A bit like usenet of old, information could be recreated on everyone running a full node. Making it much harder to censor.
Now this makes sense for a number of industries, particularly financial, where the data is small, and the rewards are large. Storing petabites of porn on a distributed blockchain, probably not efficient.
So extrapolating here, web3 is a new kind of anti-censorship system with blockchain that ensures the original information isn't corrupted and replaced with misinformation? It's an interesting topic, but it seems in relation to finances, we're talking about a system that enables financial crime.
Right after I posted this I logged onto Twitter to read this by Kimbal Musk tweeted 20 hours ago: "Web3 reminds me of 1995 Internet days. So many older people (younger than I am now) just could not get it. It was clear as a bell to 22yr old me. Now I understand those older people better and I'm working as fast as possible to be a better old person"
I read about how people are making the claim of how this will bring back the web of the early days. The web was always introduced as walled gardens and people love walled gardens. From the beginning if was Yahoo telling you what links to click or aol portals. Today its Apple's curated ecosystem and Facebook.
People are legitimately making a living trading crypto, you know. It's actually putting food on people's tables. It's a tradable asset like any other, and its value is dictated by supply and demand, like any other. How is someone a fool for profiting from trading it?
I see nothing wrong with that. Bookies have been making a living for a long time trading numbers on slips of paper. Gamblers in Las Vegas make a living in the games. The stock market has been described as a casino.
The skepticism I feel is about the web3 meme and the additional meme that it must be good because old people don't understand it. Web3 is a basket of experimental technologies that may or may not bear fruit, but don't tell me it's so new that skeptics are people who are incapable of understanding it. I'm looking for more detail and I get a lot of hand waving. But I'm open to it.
Sure, most revolutionary ideas are pushed by younger people and rejected by older people. That doesn't make every idea pushed by younger people revolutionary. And the convenient fact that early adopters of this revolutionary idea will become incredibly wealthy if it takes off doesn't really help with credibility.
This is survivorship bias stretched to a pretty crazy extreme. I'm pretty sure you could make a much larger list of differences in the evolution of the web and web3 than similarities.
This is simply another form of pushing FOMO for cryptocurrency.
I was a teenager in the 90s, and my dad was my current age and working for an ISP. Everyone there was around his age or older, and they all understood the potential of the early internet and the web. Most of the people in the early 90s internet era that built out the tech were older. It's one thing to say people outside of the tech field can't see the potential in technology, but it's a completely different thing to say that older people in an industry can't see the potential.
I see lots of potential in newer technologies, but web3 is trying to build an inferior version of what we currently have, with rent-seeking middlemen. It's doing so with blockchains, a 13 year old tech, which most of us have been saying for 13 years is a solution in search of a problem (and we've been right so far). Web3 is yet another way of trying to package up and sell it, primarily being pushed by people who have a monetary interest in having you use it, because they're the landlords.
Cross-border transactions are an incredibly niche use-case, and my guess would be that it's primarily used for money laundering. AML laws will probably kill this off, since you still need to turn that crypto into fiat to use it.
DeFi's purpose is avoid taxes on crypto gains. Otherwise, it's the worst form of banking possible.
That wasn't my experience as a young web user in the 90s. Older people definitely "got it". And it took off like a shot for folks of all ages when the .com market opened up.
There are a lot of ideas out there for what web3 would be, but sooner or later, some rubber has to be put to the road. The reason we don't "get it" is because "it" is so nebulously defined.
One theory I have is that the gravity of capital is pushing things towards a world where users pay for more and more web infrastructure costs. Decentralization, it appears, does not lead to democracy, but it does lead to less monolithic servers, and more shared mesh/edge computation. Just good business sense to offload computation on regular users, if the tech is there.
There are a few things that people find exciting, but for me the idea of being able to pay for content frictionlessly is pretty neat. I'd love, for example, if when you get one of those ad blocker blocker popups if there was an option to pay .005 cents to bypass it.
Double spend and censorship resistance are a couple big ones. Privileged westerners have courts and banking which are good enough, so not much reason for them to be interested. Probably nothing.
