, but they don't know what is actually is. Often the thing people are "buying" are centrally stored and controlled, and by that point there is no point in using a blockchain.

There are also a lot of other things that blockchains are used for that is completely pointless as it can be done without it.

Some times I wonder if most people think that blockchains is the only way to use cryptography...

I'm a 10-year web developer and I failed in trying to understand how web3 works. For instance, will there be servers? How do you host databases without servers? Who pays for hard drives for sites like youtube?

If I can't understand it, I doubt more than 1% of people can.

It just sounds like you did not do much research. Answers to all of your questions are neither complex nor hard to find.

> will there be servers?

Yes, both practically and conceptually. Practically, there are servers acting as network nodes. Conceptually, your code runs on VMs like the EVM, which can be thought of as a distributed server.

> How do you host databases without servers?

By adding transactions to the immutable ledger, in an append-only fashion. To index the data, you could use your own node, or defer to something like The Graph.

> Who pays for hard drives for sites like youtube?

There are different models for that. Essentially the uploader, the downloader, or both.

Take Arweave, for example. There you get indefinite storage for a one-time fixed fee. This is based on the extremely conservative assumption that storage prices will decrease by 0.5% pa on average. Over the last 50 years, it was something like 30% pa.

> Take Arweave, for example. There you get indefinite storage for a one-time fixed fee. This is based on the extremely conservative assumption that storage prices will decrease by 0.5% pa on average. Over the last 50 years, it was something like 30% pa.

It's based on a lot more than that. The fact that you can go through their entire webpage without them even trying to explain the risks to their potential users is downright shady.

I honestly don't know what web3 is - so I was eager to see a section titled "What is Web3" on this article's site. Turns out it's... "a buzzword made up by one of the developers of Ethereum".

Excellent. That clears that up then.

If you are interested in an intellectually honest discussion and actually valuable information:

Web3 is like web2, but operated and owned by its users rather than centralized authorities. This is accomplished through blockchain technology.

I could also give a more detailed explanation with (dis)advantages. However, I should really get back to work. Moreover, I am under the impression that you are not really interested in the truth, given that you were happy to adopt the BS "definition" from that article. If I am wrong, I would be happy to get back to you.

"you were happy to adopt the BS "definition" from that article."

On the contrary - my comment was lightheartedly criticizing the article for defining web3 in a way which gives no further information, beyond what a sceptical person might already think, thus confirming their suspicions!

I am very interested to hear a real definition of web3, and perhaps debate it a little, if it turns out to be debatable.

In what way do users "operate the block chain"? Almost everyone uses centralized exchanges and centralized block chain anaylisis services. The number of users who operate their own node isn't higher than the number of users who operate their own server.

This is simply a cryptobro talking point that you haven't spent the time to think critically about.

That's how you know this is an informed and well-thought article.

Is he wrong? What is "Web3", except a trendy marketing term to make the old seem like it's new? All I hear about Web3 is that it's the future, it's the next big thing, it's blowing up, it's coming soon - but they were saying the same things five years ago about "blockchain", and none of those promises came true.

The only thing that seems to have materially changed since 2017 is that "blockchain" is now rebranded as "Web3", meaning its enthusiasts can recycle the same old promises about how this stuff is definitely the next big thing and hope that no-one will say "hold on, haven't you been saying this for five years now without a single thing to show for it?"

"Is he wrong? What is "Web3", except a trendy marketing term to make the old seem like it's new?"

I honestly don't know - I'd assumed there must be a lot more to it, given all the chatter.

All this cryptocurrency/NFT thingy is just another tulipmania full of bs. https://henvic.dev/posts/bitcoin/

oh wow, THAT is what threatens the free web. not that every bit of critical infrastructure is corporate owned - ISPs, registrars, PKI, payment processors. not that they're milking us with obscene profit margins. not that they have the power to shut any entity down extralegally and with no recourse. no, no, not that.

it is amazing how easy it is to rally the twitter cheguevaras to the corporate cause. big pharma, central banking, the military–industrial complex. just put the right twist on it, push it from the corporate media for a while, and they'll fight the detractors for you

virtue signalling satisfies a huge hole in many souls

The web is not free. You pay with your data and ads.

