I don't think there's a good explanation out there.
From what I've read, the main idea is decentralization, either of website databases using blockchain (which seems wildly impractical and ludicrously expensive), or of payment of advertising revenue to website users and contributors (which seems like an impossible business model)
The main issue, I think, is that "decentralization" means a different thing to every person, therefore "web3" can mean a different thing to everyone. This makes it hard to define it or to argue for it or against it.
I read a blog post linked on HN recently on "the architecture of a web3 application" [1] and it was so long and complicated that I honestly thought it was satire. I don't think the methods described in the post were at all practical.
Ultimately, web3 might simply be a rebranding of blockchain and crypto technologies in order to make them seem more democratic and transformational than perhaps they are.
Another fast and loose term is "User". The claim OP makes is that Users will control the network and money created. Seeing how you can't directly transfer an NFT from opensea to a different marketplace, I find this claim dubious. But that aside, the "user" is a programmer, not your Aunt and Uncle.
So, many people here complain and whine about how the internet has become too centralized and ad-rev driven by the big tech behemoths and all the little shitty fish that follow their tactics, but then when a bunch of people come along and at least propose a certain type of possibly workable solution that's particularly friendly to avoiding major centralized arbiters, they get booed down because some of them also happen to be pie in the sky or scammers (where does either o these two not exist in any tech?) The same people booing these types themselves work for the giant tech behemoths, which are themselves some of the absolute most parasitical, mendacious, lying, perpetually damaging agencies on the entire web and in the wider world of digital technology.
Tell you what, as full of scams and cons as the world of crypto is, i still sympathize with it much more than I do with any random argument in favor of a real monstrosity of dishonesty and prying scumminess like Facebook or today's Google. Those and so many of their modern digital cousins are the real enemies of so many good things.
Ethereum's javascript API was named web3. It enables people to login with their wallet anywhere. From there it exploodes to a universe of possibilities.
Some people found out that legitimacy is implied by coordination and started using cryptography to build various ways to coordinate multiparty computations that can simulate various banking/finance protocols.
Web3 is normal web development where you use some APIs to interact with these protocols and condition access to {functionality,resources,..} in your webapp on the current state of the multiparty computation. You can also participate in coordinating the computation.. idk maybe I'm taking the 2007 constraint a bit too far.
It's just a rebrand of the term "blockchain" and the ecosystem of apps built on top of various blockchains. It's trying to presume that these ecosystems are the next iteration of the internet.
It’s the latest problem invented so that cryptocurrencies can fix it, after egold, currencies, payments, micropayments, apps, smart contracts, icos, asset tracking, nfts, now we have communities of bored apes and pudgy penguins who pay someone to be members of an exclusive club of pixel receipt owners.
Web 3.0 didn’t exist, so it was necessary to invent it to give cryptocurrencies value again.
Serving web sites from a blockchain (which is decentralized, exists in pieces across the whole Internet), instead of serving them from a single computer located in a data centre.
i.e. makes web sites harder to switch off/censor.
p.s. Freenet has been doing this since Satoshi was in diapers.
Here's my take (coming from somebody who has been running what may now be called a "metaverse" company for the past 5 years - https://ayvri.com).
The most interesting part I find is not the 3D VR element, that's like saying the most compelling part of Web 2 was CSS and HTML5.
It's the distributed nature of data and data ownership.
Where Web2 was all about user created content -> corporate owned content, in web3 you own the content you create.
The benefit of this is that the platform that you use your data on, is just a platform. You can easily move your data to another platform for other purposes.
The example I use to compare to "real world" stuff is your fitness. You pay a monthly membership to go to the gym and stay fit. When you want to go on a ski holiday, you don't have to go to your gym and tell them you want to go on a ski holiday and ask if you can use your fitness at the resort, and they can say "oh, we don't have an agreement with that ski field, or any ski fields, so sorry, your fitness stays with us. But we've been selling your data to a bike tour operator, so they know all about you, and you can go use your fitness with them...but only with the bike tour operators we've partnered with and have a commercial agreement with...if it isn't them, then...sorry, you can't use your fitness.
In a Web3 world, your data lives in your wallet, and you should be able to decide who gets access to it and how they use it, and revoke it from those you don't want access to. We're looking at adding this capability to Ayvri. We did an integration with Strava, but our users want an integration with Garmin, Suunto, every little paragliding device you've never heard of, etc.
A friend that runs a fintech company was describing the process people go through when looking for a mortgage. They go to a banks website, give their details to the bank, see the offers on mortgages, then go to the next bank or lender, and do the same again and again. If your data is in your wallet, you should be able to just go - here's my data, do your thing.
