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What Is Web3? Should You Care?

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Re: What Is Web3? Should You Care?

#21

Post by dwaite »

tomByrer wrote: post #18
0xcoffee wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There has never been a web problem with people being published. Run your own website.

What you are talking about is how large companies are not willing to amplify those voices.

Web3 so far has not been about new forms of publishing _or_ amplification nearly as much as it has been about owning generated cat drawings. I don't think it is meant to solve this problem.

There's also the question of whether uncontrolled and anonymous amplification is a societal harm.

Re: What Is Web3? Should You Care?

#22

Post by dwaite »

noman-land wrote: post #17
hihihihi1234 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ever…

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

These are identifiers, backed by accounts with credentials.

> 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.

What value does this have for your email provider? Instagram or Twitter? The phone company? The bank?

All of these companies provide value _through_ the identifier. Checking accounts and Credit cards issued by the bank. The phone number. Your handle on Instagram or Twitter.

Many of these need to have an idea of a real-world identity for regulatory reasons. For account recovery actions. For effective enforcement of abuse bans.

What about this off switch? Even if I show up with my own identifier - twitter can still refuse to post my messages. My bank could block access to my funds.

This vision seems to be able replacing these businesses with new businesses and new infrastructure.

Re: What Is Web3? Should You Care?

#23

Post by dwaite »

noman-land wrote: post #7
jwilber wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you describe some of these possible changes?

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".

This doesn't require web3 though. We have Web Authentication already integrated into every browser.

Re: What Is Web3? Should You Care?

#24

Post by jazzyjackson »

guilhas wrote: post #9
jwilber wrote: 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…

did you get involved in bitclout? it approaches decentralized social media from this “monetize everything” angle, with one click to mint NFTs from any post. I actually like the micro-tipping and fundraising potential, but honestly the drama just gets cranked up to 11 once people’s financial solvency is tied to randos’ reputations.

i’m of the opinion that everything monetization touches dies, tho i’m sure META will be full of content creators getting their royalties as people have no choice but to buy an NFT of any MP3 they want to play in their zuck-sanctioned surveillance-spaces, I still believe in the old cyberspace declarations [0] where government regulations and copyright law are considered quaint anachronisms.

[0] https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

Re: What Is Web3? Should You Care?

#25

Post by NicoJuicy »

noman-land wrote: post #17
hihihihi1234 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ever…

Your first sentence greatly exaggerates the content that follows. I don't see any actual problems with the latter.

I do see more problems with the "solutions" actually.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: What Is Web3? Should You Care?

#26

Post by 8note »

dwaite wrote: post #21
tomByrer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

There has never been a web problem with people being published. Run your own website. What you are talking about is how large companies are not willing to amplify those voices. Web3 so far has not been about new forms of publishing _or_ amplification nearly as much as it has been about owning generated cat drawings. I don't think it is meant to solve this problem. There's also the question of whether uncontrolled and…

I'd rephrase amplification as discovery.

As a consumer of publications, I am limited by the centralization of discovery mechanisms, to only see what big companies want to show me.

It becomes a bigger problem when they choose to show different people disjoint information. Eg. Somebody could plan and attempt a coup without me hearing about it till after the fact, even though they conspired quite openly

Re: What Is Web3? Should You Care?

#27

Post by 8note »

erulabs wrote: post #20
_alex_ wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-distr…

I'd expect a voting system to be unable to prove that any one voter voted in a certain way. I don't think that requirement is well suited for a blockchain?

Re: What Is Web3? Should You Care?

#28

Post by 8note »

guilhas wrote: post #9
jwilber wrote: 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…

What's in it for YouTube in this? It operates quite profitably without using blockchain to track ownership of videos and copyrights and who to send ad money to

Re: What Is Web3? Should You Care?

#29

Post by md_ »

erulabs wrote: post #20
_alex_ wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-distr…

Thanks for sharing the examples!

The obvious criticism is indeed that these use cases could be addressed—if not with Postgres—with Merkle trees, no? Like (at a quick glance) MediLedger wants auditability similar to (say) Cert Transparency, and is using a “permissioned” blockchain to do that. How that differs from a centralized or partially centralized model like CT isn’t obvious to me.

Perhaps more importantly, though, none of these examples seem like they demonstrate the supposed appeal of “Web3.0”: permissioned blockchains, by definition, do not have truly distributed ownership; the entire bullshit premise of Web3.0 from people like (ironically) a16z is that you get to own “digital assets.” Yet permissioned, partially centralized blockchains—-irrespective of whether Postgres would be a better solution!—-exhibit none of those characteristics, right?

If all the hype around “Web3.0” is just a way of saying “supply chain tracking will be done, at greater cost and complexity, in a distributed manner”, that doesn’t strike me as deserving of all the hype. What broad cultural or economic impacts will it have?

Re: What Is Web3? Should You Care?

#30

Post by md_ »

dropnerd wrote: post #5

you can lose half of your logins (oauth) if faang's algorithm don't like you. decentralized identities fix this for free (no-onchain transactions required)

Indeed, but I do wonder whether most users need a single global identity anyway. FIDO keys or—gasp—passwords-per-site seem to solve the real problem most users have (which is, you know, maintaining logins).

I do think if there were strong user demand for a unified web identity (beyond email identifiers, which aren’t obviously improved by blockchain), we’d see more adoption of OIDC, including offered by IdPs who only provide that service.

Instead, the common providers are providing federated identity as a sideline—you don’t create an Apple or Facebook account because you want to be able to sign in with Facebook elsewhere on the web; you create it ‘cause you want to use Facebook’s app.

Users don’t care—or don’t understand—federated identity, so they sure as hell aren’t going to be interested in blockchain-decentralised versions.

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