Odd. This site is on the web and yet I don't pay with either.

Maybe you're confusing the web, as a network and set of protocols, with individual sites on the web, which can but (unlike with web3) aren't required to operate under a surveillance-based commercial model.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31470304

Looks like an Ad to me. Maybe also try clicking the Y button in the top left, or leaving ‘news.’ out of the URL bar.

If you don't think you pay for Hacker News with your data, try deleting an old comment.

How does that "pay" for anything? Who is that data being sold do? How is it being used to target advertising to me?

try search in HN, algolia is mining the data of HN for sure.

Mining for what?

I bet they couldn't care less and haven't ever touched the data since the implementation.

Here, you pay with attention, same as with advertising. Arguably this whole site is an advertising platform for YCombinator, and they keep you coming here by maintaining an engaging community with interesting posts/comments. So while you do get something out of it in the form of potentially useful information, YCombinator also certainly benefits from running this platform.

you can perfectly make websites that dont have ads, or use websites that dont have ads... and what data you share with a web server is still up to you.

not only that, you can also host websites for free, using your home computer as a server.

The current web is good. If you dont want to pay with your data, dont use their websites.

Well, that home computer isn't exactly free... But pedantic point aside I think the core point is that as long as you can connect to the web, it can absolutely be free.

Oh look, an unsigned article recycling myths about what Web3 is and what its impact will be. So tiresome to see how ignorant people in tech are about what is being built, how it will be used, and what the potential is without actually trying it out. As with anything with a financial incentive there are bad players in the space, but there are also people dedicating their lives to creating a better financial future for everyone. The fact that people like whomever wrote this dreck get away with the BS the spread, because people aren't actually intellectually curious enough to check it out is disappointing along with the spin that there is some nefarious force of people trying to steal from others. Do yourself a favor and actually try shit before you comment on it.

Example:. There is an entire social network protocol called Lens that frees people from the nefarious crap that Web2 gives to us. No costs to using it and it is built so anyone can build a network with privacy protected.

The whole web3 hype is that it promises a utopia version of the Internet hence no matter where you choose to attack it, it almost always seems vague.

But remember this, Internet itself is someone's utopia in very beginning but it morphed and transform from inspiration and motivation into a technology that we use almost every day. Having a vision is the necessary step for disruption to happen, the wilder and more resonating it is the bigger the disruption is going to be.

However, when someone tries to define the future (or un-define it like in this article), it is almost always cringey. The next web or the next big thing cannot be define, if it could be then it would already happened, the technology would already be accessible right from our pocket.

If one look closely underneath the web3 blanket, there are lots of innovation to was expedite as we are throwing in so much resources and talents.

Will all of them come together and form the next web? I doubt it but will one of them preserve, stood the test of time and finds its application? I remain very optimistic.

> This is a no-hype, down-to-earth breakdown of everything we have learned about Web3.

I don't know but it did not look like a down-to-earth article to me.

"We" reads more like "me". It feels like the author doesn't like crypto and wants to push this narrative on Web3, but, there is no Web3.. It's just talk? This article seems to be a bit resentful.

Am I missing something about Web3? When I look at Web2 it made the web programmable, it's what allowed applications to be built on the web. I don't see Web3 changing any of that - it appears to be blockchain technologies, which I can use today. What exactly is changing and how does it affect how I create and deliver web applications?

One of the theoretical goals of Web3 to my understanding was the (rightful) destruction and replacement of centralized marketplaces that hold near-monopolies.

Companies like eBay, AirBnB, Uber that have a massive first mover advantage and use it to extract very high fees from the sellers.

Web3 seemed like a potential way to open these marketplaces up. Am I wrong about this?

you're not wrong about this and much of the negative sentiment directed at web3 comes from establishment players of one form or another opposed to being disrupted.

it's also clownish to expect bitcoin/crypto/web3 to have delivered 100% on their potential this early. a lot still has to be figured out.

Current crypto and blockchain technologies are not enough to solve decentralization and privacy problems which web3 is targeting. To make internet truly decentralized, we need to make network of optical cables P2P in real sense. DNS too. Privacy is a very hard problem to solve without requiring some form of centralization.

