Ask HN: Do you think web3 is a hype or a real thing about to happen?
I liked a lot the period of mid to late 1990 until mid 2000s where I was mostly communicated with strangers over internet and focused on learning things. I installed my first linux version those days, setup a mail server and then later a http server, played with Netscape and Mozaic. Remember using Pine to read emails and I remember how many nights I spent downloading resources from mailing lists as the internet was cheap during the night.
What a wonderful time going from linux to window 3.1 to windows 95 back to Fedora and Redhat and waiting hours with enthusiasm to install a new OS and playing with what it had to offer, discovering almost every default installed program, tweaking and sharing and learning.
Do you think that web3 will really work? My scepticism is related to users hosting content for other users. I don't see yet how this will truly work at a massive scale. But of course I did not read everything about this subject so I am sure there are things that I miss, maybe trends that I am not aware of.
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[ 6.9 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadI don't believe in users hosting content for other users either. However, why don't users host their own content. I would not let anyone to host anything made by me that took me more than 15 minutes of effort. My stuff, my rule.
Web3 makes these tasks more complex and slower in order to create a decentralised, privacy-preserving, cryptocurrency supporting network. No average user cares about privacy on the web or paying with anything other than fiat.
And if the user base isn't there, what company will build software to interact with Web3? Every usable browser today is made by a for-profit company.
I can see it being used for niche, nerdy communities, but that's about it. I don't think it will ever be mainstream.
We will work the kinks out of this protocol, as well.
It's not a protocol problem, it's a purposefulness problem.
You can have the most perfectly oiled and flawless Rube Goldberg machine, but that doesn't mean it manages to become useful because all the kinks are ironed out. At the end of the day, it's still a convoluted way to do stuff no one cares about.
The big fundamental is it allows for platforms to share equity with their users. It also has a bunch of marginal features downstream of “I can code my treasury/board” and anonymity, but the big one is it allows for platforms to share the upside with early adopters. And if that’s the only benefit, it’s a huge one.
The problem is it has no single protocol. Browsers and http somehow unified on similar standards. I don’t know if that was a miracle, but I don’t see it happening in crypto. There’s a fractal of competition, and that’s actually bad for adoption. It has no correlate, though it’s possible bridges over bridges and a lot of hammering on the UX will eventually paper things out.
But contracts that guarantee revenue share or other types of equity share with users is a significant benefit and a new world.
Regulation May kill it as well.
Ok I'll bite: in your opinion what is the absolute best application you associate with the web3 keyword, and is a clear unquestionable selling point?
> The big fundamental is it allows for platforms to share equity with their users.
What leads you to believe that equity sharing is not possible right now without resorting to web3 buzzwords? I mean, the only reason that stops platforms from sharing equity with anyone at all is the fact that platform owners do not want that. That is a business model consequence, not a technology limitation.
> The problem is it has no single protocol.
I don't know if you even noticed that you haven't described a single problem at all, at least one that people care about. You only talked about crypto as a solution to a problem than no one has.
And the reason why no one shares equity is quite simple: no one wants to, because the ones that do never felt blocked at all.
Anything with user generated content. The takes on web3 are significantly smaller and you can argue why but the fact is people get to choose their platform based on public contracts. Trust is the feature, the platforms can do anything web 2 does just with better more solid terms.
> What leads you to believe that equity sharing is not possible right now without resorting to web3 buzzwords?
Because modifying the cap table is hard and controlled by a single entity, so even if they somehow jumped through all the regulatory hoops they wouldn’t have the trust.
You’re also arguing against reality. Name companies that do it without crypto, because every crypto company does.
> you haven't described a single problem at all
I guess you think Twitter, YouTube and Facebook don’t have trust problems.
> the reason why no one shares equity is quite simple
Crypto has proven this wrong already.
I'm sorry but that is meaningless. I was hoping for a concrete, tangible example, but this sounds an awful lot like handwaving and question marks preceding the inexplicable "profit" stage.
> (...) but the fact is people get to choose their platform based on public contracts.
What exactly leads you to believe that's something anyone cares about or is even a problem that people need fixing? Right now it's more than enough to just point to a resource as a reference.
> Because modifying the cap table is hard (...)
No one even know what a "cap table" is, let alone cares about it.
I was hoping to hear about real world problems that the web3 buzzword promises to fix, but at best that's just a contrived way to shoehorn crypto as a solution to a problem that does not exist at all.