Sure there's also all the stuff about de-platforming, and there are going to be issues with propaganda, scams, etc. But will it be any worse than what we have today?
1/ New wave of applications - imagine 3d, AR, VR - new interfaces and possibilities.
2/ When you have these new wave of applications, these applications are going to do something (transactions). What if the transactions did not have to go through a bank or Google or Amazon.
3/ Today, you and your data are the product. What if you could control who gets access to your data.
The most exciting themes in technology today are transformative visions for 2025 or 2030: crypto, web3, VR, metaverse… and then everything else.
Ugh. Is that all we get? Not even self-driving cars?
The big trend in cryptocurrencies is crackdowns. In June 2021, China dropped the hammer on crypto mining. They started with "please stop doing that" in 2018-2019, and progressed to turning off the power to hundreds of Bitcoin mining operations and arresting people. This stopped the big use case of Bitcoin in China - evading exchange controls on capital.
In the US, we're seeing much more involvement by the IRS, SEC, FBI, and New York State authorities. The US government seized US$3.3 billion in cryptocurrency in 2020. Cryptocurrency operations are being forced into either bank-like regulation (UK, Canada) or pushed to the usual regulatory havens (the Cayman Islands is popular). The SEC stopped most ICOs back in 2018. Currently being looked at hard, stablecoins. Next, NFTs. Most legit countries are now requiring Know Your Customer identification, and many of those countries share that data between tax authorities. The legit use cases of cryptocurrencies being somewhat absent, this doesn't look like a transformative technology.
2019 was the year of VR. Like 3D TV, it works, but it's just not that interesting. AR, though... For that, see the "Hyperreality" video I've mentioned before. That's where Facebook probably wants to go.
Much as I like virtual worlds, I don't see them as being a big thing. 3D social worlds go all the way back to Quantum Link, which predates AOL, and continue through to Second Life, which is sluggish but has all the features people claim metaverses should have. They are only useful to people with too much free time.
The technology most likely to change the world in the next decade is vaccine engineering. Not just COVID. Vaccines for AIDS, tuberculosis, all variants of influenza, and Alzheimer's are in development. Some of them will probably work. Creating new vaccines is now done by sequencing and then synthesizing a candidate vaccine. There's much less trial and error involved.
Batteries are going to get cheaper from production economies alone. This will quietly change the whole energy landscape.
And we're going to get self-driving cars. Waymo and Cruise test in San Francisco routinely now, and they have few accidents. Usually they get rear-ended at slow speed because they're cautious about left turns. That will get better as most manual cars get auto-braking.
> Batteries are going to get cheaper from production economies alone. This will quietly change the whole energy landscape.
Indeed, and even better, I think this will finally be the decade of grid storage. There are something like a dozen pilot projects for all kinds of theoretically scalable grid storage solutions being built and tested right now. This will make or break renewables as a viable source for baseload power.
It will also see the revival nuclear because grid storage can't be built cast enough and many governments don't want to invest in the infrastructure improvements that will be needed.
Much less grid storage is needed than you think. Batteries are sufficient and cheap enough. More exotic storage systems might be cheaper, but they're not necessary.
> It will also see the revival nuclear because grid storage can't be built cast enough and many governments don't want to invest in the infrastructure improvements that will be needed.
I don't understand this point -- if governments don't want to invest in infrastructure, why would they invest in nuclear which is an order of magnitude more expensive?
Cheap enough at current production levels is not necessarily cheap enough to meet the capacity needed for widespread grid storage. Lithium extraction is pretty dirty right now too.
> A 3x overbuild of solar+wind in an optimal mix, along with a continental grid and 3 hours worth of batteries is all you need for 99.99% reliability
I think that's overstating those optimistic results.
If you also account for the end to end/total carbon footprint, some calculations show nuclear emits less carbon than wind and solar. Consider that a wind farm producing as much energy as a nuclear plant requires an order of magnitude more concrete, and concrete is a large carbon emitter.
> if governments don't want to invest in infrastructure, why would they invest in nuclear which is an order of magnitude more expensive?
It's not an order of magnitude more expensive than restructuring the whole grid. Arguably nuclear is more cost efficient overall:
wrt biotechnology, don’t forget at-home desktop-pharmaceuticals via engineered yeast. It’s a good thing vaccines will provide profits because their over the counter drugs will soon be subject to pirating.