The Web hasn't been free ever since Web2. I've written about this in CoinTelegraph[1] and CoinDesk[2], etc. We live in digital Feudalism (https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/) where early adopters and VCs prop up and dump private stocks on the public (remember SoftBank and WeWork for instance?) to make a fortune, and the public proceeds to exert pressure on the companies to extract rents forever. The Web2 companies are run top-down with an iron fist. Zuck and Elon own our public forums, for instance. Web3 just decentralized the grift, but it did so on a technology (blockchain) which is about the only one in the world that promises to be slower and more expensive with time.

Crypto has been around for 10 years and it hasn't gone mainstream. There are several reasons for that, and they ALL need to be fixed before it can be adopted by people and have real utility. (Some crypto does, such as FileCoin, but it's few and far between.)

Here is what needs to be done: https://intercoin.org/proposal.pdf

Whether that's done with tokens or not, is a separate story. But we have to move past scarcity, as Albert Wenger says in https://worldaftercapital.org . I propose to coin the term Web4.

1. https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-c...

2. https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/03/12/in-defense-of-block...

As a person who is allergic to trends like this, can someone bring me up to speed on the details of the blockchain? Particularly:

1) Is it resilient to catastrophic failure? Does there exist an N < 100 such that if there is an EMP, a computer virus, or some other anomaly that wipes the data from more than N% of the nodes, the block chain enters an irrecoverable failure state?

2) How scalable is it? Sure, it might work for a very small % of the world's transactions, but could it ever handle the sort of load that is taken on by say, Visa credit cards worldwide, while still allowing transactions to complete in a "reasonable" amount of time (that the average person would tolerate)? If not, what is the upper limit of requests per second while maintaining some sufficient upper bound for transaction time?

Feel free to be completely hand wavy. This is just a thought exercise for now.

1) Depends on the protocol, chain and platform. Ethereum itself is unlikely to be impacted by an EMP as the number of validators is large and widely distributed across the globe.

2) A chain like Ethereum is positioning itself as a secure and decentralized settlement base layer upon which more scalable higher-level and application-specific layers might be built, typically with rollups that batch many operations together. Other chains are making security and centralization trade-offs to provide scalability at this bottom base layer. The latter may not always work out, as seen with Luna crashing or Solana network going offline.

I'm not learned enough to answer question 1... but I don't think the fiat system is fully resistant against catastrophic black swan events either.

As for question 2 - it depends on which blockchain and which use case. Blockchain does not need to replace Visa in it's entirety in order to add value.

I'm not taking a side on the fiat vs. crypto debate. I'm inquiring purely about the technical aspects of the blockchain.

That being said, with non-blockchain data storage, one could create backups, so that if all the live running data stores were somehow destroyed, one could recover to some previous point in history with the redundant copies.

I'm trying to understand whether this, or any other sort of failure recovery, is possible with blockchain technology.

I see. I think it's possible. If there's a catastrophic event that nukes everything, it's certainly possible to restore from a prior state... or even multiple prior states. You would effectively get a fork or multiple forks and then the ones that folks decide to use en massed would become the dominant chain. It's happened already when there have been disagreements in how to scale protocols, or even in the case of a pseudo-catastrophic event like the DAO hack on ethereum.

1) No, but with sharding it could happen. Sharding is a scalability solution being pushed for. Wouldn’t be failure it would miss some information. An application not designed for this missing information could break irrecoverable. Its a data availability issue.

2) Most of today’s largest blockchains can handle VISA levels of transactions and the bandwidth has been used for something like NASDAQ levels of transactions (but doesn't reach that) since its mostly trading of assets on those blockchains. (The “merchant adoption” use case was always a small use case being masqueraded as a “killer app”by irrelevant people grasping for any use case, but its worked to get more relevant interest into the system, so maybe you heard that, the VISA benchmark is still useful though) When a form of sharding is implemented they get an additional 1-2 orders of magnitude more bandwidth. We’ll see how it pans out.