> I guess you think Twitter, YouTube and Facebook don’t have trust problems.
To the eyes of virtually everyone, no it does not. Content is posted by users, and to most checking who posted it is more than enough.
More importantly, even if people cared about that, you're trying to pass off the web3 buzzword as the only possible way to address the problem, while at most it's just a contrived way to propose one alternative approach to the issue.
> Crypto has proven this wrong already.
I'm sorry but your statement is plainly absurd. Crypto does not nor ever addressed the issue of equity at all.
If that's the very best argument you can muster to sell the web3 buzzword on it's perceived merits then I'm sorry but you've only inadvertently demonstrated once again that at best web3 is a convoluted solution to a problem that does not exist.
A lot of people definitely are not happy with existing platforms, and they very much understand getting paid for their contribution vs not. All your replies are essentially “sorry that’s ridiculous” so there’s not much for me to reply to here.
Argue why trust isn’t worthwhile or isn’t plausible, don’t argue that it doesn’t exist or somehow isn’t understandable especially without reasoning. Any boomer can understand a smart contract that’s not changeable without heavy majority vote ensuring they make 90% earnings on their, say CryptoTube channel and why it’d be better than 30% at Googles whim.
I made no assertion at all. I asked you to present what you feel is the best value proposition behind the web3 buzzword, the best examples you could come up with were "equity sharing" and "trust", and I pointed out the fact that in the eyes of virtually everyone in the world none of those examples register even remotely as issues, and in fact they are seen as solved problems.
That is exactly the core problem with the web3 buzzword: at best, it is nothing more than a solution searching for a problem to fix, and so far the best that the hand-full of web3 buzzword supporters could come up with are irrelevant things that no one really cares about but require major technical overhauls to address?
The whole story is totally absurd, and we're talking about the absolute best examples you could come up with.
> Like I understand not believing that sharing equity is a good incentive, but literally denying the current day reality is just weird.
You're unwittingly demonstrating another problem linked with web3 enthusiasts: you handwave an awful lot to try to fill in all the holes in your arguments.
Here you are trying to use the term "reality" to try to deflect the fact that no one cares about web3's convoluted value proposition for "equity sharing" and "trust", two solved problems in the eye of the world that are only orthogonally related to web3.
If your arguments had any substance or merit to them, you could simply support your claims that people are willing to migrate to an entirely new infrastructure to benefit from the value proposition you've presented, but instead you fell back to handwaving and personal attacks.
> A lot of people definitely are not happy with existing platforms, and they very much understand getting paid for their contribution vs not.
Don't you understand that neither of those arguments comes close to make a case for web3?
At most, web3 proposes a specific proposal that is convoluted and demands a complete overhaul of the current infrastructure, but it is at best orthogonally related.
You could, right now, implement platforms where users get paid. There are a million of those already. Why do you feel the need to ignore reality to be able to even start proposing web3 as one of all alternstive solutions to a solved problem?
This whole discussion is tiring, specially as your absolute best usecases for web3 even fail to register any relevance or usefulness. frankly, you make it all sound like a convoluted but thinly veiled and desperate attempt to pump crypto. As handwaving and personal attacks don't help anyone make any case, I don't see a point in continuing the discussion.
You asked for why, and I gave reasons why. When I answered the why you fled back to “examples” of specific implementations, which is a different conversation but not necessary to show why. I’m not even a web3 person or whatever you seem to be making this tribal, I’m just not a blanket denialist and can acknowledge it has interesting upsides.
Finally, crypto is already huge despite its current massive hurdles. Those hurdles will only go down. You talk like it’s failing but it’s actually been winning for over a decade. In fact it’s crazy how many non technical people have adopted a very technical thing. The claim that it isn’t catching on is quite literally perfectly backwards, it has caught on to a huge degree despite huge barriers.
Cdixon just did a nice thread on this: https://mobile.twitter.com/cdixon/status/1444072365822857219
The web became popular because it solved a myriad of problems that people cared about, from text and voice communication to meeting new people.
If you cannot come up with any real world use or purpose for a new hyped tech then I'm not sure if there is any rational basis for that hype.
And searching for problems that match a solution is not how progress happens.
You tried to compare web3 to the web in the 90s, but you unwittingly make web3 sound like the semantic web in the 90s up to now.
It takes vision to predict the future. The people who have it are too busy making things to be making propaganda on Hackernews.