I think this metaverse/VR emphasis is a passing fad. We've been talking about VR for decades. Engineers focus on technology, so focus on how the technology for VR keeps getting better. But outside of very specific domains, no one wants VR.
Speak for yourself, I've desperately wanted a VR setup for years, but have never had access to the real estate. I tried it once a long time ago, and long for the day I can have my own.
If at one point a VR/AR headset looks the same as ordinary sunglasses with 16k per eye , I am sure it will be a new revolution. The amount of information you can project on those glasses while walking around in the normal world is beyond imagination. you can show the world as it is plus a ton of info at every object you look at.
Those glasses will slowly evolve to the size of eye lenses and it will be a necessary item in order to participate in modern society. Just like living without internet isnt possible.
Sure it is, my MIL doesn't do anything on the internet other than entertainment (TV and music) and maybe email or texting. If she wanted to, she could cut it out completely and get along fine with landline phone calls and mailing bill payments and such.
When iPhone came out, I did not believe it would succeed even a year later. When YouTube was released, I could never grasp how people would watch video on Internet.
Now-a-days I question my immediate reaction to anything.
I want VR, but not Oculus because of the FB linkage (I don't have FB). I also want it to be self-contained, so I don't need a fancy PC to run it, but it should still connect to my PC as a display device or something. I also want it to be open source, or at the very least it should not have telemetry, account logins, or anything like that for the hardware. It also has to work on any OS, it should work with my game consoles, and my TV output as a virtual screen. I just want a "dumb" VR display, effectively. An AR display would be nice, too, if I could put a "mask" over it to turn it into a VR display.
Right now, I am pretty sure there is nothing to fit that bill. If there is in the future, I definitely want this, if only to be able to play games while lying in bed or to have several virtual computer screens for coding and work.
> But outside of very specific domains, no one wants VR.
Parallels with early computing industry? The very nature of technology adoption is such that it always appeals to a niche first aka "no one but a handful want it". Then, depending on incentives, an ecosystem crops up that continues to add value as it grows. Computers had internet to fallback on for network effects, with web and email help add value. For VR, that could be gaming, crypto-currencies, social networks... who knows what else.
Growing up with a specific, media influenced vision of VR(Ghost in the shell, .hack, sword art online) where lots of of the current technical challenges to create something truly immersive are solved, I really want VR to succeed. I got to try the original Oculus Rift and later Quest and I would argue that visually we are maybe 5 or so years away from a pretty decent experience (like 4k by 4k per eye with decent latency, 120hz+, no screen door and maybe even proper foveated rendering). Sound-wise I don't even think there is much missing. Form-factor/comfort-wise
I also believe that we are not far off. And experiences which make use of "just" that are ok or fun even.
IMHO however, movement and tactile feedback are still lacking so far behind that I don't even know if they can be solved in a non-invasive, average user friendly manner. I mean sure, you can strap yourself to a treadmill contraption and use controllers or gloves to track your hands and maybe even wear some suit which vibrates here and there. But you won't feel real collisions, let alone texture, realistic force and acceleration.
And somehow when I tried VR I felt like this was missing so much that it limits my enjoyment big time.
For more anime examples of metaverse-like concepts, there is Dennou Coil, Megaman, Digimon, Summer Wars, Gatchaman Crowds, and Belle to name a few off the top of my head. Whilst the first features immersive AR, the rest kinda just rely on conventional screens. Similarly, I'm not entirely convinced that VR/AR is a necessary or sufficient requirement of the metaverse.
I have an Oculus Quest 2 and me, my wife, and my kids all love it. The biggest gating factor in our enjoyment is lack of content. If there were more AAA titles I would spend way more time with my oculus. It is the most immersive and intuitive gaming experience I've ever had.
Innovation has reached a local maximum if tech elites can only think of cyrpto-currencies and VR as near or long-term opportunities. What a depressing time to be in technology.
I think Web3 is still a solution in search of a problem at this point. I personally remain unconvinced. This presentation proposes Helium as a suitable application but it seems to me you could do everything Helium does just as well with an old-fashioned centralized network controlling the whole thing. Collect usage fees on one side from the users, and pay them out to the "miners" (AP providers) on the other... and you don't need any stakers. If the network is too stingy with paying out the proceeds to the AP providers, you won't attract AP providers, so the whole thing self-balances in the same way Google Adsense does.
Helium comes the closest to being "actually potentially useful" of all the cryptocurrency gobbledygook.
But, amusingly re: your point that it could be done in a centralized way: recently my wife's (sigh) Helium miner stopped working for a few days because... centralized stuff failed!