I often find it useful to relate the Web3 movement to the introduction of the internet. What problem was did that attempt to solve?
The internet solved problems that were only apparent in hindsight. The same could be true of Web3. It could also be nonsense, but I don’t think so. The absence of a particular problem to solve doesn’t necessarily render it useless.
I'm not sure it's trying to solve a specific problem. It's basically the web plus cryptocurrency and related technology which you can use to make a variety of stuff for better or worse. IPFS is cool in principle - being able to store stuff indefinitely on the web without needing ongoing payments to some hoster.
Your thinking is wrong and you should probably log off. Because we live under patriarchy sexism against men just sounds like cuckolded incels complaining. It doesn't exist.
Edit: this incel man child flagged me to the mods in under 15 seconds lmfao
The fact it's impossible to disconnect the profit motive from the technology stack should be incredibly concerning, and the article makes a good point as to why.
My primary concern, right now, is that Web3 is inaccessible to the majority of people, because its very architecture makes a "free" version of it impossible.
Using web3 for auth costs nothing, and users here have often stated an interest in an ad free pay-per-use web.
Here it is, people are just confused because there is a strong incentive on this forum to trash anything cryptocurrency related.
Web3 is by far the easiest way to provide auth to a web app right now, if you haven’t experimented with it I highly recommend giving it a try. The react library is a decent place to start.
> Web3 is by far the easiest way to provide auth to a web app right now
Easiest by what measure? As I understand it, few browsers (read: only one or two) have built in wallets and outside of that the UX for this auth isn’t great. It’s hard to see how this is better/easier to use than existing OIDC/"Sign In With X" solutions.
Tho personally, beyond GitHub for dev related sites, I won’t use them.
If anything it enables “websites” to be simpler, smaller.
A UI atop a single function.
Without the bloat. Without the “we must do enough to show value to get users to sign up”.
I just auth, use it, and move on with my life.
Sometimes there’s a fee per use. Sometimes that value is exchanged somewhere else in the transaction. But either way, I got what I needed and I’m done.
Only if the web3 app itself is entirely decentralized, doesn't implement any moderation, and never votes to change the above. I suspect they will quickly need moderation, and therefore it wont matter if your identity is irrevocable as the platform itself could easily block it.
I do see the value in being able to bring an identity around and store it in a blockchain, but... extreme fragmentation is a bummer.
And what does this revocation accomplish? The app still has your unique address. This revocation is simply "don't log me in next time." You still need to use the app to delete any data, if that's even possible (highly-dependent on the app). This is no different than going to your GitHub account (in the parent comment's example and revoking https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/keeping-your-accou...).
The pay-per-use web has always been a pipedream because of theoverhead of microtransactions. A one time view of a page may be worth $0.25 , but nobody can make that work because of creditcard transaction fees - hence the move to mothly fees and subscriptions. I fail to see how crypto with its variable 'gas' charges are going to make that work or work better. The only ones who made it work were the phone company where they could bill you by the minute based on your activity - and we are right back to centralization.
The current transaction fee is about $2.19. Nobody can use Bitcoins for microtransactions because the fees are worse than credit card networks, PayPal, etc.
What's expensive is storage and meaningful actions.
In terms of "easy way to provide auth" … for who? Certainly not end users.
Also, the people who want a "pay per use" web are, shockingly, generally people for whom "pay per use" is financially feasible. That is not the majority of people.
I've used IPFS[1] to store and host files completely separate from cryptocurrency. IPFS is a major backbone of Web3 tech, and is responsible for enabling much of the current NFT craze because IPFS is free. The same company that made and maintains IPFS also created Filecoin, and the fact that the two are completely separate projects to the point where I can and have used IPFS for free without having any knowledge of or owning any Filecoin speaks volumes.
Judging from some view of the Web3[2] stack, I can create a decentralized application that exists entirely through p2p storage without ever actually having to incorporate a blockchain or cryptocurrency, and this can still be considered Web3 technology.
This is an interesting comment because I disagree completely. Web3’s binding of economics and technology is _exactly_ what makes it compelling.
