Is Web3 Bullshit? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#101

Post by gjulianm » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 12:49 PM UTC

hbbio wrote: post #58

I have the impression that most comments here are either biased against cryptocurrencies or trying to push for them blindly. That's a bit sad considering we should at least be discussing the technology here. web3 is a marketing brand that defines a future version of web apps where the frontend is a compiled SPA possibly hosted on decentralised platforms (IPFS) and where the backend is a decentralised blockchain (and…

There's a question that isn't answered and that's why would users care about those details of the backend. In the end, a solution can be as technologically elegant as you want, but the thing it really needs to do is improve from the users' point of view. And I don't think it does.

For most people, a decentralized platform will usually be worse (speed, latency), and only very rarely better, than a centralized server. The "paying to access a database" will introduce a lot of issues both for users and developers, no matter how you implement it, for barely any user-facing improvement. And centralized processors appeared to make things easier, so you'd need a payment platform that is as least as easy and, also, that protects you against scams (AFAIK, you can't do too much if someone steals your crypto wallet or you forget the password).

So while I agree that web3 could provide identify + payments, it doesn't need to be technically elegant, but user-facing elegant.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#102

Post by majani » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 12:51 PM UTC

flooow wrote: post #77

mattlondon wrote: post #7

It saddens me that they chose "web3" for the latest crypto pyramid scheme. Call it what you want, but please don't sully the web with your plat du jour crypto antics. Also for what it is worth, the web has been decentralised from the very start, I don't see what the fuss is about apart from just everyone getting rich selling the next hot coin/token/whatever.

If the crypto community wants to demonstrate that it isn't a giant Ponzi scheme, why not come up with a non-deflationary token, which will not massively reward 'early adopters' at the expense of everyone else, in perpetuity? (A non-deflationary token would be one where the supply grows by some reasonable percentage every year, effectively acting as a flat tax on one's holdings). In reality, non-deflationary cryptocur…

New Ether gets issued every year

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#103

Post by goodpoint » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 12:51 PM UTC

_se0c wrote: post #2

Reading through the linked article on "real world uses for Web3", most of them seem to consist of things that public key cryptography has been able to solve for decades (persistent identity, multiple persistent identities) or things you could do anyway ("right now, people can only go to facebook or Google. With Web3, everyone can have their own space!!") because the writer has apparently never heard of a web server.…

> Compute power is nearing post scarcity

Nearing? 99.9% of the Internet content I care about is pure text.

In quantities could be served and stored on SBC or a phone from 10 years ago.

Think of text messaging, IM rooms, forums like HN or mailing lists, activitypub.

Do the math around how much text a person can consume in a day and how much data can a SBC handle in a day.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#104

Post by GDC7 » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 12:51 PM UTC

flooow wrote: post #77

mattlondon wrote: post #7

It saddens me that they chose "web3" for the latest crypto pyramid scheme. Call it what you want, but please don't sully the web with your plat du jour crypto antics. Also for what it is worth, the web has been decentralised from the very start, I don't see what the fuss is about apart from just everyone getting rich selling the next hot coin/token/whatever.

If the crypto community wants to demonstrate that it isn't a giant Ponzi scheme, why not come up with a non-deflationary token, which will not massively reward 'early adopters' at the expense of everyone else, in perpetuity? (A non-deflationary token would be one where the supply grows by some reasonable percentage every year, effectively acting as a flat tax on one's holdings). In reality, non-deflationary cryptocur…

> In reality, non-deflationary cryptocurrencies have been tried on various occasions. Surprise! None of them have taken off because "number doesn't go up".

I am curious to see what will happen when the everything bubble pops

If people don’t react in an angry way that’s the clear signal from society that it wants a certain % of ponzi and scams to be allowed and tolerated

Much like it tolerates gambling , lottery and games of chance which are all zero sum games

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#105

Post by bsenftner » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 12:52 PM UTC

legutierr wrote: post #34

mattlondon wrote: post #7

It saddens me that they chose "web3" for the latest crypto pyramid scheme. Call it what you want, but please don't sully the web with your plat du jour crypto antics. Also for what it is worth, the web has been decentralised from the very start, I don't see what the fuss is about apart from just everyone getting rich selling the next hot coin/token/whatever.

