Or even mention the “value” of the many DeFi apps that are available on the ethereum blockchain. What do they do?
My real question is: why would an investor want to put money into a company that doesn’t “own” the data from their customers? Do they even _have_ customers? What is their business model?
I know, I know - they make commissions on all those billions of transactions that will happen on the blockchain. Right? Is the value simply coming up with new ways to add cost to transactions?
I’m lost. Even when web2 was in an eyeballs race, I understood that you could monetize eyeballs with advertising (in what I considered a worst-case model).
And SaaS was an obvious model, even if Marc Benioff seemed to yell about it a lot.
What is a web3 business model outside of currency exchange?
In some sense it came true in that you could access the AP newswire on Compuserve and the Source and that there were teletext services in Europe.
All of these faced bad economics. The cost of CompuServe was astronomical. The only one that came close to mass market was Minitel in France and that was because the phone company saw they could save money on directory services.
The web came along because technology had progressed an order of magnitude past feasibility to the point where people could publish stuff on the web and not worry about what it costs. That act of closing the circle and making it financial sustainable really trashed it.
He's a VC, he needs to project that they invest in things that have value. They're part of the grift. I have 0 faith in anything coming out of a VC's office to be beneficial to society. An interesting business? Sure! But in the long run it will not be a good thing.
That guy usually writes some good articles and seems to have some sense but since the NFT grift hit it big the blockheads have really gone down a rabbit hole.
One thing that is confusing most loud supporters of Web3 are VCs and yet:
"It all comes down to the database that sits behind an application. If that database is controlled by a single entity (think company, think big tech), then enormous market power accrues to the owner/administrator of that database.
If, on the other hand, the database is an open public database that is not controlled and administered by a single company, but instead is a truly open system available to all, then that kind of market power cannot be built up around a data asset"
So why are they flowing billions of dollars into this ? If there is no locking what will create outsized returns for them?
The locking is in the company that controls the spec of the protocol and its reference implementation. It’s always been about getting as many people onboard as possible, this time the bait is decentralisation.
Find some problem that requires a ecosystem. Create this ecosystem and carry a large stake in it. Have the stake be a part of the ecosystem somehow. In the future, once the problem has a solution/ecosystem, start selling parts of the stake.
You do not need to make money from the product directly. Think for example if the Bitcoin creator would get 10 cent every time someone mentioned Bitcoin. Or the easiest business model of them all, sell ads on your org site.
> Think for example if the Bitcoin creator would get 10 cent every time someone mentioned Bitcoin
Eh, how would that work exactly?
> Or the easiest business model of them all, sell ads on your org site
That's great, but I can ensure you: none of us in the cryptocurrency ecosystem wants anything to do with ads. Also, can't really build a big business by having ads on your website.
There are casual games that are mostly funded by merchandise (Angry Birds). The game makes the brand popular, then they sell kid toys and clothing. I don't know exactly how you would get paid by just someone mentioning your trademark, but it might be your business innovation - as in order to reach unicorn status you either need to innovate in the business area, or innovate in the product area - you do not need to innovate in both! (heck it's probably enough to copy/apply an already successful business model on an already successful/invented product, but in a combination that no one yet has tried)
> I don't know exactly how you would get paid by just someone mentioning your trademark, but it might be your business innovation
If we're just making up "business innovations" willy nilly, why not just create a company that prints money from used t-shirts instead, I guess that would make a lot of money for the business.
One company controls the specification and reference implementation. These gimmicks tend to be "open" so contributions can flow in from anywhere, but the company has full priority and benefits by controlling the pace and final result.
Outsider contributions are submitted publicly, while features developed by the company start in secret and can remain secret as long as possible. The company's contributions are rammed through while outsiders contend with endless bikeshedding with no guarantee they will get anything they need.
In the end there is no sensible reason for any other entity to partner with the controlling company. The partner finds they are prevented from innovating while being bogged down by the "process." The controlling party then seeks to cannibalize the partner's product during this time by shelving any of their unique features and ideas. Once the partner moves on, the requisite changes and fixes to the specification are magically pushed through.
I wouldn't call this a core business model as much as an enhancement to one. Fundamentally it's an attention grift -- a bamboozle of complex rules, procedures and processes, cloaked in goodwill, and furnished by a large interest and future hope at any given time.