Free versions of things are often impractical. Good things take time and effort. How many users host their own email servers or have their own mastodon instance for example? Most people prefer to pay (in fees or in ad attention) for premium versions of these services that are built/maintained by private companies in a closed/centralized manner.
At its best, Web3’s marriage of economics and technology allows for a hybrid model where people pay for premium versions of these products built by people/companies in an open manner. The closed vs. open is key here. Without Web3 you can build something open/decentralized for free or something closed/centralized for profit. Web3 allows building services that are open/for profit.
Imagine the power of capitalism harnessed by open projects. Maybe I’m crazy, but that’s what excites me about Web3.
I'm not sure I agree with this article. It's like saying the web is centralized because everyone has to use the same web technologies. Decentralization is about how many people have control, not about how many choices in technology there are.
If something like a social network on top of Bitcoin takes off, the Crypto Bros will have far, far less control than Mark Zuckerberg does over Facebook.
> The idea of the Decentralised Autonomous Organisation that runs itself by consensus, where nobody is really in charge, is illusory. Some individuals will always find a way to be more influential, whether that’s through money, connections or rhetoric. A DAO doesn’t change this simple fact of life; it simply hides it with a new layer of obfuscation.
If the DAO has a number of members, but a single individual in the DAO has wrangled control from the other members (through any number of means), then it's not a democracy, it's a dictatorship.
DAOs don't solve socio-political issues, because technology can't do so.
Most of the piece is mood affiliation, accusing anyone supporting crypto aims of bad faith. Under the fluff, there are two substantive points:
- If Web3 advocates move essential internet services on-chain, that would centralize into a single-database-like source of truth - not decentralize.
- Web3 will not eliminate hierarchies of influence.
The second is unambiguously true. For the first, in my view, there's a sort Schrodinger's cat thing with crypto. DAOs seem much more open than corporations - and they're also creating mini-economies which can lock out non-token holders, privileging the financialized. So it's also kind of true, but the matter is complex.
Any odds, there are a lot of sincere and smart people in crypto, and dismissing them all as basically evil is silly.
Web3 is inclusive in the fullest sense of the term. It does not care if you are a bro. It doesn't even know if you are a bro. It doesn't care where you live, what your name is, what your opinions are, what your hair or skin color is, what your credit score is. Nothing. Anyone and everyone on planet Earth can use it. This is not true of traditional banking and other web2 services. Where people get locked out or denied entry every day by central actors.
Furthermore, all activity is transparent. Everyone can see the database. History can't be altered and the rules can't suddenly be changed. We have no real transparency into the stock market, banks, twitter.com. They can and do selectively edit their databases and change the rules at will. The public can't audit what they are doing. They public can audit the blockchain. The more our institutions become corrupt, the more important transparency and full inclusivity is.
But even if that wasn't the case, so what? HN is overrepresented by people convinced web3 has no merit. That doesn't seem to be a problem (and IMO it isn't), but presenting arguments in favor is a problem?
> Web3 is inclusive in the fullest sense of the term.
Only to those that hold the tokens. Web1 and Web2 seem to be more inclusive.
> Nothing. Anyone and everyone on planet Earth can use it. This is not true of traditional banking and other web2 services.
How is web2 more inaccessible than web3? Also banking is accessible to more people than the internet. The vast majority of unbanked aren't unbanked because they don't have access to banks but because they are so poor that they have no need for banks. How will crypto/web3 help those people?
I still don't know what web3 is supposed to be. It sounds like IPFS and bittorrent but with more cryptocoins involved somehow.
I've only heard the term from people pushing their investment in crypto so maybe I'm biased against it. The whole "decentralised" part of it is already here in the form of peer to peer networking and regular old web servers anyone can run. The fediverse is also great at replicating information across networks. Is that what's meant by web3?
People and companies choose to centralise the internet because it's easy and because it's cheap. Graph theory is hard to get right in software, after all.
This is the thing I do not fully understand about crypto and more specifically Bitcoin. If Bitcoin is successful, it will inevitably create a tiny group of super-wealthy early adopters amongst everyone else and we are back to the same rigged system evangelists were arguing crypto solves. Even worse, there is no method of confiscation/redistribution/taxation to prevent monopolies.