I think hardware attestation is the most dangerous thing in recent history. All they have to do is convince the public that certain programs are like owning a gun or a bazooka that can do real harm, and begin normalizing the idea that only applications signed by microsoft or the gov should be running on your computer for national security. We've already become friendly to companies owning devices on tablets/phones. Then extend that with attestation so virtually every website or service you interact with is confirming you're using unmodified software. I recognize this is tinfoil hat stuff, but the pieces are there to make things painful. At minimum it becomes inconvenient to use any software you like. At worst, the content we enjoy begins owning us. </tinfoil>

I’ve been enjoying gopher sites since all the recent mentions on here. It’s really fun, no images, no JS no BS.

could you recommend some?

Web3 is not going to happen. The crypto economy is failing. The promise of crypto was (and still is among the devoted) to provide a viable alternative to government backed currency. At this time, crypto accounts for a fraction of a percent of global economy and is already plagued by so many technical issues to make it almost impossible to actually use for anything.

Also, I highly recommend the video on YT called Line Goes Up. https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g

I don't agree with the video author on 100% of things, but I do agree with a lot and he is very comprehensive.

I just listened to Hidden Brain: Origin of money https://www.npr.org/2020/01/10/795246685/emotional-currency-...

It based on human relations. But not relations among us the but rather our relation between us and authority. We use to think of authority as a collection of somewhat well intended group of people. Are algorithms our new uber-fair non bias overlords? Perhaps.

Seems web3 is doing everyone a favour and imploding itself right now.

At an abstract level I’m all for web3, where web3 is an internet application with distributing hosting and all users paying in equal proportion to their usage to maintain said hosting.

That said everything we have now is a lackluster proof of concept that doubles as a pyramid scheme.

Imagine if you had to pay for your Netflix subscription with Netflix stock. What a joke.

I think a problem with web3 is that the only mechanism it really has is "monetary transfers", and that's just not an appropriate primitive to build most things out of, as much as its proponents would like it to be.

I don’t agree actually. The only mechanism web3 has is “entries in a ledger”, on which you can build arbitrary data stores.

The choice to tie each ledger entry to a pyramid scheme is entirely made by the founders and investors of the projects, for obvious reasons.

IMO the real theoretical problem with a functioning web3 is the “a” in “entries in a ledger”. One ledger cannot power a high throughput application. This is a fatal flaw to a web3 project succeeding on non-financialized merits.

There’s some research into protocols for inter-ledger transfers that could enable scalability, but that’s always (so far) for the sake of wrapping and moving around pyramid coins between ecosystems.

the entire crypto grift, including web3, is easily summarized:

there's a reason why stable coins aren't the most popular crypto in their own right and only serve as a financial mechanization for others

or, put another way, why are all of the popular crypto deflationary? think about it and it's obvious why

The original point of cryptocurrency was to create a free market currency that wasn't controlled by any government. Stablecoins are either backed by unstable coins or centralized. Without "nonstable coins", stable coins are just...gift cards, which we already have.

it's possible to have a "stablecoin" in the sense it's non-deflationary and is algorithmically trying to maintain the same price.

Stablecoins may not be the most popular but they're way up there (BinanceUSD is the #3 most traded coin today coin today, under Bitcoin and the main smart contract platform Ethereum).

You can get pretty good yields for holding stablecoins. Personally I tend to only use it for paying for things with crypto though (I used it to buy my last computer, for example), but I'm more of "treat crypto as an asset" and not "treat crypto as a currency" person.

It doesn't help that a stablecoin imploded a couple of weeks ago (Luna) so people are rightfully a bit skeptical of stablecoins (in particular, those that rely on an algorithm to automatically balance it, like Luna did) for the moment.

Web3 is currently bullshit, but decentralization is important. I don't fault the excitement around it, but it's hopium for the most part. This is not practical currently, there are some very important missing pieces.

We already have IndyWeb (https://indieweb.org/). What is web3 other than an attempt to distract from crypto-scamming?

The web is not free. It never was, it never will be.

But it can be made open, transparent and accountable. It seems that this is the thing that most of the corporations behind the current web fear so much.

