151–160 of 309 posts
I get that "Web 3.0" is catchy as "Web 2.0" was back in the day but I wish people would stop trying to version "the web". It doesn't make any sense.
The web evolved constantly from birth and became more interactive over time.
I always hated that silly “web 2.0” branding.
Never forget that cryptocurrencies are essentially software, therefore it can most likely change to overcome its present pitfalls. You don’t like the negative environmental impact that PoW has? There are many eco-friendly cryptocurrencies that don’t use PoW. Don’t like that the fees are too high? There are feeless cryptocurrencies. Don’t like that many cryptos are VC money schemes? There are many with fair distributi…
Is it though? Valuable how? Has it been proven?
The core of the issue is that PoW is fundamentally a sort of algorithmic cancer that threatens to basically take over on the order of half of the worlds computational power to fuel worthless speculative trading. IMO there's an important argument to be had that trading on PoW blockchains should be outright banned. Yes, you can't get rid of it completely, but you can get the impact down to a manageable level.. like with cancers.
And yeah, then you have PoS and PoA blockchains. But it's yet to be proven that PoS provides the same level of security as PoW, and there's solid arguments that it never possibly could. PoA is fundamentally different from PoW and PoS, so you can argue whether it's even the same underlying thing. It's no longer truly decentralized. I think it could be very useful. It's just not as sexy and susceptible to fueling pyramid schemes, so it's less popular.
So to me it seems like we really don't know at all yet if the "underlying technology" is even providing a net positive value to society.
If the "underlying technology" here is trustless distributed blockchains (that is, PoA doesn't really apply), then I think there's an argument that the core of the idea is fundamentally broken. There is perhaps no such thing as a truly trustless system (for PoW/PoS blockchain, you're just converging on concentrating de-facto trust with a small clique of trading platforms and mining/wallet app developers), so maybe it's better to just be more explicit about where we're placing our trust (through solid cryptography if we can) and to make sure that those entities are democratic institutions worthy of our trust. But this quickly becomes a very deep and philosophical argument, so it's outside the scope of this comment.
I support further research and development into blockchain-related technology, I certainly think it could be truly valuable. But it's yet to be proven IMO.
I can’t do anything any more after posting two comments. And the website ate my gas just by pressing the post button.
This parody is quite funny, but it's actually a take on the micro-transaction model more than web3. Web3 sites could work exactly the same as web2 sites except for the bits people want to own themselves. I don't imagine many people care about owning a Like or a comment. What's perhaps even more fun to think about is that somewhere in a lofty corner office at Instagram there's someone with a math or compsci PhD doing…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Crypto makes it possible to own something digitally. Web3 incorporates this ownership. While Web 2.0 was about writing something to the internet and the World Wide Web was about reading something on the internet. It's a further iteration which just makes sense.
Why the hell do I need to "own" something online? Whatever I publish, people can do whatever the hell they want with it. I don't want DRM incorporated into the internet. Blockchain is a scam and anybody parroting its supposed advantages is either invested or naive.
I only really see a use when mapping to an actually digitally scare good, say an IPv4 block or a domain name. But that's it really. Maybe some gacha/collectible games, but that's iffy.
So far I've yet to see a convincing argument for what "Web 3" is and can offer that we can't currently do without the use of a Blockchain. It all seems to boil down to "it'll cost something to do something", which isn't exactly a convincing argument on its own. The responses to this story read rather like Facebook comments on controversial news articles - there's a bunch of comments claiming the website is a bunch of…
Crypto makes it possible to own something digitally. Web3 incorporates this ownership. While Web 2.0 was about writing something to the internet and the World Wide Web was about reading something on the internet. It's a further iteration which just makes sense.
We have of course been able to buy and own more or less exlusive licenses to digital goods for a long time now. The video game market is now larger than the music and film industries combined and quickly becoming entirely digital.
And if it's own work and the more literal form of ownership rather than just a license to it, these rights are well protected in law and don't really use to become a problem? Unless you live in a state with state-sponsored copyright infringement, but these would absolutely not respect NFT's and proofs of ownership either.