Writing anything to blockchain costs money ("gas" on ETH) and energy. And deleting written data is practically impossible. Why not skip it altogether and build Web3 as peer-to-peer based, really decentralized system?
Great idea! How are we going to get people to run their own persistent servers at scale so this peer-to-peer network stays online 24/7 though?
Oh I know, why don't we build some kind of economic incentive that pays whoever wants to run one of these servers some small amount of money for doing so, and we all pay a little to these servers when we want to do things with the network?
Under that model nodes would contain search indexes. Content would be self hosted or blockchain hosted for a fee or sponsor hosted through ads. It could work..
Most people already have persistent servers - smartphones. Considering how much tracking data and ads are already sent up and down the network by apps, installing a tiny web server to share a simple blog or image gallery shouldn't make a huge difference. And 24/7 uptime is not strictly necessary; considering digital wellbeing, that might be an unintended feature.
> Imagine if someone were to suggest that all web infrastructure should share the same database. That would rightly be seen as an absurd idea — but that’s what Web3 advocates are essentially suggesting.
I think BGP routing tables, ARIN, ICANN, whois records, and DNS root servers are equally as centralized as a blockchain would be - in that they form top level federations, sort of how "the internet" is centralized when you call it one thing. Cloudflare, Akamai, AWS etc are more centralized as single companies. Blockchains are essentially nested application/data layer federation protocols.
It's hard to respond with more charity than he ventured, so I'd ask if there is a smarter form of his argument I should consider. It may be worth hearing what the concern is rooted in.
All anyone talks about in crypto is how to make money from crypto - this is the number one use case for it.
Sure, it's used on the dark Web, but when was the last time you heard someone talk about how great it was to buy something with crypto?
I can't get over the fact that crypto seems kinda useless - in the sense that it doesn't actually get used for anything other than on crypto exchanges.
Talk of Web3 is also equally confusing to me. It seems to me that people want to spend less time with tech these days, not more. If anything it seems that web3 is going to be more about interaction with the real world, especially after pandemic lockdowns.
People talking about social networks paying its users and smart contracts etc... I also just don't understand - these things are already possible but have not been done with existing tech, so why would anything change just because we have NFTs or whatever?
It all smells of greed and feels like people peddling some new MLM system.
You can talk about gov and how the man has us all entrapped in the system or whatever, but we don't typically store lumps of gold in our homes, so why would you do the same with crypto (which is arguably easier to steal)?
Getting and spend coin in the early days was the draw. Too much money poured in making everyone afraid to spend because everything is worth so much. I remember people dropping coin in reddit to anyone with a positive comment.
Some legal currencies are issued more and more based on "government credit" instead of real assets like gold will likely have their value drop (supply > demand).
For "Cryptocurrencies" (let's discuss whether they quality as "currency" or not in another place)
Some types of them has limited supply by design (but the supply can still increase slowly for the next N (e.g. 10) years with slower rate each year)
So if the demands goes up (which can also go down) and the supply does not grow too much, the value per "coin" would increase.
Maybe for some, but not for the majority. I don't view my dollars as assets. I view my dollars as a way to get goods and services (mostly as a way to pay bills). I don't hold on to dollars if I expect the value to rise (I don't really have a choice), like most people, I live paycheck to paycheck paying for a roof over the heads of my kids and food in their bellies.
The only people I know who "hold" fiat currency either are ridiculously rich, are single with no serious responsibilities or when I was in the Navy, there was scheme thing going around that to get rich quick enough to get out the Navy and fuck off for the rest of days, day trade foreign currency (didn't really work out for anyone).
That's due to you are valuing "goods and services" higher than your dollars. (Certain amount of it not all of it)
Unless you spent every dollar or convert all remaining dollars into something else, you are holding those dollars. And some "convert all remaining dollars into something else" actions are sometimes called "investment".
I could be wrong, but I don't think storj is "crypto"/web3. It's decentralized and encrypted, but it's not like files are being stored on a blockchain. (I think they did to an ICO way back in the day, but I don't think that has any bearing on current Storj).