Agreed. Every time I have seen some form of NFT advertising or the like, it is chock-full of predatory marketing, not to mention the get-rich-quick aura that surrounds it all.

This person very clearly doesn't get Web 3.0.

Your kid enters a wrong birthdate on YouTube? Gmail account gone. File identified as DMCA material uploaded to Gdrive? Gmail account gone. Theorized about covid origin? Disinformation; Twitter account gone.

See the pattern? The key to a decentralized web is federated, decentralized identities. Sure, you can self-host videos, blogs and forums and let people create accounts for every website, but being able to log in with your wallet and pull graph data is THE non-financial killer app of Web 3.0. Log in with Metamask or Phantom on a few sites and you'll see what I am talking about.

Why do I need a currency, which is used for trading, for this?

The federated web already exists. (Matrix, Jabber, Mastodon, Torrents etc)

Web 3.0 is more than trading (arguably speculative) coins.

Nader Dabit has done an excellent job describing the use cases: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/what-is-web3/

That reads like fairytales and wishful thinking which entirely ignores the substantial corruption and manipulation of the 'crypto economy' that exists now.

Everything mentioned int it can be done right now without crypto, it's called FOSS, and people have worked out how to monetise their ideas while keeping them open and reusable.

you dont need a currency, its just another product of byzantine fault tolerant systems. Decentralisation has many products, currency is one of them.

Ultracorporate dystopia which is called "web3" will hopefully die on its own, along with the tokens of all kinds.

people forget that web3 doesn't cost money - it costs tokens! those tokens are minted "out of thin air"... you either produce some by contributing the network, or contribute the network by buying some. the "grass, gas or ass" of computing. no free meals, although some meals are bigger than others...

How about we rebrand web 1.0 web4?

> We can make a better, free, decentralized internet without it.

So why haven't you? In 20 years since the platforms have colonized the web all attempts at decentralization were completely marginal and achieved nothing or less. I'm a fan of all incentiatives for a better web, but this article is either lies or willed stupidity.

I can find better counter arguments to crypto from competing crypto projects.

Does web3 have anonymous payments/currency? If not... NO is obvious.

It has.

There are things like Tornado Cash and Cardano.

Some crypto currencies do shield payments using zero-knowledge proofs. Within public blockchains like Ethereum, there will eventually be more layer two rollups that can support privacy through zero-knowledge proofs. Polygon Nightfall is one:

https://polygon.technology/solutions/polygon-nightfall/

“Remember: those pushing Web3 and anything else crypto-related are those who stand to profit off of it.”

Remember: those pushing bread and anything else bread-related are those who stand to profit off of it. Or did you think the bread makers would just hand out their pastry for free?

In it's simplest terms the aim of Web3 is simply to remove anyone in the middle monetizing both the production and consumption of services in a completely decentralized way.

Am I wrong in thinking that there's no way to force users to participate in Web3?

Like, there's no proposal to somehow move existing infrastructure over to Web3?

Honest question: What does that even mean?

Web3 feels like a hodge podge of random ideas with some crypto-blockchain sprinkled on top.

I'm really starting to think this anti-web3 and generally anti-crypto sentiment is being encouraged and pushed by corporations and elites so they can take over the space and add it to their hypercapitalist armoire

A bit boring seeing those lopsided anti-crypto/web3 comments at the top of HN so regularly. Those who entered crypto markets during the boom have already been burnt severely, that should be all the warning they need. I don't even disagree with many of the critiques, but I think they don't acknowledge some merits that web3 actually has. The ability to host open source web services pretty much indefinitely (with or without maintenance) after initial deployment is interesting, especially for hackers.

The fact that a ridiculously high percentage of current projects may be scams doesn't negate that, it's not an uncommon phenomenon with dissemination technologies (printing presses were also used to disseminate outrageous propaganda lies).

The more interesting critique is that web3 tends to 'financialize everything'. I can see what's meant there and I wouldn't even contest that there is such a tendency. I can also see why people would be opposed to that, but I think that argument misses what's already happening. Facebook, gmail, Google Maps, pdf-merge,... may be mostly free for users, but their data is heavily monetized by the companies providing those services, with little to no transparency. Web3 can shift the pendulum of economic power a little bit (not fully, as maybe claimed by some enthusiasts) in the direction of users again. Public databases, anyone can build frontends for popular services, no need for rate-limited APIs when building on top of other projects,... I can see why FAANG shareholders should be opposed to that, but not why there seems to be such fundamental opposition on HN.

