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What Is Web3? Should You Care?

spiegelmock.com

11–20 of 47 posts

Re: What Is Web3? Should You Care?

#11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot to say but one of the big ones for me is normalizing the use of public key crypto for identity management. Now anyone can create a keypair offline and suddenly they have a way for people to interact with them and they don't have to run any of the infrastructure themselves. I like that it inverts the concept of "self hosting" into "everybody hosting".

What problem does this solve? What's wrong with the way I currently do "identity management"?

It solves the problem of needing to make and remember a username/password on every site you use, it solves the problem of password hashes being leaked when a site gets compromised, it solves the problem of not being able to know that hihihihi1234 on hackernews is the same person as hihihihi1234 on lobste.rs, and it solves the problem of trying to make an account on a website only for your typical username to be taken already

Re: What Is Web3? Should You Care?

#12
post #10
post #3

web 1 and 2 promised very little and delivered a lot, web3 looks like the opposite

This isn't going to age well.

That’s what people keep saying but I’ll start to believe it when any web3 tech has even a hypothetical consumer or business application outside of web3.

Re: What Is Web3? Should You Care?

#13
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What problem does this solve? What's wrong with the way I currently do "identity management"?

It solves the problem of needing to make and remember a username/password on every site you use, it solves the problem of password hashes being leaked when a site gets compromised, it solves the problem of not being able to know that hihihihi1234 on hackernews is the same person as hihihihi1234 on lobste.rs, and it solves the problem of trying to make an account on a website only for your typical username to be taken…

How does me making an offline private key with the username Spivak fix the problem of someone else making their own key with the name Spivak? There is still a shared namespace of user ids. And if it’s fine that two keys have the same display name then you could just do what Discord does and do Spivak#42069.

There can still only be one twitch.tv/spivak.

Re: What Is Web3? Should You Care?

#14
post #6
post #2

Yes we should. Very exciting time full of opportunities If people ignore the buzzword scams, and focus on what is possible to change with these new paradigms... I am already getting FOMO

Can you describe some of these possible changes?

evilmaid.crypto

Re: What Is Web3? Should You Care?

#15
post #4
post #3

web 1 and 2 promised very little and delivered a lot, web3 looks like the opposite

I feel like web 1 & 2 was really about sharing things. Newsgroups and forums. Then videos and social media. However 'web3' seems the opposite. Decentralization is touted as a feature, because we cannot place our trust in other people. NFT hype is all about 'claiming' ownership over something. Where is the sharing and community? For these reasons I do not think it is something interesting.

also the early web had some hype with claiming ownership of web domains.

Re: What Is Web3? Should You Care?

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot to say but one of the big ones for me is normalizing the use of public key crypto for identity management. Now anyone can create a keypair offline and suddenly they have a way for people to interact with them and they don't have to run any of the infrastructure themselves. I like that it inverts the concept of "self hosting" into "everybody hosting".

What problem does this solve? What's wrong with the way I currently do "identity management"?

It solves a few problems as mentioned below.

Every single form of your identity right now is mediated by a third party.

Your email. Your Instagram. Your Twitter. Your phone number. Your bank account.

Not only that, but each one is independent of the other. That's 5 different accounts with 5 different providers. Each of them has a vast infrastructure and duplicate copy of everything about you and everything about everything else. Each one of them has an off switch to your identity that they can freely flip on a whim with no recourse available to you.

If you invert that and say that your identity is no longer mediated by any specific entity, or array of entities, it is mediated by a provably neutral public infrastructure that is completely opt in and costs only the amount that is proportional to your usage.

Now the identity resides with the user, not any third party, which means they have full control over it, without having to rely on any one entity that can fail or turn against you.

Re: What Is Web3? Should You Care?

#18
post #4
post #3

web 1 and 2 promised very little and delivered a lot, web3 looks like the opposite

I feel like web 1 & 2 was really about sharing things. Newsgroups and forums. Then videos and social media. However 'web3' seems the opposite. Decentralization is touted as a feature, because we cannot place our trust in other people. NFT hype is all about 'claiming' ownership over something. Where is the sharing and community? For these reasons I do not think it is something interesting.

"because we cannot place our trust in corporations"

Fixed your statement to demonstrate why Web3 is a thing. Once we saw how many scientists on FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, YT, etc got muted the past few years, the need for communication outside of the corporations is desperately needed.

Re: What Is Web3? Should You Care?

#19
post #9
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you describe some of these possible changes?

Just being completely random imagine the internet is now the multiverse. And everything publish on it is an NFT, posts, videos, images, comments. Like the current internet but everything has a value. Creating a comment on StackOverflow could get you paid instead of just reputation The NFT concept seems stupid at first, and a 60 million NFT is definitely stupid. But imagine Youtube is the metaverse where videos, or NF…

Just ask: How much money do you expect to get? Who currently has that money? Why would they give it to you?

Re: What Is Web3? Should You Care?

#20
post #16
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't going to age well.

Name a non-speculative usecase

I mean, I'm far from an NFT buyer or fanboy, but what can smart contracts and distributed trust-less compute do?

Supply chain tracking is a fairly perfect match. An example in production usage today is https://simbachain.com/ and https://www.computerworld.com/article/3439843/how-pharma-wil... and a particularly interesting vaccine distribution database from IBM: https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/industries/vaccine-distributi... - or how about voting: An example in production usage today: https://www.govtech.com/products/utah-county-makes-history-w...

There is the obvious securities trading usages, but that may or may not qualify as speculative. Anyways, you could argue blockchain is a stupid tech for all those reasons and all the startups mentioned in these articles will fail - and fine, maybe you're right. Maybe postgres is better for all those jobs. But these are non-speculative use-cases. If they're the right fit for those problems -- well, I'm not running a crypto startup, so... But in the long expanse of history, I do believe trustless societies will eventually emerge.

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