Blockchain might also be attractive to users who are not developers, but are computer power users, since they can effectively rent their computer for extra money, and provide a valuable service (That they hopefully personally support) in the process.
Now I discover new things but - maybe because I am older or I have a better imagination - I dont have the same awe or wow factor of discovering a new type of knowledge that I never even dreamt about like back then.
So I am wondering will web3 bring something like this?
Of course it could be nostalgia and I probably see that period through a magnifying glass.
There are very few projects doing anything interesting with web3 outside of speculation or "grifter" quasi-MLMs (NFTs). Until that changes, web3 won't be interesting. But, we are on the cusp of that change. Soon, there will be interesting applications on web3, and they will change the web permanently.
Two things stand in the way::
- web3 requires specialized browser plugin or even worse, a special app. You cannot do web3 inside a web2 browser.
- transaction costs and throughput
web3 requires a browser plugin (meaning not on mobile) AND education on how to use it. Those are blockers for 99% of the people, so you only have 1% of the people who will use it, and in that small population, most of them are there to get rich quick or die trying.
And, transaction costs are high for the web3 (I'm equating web3 with Ethereum). It only makes sense to participate for people who are trying to get rich.
BUT: if transaction costs go down, and people can participate in web3 WITHOUT a browser plugin, then people will start building interesting projects OUTSIDE of speculation and MLMs.
That will be the moment really exciting things start to happen.
When will that be?
If you don't know what L2 is, here is why it is important: L2 is a way to scale transaction throughput outside of the mainnet Ethereum. There are many ways to do it, but generally they involve rollups, either optimistic or ZK-proofs.
What's a rollup? A rollup is a way to do lots of smaller transactions off the main Ethereum network, and then roll them all up into a single main Ethereum transaction. You amortize all the small transactions across one single mainnet transaction.
L2 products are still in their infancy, don't work great, and have poor UI. But, they are one of many solutions to solving the transaction cost and throughput problem.
If you are rolling your eyes at ZK-proofs and saying "Oh, those crypto guys, more snake oil!" You should know that Google is using ZK-proofs to guarantee the information they pull from Android devices and processed in ML is has a guarantee of anonymity when shared into Google. There is a lot of interesting research happening despite all the grifting in crypto, so don't miss the good stuff. If you are excited about hard math, crypto has some fun work.
So, L2 will solve the "transaction cost and throughput problem."
The only other barrier is browser plugins, IMHO. The exciting thing is that L2 solutions have their own API. When one of them finallly offers a great UX for interacting with their network, you can interact with it using web2 and not with MetaMask.
Then, everything will open up. It's going to be soon.
If it were to gain mainstream attraction it seems like we're talking at least five more years unless the chromium and safari teams pick this up and make it a priority.
But, my point about L2 solutions is that with those you have a work around.
web3 requires that you use secp256k1 ellptic curves. Those are not available in any browser. So, you cannot sign transactions. You cannot participate in Ethereum from a browser.
But, what if the L2 network does not require that curve? What if it accepts WebCrypto signed L2 transactions? Then, you can participate in Ethereum through L2. You might give up a little in terms of absolute security (these still have much better security than anything else out there, by the way), but for certain applications that might be a tradeoff worth having.
If you can manage transactions in a vanilla browser using WebCrypto (or bundling your own crypto in JS with browserify or something -- that's what I did), and the API is over HTTP instead of into an Ethereum node, then you can participate in a vanilla browser.
L2s can choose whatever encryption schemes they want. They could use rot13 if their customers would be willing to work on a L2 chain with that compromise. :)
A blockchain (if you already know this, sorry...) is just a ledger with transactions created using public/private keys. Ethereum (and Bitcoin) use secp256k1. But, each blockchain can choose their own and L2s have different ones for different reasons. Eventually the L2 needs to put something back on L1 and that transaction has to be using the crytpo the L1 uses. But, the L2 can store into the L1 the answer to a ZK-proof (with the answer as a link in a Merkle tree), and how you manage transactions (and that Merkle tree) inside the L2 is up to the L2 managers.
Edit: Thanks for the interfacing explanation btw, very clear and concise.
https://finneyfor.com/
You can see transactions delivered using this method when I started this four years ago.
https://etherscan.io/address/d2bb82d40c8bcf50d008e39ecb9e44d...
Those were $1 transactions at the time. Now that ETH is worth $200+!
Transaction costs are such that I'm refactoring it to use L2, but my solution works inside vanilla browsers without a browser plugin.