> the latest crypto pyramid scheme The client libraries for Ethereum are called “web3”, and have been for half a decade at least. Web3 has been a core concept promoted by the Ethereum team from the beginning. Say what you will about Ethereum, it is not the “latest crypto pyramid scheme”.

So the started their crypto pyramid scheme a long time ago, still a pyramid scheme.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#106

Post by Hjfrf » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 12:52 PM UTC

iso1210 wrote: post #88

flooow wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the crypto community wants to demonstrate that it isn't a giant Ponzi scheme, why not come up with a non-deflationary token, which will not massively reward 'early adopters' at the expense of everyone else, in perpetuity? (A non-deflationary token would be one where the supply grows by some reasonable percentage every year, effectively acting as a flat tax on one's holdings). In reality, non-deflationary cryptocur…

Isn't that Dogecoin? (although inflation rate itself is deflationary - dropping from 5% pa about now to 2% in about 20 years)

Dogecoin is a copy+paste of bitcoin with a few config values changed.

That's why it shares the inflationary model.

The reason bitcoin is often described as deflationary is that many coins are lost, and the inflation is somewhat priced-in.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#107

Post by Smithalicious » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 12:54 PM UTC

As with a lot of cryptocurrency stuff, web3 is very overhyped yet also genuinely promising and useful. The ecosystem is not yet at a point where it's streamlined enough for mainstream adoption, but it's possible to build working MVPs for very interesting services with privacy and decentralization guarantees that just weren't feasible pre-web3.

Of course that does come at some cost and from a pure surface user experience level a lot of these services do still feel like "existing things but worse". It takes a while for these kinds of structural changes to catch up in some ways, though there's already plenty of web3 services that are genuinely useful in their own right, too.

Disclaimer: I get paid to develop web3 applications and I like my job

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#108

Post by gandutraveler » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 12:55 PM UTC

Web2 adoption was organic, driven by programmers and it definitely made the end user experience much better. With web3 we are jumping ahead of what it will be before even there has been consensus on it. For now it's an idea with possibilities. What is worse is VC's, hustlers, influencers (Gary Vee etc),Elite crypto tribes(polka) are selling the 'product' that doesn't exist yet. I say let it organically evolve and not prematurely bring in the marketers to sell it.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#109

Post by throw0101a » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 12:55 PM UTC

austincheney wrote: post #68

mattlondon wrote: post #7

It saddens me that they chose "web3" for the latest crypto pyramid scheme. Call it what you want, but please don't sully the web with your plat du jour crypto antics. Also for what it is worth, the web has been decentralised from the very start, I don't see what the fuss is about apart from just everyone getting rich selling the next hot coin/token/whatever.

I agree that cryptocurrency is a pyramid scheme, but the web is incredibly centralized. The whole point of DNS is to normalize an easy to remember name to an address so that everyone can access that same address easily. That is almost the purest essence of centralization. In practice if you want to share family photos with your family do you upload those photos to a third party like a social media site or a cloud pro…

> In practice if you want to share family photos with your family do you upload those photos to a third party like a social media site or a cloud provider for all your family to access? That is centralized: an agreed upon location for everyone to access.

As there are multiple places where the family photos can be posted (Facebook, 500px, Google, etc), that demonstrates that the web is decentralized.

What it may not be is distributed, where one can easily self-host:

* https://berty.tech/blog/decentralized-distributed-centralize...

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#110

Post by 3np » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 12:56 PM UTC

_vufv wrote: post #33

One aspect that I strongly dislike about "web3" is that it poisons the discourse with its incentives. I don't believe that every person on Twitter with $BTC in their profile understands or can knowledgeably argue the benefits of Web3, but their crypto holdings make them a hard-lined crypto zealot in the hopes of multiplying few hundred dollars they've put in. It's fairly widely known how laughable it is to look for u…

Sure, let’s accept that cryptofinance creates bizarre incentives for people to irrationally support a change.

Consider on the other side of the table how the economics and network effects have created incentives for everyone to depend on centralized architecture to the point where if you’re not acting through any of the top two companies in any given market, you’re effectively shut off from large parts of modern economy and social life.

Incentives are broken all over, that doesn’t mean the cause is wrong.