Could you give an example of a successful and useful web3 implementation? Because I look around, and all I see are grifters, scams and pyramid schemes. There must be some examples of something useful and popular that has been built, if it's such a revolutionary technology?

>> There must be some examples of something useful and popular that has been built, if it's such a revolutionary technology?

That’s a very high bar. There are lots of fun web2 websites that are useless, fun and used by a few people. Also, useful is highly subjective. For example if you are into NFT’s you might find OpenSea popular and useful. If you are not, then you won’t.

Honestly this is a great point. A lot of these discussions can be summed up as “what is your definition of useful?”

A gamer, a retail investor, and a backend developer (permit the one-dimensional characters) have very different ideas of what is useful/not useful.

Are you honestly arguing that Wikipedia or Google Maps can be reasonably argued to be not useful depending on the user?

Ease off the throttle a bit man, I'm not sure what the hostility is about.

Of course I don't think that, like I said that was a very one-dimensional example. Of course many things work well for many people. But I imagine different professionals have very different idea of what constitutes "useful" on the internet.

I guess I just poorly communicated my point, it's whatever. Not like I'm dying on this hill here.

Oh come on. "Useful" is subjective? Either there exists something that serves a purpose to target groups outside of the crypto world or there is not.

They meant useful in general. Forks are useful in general. A stamp database is only useful to stamp collectors and similar.

Aave is an overcollateralized lending protocol with immutable code and a front end hosted on IPFS. That's fairly (not fully) close to providing a 'code-and-forget', public-goods-like web service. Liquity is an overcollateralized stablecoin that doesn't even have an own front end, but has a parameter in the protocol that front end providers can use to set their rewards. Both have also weathered the recent crashes pretty well.

I don't know what most of those words mean, but I do know that Aave is not being used in any popular sense, beyond people speculating that the price of the token increases. I was hoping someone would provide a link to a "popular and useful" example.

Lending is a financial service and undeniably useful. In fact, chances are high that you've used loans in some form yourself already. Overcollateralized means that the value of the collateral is greater than the loan value, as is common for eg mortgages in 'traditional' finance.

I don't have usage statistics, but they're definitely not insignificant.

> I think they don't acknowledge some merits that web3 actually has. The ability to host open source web services pretty much indefinitely (with or without maintenance) after initial deployment is interesting, especially for hackers.

How is this possible, exactly? Which Web3-specific innovation enables this?

P2P file hosting has been around for decades, but that's not a "web" and it's barely a "service".

> it's not an uncommon phenomenon with dissemination technologies (printing presses were also used to disseminate outrageous propaganda lies)

The promise and value of printing presses was immediately obvious. It automated a manual process that people had previously done painstakingly slowly for hundreds of years.

Web3 does not automate any manual process (or any process at all) that people were previously doing.

> Web3 can shift the pendulum of economic power a little bit (not fully, as maybe claimed by some enthusiasts) in the direction of users again.

Web3 and blockchain have not democratized anything. They've centralized power into secretive whales and project backers. Try to find a major crypto project that doesn't have names like A16z and Saudi Arabia among its backers.

Big banks are in on it, too. I don't know why anyone would expect opposition from existing financial players, rather than an attempt to buy and control these projects.

I'll give a simple example: think of an escrow service. It's clear that it provides some value, it's easy to code up and audit, and it actually needs the blockchain (so that the code is inevitably open source, and you know that that's the code you're interacting with).

It may not be fully trustless, but at least for technically savvy users it can reduce the extent of trust required sufficiently to make it sane to do OTC transactions (it's very unlikely someone would try and succeed in reorganizing the blockchain for a small transaction; the code might have backdoors, but such a simple service isn't too hard to audit - fully open source code is a tough environment for backdoors).