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that decentralization and cryptography obviously predate all this blockchain nonsense and we shouldn't let the crypto hucksters try to "own" those terms.
The most relevant thought leaders in the crypto world are people who have no intention of "owning it", meaning being at the helm of an organization.
They are the so called hodlers and traders, like Microstrategy CEO.
People like Vitalik Buterin would deserve to be in charge because they seem genuinely interested in providing soltions, but he seems very ineffective because he's in search of a problem.
1. People have out-of-band trust relationships in real life which reduce the likelihood of malice. Bitcoin-style anonymous identities undermine trust relationships and are not needed for legitimate (not illegal) transactions.
2. Real life legal systems encourage good behaviors. If you have a dispute with someone, you can sue them. Bitcoin and related systems lack these protections.
3. Existing tools such as public-key cryptography and digital signatures can provide most of the functionality that applications need without the problems that blockchain-based systems have.
1. The assumption that anonymous or pseudonymous identities undermine trust is very… naive and doesn’t consider the fact that many things are considered illegal but shouldn’t be and even if you think they should be, there will always be people that think otherwise. Like participating economically with a relative in an embargoed country for example.
2. Real life legal systems can still be used. Stolen coins can and have be blacklisted by court of law and chainanalysis companies meaning they are frozen immediately at fiat off ramps. Just like would happen with a fungible physical asset like gold.
3. This is 100% true. The thing is one of the problems that is fixed by blockchain based systems is trust. Trust that the source code won’t be changed because of the very pecuniary incentives people keep hating on.
Nah, this article is way off base. Web3 is at best a public key signing protocol that authenticates a web client (primarily metamask).
You can use this for any authentication with an ethereum-like address, eg: 0x06012c8cf97bead5deae237070f9587f8e7a266d
Spending coins is not actually the point. Its to authenticate with a public key, the same way SSH public key authentication works.
Most of the time, one should not be spending coins on random websites anyway.
This complaint is like saying public key authentication is a plot to put big-PKI in charge. Nonsensical.
If you had mailed CDs of pictures and all your data to everyone in town, you mostly gave up your privacy already. And then you want a magic delete-all-CDs button?
Call the contract self destruct function. The contract and stored info (state) are removed.
You may want to explain how mailing CDs to everyone in town allows an expectation they will destroy the CDs when you press the magic delete-all-CDs button.
If you want to publish your info on a public ledger, and you want privacy, you would be studying zk proofs rather than learning about selfdestruct().
I hope I never actually have to use crypto as a real currency. I don't want to use a coin without fraud protection. I don't want to completely restructure how I handle security because now a stolen phone means my life savings gone.
And I especially don't want to see the entire tech world stagnate because there are basically no new P2P projects not ruined by a blockchain(That's not P2P, it's P2MiningFarm)
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadNow this makes sense for a number of industries, particularly financial, where the data is small, and the rewards are large. Storing petabites of porn on a distributed blockchain, probably not efficient.
Telex (anti-censorship system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex_(anti-censorship_system)
Internet censorship circumvention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_circumvent...
https://twitter.com/kimbal/status/1465425295393976321
I don't see how decentralizing anything helps.
For sure! Pumping and dumping overvalued equity to bigger fools together with his cousin.
The skepticism I feel is about the web3 meme and the additional meme that it must be good because old people don't understand it. Web3 is a basket of experimental technologies that may or may not bear fruit, but don't tell me it's so new that skeptics are people who are incapable of understanding it. I'm looking for more detail and I get a lot of hand waving. But I'm open to it.
This is survivorship bias stretched to a pretty crazy extreme. I'm pretty sure you could make a much larger list of differences in the evolution of the web and web3 than similarities.
I was a teenager in the 90s, and my dad was my current age and working for an ISP. Everyone there was around his age or older, and they all understood the potential of the early internet and the web. Most of the people in the early 90s internet era that built out the tech were older. It's one thing to say people outside of the tech field can't see the potential in technology, but it's a completely different thing to say that older people in an industry can't see the potential.
