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Web3 – An Arrogant and Treacherous Successor Doomed to Fail

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121–130 of 267 posts

Re: Web3 – An Arrogant and Treacherous Successor Doomed to Fail

#121
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is using a decentralised Twitter alternative like Lens gambling? How is using a decentralised Zoom alternative like Huddle01 gambling? How is using a decentralised Pusher alternative like Push gambling? I agree, that in the last years most web3 apps focused on financial/blockchain specific use-cases. I also agree, that many of them had quite dubious claims. But that's not all there is and I think, that won't be t…

Which of those have the "millions of users" the upthread comment referred to?

Good point. The ones I wrote probably just have a few 10k max.

Maybe, the Internet Archive is a better example millions of users?

Re: Web3 – An Arrogant and Treacherous Successor Doomed to Fail

#122
post #19

Web3 is already making inroads piece by piece into the web. It started with ssh. Once keys were exchanged, you did not have to trust the infrastructure providers anymore. You knew whom you are talking to and that the communication is not tampered with. Similar with https. A recent development is that ActivityPub profiles have private keys and publish their public keys. So if you run your own Fediverse node, you alrea…

Both of the things you mentioned predate the "web3" marketing term and do not use any of the cryptocurrencies which that term is being used to market, and the ActivityPub people do not seem to be fans of cryptocurrencies. It's dishonest to try to claim credit for their work.

Re: Web3 – An Arrogant and Treacherous Successor Doomed to Fail

#123
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s amazing how this description is entirely unrelated to the reality of the so-called web3. Not just “we’re still working out some of the details,” but literally none of it exists. It’s like you’re promised a grand night at the opera and the bus takes you to a roach-infested casino. “Music? We don’t need it, the slot machines make enough sound. Now are you going to buy some tokens?”

This seems like rhetoric. Have you tried looking? Counterexamples: lens.xyz, farcaster.xyz, urbit.org

You can't say something that's generally beloved like Urbit!

By the logic of web3 critics, everything they consider 'good' isn't part of web3.

Re: Web3 – An Arrogant and Treacherous Successor Doomed to Fail

#124
1) Web1 was the fruit of academia and unix neckbeards

2) Web2 was the fruit of web developers and silicon valley finance

3) "Web3" was the product of MBAs and finance bros

You can see what's wrong with Web3. Silicon valley finance just wanted to get rich quick too, but they at least had to go through technology and programmers to get there.

"Web3" was pushed by MBAs/Wall Street (at best) and shady crytpo finance bros (at worst), and had little in "new technology". The technology that WAS used came from the Web2 era with bitcoin.

The real "next web" is in things like Mastodon (and Bittorrent and MAYBE some cryptocurrencies around distributed storage). Community or emergent things. Web1 was like that. Web2 was less so, and Web3 almost not at all.

What made "web3" actually stick a bit in the zeitgeist was the emergent nature of Bitcoin. It was distributed, networked, it didn't have controlling company, or even any real celebrity originator aside from the pseudonum "Satoshi Nakomoto".

Web1 was the maturation of TCPIP, networking, and basic text documents

Web2 was a powerful standardized browser and more general purpose UI/computing.

Web3 the hype was distributed and encryption, but has failed to produce utility to the average person, or even the average developer.

Web2 only hit its stride in the post-dotcom crash when the money got back out. In a way, the dotcom boom funded the real Web2, then the crash weeded out the get rich quick people, and Web2 was built on the hardened survivors.

Maybe "Web3" will similarly survive and thrive from a crash that weeds out the scammers.

Re: Web3 – An Arrogant and Treacherous Successor Doomed to Fail

#125
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly… NFT’s blah blah .. blockchain everything .. came off as like a sales pitch and never seemed to resonant as where the web was headed

Paying for things ONLINE with a crypto wallet is legitimately a far, far better experience than fumbling around with credit cards. A seamless on-ramp from a bank account to a crypto wallet will really change the way we pay for things online. I believe this on-ramp is coming with CBDCs. Edit: HN is hopelessly anti Wayne Gretzky when it comes to crypto :D Edit 2: I should have mentioned 'online'

I don't know. To pay with google pay I unlock my phone and get it close to a pos. Even here in Chile is rare to find a business that doesn't have contactless payments. Even if I could't use the contactless payment system that uses the same bank that I already have I can pay using a QR code with one of the many wallets that can connect to my bank.