But if you for some reason need to support the specific case of proving original ownership, NFT is a technology that can help although I think this is becoming a too niche use for a widespread internet-wide revolution. It's still digital which can be made into perfect copies and I think this alone reduces the appeal even if it would come with a sticker that validates the product. At least it does so for me. Sure it's "useful" kind of like how an MD5 sum is, and now we get even further along the way than that but... it's still digital goods with everything that implies...
Maybe blockchains immutability is going to actually make people think twice before putting something online. "Web2" makes us think that we can delete whatever we post, or what we send is not going to be stored. And we believe it because it is technically possible, even though we don't have any way to double check. If a service claims that you can delete/hide whatever data you uploaded on the blockchain, you'd be able…
It's all fun and games until a judge orders you to remove the content, like a revenge porn photo for example. You'll have plenty of time to think about how best to explain immutability, blockchains, etc. as you're sitting in jail in contempt of court. The web3 dream of nothing is ever deleted is going to have to hit the brick wall of reality that we as a society agree to follow laws that explicitly allow deleting and…
Can a judge order you to do something that is not possible? For example, if you were offering an end-to-end encrypted messaging service, can the judge order you to provide a decrypted version of a user's correspondence?
> The web3 dream of nothing is ever deleted is going to have to hit the brick wall of reality that we as a society agree to follow laws that explicitly allow deleting and removing content. You need a judicial solution to change that, not just a technology one.
Yes, I think that's why Balaji Srinivasan is talking about "network states", and "layer 0" (the ideological and legal layer) of cryptocurrencies.
So far I've yet to see a convincing argument for what "Web 3" is and can offer that we can't currently do without the use of a Blockchain. It all seems to boil down to "it'll cost something to do something", which isn't exactly a convincing argument on its own. The responses to this story read rather like Facebook comments on controversial news articles - there's a bunch of comments claiming the website is a bunch of…
The real issue with responses like this is that you can do anything with computers anyway. The blockchain basically gives you a
* Globally writable database
* With stored procedures
* And row level security
Now, you can always swap out that with a centralised service. Turing machines can do stuff and machines can talk to each other. Whether it's possible to build a technically equivalent thing is not really the important question.
What tends to happen though is that the underlying infrastructure if supported by a profit-making company is that it has its own agenda and desire to control access. There's no real desire for the base layer to be open, it's not profitable in itself.
One of the more appealing things to me in the area is that there's a lot of work with shared interfaces. Working with the ERC721 spec I can easily make a non-fungible token that refers to a ticket at a conference, or right to claim a financial security, or game item, or has a link to a wiggly line or whatever I want. Someone else can build an auction contract, and my nft will automatically work in it, as will anyone elses. If you have control of the NFT you can pick which auction type/contract/service you want to use. I don't (and shouldn't) care, that's not the part I build or manage.
Finally, "but can't you do it with postgres and ..." is true but there's a huge shift that's happened. Before, sure, I'd have to have built all this stuff on chain and have all of the complete pain-in-the-arse stuff to deal with that comes with crypto. But now that all exists.
So to make, say, an in game item that people can re-sell, swap, etc, instead of
* Make a website
* Setup the DB
* Manage user accounts
* Manage payment information
* Code the sales, auctions, etc
* Build the integration with my game & my API
* Manage and maintain the server
to do it the traditional way. To do it on chain I
* Create a trivial NFT contract
* Build the integration with my game & a generic API
That's it. All the other work, auctions, etc. has been solved and built already. User accounts are already managed.
You can always solve it another way. The more interesting question is in which cases should you solve a problem in certain ways? Not everything makes sense on chain, the database is slow and public (and even for very cheap chains comparatively expensive), and the stored procedures are extremely limited.
However some things can fit well - do you need to create some kind of economic incentive & want to let market forces control things (for example, filecoin and paying people for storage)? Maybe just creating a token on existing infrastructure will fit your needs. If it does, does it make sense to build even more things yourself?
Disclaimers - I am currently doing contract engineering in this area but am not looking for work, have only small holdings and am not here to shill for anything.
This is just a hater hatin, coming up with the worst ways to make web 3.0 look bad. An example of a real value proposition of web 3.0 is spam protection and reduction of fake reviews. Much like how bitcoin itself cannot be counterfeited, utilization of the blockchain enables some guarantees in a digital world of endless copying. The only thing I got from it was that the creator hates crypto bros so much he's willing…