I see lots of potential in newer technologies, but web3 is trying to build an inferior version of what we currently have, with rent-seeking middlemen. It's doing so with blockchains, a 13 year old tech, which most of us have been saying for 13 years is a solution in search of a problem (and we've been right so far). Web3 is yet another way of trying to package up and sell it, primarily being pushed by people who have a monetary interest in having you use it, because they're the landlords.
But I agree with Stan Druckenmiller that Bitcoin is a brand now and is an asset. It has finally found its purpose.
Also crypto for cross border transactions, unless regulations kill them
And DeFi for cross border finance, again regulation can kill this.
Cross-border transactions are an incredibly niche use-case, and my guess would be that it's primarily used for money laundering. AML laws will probably kill this off, since you still need to turn that crypto into fiat to use it.
DeFi's purpose is avoid taxes on crypto gains. Otherwise, it's the worst form of banking possible.
There are a lot of ideas out there for what web3 would be, but sooner or later, some rubber has to be put to the road. The reason we don't "get it" is because "it" is so nebulously defined.
Edit: this incel man child flagged me to the mods in under 15 seconds lmfao
My primary concern, right now, is that Web3 is inaccessible to the majority of people, because its very architecture makes a "free" version of it impossible.
Here it is, people are just confused because there is a strong incentive on this forum to trash anything cryptocurrency related.
Web3 is by far the easiest way to provide auth to a web app right now, if you haven’t experimented with it I highly recommend giving it a try. The react library is a decent place to start.
Easiest by what measure? As I understand it, few browsers (read: only one or two) have built in wallets and outside of that the UX for this auth isn’t great. It’s hard to see how this is better/easier to use than existing OIDC/"Sign In With X" solutions.
Agreed, it’s much the same as OIDC.
Tho personally, beyond GitHub for dev related sites, I won’t use them.
If anything it enables “websites” to be simpler, smaller.
A UI atop a single function.
Without the bloat. Without the “we must do enough to show value to get users to sign up”.
I just auth, use it, and move on with my life.
Sometimes there’s a fee per use. Sometimes that value is exchanged somewhere else in the transaction. But either way, I got what I needed and I’m done.
Web3 is everything we wanted out of auth for the last decade or so.
I do see the value in being able to bring an identity around and store it in a blockchain, but... extreme fragmentation is a bummer.
I don't disagree that having a keypair on the client for authentication is a cool idea, but it's hardly specific to "Web3" (e.g. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/authenticationserv...).
If that's your basis, then I don't think you're inspired by anything other than pecuniary interest, which is the crux of the issue by the OP.
It's pretty well-known that Bitcoin is likely the worst way to digitally send micropayments. The fees are way too high. Bitcoin does not scale.
Yeah, the Lightning Network exists, but that doesn't really solve the problem for one-off microtransactions.
What's expensive is storage and meaningful actions.
In terms of "easy way to provide auth" … for who? Certainly not end users.
Also, the people who want a "pay per use" web are, shockingly, generally people for whom "pay per use" is financially feasible. That is not the majority of people.
[1] https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/faq/#what-is-ipfs [2] https://web3-technology-stack.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Free versions of things are often impractical. Good things take time and effort. How many users host their own email servers or have their own mastodon instance for example? Most people prefer to pay (in fees or in ad attention) for premium versions of these services that are built/maintained by private companies in a closed/centralized manner.
At its best, Web3’s marriage of economics and technology allows for a hybrid model where people pay for premium versions of these products built by people/companies in an open manner. The closed vs. open is key here. Without Web3 you can build something open/decentralized for free or something closed/centralized for profit. Web3 allows building services that are open/for profit.
Imagine the power of capitalism harnessed by open projects. Maybe I’m crazy, but that’s what excites me about Web3.
And nothing is stopping anyone, today, from building open things, while making money.
Why does this kind of trash get upvoted here?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If something like a social network on top of Bitcoin takes off, the Crypto Bros will have far, far less control than Mark Zuckerberg does over Facebook.
