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Is Web3 Bullshit?

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Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#51

Post by legutierr »

_se0c wrote: post #2

Reading through the linked article on "real world uses for Web3", most of them seem to consist of things that public key cryptography has been able to solve for decades (persistent identity, multiple persistent identities) or things you could do anyway ("right now, people can only go to facebook or Google. With Web3, everyone can have their own space!!") because the writer has apparently never heard of a web server.…

> because the writer has apparently never heard of a web server.

But blockchains do introduce a technical capability that never existed before: shared, “trustless” access to and control over data.

Previously, you could run your own webserver, your own email server, etc, and you could trust your own data, but other people collaborating with you would need to trust you to manage that data, and trust that you hadn’t manipulated the data in some way. What if they don’t know you well enough to trust you?

Sure, other people could keep their own copy of that same data, and sync with you somehow, but most pre-blockchain data services lack replication capability out of the box, and as far as I know there are no non-blockchain data services that can give you any assurances at all that data has not been tampered with.

And on top of the issue of trust is the issue of network size. If you personally know who you want to collaborate with, you can share a single server, but what if you want open collaboration and discovery to be part of the application?

Federated application services capable of competing with big tech have been a dream and an objective of open-source advocates for decades, but no one has been able to deliver. I would say the major reason is because trustless data syncing at scale is orders of magnitude harder than running a single standalone server, and all of the solutions until web3 attempted to perform data syncing at the application layer—which means a lot of duplicated effort, and almost zero opportunity for reuse between projects.

Blockchain tech moves replication and tampering protection to the data layer, as a generalized service that is relatively trivial to set up. The promise of web3 is that shared-data applications can be built on top of that data layer in the same way that complex centralized applications can be built on well-defined centralized data layers like the file system and the relational database.

A robust and abstracted data layer allows application developers to spend more time thinking about application logic and less time thinking about data.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#52

Post by throwaway4good »

"Web 2.0" was the modern web around 2008, and concurrent with or associated with things like AJAX and Ruby-on-Rails - here is an old article expanding on the term:

https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1310178

"Web 2.0 is a term (or rather buzzword) that you often hear when describing most “modern” web sites; however, it shouldn’t be a new concept to web developers. Web 2.0 is actually a consolidation of many existing technologies that allows you to provide a rich interactive user experience over the web. Examples of Web 2.0 technologies include, but aren’t limited to, the following areas:

  - Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), which include AJAX, Adobe Flash, Silverlight, and Moonlight
  - Web services
  - Blogs
  - Wikis
  - Social networking
  - Social bookmarking
  - RSS/Atom"
Just a reminder on how easy it is not seeing the forest because of the trees, and instead focusing on things that are shiny and noisy yet will not last.

What lasted was to move from server-side computing where all the UI was rendered server side as HTML pages, to a world where a lot of the computing and all of the UI rendering was done client-side.

So it meaningful to ask: Are we going into a world where the centralised server gets even less of a role because of things like data storage, payments, authentication are done in a distributed manner or purely client-side?

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#53

Post by mercurialsolo »

A lot of what seems jargon and bullshit is because of the initial applications sprouting on top. Do creators need to have better ways to retain ownership, monetize their work? Does open source creation need a better monetization model? I guess we would all be in sync with this.

Do we see the initial applications of web3 about creating these decentralizing apps to decommission centralized infra & taxation ? I guess not. The web does need to fundamentally evolve from already now being turned into walled gardens.

Web3 with decentralized protocols around not only comms but value will hopefully be a spur and movement towards this. Time will tell

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#54

Post by hbbio »

mattlondon wrote: post #13
monkeydust wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. As soon as I first heard about web3 I thought did I miss web2?

Web 2 was the idea of user generated content and commenting etc - digg/reddit, twitter, youtube etc have no content of their own (c.f. a news website or whatever) but everything there came from the users. Now it seems obvious and not worthy of a label, but at least at the time I guess it kinda captured the imagination and people imagined new/different ways to do things (I think it also coincided with a lot better too…

Quite a good summary!

However, web3 has nothing to do with Bitcoin which does not provide smart contracts or wallets connected with web apps. Most decentralised apps are built with the Ethereum code (either using the original chain or one of the many forks).

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#55

Post by bravenous »

mattlondon wrote: post #7

It saddens me that they chose "web3" for the latest crypto pyramid scheme. Call it what you want, but please don't sully the web with your plat du jour crypto antics. Also for what it is worth, the web has been decentralised from the very start, I don't see what the fuss is about apart from just everyone getting rich selling the next hot coin/token/whatever.

