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Is Web3 Bullshit?

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Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#81

Post by kevinak »

Ironically the people pushing for Web3 are mostly those that do not understand why decentralisation is key^1. The projects pushed by these individuals and corporations are largely very centralised.

Look at the Solana fiasco a while back where the network went down and required a coordinated restart.

Another centralising power in these "smart" blockchains are the stable coin issuers. In the event of a hard fork^2 Tether and USDC essentially have the power to decide single-handedly decide which chain ends up being the correct one. Why? Because they can't support two chains, the value of the tokens would be split in half. So, for example. Let's say Tether decides that Eth 2.0 is not something they would like to support, they would simply say "We will not redeem any coins on Eth 2.0" and that would be it. The value of the DeFi on that chain would evaporate instantly and no one would use it. The fact that almost no-one talks about this is pretty scary.

^1 Only Bitcoin is actually sufficiently decentralised to withstand large take-over attempts and politics, IMO.

^2 Ethereum hard forks every 6 months by design, by the way

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#82

Post by chimen »

bravenous wrote: post #55
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 l…

What were you able to do in the 90s that you cannot do now on the web? I do not subscribe to this mumbo jumbo about gatekeepers, data stealing, centralised internet etc. While true, you are literally free to use any service you like, nobody is forcing you to spend your dollar here or there.

Good products are usually driven by commercial entities. I would love to use something else besides Android or iOS that is not backed by a commercial giant, which WORKS, is not full of spyware and has a healthy ecosystem but nobody is making one, nobody is able to put 2 and 2 together there.

Are the products you buy online going to physically move differently when you use the "decentralised" internet? Are the small businesses going to revive because of that? AMZN did not kill them, the consumer did. It's the consumer that spends the dollar and dictates such outcomes - none of which are going to be fixed by Web 3. For me, the centralisation that amazon provides is a feature, not a bug. You will not kill AMZN until you understand why it works the way it does and start competing with them. Don't tell me it can't be done because AliExpress is giggling in the background.

I have a few friends doing a fortune on AMZN without even seeing the products they sell (FBA). Adapt or die, it's just nature.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#83

Post by codingdave »

I reject the term 'web3'. Let start with the simple fact that blockchain is not web-based. Actually, lets end with that fact, too. This tech, whether or not you believe it is going anywhere, is quite simply not the web.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#84

Post by pornel »

_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…

The thing that cryptocurrencies have really successfully decentralized and democratized is becoming a shareholder — of cryptocurrency schemes.

Anyone can buy a share of a coin, and make a profit as long as the amount of fiat currency put into the chain keeps growing. Every new user convinced it's going "to the moon" pays dividends to existing holders. This automatically creates a financial incentive to become an astroturfer for the project.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#85

Post by jedimind »

jstx1 wrote: post #72
hbbio wrote: post #58

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…

Who's maintaining the service instead of AWS in the web3 scenario?

There might be more, but the only one I checked out is https://akash.network

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#86

Post by GDC7 »

kevinak wrote: post #81

Ironically the people pushing for Web3 are mostly those that do not understand why decentralisation is key^1. The projects pushed by these individuals and corporations are largely very centralised. Look at the Solana fiasco a while back where the network went down and required a coordinated restart. Another centralising power in these "smart" blockchains are the stable coin issuers. In the event of a hard fork^2 Teth…

The only real decentralisation is the one constituted of 8 billion brains and 8 billions bodies which are all roughly the the same size and strength

All the other types of decentralisation are marketed to you by early adopters who want you to pump their coin in order for their asset to increase in price

They are ironically using the concept of decentralisation to centralise wealth and power in their hands

Of course even if with their dishonest intent they can never quite beat the real decentralisation provided by nature which makes it so that even the most powerful “human” ever (Jesus Christ) only has an extremely limited amount of power over the totality of humanity.

Matter of fact “he” only gets to be the spokesman of otherwise already popular concepts such as compassion , love and the reward for those who practice them

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#87

Post by pmontra »

3np wrote: post #73
hbbio wrote: post #58

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…

Yeah, even if the web3 moniker has been spearheaded by Ethereum and Parity/Polkadot related projects (it’s been a thing since ~2015 and until about last year its use has mostly been following Gavin Wood and crew), in my mind for a typical web3 app that doesn’t involve payments, the only blockchain/crypto-related functionality would be the built-in key management and using it for authn/authz. Possibly signing messages…

Js and Ajax calls where useful to everybody, including the companies paying for developers time. Web3 with P2P and federation seems exactly the opposite of how companies make money. So it's what I'd like to use but it's not what I'm expecting to be paid to develop.

Actually I've got a customer using Ethereum first and then Algorand to timestamp events but it was only a little more than calling a HTTP API for us.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#88

Post by iso1210 »

flooow wrote: post #77
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.

If the crypto community wants to demonstrate that it isn't a giant Ponzi scheme, why not come up with a non-deflationary token, which will not massively reward 'early adopters' at the expense of everyone else, in perpetuity? (A non-deflationary token would be one where the supply grows by some reasonable percentage every year, effectively acting as a flat tax on one's holdings). In reality, non-deflationary cryptocur…

Isn't that Dogecoin? (although inflation rate itself is deflationary - dropping from 5% pa about now to 2% in about 20 years)

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#89

Post by arnvald »

_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.…

One more point from that article I noticed: in a section talking about taking on multiple projects, the author writes "This is how much of Hollywood works."

How can you not think: well, if this is how much of Hollywood works now, isn't that proof that you don't need a blockchain for it?!

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#90

Post by 3np »

pmontra wrote: post #87
3np wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, even if the web3 moniker has been spearheaded by Ethereum and Parity/Polkadot related projects (it’s been a thing since ~2015 and until about last year its use has mostly been following Gavin Wood and crew), in my mind for a typical web3 app that doesn’t involve payments, the only blockchain/crypto-related functionality would be the built-in key management and using it for authn/authz. Possibly signing messages…

Js and Ajax calls where useful to everybody, including the companies paying for developers time. Web3 with P2P and federation seems exactly the opposite of how companies make money. So it's what I'd like to use but it's not what I'm expecting to be paid to develop. Actually I've got a customer using Ethereum first and then Algorand to timestamp events but it was only a little more than calling a HTTP API for us.

Imagine a world where infrastructure, libraries and developer tooling are all there. Imagine the reduction in costs for infrastructure, security (sure you still have to do it but the body looks completely different) and all that goes with having a "backend". Suddenly you don't even need to run a business to afford supporting an app that loads of people use.

Sure, you will still have backend processes but the exposure to "the app" is greatly reduced.

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