> The idea of the Decentralised Autonomous Organisation that runs itself by consensus, where nobody is really in charge, is illusory. Some individuals will always find a way to be more influential, whether that’s through money, connections or rhetoric. A DAO doesn’t change this simple fact of life; it simply hides it with a new layer of obfuscation.
DAOs don't solve socio-political issues, because technology can't do so.
- If Web3 advocates move essential internet services on-chain, that would centralize into a single-database-like source of truth - not decentralize.
- Web3 will not eliminate hierarchies of influence.
The second is unambiguously true. For the first, in my view, there's a sort Schrodinger's cat thing with crypto. DAOs seem much more open than corporations - and they're also creating mini-economies which can lock out non-token holders, privileging the financialized. So it's also kind of true, but the matter is complex.
Any odds, there are a lot of sincere and smart people in crypto, and dismissing them all as basically evil is silly.
Web3 is inclusive in the fullest sense of the term. It does not care if you are a bro. It doesn't even know if you are a bro. It doesn't care where you live, what your name is, what your opinions are, what your hair or skin color is, what your credit score is. Nothing. Anyone and everyone on planet Earth can use it. This is not true of traditional banking and other web2 services. Where people get locked out or denied entry every day by central actors.
Furthermore, all activity is transparent. Everyone can see the database. History can't be altered and the rules can't suddenly be changed. We have no real transparency into the stock market, banks, twitter.com. They can and do selectively edit their databases and change the rules at will. The public can't audit what they are doing. They public can audit the blockchain. The more our institutions become corrupt, the more important transparency and full inclusivity is.
It's a bit strange IMO when someone shows absolutely no doubt on a topic that is so divisive and controversial.
anyway: anyone on planet Earth can use the web too, proof is everybody already does.
But even if that wasn't the case, so what? HN is overrepresented by people convinced web3 has no merit. That doesn't seem to be a problem (and IMO it isn't), but presenting arguments in favor is a problem?
Only to those that hold the tokens. Web1 and Web2 seem to be more inclusive.
> Nothing. Anyone and everyone on planet Earth can use it. This is not true of traditional banking and other web2 services.
How is web2 more inaccessible than web3? Also banking is accessible to more people than the internet. The vast majority of unbanked aren't unbanked because they don't have access to banks but because they are so poor that they have no need for banks. How will crypto/web3 help those people?
> Furthermore, all activity is transparent.
Fuck no!
https://polygonscan.com/ https://etherscan.io/ https://www.bscscan.com/
The transaction logs, events and spends are all public. It is very transparent.
Only to those who hold internet-capable computing devices. Newspapers seem to be more inclusive.
Wow, that sounds like a stupid comparison doesn't it.
And web1 and web2 are somehow not accessible to those people? How?
I've only heard the term from people pushing their investment in crypto so maybe I'm biased against it. The whole "decentralised" part of it is already here in the form of peer to peer networking and regular old web servers anyone can run. The fediverse is also great at replicating information across networks. Is that what's meant by web3?
People and companies choose to centralise the internet because it's easy and because it's cheap. Graph theory is hard to get right in software, after all.
Oh I know, why don't we build some kind of economic incentive that pays whoever wants to run one of these servers some small amount of money for doing so, and we all pay a little to these servers when we want to do things with the network?
Information wants to be free, fuck economic incentives. Stop financializing everything.
I think BGP routing tables, ARIN, ICANN, whois records, and DNS root servers are equally as centralized as a blockchain would be - in that they form top level federations, sort of how "the internet" is centralized when you call it one thing. Cloudflare, Akamai, AWS etc are more centralized as single companies. Blockchains are essentially nested application/data layer federation protocols.
It's hard to respond with more charity than he ventured, so I'd ask if there is a smarter form of his argument I should consider. It may be worth hearing what the concern is rooted in.
They are trustless, that's the biggest advantage.
Sure, it's used on the dark Web, but when was the last time you heard someone talk about how great it was to buy something with crypto?
I can't get over the fact that crypto seems kinda useless - in the sense that it doesn't actually get used for anything other than on crypto exchanges.
