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Why Web3?

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Re: Why Web3?

#251

Post by snowwrestler »

When thinking about web3 I try to maintain a mental distinction between the enthusiasm for new ways of building applications, and the technical capabilities available to do so now.

To the extent there is something “there” in web3, I think it is mostly the former—the enthusiasm.

I saw someone write that there is a whole generation that grew up in a web dominated by Facebook, YouTube, etc. and they are hungry for a new way of doing things that feels free. I grew up with the original implementation of the WWW so I feel a lot of empathy for this point of view. It felt incredibly exciting and free.

That said, the “web3” technology so far seems to be a dumpster fire. NFTs are packed with wash-sale scammers, and smart contracts are super inefficient, or break in expensive ways, or both. Although to be fair the early Web 1.0 was largely a dumpster fire too. :-)

I think there is a big risk that the enthusiasm gets coopted by “solutions” that are in fact still centralized and just the old rulers in new clothes. I have to say that seeing so much boosting from rich established VCs does not seem like a good signal in that regard.

When I see someone whose job it is to centralize huge control and rewards on behalf of their investors shouting that web3 is freedom from control and centralization… I start to feel dubious.

Re: Why Web3?

#252

Post by lottin »

cercatrova wrote: post #234
aquateen wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 en…

> 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

Or more likely, there was no demand for their product to begin with.

Re: Why Web3?

#253

Post by makeee »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #98
doomrobo wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NFTs are a scam and are retroactively obsoleted by digital signatures I'm not one to ever defend NFTs, but this is not right. Suppose I bought an extremely trendy natural number k ∈ ℤ and I have a signature σ from its inventor that says "doomrobo owns k". Suppose in a year the trend has passed and I'd like to sell k. How do I transfer ownership to someone else? Clearly sending σ doesn't suffice, since σ is public.…

Good questions. Let's say I create a piece of digital art and create an NFT out of it. The NFT somehow starts increasing in value. Then I copy my original digital art-asset and perhaps use a Photo-Shop filter to make it have a different hue. I turn that into another NFT. And I keep on doing this for all colors of the rainbow. What prevents me from creating new NFTs with the same or slightly modified underlying digita…

This isn't any different than an artist offering a limited run of physical prints and then going back on their word. There's generally some level of trust between the buyer and the artist and if they break that trust then they hurt demand for their work. I've been following the NFT space for years and I haven't seen this issue crop up much at all.

Re: Why Web3?

#254

Post by ipaddr »

cercatrova wrote: post #234
aquateen wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 en…

The approach to validate ideas with conversation with your target market when you are unsure if anyone will buy.

But in this case you need to validate it by building it and proving it can be done. The market is already prepped.

Re: Why Web3?

#255

Post by nfw2 »

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.

Maybe it's not common wisdom in general, but it is a pretty common viewpoint in the startup world. Building products is expensive, and startups can't afford to build something no one wants. It's pretty much universal advise that finding an initial market fit should be the first priority of any new startup.

Literally making a sale before the product exists is the extreme end of that philosophy. Whether or not this is good advise, or even possible, probably depends a lot on the domain. For most domains though, there is some degree of market research that can and should be done before investing in product development.

Re: Why Web3?

#256

Post by cercatrova »

lottin wrote: post #252
cercatrova wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 en…

> 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 Or more likely, there was no demand for their product to begin with.

Indeed, the worst is when they don't actually solve any problems whatsoever, they treat it as a way to have fun building the product, using new technologies, new architectures etc.

There's nothing wrong with building to learn but the problem arises when engineers think building automatically leads to business success; the two are often entirely disjointed. WordPress is maligned as well but it's wildly successful for Automattic.

Re: Why Web3?

#257

Post by devin »

indigochill wrote: post #90
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... And the order of operations. Traditionally, you build something great (or an MVP) and market it. The crypto community has been putting the marketing before the building. It's probably uncontroversial to say although cryptocurrency -could- do great things, right now the bulk of trade…

To be fair, it's not a bad target market. Look at FanDuel and PokerStars and such. For many watching, it's just a new kind of gambling. The decision many are likely making is to throw their money at bitcoin instead of placing a bet at an online sportsbook. The feeling of "investing" in crypto versus outright gambling is a nice little story to tell oneself, even if it's not particularly true.

Re: Why Web3?

#258

Post by pg_bot »

saurik wrote: post #240
pg_bot wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exi…

The best case scenario I can see is that cryptocurrencies push the US banking system to adopt something like the British "Faster Payment Services". If anyone begins to gain adoption they will be outcompeted by incumbent banks. It has never been the case that banking has been limited by technology for quicker and cheaper transactions in the US.

Re: Why Web3?

#259

Post by lottin »

kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #223
root_axis wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do the exact same thing with a blockchain NFT - there's absolutely no difference in terms of outcome. Each "sale" generates a unique digital signature NFT because the public key of the person buying is incorporated as part of the cryptographic signature.

Every sale is on the blockchain, so if somebody creates multiple sales of the same item, it would immediately be visible. Of course it depends on the implementation, how do you identify an object? Leonardo could still create one NFT saying "this is ownership of my painting of the woman that always looks at the beholder" and another saying "this is ownership of my painting "Mona Lisa" and it would perhaps not be immed…

> Every sale is on the blockchain, so if somebody creates multiple sales of the same item, it would immediately be visible.

There is an infinite number of blockchains.

Re: Why Web3?

#260

Post by acdha »

ehsankia wrote: post #231
acdha wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes — between the people who only work with a handful of company's APIs or which are still completely dependent on the real web, it seems a lot less decentralized than, say, Tor.
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