Yes web was decentralised till it became centralised with big tech gatekeepers. AMZN makes more money from sellers fee than AWS now. Thus killing small businesses - the lifeblood of most economies. Link below.

It is time to get rid of gatekeepers, toll collector and have control of our data & communities. Web 3 is a way do that and will take about a decade as the infra builds out. So it certainly is BS for big tech landlords and their retinue.

Crypto, is part of that plan for payments. Certainly there are scams but no different than scams today - where we are treated like lab rats subjected to data stimuli, our data stolen without permission or compensation.

Sure I will take the Internet of 90s any day over today’s web with its surveillance capitalism. But that boat passed long back, as will the current one. Web3 allows users to be in control of the network(s) or communities collectively. That certainly is good for most folks.

https://www.businessinsider.in/finance/news/amazon-has-a-spe...

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#56

Post by gondo »

onion2k wrote: post #50
mattlondon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This all sounds very noble, but it will last precisely as long as it takes someone to right-click copy right-click paste. Sure you can verify the hash and signature etc, but no one reading an article is going to bother verifying the signature apart from the real die-hards. Heck my mum can't even verify she typed in the right URI and ends up on all sorts of crazy scam sites (e.g. "I went to google and they said I had…

The ownership aspect of web3 doesn't fix the problem you outline, sure, but it isn't meant to. Ownership of something isn't proof of uniqueness, it doesn't stop copying, and it would have no impact on what user's are able to do with other user's content. That's the same as ownership in the real world - the fact you own a Picasso doesn't stop me copying it, or photographing it, or telling people it's really by me. Own…

Legal system is still playing catch-up with web1.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#57

Post by ojr »

_vufv wrote: post #33

One aspect that I strongly dislike about "web3" is that it poisons the discourse with its incentives. I don't believe that every person on Twitter with $BTC in their profile understands or can knowledgeably argue the benefits of Web3, but their crypto holdings make them a hard-lined crypto zealot in the hopes of multiplying few hundred dollars they've put in. It's fairly widely known how laughable it is to look for u…

there's middle ground people just choose to ignore it. So many similarities to the dot com bubble. As more time passes I truly feel I would have been one of the people who could spot out Amazon from the webvans and pets.coms. The strength in web3 is bitcoin and ipfs.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#58

Post by hbbio »

I have the impression that most comments here are either biased against cryptocurrencies or trying to push for them blindly. That's a bit sad considering we should at least be discussing the technology here.

web3 is a marketing brand that defines a future version of web apps where the frontend is a compiled SPA possibly hosted on decentralised platforms (IPFS) and where the backend is a decentralised blockchain (and in its purest form only that).

This goes a step beyond web 2.0 where you would build a SPA with a cloud backend, e.g. Firebase / Google. With web 2.0, you have to trust the backend (so again in most cases Google or Amazon) and that is a limiting factor for sensitive apps, or simply if you care for decentralisation.

Another addition of web3 is the payments, which could have been standardised in the web platform (I am a former W3C member and there were lots of discussions on that), but instead of the browser implementing payments, we ended up with a few centralised processors like Stripe. Same goes for identity.

Quite interestingly, web3 solves both Identity + Payments with a technically elegant solution. Many people got rich by holding AMZN stock, which is in great part due to AWS -- the cash cow of the company. Why would you have a problem with a cryptocurrency token being used to pay for the backend infrastructure i.e. paying for accessing a database-as-a-service?

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#59

Post by paradite »

_se0c wrote: post #2

Reading through the linked article on "real world uses for Web3", most of them seem to consist of things that public key cryptography has been able to solve for decades (persistent identity, multiple persistent identities) or things you could do anyway ("right now, people can only go to facebook or Google. With Web3, everyone can have their own space!!") because the writer has apparently never heard of a web server.…

> because the writer has apparently never heard of a web server.

This gives me the initial dropbox dismissal comment (you can do it trivially with ftp) vibe...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#60

Post by Gigachad »

mypastself wrote: post #44
_se0c wrote: post #2

Reading through the linked article on "real world uses for Web3", most of them seem to consist of things that public key cryptography has been able to solve for decades (persistent identity, multiple persistent identities) or things you could do anyway ("right now, people can only go to facebook or Google. With Web3, everyone can have their own space!!") because the writer has apparently never heard of a web server.…

I often feel like I’m missing a key piece of technological or intellectual insight when I read bullish articles like the linked one. I cannot see a single use-case in there that would definitively be improved by the use of blockchain, and in most cases, I’d expect the opposite to happen.

The key insight you are missing is that someone makes a lot of money trying to convince you that this stuff is the future of the internet.
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