Talk of Web3 is also equally confusing to me. It seems to me that people want to spend less time with tech these days, not more. If anything it seems that web3 is going to be more about interaction with the real world, especially after pandemic lockdowns.
People talking about social networks paying its users and smart contracts etc... I also just don't understand - these things are already possible but have not been done with existing tech, so why would anything change just because we have NFTs or whatever?
It all smells of greed and feels like people peddling some new MLM system.
You can talk about gov and how the man has us all entrapped in the system or whatever, but we don't typically store lumps of gold in our homes, so why would you do the same with crypto (which is arguably easier to steal)?
Every "currency" (even the legal ones like USD) are in the end "assets"
If people predict that the value (not price) will rise, they hold.
If people predict that the value will drop, they sell (i.e. swap it with something else).
Some legal currencies are issued more and more based on "government credit" instead of real assets like gold will likely have their value drop (supply > demand).
For "Cryptocurrencies" (let's discuss whether they quality as "currency" or not in another place)
Some types of them has limited supply by design (but the supply can still increase slowly for the next N (e.g. 10) years with slower rate each year)
So if the demands goes up (which can also go down) and the supply does not grow too much, the value per "coin" would increase.
The only people I know who "hold" fiat currency either are ridiculously rich, are single with no serious responsibilities or when I was in the Navy, there was scheme thing going around that to get rich quick enough to get out the Navy and fuck off for the rest of days, day trade foreign currency (didn't really work out for anyone).
Unless you spent every dollar or convert all remaining dollars into something else, you are holding those dollars. And some "convert all remaining dollars into something else" actions are sometimes called "investment".
The most relevant thought leaders in the crypto world are people who have no intention of "owning it", meaning being at the helm of an organization.
They are the so called hodlers and traders, like Microstrategy CEO.
People like Vitalik Buterin would deserve to be in charge because they seem genuinely interested in providing soltions, but he seems very ineffective because he's in search of a problem.
In "Blockchains Are a Bad Idea", James Mickens gives several arguments against blockchain-based systems like Bitcoin:
See his presentation here: https://youtu.be/15RTC22Z2xI
1. People have out-of-band trust relationships in real life which reduce the likelihood of malice. Bitcoin-style anonymous identities undermine trust relationships and are not needed for legitimate (not illegal) transactions.
2. Real life legal systems encourage good behaviors. If you have a dispute with someone, you can sue them. Bitcoin and related systems lack these protections.
3. Existing tools such as public-key cryptography and digital signatures can provide most of the functionality that applications need without the problems that blockchain-based systems have.
2. Real life legal systems can still be used. Stolen coins can and have be blacklisted by court of law and chainanalysis companies meaning they are frozen immediately at fiat off ramps. Just like would happen with a fungible physical asset like gold.
3. This is 100% true. The thing is one of the problems that is fixed by blockchain based systems is trust. Trust that the source code won’t be changed because of the very pecuniary incentives people keep hating on.
You can use this for any authentication with an ethereum-like address, eg: 0x06012c8cf97bead5deae237070f9587f8e7a266d
Spending coins is not actually the point. Its to authenticate with a public key, the same way SSH public key authentication works. Most of the time, one should not be spending coins on random websites anyway.
This complaint is like saying public key authentication is a plot to put big-PKI in charge. Nonsensical.
If you even remotely value your privacy you won’t support blockchain backed web3
If you had mailed CDs of pictures and all your data to everyone in town, you mostly gave up your privacy already. And then you want a magic delete-all-CDs button?
You may want to explain how mailing CDs to everyone in town allows an expectation they will destroy the CDs when you press the magic delete-all-CDs button.
If you want to publish your info on a public ledger, and you want privacy, you would be studying zk proofs rather than learning about selfdestruct().
Again, your link doesn’t explain how something is deleted for everyone. Your link doesn’t say that it’s deleted, simply sent to another address.
Most people are not ready for this kind of responsibility--living without social contract. (Maybe I am using wrong words)
And I especially don't want to see the entire tech world stagnate because there are basically no new P2P projects not ruined by a blockchain(That's not P2P, it's P2MiningFarm)