Re: Web3 – An Arrogant and Treacherous Successor Doomed to Fail

#126
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly… NFT’s blah blah .. blockchain everything .. came off as like a sales pitch and never seemed to resonant as where the web was headed

Paying for things ONLINE with a crypto wallet is legitimately a far, far better experience than fumbling around with credit cards. A seamless on-ramp from a bank account to a crypto wallet will really change the way we pay for things online. I believe this on-ramp is coming with CBDCs. Edit: HN is hopelessly anti Wayne Gretzky when it comes to crypto :D Edit 2: I should have mentioned 'online'

You can actually buy stuff with crypto? IBD - first you exchange your crypto for fiat then exchange the fiat for the thing you purchased. Noticed how long Tesla's experiment with direct crypto payment lasted. The dollars I received yesterday will still pretty much buy me what I bought the day before. My $60,000 bitcoin from last year not so much.

Re: Web3 – An Arrogant and Treacherous Successor Doomed to Fail

#127
Web3 refers to the emerging shift in internet value chains from permissioned, centralized databases to permissionless, decentralized databases where users own their data. The driving force behind Web3 is that we can now enforce invariants on state transitions in a permissionless, decentralized manner for a limited set of applications (mostly financial). For an even more limited set of applications, we can also enforce invariants while preserving the confidentiality of transactions.

With hindsight, the two technological breakthroughs that proved decentralized databases possible were Bitcoin and Zerocash. Bitcoin showed that state-machine replication (SMR) is solvable in a distributed, permissionless, partially synchronous setting with Byzantine fault tolerance. Zerocash showed that zero knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge can be used to ensure the confidentiality of transactions in this SMR setting.

The tech is improving rapidly and it’s pretty easy to see where things are going from here: soon we’ll have general purpose decentralized databases where data is open as open source code is open. In fact, state-of-the-art blockchains can be viewed as special (financial) purpose decentralized databases.

As to why decentralized databases are desirable: imagine if you could fork databases in a completely permission-less manner like you can fork code. This is how web development would look like:

You, the programmer, take a look at a public data schema (eg. a smart contract that implements the ERC-721 interface) and decide to build on top of it. Then, a user, who has already interacted with what you built on, decides that they like what you built and lets your app use their data. You, the programmer, can be sure that the data you built on remains available, and the user can be sure that they'll be able to port the data produced by your app into new apps.

Re: Web3 – An Arrogant and Treacherous Successor Doomed to Fail

#129
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s amazing how this description is entirely unrelated to the reality of the so-called web3. Not just “we’re still working out some of the details,” but literally none of it exists. It’s like you’re promised a grand night at the opera and the bus takes you to a roach-infested casino. “Music? We don’t need it, the slot machines make enough sound. Now are you going to buy some tokens?”

Entirely this. And when it comes time to show success stories, they co-opt other decentralized tech like IPFS or DID. None of that needs a blockchain to operate and does just fine without implementing one. Web3 is truly DOA.

Again, web3 isn't just blockchains.

IPFS is a fundamental web3 tech since it's inception, even it's creators from Protocol Labs say so. Just because you like it more than blockchains doesn't mean it's not part of web3.

IOTA uses hashgraphs.

ArWeave uses blockweaves.

IPFS uses DAG.

Re: Web3 – An Arrogant and Treacherous Successor Doomed to Fail

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paraphrasing this week's TWiT: Web 1.0 and 2.0 were created by engineers to solve problems. Web 3/3.0 was invented by finance bros to disguise their various scams as the next technology revolution.

That’s cynical at best. One of the goals of Web3 is to enable direct commerce without trusted intermediaries. Anyone here like using PayPal? What if instead you had the equivalent of cash that you could use on the internet? Web3 is attempting to create an economy decoupled from existing currencies (fiat). Unlike a country seigniorage determined ahead of time, and is publicly visible for all to see. If the idea of cre…

dude, HN is not the place to be a blockchain pro.
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