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Why Web3?

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Re: Why Web3?

#231

Post by ehsankia »

acdha wrote: post #97
davidhariri wrote: post #84

> Frankly, it is all too much for me. Same. I've been actively unfollowing people on Twitter every day to clean my feeds of it. I'm not anti-web3 or anti-crypto, but I definitely don't need to read the same rhetoric from 100 people a day. Decentralized trust could be great, but I wonder how much time actually needs to be spent talking about it vs. actually building it...

> Decentralized trust could be great, but I wonder how much time actually needs to be spent talking about it vs. actually building it... This is the tell for me that most of the people promoting it are just trying to find buyers for their tokens: there's tons of marketing for things which either don't exist at all or offer a worse experience than the status quo, and it's very rare to find someone who clearly understa…

An interesting quote I heard was something along the lines of: any action you take that doesn't cost fees on your wallet is probably not actually running on web3. A lot of stuff you see is just pretending to be web3 but not actually decentralized.

Re: Why Web3?

#232

Post by kkjjkgjjgg »

root_axis wrote: post #212
kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But at least you can check the blockchain for all the content the author has created.

The author could use a unique private key for each blockchain NFT if they wanted to avoid that.

The problem of how to associate a NFT with a physical object is a different one from the transfer/spending problem.

I think that is the "minting" problem.

An artist simply signing stuff does not even prove that a physical object corresponding to the token exists.

I like to think of other use cases, like real estate or stock options. If you talk about a plot of land, it seems feasible to find a unique identifier (you could even involve the government).

Edit: HN does not allow me any more replies right now, so I have to leave it at that. The reason why a "government signature on the deed" would achieve the same thing is because we trust on the government to keep a proper ledger. And the government asks for a lot of money for a transfer.

Re: Why Web3?

#233

Post by corobo »

numbsafari wrote: post #182
arbuge wrote: post #23

I read this as yet another article stating how great web3 is going to be and how important the decentralization aspect is, without making it clear exactly why this is the case, and what concrete examples of things we'll be able to do with it (that we're unable to do today) are. Web3 sounds to me like one of those soap opera startups PG talks about. They sound like a great idea when you propose them, but do people rea…

With web3, there is no deplatforming, no moderation, no accountability. There is no responsibility. That’s what they really want. They want a system that, in their minds, won’t be subject to regulation or social pressure. They are still mad that Reddit blocked certain groups. That parler got banned from public clouds. Those are the things that made them “wake up” to the need for web3. Deleting data and social account…

> With web3, there is no deplatforming, no moderation, no accountability

A collection of NFTs got deplatformed, moderated, and even accepted accountability yesterday

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29714296

Re: Why Web3?

#234

Post by cercatrova »

aquateen wrote: post #224
cercatrova wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Traditionally, you build something great (or an MVP) and market it. I don't like the Web3 hype either but generally people say one should market their product first then build it if there's enough demand, through a landing page capturing emails or pre-payments, or other such ways of gauging demand. It just seems that Web3 fanatics took the marketing side too far that they've forgotten they actually have to build a…

> generally people say one should market their product first then build it if there's enough demand I don't agree this is the common wisdom, and it's kind of a surprising take to see on this website specifically.

It's what I commonly see on startup fora including HN, reddit, IndieHackers etc. There's books about this method like Lean Startup, Mom Test and so on.

The advice to build first and market later is actually advice that is much maligned in my experience, as there are too many stories of engineers who build and then find out they can't actually sell their product because they focused too much on the building and not enough on getting people to know about it.

Re: Why Web3?

#235

Post by ehsankia »

jshen wrote: post #19
Apocryphon wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn’t an open database lead to loads of ACID issues or is the point of blockchain to prevent that

It’s a very limited database that is very slow and scales poorly.

Not only that, but every operation would cost fees, right?

Good luck convincing people that every time they logging into their account or literally do any action will cost them some fees. Refreshed the page? Oops that'll cost ya!

Re: Why Web3?

#236

Post by wslh »

nathias wrote: post #174
ReggieCommaRose wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The topic at hand is mainstream adoption and I think empirically the world disagrees with you.

I'm sure you believe mainstream adoption is a consequence of a software having good UX and being very useful, I don't.

Mainstream adoption is independent if the app is centralized or not. You are ignoring the people who use Netflix, TikTok, Instagram, etc. People care about the brand offering not if they are decentralized or not.

Re: Why Web3?

#237

Post by JohnWhigham »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

The author struggles to make the point that Web3 has value. Isn't "another opportunity for grift" a source of value for grifters?

He's a VC, he needs to project that they invest in things that have value. They're part of the grift. I have 0 faith in anything coming out of a VC's office to be beneficial to society. An interesting business? Sure! But in the long run it will not be a good thing.

Re: Why Web3?

#238

Post by beardedman »

The people who are advocating web3 are not the people who were part of building web1 & web2 (whatever those even mean). They're people who are idealistic & seem to disregard (or are ignorant of) the effort in building infrastructure at scale. Building things is hard. Building things that scale even harder & anybody who has worked at a company that needs to scale knows there are trade-offs between security, centralisation, reliability & making things work for the user in a nice way. Web3 is a moot point until somebody actually brings something real to the party. Otherwise, IMO, it's a hype train.

EDIT: Ironically, web3 also seems to be able to rip the environment a new one. Which is pretty funny given the demographic of its fans.

Re: Why Web3?

#239

Post by [deleted] »

kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #205
root_axis wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wouldn't the author be different if you just minted a copy? The problem being described above is the possibility of the trusted author minting multiple digital signature NFTs for the same content. A reseller can't create a copy because they can't sign a message conferring ownership from the trusted source without their private key.

But at least you can check the blockchain for all the content the author has created.

[deleted]

Re: Why Web3?

#240

Post by saurik »

pg_bot wrote: post #75
capableweb wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, I think we've had enough time to evaluate enough of these technologies "We" (humanity) started working on networking/the foundations of the internet in the 1970s, and it wasn't until late 1990s that it actually became mainstream and started providing a solution to "real" problems we had at that time. What makes you confident we can judge cryptocurrencies in just ~12 years instead of ~20 years it took for t…

Even in the early days of computing, there were obvious benefits to networking computers. The work wasn't done for no reason, there was clear value in coming up with all of these protocols. The main reason it took so long for general adoption was the fact that computers were not in most family homes until the 1990s. The barrier to adopting the internet wasn't the inherent value of the protocols it was the cost of the…

I mean, if I want to send you some money, and let's say you are just in Canada (I am in the United States), my options are limited and many are super expensive... and almost all of them take forever. The only cheap, easy, and fast way is PayPal (or their subsidiary Venmo), which I don't think anyone truly likes (evidence for which is easy: find literally any thread on Hacker News about them that isn't using their existence to defend why cryptocurrencies are unnecessary).

Other than PayPal, Bitcoin (or Ethereum and Avalanche or what have you) is much easier than all of these systems, and while it currently may or may not be as cheap, it was frankly a "first draft": the subsequent protocols the community is using are all (incrementally) cheaper and the ecosystem has even been succeeding at improving the overall scalability. If you tell me your Bitcoin address--no matter where you are in this increasingly global world--I can reliably send you money.

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