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Web3 is a stupid idea

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Re: Web3 is a stupid idea

#121

Post by kybernetikos »

acdha wrote: post #37
gfodor wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN comments that use the word "never" should raise eyebrows. You're not wrong if you assume technology is fixed. But it ain't.

The only way I can see your comment being correct is if you're open to redefinitions of “blockchain” which do not require either immutability or the global public ledger. The current blockchains handle a vanishingly-small fraction of global financial traffic using far more equipment, data, and power — there's no magic wand which can allow you to scale up by many orders of magnitude without architectural changes. That…

The Ethereum roadmap has sharding coming soon, and architectural changes aplenty. Of course in the near term the approach for scaling is rollups, zk-rollups in the mid term and optimistic rollups in the short term (already running).

Those approaches still have immutability and a global public ledger but that ledger no longer lists every single transaction.

Re: Web3 is a stupid idea

#122

Post by Nraphael »

wtvanhest wrote: post #113
rewtraw wrote: post #100

A large chunk of my internet experience lately has been on web3, and the experience is _wonderful_ despite it's immaturity. It's incredible to be able to go to different websites (Zapper, Zerion, OpenSea, etc.) and simply have all my data already exist -- without needing to create an account, export/import. web3 makes me believe in a new era of the internet that isn't full of ads, cookie consent forms, dozens of sign…

Yeah. I started really digging in earlier this year and what I realized was that web3 offers true ownership over the important parts of your online identity. For the average user, it’s not exceptionally helpful yet, but for power users like celebrities, politicians and executives, it is extremely valuable. Where they go everyone else will go. Web3 has a massive future

Why would these types of people want all their data available on a public chain?

Re: Web3 is a stupid idea

#123

Post by majormajor »

divs1210 wrote: post #51
semicolon_storm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's just when the database is decentralized, why even call it web3? Why should web standards even care about implementation details of the database? We didn't move to "web3" when db sharding became a big thing, or when NoSQL caught on.

Because this is fundamentally different? No third party owns your data. Imagine a social network built like this.

Isn't that just the late 90s internet? Make your geocities page with your info, link to whoever else's pages you want, use email or chat to communicate with them. HTTP, SMTP, IRC...

Re: Web3 is a stupid idea

#124

Post by tshaddox »

ketralnis wrote: post #104
max_ wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot separate economics incentives from networking protocols. You need an actual sepeculative market to price and offer these services. Most of open source fails because they don't acknowledge this reality.

That is an extraordinary claim. Network protocols and currencies went some 60 years being unrelated to each other and I see no reason to think they won't continue right along that way after this current set of grifters finds a new set of marks

I've heard it argued that a huge flaw of the big protocols like HTTP is that they chose to be entirely unopinionated about payments. Apparently standards bodies did discuss standards for microtransactions, for example W3C's abandoned efforts: https://www.w3.org/ECommerce/Micropayments/

Re: Web3 is a stupid idea

#125

Post by wtvanhest »

Nraphael wrote: post #122
wtvanhest wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I started really digging in earlier this year and what I realized was that web3 offers true ownership over the important parts of your online identity. For the average user, it’s not exceptionally helpful yet, but for power users like celebrities, politicians and executives, it is extremely valuable. Where they go everyone else will go. Web3 has a massive future

Why would these types of people want all their data available on a public chain?

They want their public data public, but owned. It won’t be ‘on chain’ it will be off chain but the ownership token will be ‘on chain’.

As an example, they may have their public photos in IPFS, served from their server (or shared pointers), but will have ownership rights of those photos on chain.

That is different than Instagram where Facebook owns the images.

They cannot be deplatformed which is valuable. The question is whether it’s value exceeds the value of Instagram distribution.

Re: Web3 is a stupid idea

#126

Post by wtvanhest »

imwillofficial wrote: post #117
wtvanhest wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I started really digging in earlier this year and what I realized was that web3 offers true ownership over the important parts of your online identity. For the average user, it’s not exceptionally helpful yet, but for power users like celebrities, politicians and executives, it is extremely valuable. Where they go everyone else will go. Web3 has a massive future

Celebrities, politicians, and executives and the farthest thing from a power user as is possible in this universe. Did you mean people with a lot at stake in regards to their public image?

Power users in terms of social media

Re: Web3 is a stupid idea

#127

Post by platz »

rattlesnakedave wrote: post #84
platz wrote: post #61

> you're able to pool thousands of dollars What does it mean 'to pool' ether? I'm not familiar with using it as a verb. Or rather, if its just a transaction, what is the mraning of the choice of the word pool for such an event.

if a group of people or organizations "pool" their money, knowledge, or equipment, they share it or put it together so that it can be used for a particular purpose for instance, you can "pool" money to provide liquidity for trades on the ethereum blockchain via uniswap.

Would it be accurate to say that if I buy a stock that I am pooling my funds?

Re: Web3 is a stupid idea

#128

Post by hackingforfun »

yunohn wrote: post #76
okdjnfweonfe wrote: post #45

Really wish progressive enhancement was chosen as the first thing, want to get rid of the backend db? ok, two APIs, store to extension-managed DB (e.g. flatfiles in the home directory, or shunted onto something managed with LDAP, or loaded onto some weird coin thing on a local light node, or etc), or in environments where extensions are fussy / overcomplicated, store to another website via a http api (la https://remo…

> If you were to decide to write your data onto a gold ingot Why do crypto enthusiasts feel the need to use gold as a strawman? The vast majority of non-crypto people use digital money (in local currencies), and have never touched gold in their lives. Digital money works great, and doesn’t need a blockchain.

