Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is Web3 Bullshit?

maxread.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 383 posts

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#121

Post by cookiengineer »

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…

> 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

And this is where the assumption is wrong. Web3 is about gatekeeping for profit, and additionally you not only have to trust a single vendor...but literally every other peer on the decentralized internet to be trustworthy with your data.

Computational security is not the same as data security, and this is where the marketing BS is happening.

As long as there's no permission management and no deletion feature built into the blockchain, your precious private data is as publicly accessible as it never was before.

You think encryption will hold forever? SHA might disagree.

You think 20 years ahead of time the password will still be secure and not leaked anywhere else? Ha, good luck.

The problem that I have with web3 is that 99% are ponzi schemes for gatekeeping ...and the 1% that are left try to market it as a privacy thing, which it cannot be by definition of how a blockchain works.

There are so many broken software programs out there already, and now we made those bugs persistent and unfixable for eternity (with respect to "how secure" user data is stored).

If the web3 would be about real distribution (not the same as decentralization), there could be much much easier solutions for having a local copy of your old myspace photos.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#123

Post by hbbio »

pentae wrote: post #80
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…

The problem with web3.0 is decentralizing all the things is super hard and really user unfriendly. At this point i'd be happy with something more like web 2.5 where the important bits are decentralized from a central authority (identity management for eg) and able to integrate nicely with centralized platforms.

Indeed it's hard to build a truly decentralised app right now, that's why I referred to "future version of web apps"...

Most people deploy a backend proxy and use APIs for indexing, etc. Originally, these APIs were centralised (e.g. Infura) but decentralised alternatives now exist (like The Graph).

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#125

Post by pcthrowaway »

woodruffw wrote: post #114
austincheney wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that cryptocurrency is a pyramid scheme, but the web is incredibly centralized. The whole point of DNS is to normalize an easy to remember name to an address so that everyone can access that same address easily. That is almost the purest essence of centralization. In practice if you want to share family photos with your family do you upload those photos to a third party like a social media site or a cloud pro…

> The confusion here is most people confuse the web for the internet. The internet is a big decentralized network thanks to BGP. The web is an application riding that network thanks to HTTP. Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but aren’t you making exactly that error above? DNS both predates and exposes networking infrastructure that isn’t the web. And for what it’s worth, I would consider DNS decentralized: it’s a system of…

> No one party owns the DNS network.

The root servers kind of do, along with central authorities like ICANN which gatekeep the TLDs

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#126

Post by paulgb »

woodruffw wrote: post #116
Hjfrf wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dogecoin is a copy+paste of bitcoin with a few config values changed. That's why it shares the inflationary model. The reason bitcoin is often described as deflationary is that many coins are lost, and the inflation is somewhat priced-in.

How is Bitcoin inflationary? Even without coin lossage (a ridiculous concept in any other financial system, short of literally setting your money on fire), the network is programmed to eventually stop minting coins. Fixed supply on increased demand (if it’s the economic substitute we’ve all been promised) is the precondition for deflationary movement. No amount of “pricing in” changes that.

It’s an argument of semantics, really: if it will eventually stop printing coins, I’d consider it inflationary until that point in time and non-inflationary thereafter. In practice, current holders are being diluted to subsidize the security of the network.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#128

Post by fastball »

padolsey wrote: post #31
nathias wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dry your tears, then you might see better and see what the fuss is about.

Can you elucidate us with how exactly this is an advancement of web technologies per se? I agree with OP comment that it's strange to adopt web3 as a moniker when it is a distinct stack/infra much akin to IPFS in spirit.

web1 – the original web, decentralized information sharing but everyone is hosting their own stuff

web2 – make it easier for people to create stuff, but it's all centralized (boo), which in turn makes the interop of the original web much less present. i.e. gatekeepers everywhere

web3 – allow the unfettered creativity of web2 with the benefits of decentralizing in web1. You can use one "account" to login to any web3 service, people can send money to that same account, etc, etc.

In other words, web3 allows you to do things that weren't present in web1 at all without all the web2 centralization/gatekeeping baggage.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#129

Post by sixQuarks »

Note to people reading these comments: HN Is notoriously anti-bitcoin and crypto. It was within hacker news discussions that I first heard about bitcoin, back when it was trading for less than one dollar. I did not buy bitcoin because I figured the hacker news crowd was very intelligent and knew a scam when they saw one. Just Keep this in mind when reading these comments make sure you take them with a grain of salt.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#130

Post by jazzyjackson »

3np wrote: post #90
pmontra wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That sounds great if it lowered costs, but it takes gas to run services on blockchains - it’s still “someone else’s computer” that has to be incentivized to do work, whether that’s executing a smart contract or paying to pin files on IPFS.

IMO there’s room for small benevolent communities where people choose to share in the cost of infrastructure (e.g. hosting seedboxes in torrenting communities where you are expected to keep your up/down ratio even) but expecting users to run full nodes is a tall order, computation and bandwidth-wise you’re offloading costs to your users. I always thought something like wikipedia could work like this since there’s thousands of committed super-users that could afford to run a background process, and indeed there’s IPFS mirrors of it, but IIRC the edits still happen on jimmy wales’ computer.

Post reply on HN