So as far as I can tell, it's a bit of huckster speculation on top of a centralized protocol. Which, theoretically, might one day compensate random people for putting up 20 watt transmitters to spread ultra-low-bandwidth internet access around (right now we get compensated in VC-funded scrip aimed at expanding the network).
Not terrible, but the crypto bits do seem only lightly glued on top of the basic business proposition.
36 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] threadI haven’t been able to tell what it is?
From what I've read, the main idea is decentralization, either of website databases using blockchain (which seems wildly impractical and ludicrously expensive), or of payment of advertising revenue to website users and contributors (which seems like an impossible business model)
The main issue, I think, is that "decentralization" means a different thing to every person, therefore "web3" can mean a different thing to everyone. This makes it hard to define it or to argue for it or against it.
I read a blog post linked on HN recently on "the architecture of a web3 application" [1] and it was so long and complicated that I honestly thought it was satire. I don't think the methods described in the post were at all practical.
Ultimately, web3 might simply be a rebranding of blockchain and crypto technologies in order to make them seem more democratic and transformational than perhaps they are.
[1] https://www.preethikasireddy.com/post/the-architecture-of-a-...
Tell you what, as full of scams and cons as the world of crypto is, i still sympathize with it much more than I do with any random argument in favor of a real monstrosity of dishonesty and prying scumminess like Facebook or today's Google. Those and so many of their modern digital cousins are the real enemies of so many good things.
Web3 is normal web development where you use some APIs to interact with these protocols and condition access to {functionality,resources,..} in your webapp on the current state of the multiparty computation. You can also participate in coordinating the computation.. idk maybe I'm taking the 2007 constraint a bit too far.
Web 3.0 didn’t exist, so it was necessary to invent it to give cryptocurrencies value again.
i.e. makes web sites harder to switch off/censor.
p.s. Freenet has been doing this since Satoshi was in diapers.
The most interesting part I find is not the 3D VR element, that's like saying the most compelling part of Web 2 was CSS and HTML5.
It's the distributed nature of data and data ownership. Where Web2 was all about user created content -> corporate owned content, in web3 you own the content you create.
The benefit of this is that the platform that you use your data on, is just a platform. You can easily move your data to another platform for other purposes.
The example I use to compare to "real world" stuff is your fitness. You pay a monthly membership to go to the gym and stay fit. When you want to go on a ski holiday, you don't have to go to your gym and tell them you want to go on a ski holiday and ask if you can use your fitness at the resort, and they can say "oh, we don't have an agreement with that ski field, or any ski fields, so sorry, your fitness stays with us. But we've been selling your data to a bike tour operator, so they know all about you, and you can go use your fitness with them...but only with the bike tour operators we've partnered with and have a commercial agreement with...if it isn't them, then...sorry, you can't use your fitness.
In a Web3 world, your data lives in your wallet, and you should be able to decide who gets access to it and how they use it, and revoke it from those you don't want access to. We're looking at adding this capability to Ayvri. We did an integration with Strava, but our users want an integration with Garmin, Suunto, every little paragliding device you've never heard of, etc.
A friend that runs a fintech company was describing the process people go through when looking for a mortgage. They go to a banks website, give their details to the bank, see the offers on mortgages, then go to the next bank or lender, and do the same again and again. If your data is in your wallet, you should be able to just go - here's my data, do your thing.
Sure there's also all the stuff about de-platforming, and there are going to be issues with propaganda, scams, etc. But will it be any worse than what we have today?
1/ New wave of applications - imagine 3d, AR, VR - new interfaces and possibilities.
2/ When you have these new wave of applications, these applications are going to do something (transactions). What if the transactions did not have to go through a bank or Google or Amazon.
3/ Today, you and your data are the product. What if you could control who gets access to your data.
Ugh. Is that all we get? Not even self-driving cars?
The big trend in cryptocurrencies is crackdowns. In June 2021, China dropped the hammer on crypto mining. They started with "please stop doing that" in 2018-2019, and progressed to turning off the power to hundreds of Bitcoin mining operations and arresting people. This stopped the big use case of Bitcoin in China - evading exchange controls on capital. In the US, we're seeing much more involvement by the IRS, SEC, FBI, and New York State authorities. The US government seized US$3.3 billion in cryptocurrency in 2020. Cryptocurrency operations are being forced into either bank-like regulation (UK, Canada) or pushed to the usual regulatory havens (the Cayman Islands is popular). The SEC stopped most ICOs back in 2018. Currently being looked at hard, stablecoins. Next, NFTs. Most legit countries are now requiring Know Your Customer identification, and many of those countries share that data between tax authorities. The legit use cases of cryptocurrencies being somewhat absent, this doesn't look like a transformative technology.
