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Web3 is a stupid idea

timdaub.github.io

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Re: Web3 is a stupid idea

#81

Post by binarymax »

X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #53

It was only this year that I actually got excited about Ethereum specifically because of what "web3" enables. Yes it's a dumb name, and this article certainly doesn't cover all of the issues, shit just look at the confirmation page for metamask, it literally just asks you if you want to spend X to submit a byte array. No link to the contract, the method you are calling, any avaliable adudits etc. But if you as a read…

Your last phrase is really what gets me. Why should any web delivery platform get "clogged up" by content? If this becomes popular, then it just gets slower and more painful to use in ways that aren't fixed by adding more infrastructure?

Also, what is the value add that can be explained to someone who just wants to use the web and leaving the jargon like permisionlessness and composability aside? What reason would anyone have to start using this as a consumer?

Re: Web3 is a stupid idea

#82

Post by rattlesnakedave »

tmcw wrote: post #43
dnpp123 wrote: post #32

Sadly not sure the ecosystem is mature enough for any kind of standardization yet.

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.

6 - 12 years isn't a long time for the ecosystems these protocols are attempting to build.

Re: Web3 is a stupid idea

#83

Post by danielrhodes »

api wrote: post #19

My biggest issue with it is its complexity. It's impossible to tell what the fuck is happening behind things like Metamask, which makes me wonder if the whole thing isn't fake decentralization with hidden centralized services or authorities working behind the scenes. It also means that it's hard to create different implementations. I've seen fake decentralization in other areas in the very dodgy cryptocurrency ecosys…

This is what happens to most decentralized services. They are hard and wonky to use. People need help using them, corporations need reliability. And hence come centralized services to help sort it out.

Examples:

* Cash -> Bank Deposit Account

* Email (host your own mail server) -> Gmail

* Rack your own server -> AWS

* Everybody is a DNS node -> Root Servers/ISPs/Cloudflare/OpenDNS, etc.

* BitTorrent -> Pirate Bay

* Git -> GitHub

* Bitcoin -> Coinbase

Re: Web3 is a stupid idea

#84

Post by rattlesnakedave »

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.

Re: Web3 is a stupid idea

#85

Post by Matthias247 »

agustif wrote: post #12

web2: client server web3: client client client

From the blog post I understood this still talks from the browser client to some gateway server, which might then be part of a p2p network. Which would certainly be required if the library uses http for communication. Or did I got it wrong and a native browser plugin enables other means of communication?

Re: Web3 is a stupid idea

#86

Post by pavlov »

overgard wrote: post #66
pavlov wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unpay…

Why should it be crypto though? If e.g. Stripe offered this and you could fill it up with your credit card (which you've probably given to them already), they could reach a much larger group of users and it would be easier to use than the private-keys-and-wallets hassle of crypto.

Re: Web3 is a stupid idea

#87

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st »

binarymax wrote: post #81
X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #53

It was only this year that I actually got excited about Ethereum specifically because of what "web3" enables. Yes it's a dumb name, and this article certainly doesn't cover all of the issues, shit just look at the confirmation page for metamask, it literally just asks you if you want to spend X to submit a byte array. No link to the contract, the method you are calling, any avaliable adudits etc. But if you as a read…

Your last phrase is really what gets me. Why should any web delivery platform get "clogged up" by content? If this becomes popular, then it just gets slower and more painful to use in ways that aren't fixed by adding more infrastructure? Also, what is the value add that can be explained to someone who just wants to use the web and leaving the jargon like permisionlessness and composability aside? What reason would an…

Long term ethereum is looking at adding more 'infrastructure' but it's early stages, the current paradigm is to move transactions to "roll-ups" that inherent their security from the mainchain. Rollups are expected to increase throughput ~100-1000x (so optimistically getting back to ~1 cent per tx)

All of this is early enough that it's all currently exposed to the user. The fact of the matter is that cryptocurrency is still quite technical and under heavy development (well bitcoin isn't, but you can only do one thing with it). Hopefully as these technical solutions are rolled out wallet software will start abstracting across them so the user doesn't need to worry about whether they are transacting on a roll-up.

The current state is really not ready for general adoption. It's easy to lose all of your funds to some sort of hack or rug-pull, if you lose your keys you've lost your funds, it's hard to determine what is trust worthy, tax day is a nightmare etc.

I participate because I find it fascinating and can stomach the technical complexity and risks

Re: Web3 is a stupid idea

#88

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st »

tmcw wrote: post #27
zzok22 wrote: post #20

It's much easier to criticize than to build an alternative. I don't think anyone at Metamask or in the space in general thinks to themselves that the ecosystem is in a state of full maturity or that there aren't major problems. Despite its shortcomings, MM and Web3 have given us capabilities that simply didn't exist five years ago. And those capabilities aren't just limited to a select number of shadowy super hackers…

People are building things like renewed web standards (Project Fugu, for example) and P2P networks (Beaker, Hypercore), and light clients (Mighty). These projects don't get any attention from the "Web3" crowd because they don't involve currency speculation.

Why exclude IPFS? That is near and dear to the web3/cryptocurrency space, but can also be leveraged without participating in currency speculation at all.

Re: Web3 is a stupid idea

#89

Post by soneca »

max_ wrote: post #77
tmcw wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are building things like renewed web standards (Project Fugu, for example) and P2P networks (Beaker, Hypercore), and light clients (Mighty). These projects don't get any attention from the "Web3" crowd because they don't involve currency speculation.

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.

> ” Most of open source fails because they don't acknowledge this reality.”

That’s a bold statement. Most of projects that do acknowledge this reality also fail. Like all for-profit and even those web3 projects that are using cryptocurrency speculation. So I think there are tons of reasons that open source projects fail, not just because of this reason.

Re: Web3 is a stupid idea

#90

Post by betwixthewires »

My main concern with it is that a lot of these temporary ecosystem workarounds become de facto standard and it lessens the original purpose of doing all this. An example in the article is Infura. It is a system designed to allow easy use of the network in the interim before a truly decentralized peer to peer network is mature, but habits form and interests entrench and tools get built on infrastructure and you get legacy systems and technical debt and nobody wants to change how things work after a while. I think this is basically the gripe of the article, we have not delivered on the sales pitch yet, are still relying on stopgaps, and as time goes on it becomes increasingly difficult to move past them and they become the norm.
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