You're sick of seeing lopsided/anti-crypto on HN? Seriously? I'm sick of 'rational and levelheaded' people saying they're sick of hearing HN be anti-crypto, but then failing to address the problems with crypto. Its the same shit every time. There's at least three of these comments below yours.

To recap, here's a quick summary of why anti crypto keeps getting voted up.

Environmental impact scales faster than existing monetary system and does not plateau.

The subsequent incentives to use fossil fuels.

Consolidation of authority via proof of stake and proof of work mechanisms.

Lack of regulation and insurance.

The impact that NFTs have had on the space (and similarly, the security issues of smart contracts).

If one of these points isn't in an article, they don't stop being a consensus concern.

P.s. Saying 'I want a discussion and people are being too rude/biased' is a transparent reframing and that WILL contribute to people being hostile.

* environmental impact can (and is being) addressed technically. Bitcoin doesn't even have (Turing-complete) smart contracts and web3 can exist without it (or PoW in general)

* lack of regulation isn't the tech's fault, and is also being addressed

* consolidation of authority: agreed, that is critical. But it's not worse than the current web. A handful of players can decide to effectively take down any project, and that also happens. Web3 does not fix it to the extent people claim / hope because of this concentration, but it's not worse

* impact of NFTs - What do you mean? Most NFTs are just hyperlinks that provide very little in the sense of uniqueness of whatever resource they're pointing to, I agree. But NFTs can be implemented differently, and anyway, the existence of problematic use cases doesn't negate other use cases.

Re: environment being addressed - is it? I have yet to see any actual evidence it's improving or that it's going to with reasonable assumption. The only thing I've heard are assurances. Can you point to a mainstream source (or project proposal)? All I have seen is that it scales WAY faster than traditional finance and that the increasing blockchain useage is incentivising oil and coal plants in China and Russia. These seem pretty damning. Proof of Stake doesn't help enough here.

Lack of regulation not being the tech's fault doesn't really make a difference. Its the same argument as 'gums don't shoot people, people holding guns shoot people'. The issue is still fundamentally about what to do with respect to the object the person is using.

Re the consolidation not being worse: hard disagree. This is measurably worse because there is now a second order of ownership beyond the usual social conventions established. It is an opportunity to financialise and gatekeep further. Additionally, those same big-player actors are not restricted from starting their own cryptocurrency or NFT related venture, then incentivising their userbase to do it. This is a common trick in software (a common example: Facebook or Uber and their app pop ups pointing you to their other apps). I think you are operating on the assumption that crypt I currencies are dictatorship-resistant, which I don't think reflects reality. There are lots of examples of cryptocurrency project decisions coming from above. A banal example: leader-led forking is not uncommon. See bitcoin and ethereum for popular instances of that.

Impact of NFTs: NFTs have a wide range of issues associated so this could be its own conversation easily, but the issues that come to mind immediately are the incentive to steal assets (legal ownership and blockchain ownership are not the same thing), lack of underlying value (as an asset, they're widely agreed to be highly risky for low expected return), their exposure to gas prices, the fact the hyperlink is the only thing 'immortalised' on the blockchain, meaning they're actually MORE fragile than regular assets in practical outcomes, 'gifted' malware that cannot be rejected, the architectural incoherence of smart contract apps, and many more.

Regarding the suggestion that problematic use cases does not negate positive use cases: well I think it depends on how good and how bad the respective cases are, and comparing that to the alternative of none of them. All of the use cases I've seen for smart contracts are either outright scams or at best very poor value propositions. I think this idea that 'the good should not have to capitulate to the needs of the bad' is somewhat adolescent and doesn't really reflect the real world. No one makes business decisions like this, even in software.

A more explicit refutation is this: if the people who participate in the community of the technology don't actually address the issues surrounding it, who should? Most people outside the community would say that the community should resolve the issue and any inaction looks bad, because it indicates a lack of social caution.

One last thing: I think its important to assess the intent behind project leaders. People like Vitalik B propose some very unpleasant uses for the block chain (he has on record suggested storing medical records on chain is a possible use - which is a very insecure and obtuse solution to the problem of internal medical record storage) and some very warped worldviews. Giving him control of a value mechanism seems bizarre at best as actively damaging at worst. Vitalik is not the only one with issues of course, but I would argue he's the most influential, next to maybe Musk (who I shouldn't need to explain why he's questionable). His attitudes should be more carefully scrutinised by the community.

