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Is Web3 anything?

chris-granger.com

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Re: Is Web3 anything?

#41

Post by infogulch »

jolux wrote: post #13
CryptoPunk wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government encompasses all of those things, so I think when the author says "trust the government", it implies all of those things.

Right, but the government is not just some unaccountable third party that sits between you and the rest of society. It is meant to embody the society, and, in a democracy, represent its interests effectively.

Yes in theory. In practice, justice is expensive to procure even when you're in the right, and sometimes even then you can lose just by being out-monied.

This leads to a more nuanced view of web3 and smart contracts: a way to acquire law-like order in business dealings at a vastly lower cost. Or put yet another way, if lawyers and the government got their act together and used technology to reduce the cost of their services (and actually passed on those savings) then smart contracts would never have been a thing.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#42

Post by TekMol »

An interesting angle to look at Web3 is the media angle. How it is talked about in the media.

It seems it is:

1: A very popular topic

For example, it comes up very often here at Hacker News.

2: A very controversial topic

On one side, there are many people who expect it to change the world in a fundamental way. Investors are investing billions of dollars into it.

On the other side, there are many people who call it useless, a fraud and outright evil.

3: This has been going on for years now.

Has there ever been any other technology for which 1,2 and 3 held true?

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#43

Post by CurrentB »

Nice read. What I don't get about all the crypto haters, who will probably make up the majority of replies here, are they really just happy with the status quo? Do they really think the current financial system is great and their online bank account is perfect and nothing radical is worth trying? That usernames and passwords given to each of a million different companies are so great, why would people want to manage their own information?

I get it, it's hard to see past the memes and bubbles and bullshit and buzzwords in the crypto industry. But there is a very real, very powerful, politically agnostic idea of self-sovereignty at the core to all this stuff. You dictate the terms of your data and your money and your stuff to an ultimate degree.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#45

Post by westoncb »

aardvarkr wrote: post #29
westoncb wrote: post #10

> Most of the descriptions I’ve seen focus on mechanisms - block chains, smart contracts, tokens, etc - but I would argue those are implementation details ... The real question is what fundamental capability are people pointing to when they talk about web3? That's exactly the change in focus needed in order for discussions of this topic to be more rational/sober/productive, imo.

Then it just becomes a solution in search of a problem. Utterly useless.

The way I see it:

1. many of the people doing originating work with the tech had deep understanding of the domain it applies to (and most software engineers to do not)

2. that gets diluted by people incentivized to shill for various reasons

3. so now we're not "in search of a problem" it's just been lost amid diverse noisy communication—and it's also defined in a domain unfamiliar to most programmers, so describing it is non-trivial

4. a good starting point for communicating this to programmers might be in terms of technical capability, then working toward more specific social/economic applications from there

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#46

Post by elliottinvent »

echelon wrote: post #4

Web 3.0 was the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web was coming into prominence at the peak of Bittorrent and P2P. It allowed people to publish data in schemas without centralized databases. Protocols in markup. You could declare and share schemas for things, build on top of other people's schemas, and remix endlessly. It was powerful. You could define your contact details in FOAF and a client could ingest that and make co…

Exactly. In my view the crypto community have hijacked the name coined by timbl because calling it web4 would have highlighted that web3.0 (the semantic web) failed, at least outside academia.

Wikipedia has two articles, it’s all about the “.0” apparently, see the page on Web3.0 [0] vs the page on Web3 [1]

I’ve seen plenty of crypto community content [2] claiming that blockchain is a key part of the original timbl vision [3], perhaps the missing piece of the puzzle.

I think it’s clear timbl’s “decentralisation” point meant “not Google”. It definitely didn’t mean “not http, use blockchain”.

You’re right that there was an opportunity where we could have delivered on the original vision of the semantic web but that time has long passed and Google have stepped into that void, to become the gatekeeper of the web.

The vision of the semantic web was supposed to make every organisation, person, place and thing machine readable. Twenty years later and we basically just use it to share pretty links on Facebook.

Plug: I’m working on a DNS-based protocol to fix this, making it easy for organisations to provide machine-readable data direct to users. We launched it in the UK last month and have machine readable data for 5m businesses. US roll out next year. I wrote up the launch in a blog post [3].

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3.0

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3

2. https://www.coincarp.com/learn/what-is-web30-crypto/

3. https://www.num.uk/blog/we-crawled-5m-uk-websites-and-publis...

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#47

Post by fatbird »

EGreg wrote: post #31

[flagged]

Ethereum has twice hard forked the blockchain to revert the results of "code is law", clearly saying that code is only law when a quorum of powerful individuals accept the outcome. Code isn't law, "code is law" is a slogan with as much veracity as slogans usually have.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#48

Post by bushbaba »

CurrentB wrote: post #43

Nice read. What I don't get about all the crypto haters, who will probably make up the majority of replies here, are they really just happy with the status quo? Do they really think the current financial system is great and their online bank account is perfect and nothing radical is worth trying? That usernames and passwords given to each of a million different companies are so great, why would people want to manage…

Idk. I get my direct deposit into my account from my employer for free. I can transfer funds to pay bills for free. And I can go anywhere in the world and withdraw money for less than a 5$ fee in less than a minute.

Try doing that with crypto.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#49

Post by ButtSpark69 »

dzonga wrote: post #12
jolux wrote: post #9

All of the examples of having to trust the government in this article neglect the fact that trusting the government is not just trusting the government, and it’s not just the government storing a deed or giving you a Social Security Number that makes it real. It’s the whole complex web of laws and regulations that created these policies that make them real, and the people (your fellow citizens) who have collectively…

succinctly said. all these web3 / crypto folks forget complex laws exist to prevent and remedy situations that can't be simply solved by smart contracts. most of the laws are so complex, we've professionals who specialise in them.

You view the complexity of American law as a feature, not a bug??

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#50

Post by robbedpeter »

westoncb wrote: post #36
qaq wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep cause the cost of people who can put together a smart contract without major bugs is peanuts :)

Fair point :) I was admittedly thinking of more DIY scenarios, but it isn't really fair to only consider how it impacts programmers. OTOH—without knowing many concrete details myself—seems like there would be plenty of room for reuse of contracts? Maybe even something like a storefront where you can grab one that matches your scenario

As open source successes start to accumulate, the costs will go down. Reuse is incentivized as development on the cryptocurrency as opposed to a perpetually monetized rent extraction by regulators or "professionals."
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