> 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.
Web3 is a stupid idea
61–70 of 220 posts
Re: Web3 is a stupid idea
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ethereum is, what, 6 years old. Metamask has been in development for 5 years. Bitcoin is 12 years old. Bitcoin is older than React.js. Ethereum has been around for as long as TikTok. Uber was founded in the same year as Bitcoin and has essentially destroyed a worldwide industry. At some point these things aren't young or early, they're just stupid.
What point are you making here? Just because they haven't destroyed a worldwide industry in 5 or 6 years they are stupid?
They haven't 'found' a single practical use case other than for some speculators who think they have a 'store of value'.
Reading this thread it's clear Web3 doesn't really have a use case either, it's more like a concept.
These have many parallels in industry - there are tons of products that never got made because they didn't make a whole lot of sense even though they were cool. The difference being, people can chose to spend their own time on these things now if they so choose and a lot of people do.
It's like a distributed technical artistic counter-cultural social movement except the artists believe they're doing something more practical than they probably are.
Re: Web3 is a stupid idea
#63This is a good answer for that: https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1434530149119135753
Re: Web3 is a stupid idea
#64So I've never heard of this term until now, but actually, I can think of a use case for this I kind of like. So, pretty much daily I get linked to an article on a paywalled site that wants me to subscribe or get a free trial. And I always click away, I'm not going through the hassle of email verification or putting in my credit card for a 2 minute read. But if this supported something like "pay 25 cents to read this…
This dream of penny transactions is as old as the web — even HTTP status code 402 was reserved for this purpose [1], but a unified solution never happened.
Many startups have tried building add-ons and other solutions for this, but it doesn't seem to be a very attractive proposition to a larger user base. People seem to prefer subscriptions rather than nickel-and-diming each piece of content. (Consider how Spotify and Netflix triumphed over the iTunes Store model of 99-cent transactions.)
The blockchain backing of so-called "Web3" is not a great fit for micro-transactions because fees are very high and the networks are congested. You'd be paying several dollars in transaction fees for that 25-cent purchase, and waiting several minutes for it to go through.
Of course this can be mitigated by a centralized solution that can handle higher volumes. But then it's no different from all the micro-transaction startups that already failed.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402
Re: Web3 is a stupid idea
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure; I would describe the technical requirement for something to be "web3" as: • data storage and/or backend computation taking place in/on a decentralized / distributed-locus-of-control system, • where these systems are exposed directly to browsers via regular-web HTTP gateways, • and where there are well-defined general APIs (these being the "web3" APIs) such that these gateways are interchangeable in the access t…
And this is the 'technical requirement' that solves what problem, that people actually need solved?
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 serving] peer-to-peer use-cases. You can't write a blockchain node as Javascript that executes in a browser and have it talk to the same network peers that other native nodes for that chain interact with.
Instead, if users want to participate in such use-cases (e.g. to download a torrent on a Chromebook), they must use technologies like WebTorrent, that stand up their own, incompatible p2p networks based on WebRTC and other web-specific carrier protocols. This creates isolated "web p2p" networks (e.g. the WebTorrent swarm) divorced from their regular-p2p equivalents (e.g. the BitTorrent swarm.)
Web3 is one way of avoiding this network split: it is a [nascent] set of standard APIs, allowing browsers and other only-speaks-HTTP clients to interact with p2p protocols by holding relationships with "p2p protocol 'light client' over HTTP" gateways, that expose the p2p protocols in standard useful-over-HTTP manners to browsers.
Another way of avoiding such a network split, instead of web3, would be creating lower-level gateways that allow browsers and other only-speaks-HTTP clients to directly tunnel p2p wire protocols over HTTP, where the gateway would terminate the HTTP tunnel and then route the p2p packets to peers as normal.
However, most p2p protocols are a really bad fit for having all communications linearized into a TCP stream. Peers connected through such gateways would be really badly-behaved peers from the perspective of the network.
Web3 "solves" this by not having the browser speak the p2p protocol itself, but instead having the gateway speak the p2p protocol and act as the finite-state-machine keeping the p2p state, while the browser just gets to interact with the state model that the gateway node builds up through its p2p interactions, via either RPC request-response flows, or event streaming flows, both of which are much better behaved over an HTTP carrier than p2p traffic generally is.
Re: Web3 is a stupid idea
#66So I've never heard of this term until now, but actually, I can think of a use case for this I kind of like. So, pretty much daily I get linked to an article on a paywalled site that wants me to subscribe or get a free trial. And I always click away, I'm not going through the hassle of email verification or putting in my credit card for a 2 minute read. But if this supported something like "pay 25 cents to read this…
This dream of penny transactions is as old as the web — even HTTP status code 402 was reserved for this purpose [1], but a unified solution never happened. Many startups have tried building add-ons and other solutions for this, but it doesn't seem to be a very attractive proposition to a larger user base. People seem to prefer subscriptions rather than nickel-and-diming each piece of content. (Consider how Spotify an…
Everyone I've talked to (and my personal feeling) is that people are kind of sick of the number of subscriptions they have and have to maintain. I think the microtransaction thing never took off not because it's a bad idea, but because it never was built-in and legit feeling and widespread. If I just had a general crypto wallet where I could add some spending money every once in a while, and I could use that to unpaywall things by clicking a button, I would totally use that.
Re: Web3 is a stupid idea
#67Earlier 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.
Right, and we will eventually choose to forgo toilets and defecate in the streets again, because "never say never". Please address my argument instead of this unconstructive purity-testing nonsense.
It's not about "never say never". It's about HN being notoriously bad at predicting trends.
Re: Web3 is a stupid idea
#68Earlier 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.
Email and Mastodon are existing decentralized social networks. If you want to call something Web3, it's going to need to be more than just "decentralized".
Re: Web3 is a stupid idea
#69I was around for web 2.0, and it felt like a substantial change over how the web worked previously. It was the first glimpse that the web was capable of replacing the desktop apps we were accustomed to, while simultaneously adding new capabilities that didn't exist in desktop apps. There was a lot more to it, but to the casual user that was the most obvious difference. This was the first thing I've read about web 3,…
This is the problem here. What kind of lay people care about this at all? I'm having a hard time being convinced myself, and I could not imagine trying to get 90% of the population remotely excited about this. There's nothing new for them, like you said, no killer app.
Re: Web3 is a stupid idea
#70I'm generally a blockchain skeptic but I would count this article as evidence _for_ web3 being important.
Everything that matters goes through a phase of the idea being great and inspiring and powerful, but the tooling being utter garbage. The latter is fixable.