Not sure there’s a need to say no. If we wait a couple more hours all these guys are going to pack up and head home.

That seems very focused on cryptos. Isn’t web3 mostly the use of serialized and decentralized data stores, eg blockchains?

Edit: thanks for the downvotes, but an actual answer would be useful too.

"crypto" and blockchains are inseparable. If you don't need the double spend protection, then it becomes just a plain old cryptography. You can imagine the next web as whatever you like, but "web3" has been advertised in the specific context of Ethereum and its wannabees.

We've already had DHT, Bittorrent, SSH keys (== log in with a "wallet"), Certificate Transparency, self-hosting, federation, Dat, OpenID, GPG and web of trust, and many other primitives for decentralized identity and distributed storage that weren't "crypto".

Ethereum is mentioned, because it has Dapps (iirc). But I don’t think you necessarily need the monetary part in order to use the blockchain to store stuff and execute procedures as a reaction to certain values. That’s what I think “smart contracts” are. I remember that IOTA has a similar function and you can send zero value entries, specifically to communicate between low power iot devices. If you really need a blockchain for most applications is a different topic though.

Using a blockchain for storing stuff without needing the double-spend protection is like using a car to just listen to music on the radio, without the driving part. You can do it, but it's a wasteful overkill.

You don’t use the blockchain to store, you use it for distributed version control.

People close and dear to me are committed to crypto, personally I dont think it adds any value and overinflates the value of money in circulation.

Why do people act like by introducing Web3 the "Web2" will cease to exist. You'll always be able to use it without any financial knowledge whatsoever "like in the old times".

Web3 as a concept exists solely to decentralize internet and take power from technological giants. If something you use is free, then you're the product.

Hosting the massive data we consume is costly and difficult, that's why only a few companies do it. These companies proveably apply their political bias into internet and threaten our society as a concept.

IMHO Everyone who really cares about the original message of the internet should stand behind web3.

Try "surfing" the web 1.0 with Navigator 4.6 like it's 1999. That's as dead as a doornail.

There are plenty of static websites today, as well as frameworks like Jekyll, which belongs to the web 1.0.

Web 1.0 does not mean 'old like 1999'. It means static websites without user-generated content. And it did not disappear, it's still there, but less popular and visible.

It is funny to me how irrationally HN hates on crypto.

Yes, there are many speculative moonboys. Sure, they overhype many things, and promote get-rich-quick schemes. There are many scammers and ponzis around indeed.

But ask yourself:

* Are dead links so great that we want to preserve them?

* Are expired domains a good experience?

* Do we want to give centralized authorities the power to control the web?

* Is it good that you cannot verify the authenticity or integrity of web pages? (Yes, even with SSL, where you only verify that (a) you are talking to the correct server, and (b) you got what the server sent. That still leaves the possibility of a compromised server.)

* Do you like great websites just disappearing?

* Do you want to be forced to use the new version of a website despite it being inferior?

* Would you like indefinite storage for a fixed fee? It is also decentralized, distributed, immutable, and censorship-resistant.

Web3 offers solutions to all of these problems and more.

That does not mean it's the greatest thing ever, that it solves all problems, or that it does not have its own disadvantages. It means however, that is does have merits, and that it should be discussed in that context. Blanket statements like "web3 is a scam/ponzi" are simply wrong/dishonest.

I don't get why otherwise extremely intelligent and well-mannered people stoop this low when it comes to anything crypto.

I think you're right. The guys downvoting you should really try to argue against your argument instead of just trying to make you go away by downvoting. If they cannot make a good argument, then downvoting doesn't make them more right, only more bitter and entrenched.

To the low and bitter people downvoting this, know that it was still worth writing it. You need to see that you can't win simply by risking nothing.

It's not a matter of bad faith or bad manners.

There are numerous ways to solve the problems you are interested in that don't involve wasting so much energy or enriching rent-seeking grifters.

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