2019 was the year of VR. Like 3D TV, it works, but it's just not that interesting. AR, though... For that, see the "Hyperreality" video I've mentioned before. That's where Facebook probably wants to go.
Much as I like virtual worlds, I don't see them as being a big thing. 3D social worlds go all the way back to Quantum Link, which predates AOL, and continue through to Second Life, which is sluggish but has all the features people claim metaverses should have. They are only useful to people with too much free time.
The technology most likely to change the world in the next decade is vaccine engineering. Not just COVID. Vaccines for AIDS, tuberculosis, all variants of influenza, and Alzheimer's are in development. Some of them will probably work. Creating new vaccines is now done by sequencing and then synthesizing a candidate vaccine. There's much less trial and error involved.
Batteries are going to get cheaper from production economies alone. This will quietly change the whole energy landscape.
And we're going to get self-driving cars. Waymo and Cruise test in San Francisco routinely now, and they have few accidents. Usually they get rear-ended at slow speed because they're cautious about left turns. That will get better as most manual cars get auto-braking.
Indeed, and even better, I think this will finally be the decade of grid storage. There are something like a dozen pilot projects for all kinds of theoretically scalable grid storage solutions being built and tested right now. This will make or break renewables as a viable source for baseload power.
It will also see the revival nuclear because grid storage can't be built cast enough and many governments don't want to invest in the infrastructure improvements that will be needed.
A 3x overbuild of solar+wind in an optimal mix, along with a continental grid and 3 hours worth of batteries is all you need for 99.99% reliability: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z
> It will also see the revival nuclear because grid storage can't be built cast enough and many governments don't want to invest in the infrastructure improvements that will be needed.
I don't understand this point -- if governments don't want to invest in infrastructure, why would they invest in nuclear which is an order of magnitude more expensive?
Cheap enough at current production levels is not necessarily cheap enough to meet the capacity needed for widespread grid storage. Lithium extraction is pretty dirty right now too.
> A 3x overbuild of solar+wind in an optimal mix, along with a continental grid and 3 hours worth of batteries is all you need for 99.99% reliability
I think that's overstating those optimistic results.
If you also account for the end to end/total carbon footprint, some calculations show nuclear emits less carbon than wind and solar. Consider that a wind farm producing as much energy as a nuclear plant requires an order of magnitude more concrete, and concrete is a large carbon emitter.
> if governments don't want to invest in infrastructure, why would they invest in nuclear which is an order of magnitude more expensive?
It's not an order of magnitude more expensive than restructuring the whole grid. Arguably nuclear is more cost efficient overall:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32820449/
Sure it is, my MIL doesn't do anything on the internet other than entertainment (TV and music) and maybe email or texting. If she wanted to, she could cut it out completely and get along fine with landline phone calls and mailing bill payments and such.
also, you seem to think projecting more information onto the world is a Good Thing, this is not obvious to me.
Now-a-days I question my immediate reaction to anything.
Right now, I am pretty sure there is nothing to fit that bill. If there is in the future, I definitely want this, if only to be able to play games while lying in bed or to have several virtual computer screens for coding and work.
Parallels with early computing industry? The very nature of technology adoption is such that it always appeals to a niche first aka "no one but a handful want it". Then, depending on incentives, an ecosystem crops up that continues to add value as it grows. Computers had internet to fallback on for network effects, with web and email help add value. For VR, that could be gaming, crypto-currencies, social networks... who knows what else.
IMHO however, movement and tactile feedback are still lacking so far behind that I don't even know if they can be solved in a non-invasive, average user friendly manner. I mean sure, you can strap yourself to a treadmill contraption and use controllers or gloves to track your hands and maybe even wear some suit which vibrates here and there. But you won't feel real collisions, let alone texture, realistic force and acceleration. And somehow when I tried VR I felt like this was missing so much that it limits my enjoyment big time.
But, amusingly re: your point that it could be done in a centralized way: recently my wife's (sigh) Helium miner stopped working for a few days because... centralized stuff failed!
So as far as I can tell, it's a bit of huckster speculation on top of a centralized protocol. Which, theoretically, might one day compensate random people for putting up 20 watt transmitters to spread ultra-low-bandwidth internet access around (right now we get compensated in VC-funded scrip aimed at expanding the network).
Not terrible, but the crypto bits do seem only lightly glued on top of the basic business proposition.