Do you think web3 will work with such volatile currencies? Will these currencies stabilize?
I guess right now I'm hesitant to receive payment in crypto for that fear.
Your point should have been my third point in my long rant above.
Yes, until the price stabilizes, it will be less exciting for a lot of people.
But, until we have utility applications, the ecosystem will just be full of grifters causing instability.
Seems like a catch 22. But, hopefully utility applications will start to appear and that will help stabilize things. .
And, at least the value is consistent in rising, not falling. :)
Perhaps ETH is different in this, as I don't know it well. I know BTC is deflationary by default, and so it seems to be ripe for prospecting/grifting: "buy it today, it'll be worth more in the future! HODL!" If I have a currency that I think will almost certainly be worth more the next day, why would I spend it? Who wants to be the $80M pizza guy?
From what I can tell about ETH, it doesn't seem to be as predictably deflationary, and yet maybe it is, because, if someone is trying to make money off of holding a digital asset, doesn't it have to be deflationary? If the asset inflates, then people lose money and would have an incentive to spend it.
The other option seems to be stable coins, which somehow make me laugh, because many people in the space seem to be so against fiat currency and the US Fed, etc., and then create a currency tied directly to it and those policies.
Maybe I'm naive on this or just brainwashed by what I hear from the US Fed, it just seems that for a currency to work well, it has to almost be slightly inflationary, plus or minus a bit, so that people have an incentive to spend it more than save it.
Anyways, I'm glad you're working in this space and grateful for the way you shared with us :-)
I am still trying to find my voice but I am writing about all this here:
https://basqui.at
Did you see my post regarding the DeFiant podcast with Nate Chastain from OpenSea? He's the one who resigned after he was allegedly purchasing NFTs anonymously and then trying to resell them. My favorite part of the podcast is when he noted NFTs are exciting because the blockchain is a transparent ledger, which is exactly why he got caught. It's so funny.
Almost all the information out there should be filtered through: "why is this person talking about this, what's their incentive?" Cryptocurrency is, of course, all about financial incentives, so that's fitting. And, make no mistake, there is a good reason I'm in here talking too...
I've been closely following the recommendations by zoenolan, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28333766
Are there other resources you'd recommend?
https://www.cairo-lang.org/ https://github.com/martriay/nile/
Yes, learn and play with solidity.
That wasn't on the list, but if you don't know about remix, go there first.
https://remix.ethereum.org/
Hardhat is great, but you can do everything inside a browser with remix, it is amazing.
This is a good starting point video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyoFT4QkoL4
There are always tradeoffs, of course. Content produced by people who don't get paid to produce it is certainly cheaper. And being a middleman who gobbles up data and sells ads is cheaper than being a content producer.
Ideological tradeoffs, too, of course. You have censorship on one side and curation and information quality on the other side. Unfortunately, I don't think very many people on either side of this want to acknowledge that there isn't a strict ideology we can just adhere to all the time and say one of those is more important than the other. Resisting censorship is probably more important when you're living under the Khmer Rouge, but when you're living in a time of abundance where the motivations of most information peddlers is solely to sell something to you, curation starts tipping the scales. This is going to be constantly changing and there is no fixed answer.
I've heard a lot of positive sentiment around "having you data available wherever you browse" - but does that not create a lot of new challenges? Will I have the same data available from all my devices with browsers installed? Everything has a browser now, even my nintendo switch (kind of). How can I make sure to trust a site to handle the parts of my data that they need to interface with?
Perhaps there is a concrete usecase that drives all this hype: come up with a convoluted scheme that involves attaching the Ethereum buzzword to other impressive buzzwords in order to pump it up. I mean, you need to be a fool to miss out on a profitable scheme that's about to blow up because it's web 3 point oh, am I right?
I’m certainly not the barometer of whether or not a technology or protocol will be successful.
It will happen, it's hard to tell if this version will be the one. It probably will never be a big part of the internet. Depending on how you measure big. Facebook and Netflix style stuff will quantifiably stay large. Even if the hosting is decentralised if Youtube doesn't sign your video you can't post it on Youtube, it's complicated to know how people might use the tech. For years bypassing China's firewall (recently tightened) was easy, but no one did it.
> I liked a lot the period of mid to late 1990 until mid 2000s
All that still exists. ie. go create a IoT botnet. It's just not longer 100% of the web. No ones forcing you to live that life anymore, so you need to do it if it's truly what you want.