> Why do crypto enthusiasts feel the need to use gold as a strawman?

Well, at least the US, the government treats crypto as property, at least tax-wise (actually it's taxed just like real estate or gold). It's just that crypto is much more easily transferable than real estate or gold.

> The vast majority of non-crypto people use digital money (in local currencies), and have never touched gold in their lives. Digital money works great, and doesn’t need a blockchain.

I understand this argument. The traditional financial system is quite mature, and works pretty well. I do have a few concerns with it though:

•Negative interest rates in some parts of the world

•Ever increasing sovereign debt throughout the world, with no intent of ever paying it back

•Lack of ability for 24/7 payments, or even instant payments (at least in the US, however, this fortunately seems to be changing with things like FedNow)

•No APIs for banks which make things like screen scraping necessary for data aggregation, i.e. Mint, or verification tools, i.e. Plaid (and I know this opens a can of worms because banking data should be regulated and private, but still, I've seen this API complaint on HN before, and crypto is a more open system, that could also have layers of permission added to it)

This leads me to another point, which is actually a question. How do people here beat inflation? Stocks? Sure, I have some stocks, too. But crypto yields are some of the highest right now, and it isn't all just some manipulation or leverage or something. Take a look at proof of stake coins, you can stake say, Polkadot, on Kraken, for 12% APR [1]. You can also stake Polkadot, directly, without using an exchange as an intermediary, it just requires more technical skill. The staking return on proof of stake coins is a reward for helping secure the proof of stake network.

I've heard Charles Hoskinson, the creator of Cardano and co-founder of Ethereum, say in one of his videos that we need a new asset class in order to make up for this inflationary environment. And also, I would add, that we need that to accommodate for what I consider to be a war on cash. I'd be happy to keep fiat in a savings account, and I did for many years, until the rates on savings accounts went to basically zero. Now people are basically forced to hold riskier things like stocks, or if they have an even higher appetite for risk, crypto.

In short, I don't think everything in digital fiat is going perfectly well. If it was, I don't think I'd find crypto as attractive.

[1] https://www.kraken.com/en-us/features/staking-coins

Re: Web3 is a stupid idea

#129

Post by derefr »

jollybean wrote: post #116
derefr wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before I answer: why are you asking this in response to the definition of a piece of technical jargon? What makes something "web3", and whether anyone should care about "web3", are separate questions. Nevertheless, the answer is: because web standards don't allow browsers and other only-speaks-HTTP clients, to interact with regular peer-to-peer protocols, preventing them from participating in [the existing networks s…

Seems to me that Web3 is focused on Etherium, which is definitely a specific kind of 'P2P' if you want to use that term. That 'broad generalized use-case' you articulated isn't really a 'use case'. It's not really a problem that needs solving. And of course a browser plugin solves can get around those problems. The issue is that this entire stack of technology doesn't do anything that people really need or want. Ethe…

Most substrate technologies are not, on their own, "problems that need solving." What real-world problem does TCP solve? WebRTC? ICMP? Nothing, without application-layer protocols on top of them.

These low-level protocols are essentially frameworks for building solutions, solutions that take a standard shape specified by the low-level protocol, and thus allow for standardization in libraries and tooling.

Web3 is a substrate standard, a specification for how browsers should frame RPC and event-streaming requests to "p2p 'light client' HTTP gateways". It's not an application-layer protocol.

Ethereum's RPC protocol is an example of a Web3 protocol, just e.g. SMTP is an example of a TCP protocol.

Web3 is a nascent concept, in that it doesn't really have other things built on top of it yet. Its implementation is a de-facto outgrowth of what people did when building the Ethereum protocol. But the concept of "a Web3 protocol" isn't definitionally tied in any way to the Ethereum RPC protocol, any more than TCP is tied to whichever application-layer protocols it co-evolved with. (TELNET was a major one, I believe.)

Web3 can be a useful framework even if the only thing people have built on it so far (Ethereum) isn't useful. (I won't claim one way or the other whether Ethereum is useful; I'm just pointing out that believing one way or the other about Ethereum being useful is irrelevant to whether Web3 as a low-level protocol is a useful tool for building protocols.)

> And of course a browser plugin solves can get around those problems.

Browser plugins do not practically exist any more. The era where you could ship an experience requiring users to install a plugin like Flash, and actually get adoption, is gone. Now a majority of browser installations in the world are inviolate apps running on a phone or tablet or Chromebook (or desktop PC with an App Store and code signing), where the device doesn't allow the user to embed other native code to run in the context of the browser. Only weak extension APIs are supported, and these intentionally do not expose features like speaking arbitrary L4/5 wire protocols.

The problems browsers have, can now really only be solved either by browser manufacturers themselves (as in e.g. the browser U2F API), or by operating entirely "above" the browser by using HTTP to communicate with gateways that do what the browser cannot.

Re: Web3 is a stupid idea

#130

Post by a94d5dc743 »

What decentralized web can there possibly be when the overwhelming majority of users is on ipv4 behind symmetric NAT?

An no, tunneling traffic through a handful of relays is not decentralization either. And neither is storing the full copy of a blockchain elsewhere but on an end user device.

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