Except all these things can be trivially forked. If you don't like how the VC one is doing things, just fork it. There are a billion forks of everything in the crypto space, for exactly this reason.
yes, when was the last time you see google chrome forked and adopted a large user base? That is event with big VC money behind it Brave for example. Open source is now days used a marketing scheme to attract developers to work for free, and attract user to think that is open.
Facebook wasn't the first social network. Not even close. Facebook succeeded because it did very similar things to the prior ones, but a little bit better than them in just the right ways. That is the essence of a fork.
>One company controls the specification and reference implementation. These gimmicks tend to be "open" so contributions can flow in from anywhere, but the company has full priority and benefits by controlling the pace and final result.
Google doesn't control the w3c. And Google Chrome is severely limited in what they can push due to threatened/actual anti-trust litigation. Their whole "privacy sandbox" thing is being done under the scrutiny of quite a few governments in addition to practically every digital advertising association on earth.
The currently most popular implementation of this "open database" (Bitcoin) is indeed slow and scales poorly. But if you start looking into the new ideas, you'll find there are plenty of still decentralized blockchains with much faster confirmation times (even as low as 5 seconds) today.
The volume has nothing to do with the confirmation time, it's a constant no matter if it's 1 or 10000 transactions. Avalanche, Algorand, Polygon and more fits the bill of very fast transactions, in case you're interested in looking into the matter further.
5 seconds is a long time, especially when a normal modern tech stack can do the same things in milliseconds. I'd also love a reference showing that any of these chains can handle 100k requests per second with a latency of a few seconds. I've never seen it.
The amount of space in a Bitcoin block is around 7 TPS.
Other blockchains make decentralization tradeoffs to process more transactions on-chain per second. For example, Ethereum requires better hardware: larger storage, better CPU and more memory. Solana makes even larger tradeoffs: expensive server hardware costing up to $25000, making it pretty much a central service controlled by the few.
The key innovation of Bitcoin is the decentralization; almost anyone can participate and no one can control it. Sacrificing this for negligble is not worth it. Especially since there are smarter ways to scale the system. Even if you could improve throughput by 100x by making the system slightly less decentralized you would still not reach VISA levels of TPS.
The correct way to scale these systems is using off-chain solutions like the Lightning Network. This way you can process millions of transactions per second.
Not only that, but every operation would cost fees, right?
Good luck convincing people that every time they logging into their account or literally do any action will cost them some fees. Refreshed the page? Oops that'll cost ya!
Further, open databases will potentially make it harder for iterative change on that data.
Structures and versioning become harder when that is distributed at the protocol/standard level. Right now the web is already distributed, the protocols/standards are open and versioning data/content/apps/endpoints on top of that is easy, but updating protocols/standards takes time. Apps are a second layer to that, versioning is harder as you have to roll out updates and the OSs/standards they are built on are the slower changing part, web3 is even harder as updates and versioning of the protocol/standards AND the data/content on top will need to propagate and there may be pushback and splits/forks as we are seeing ETH being difficult to change core protocols/flows. There may be innovations on this as we go but also turbulence until that is realized.
For some areas like personal data and ledger data not changing much is good. For anything beyond that it makes it harder to change. Versioning and iterative change is already difficult in some cases when a company has full control over the structures. Getting multiple companies to agree on standards is harder, especially when that impacts revenues on those systems. The same will happen with web3 maybe more intensely. Right now even open standards are actively killed off because they share data. Right now "web2" could have shared databases, and there are some, but companies push away from that and actively look to own data which is a problem. However the same will happen with web3 at additional levels including the protocols/standards now.
What may happen is APIs public facades/interfaces/signatures are more atomic/stable and less changing which is always nice to have, with the guts of the structures being more keyed/document data formats. I am always a fan of iterative change that doesn't nuke the public interfaces/facades unless absolutely necessary. It may lead to "cleaner" more generic public interfaces potentially, but it may also lead to stagnate iterations and infighting like current web standards. In a way, web3 is more about standards than what is built on it. Standards can be flexible or not, both with their pros and cons.
In a way with cryptocurrency, the real goal of the investors of web3 is recreating the web with a sort of toll system, that can be good and bad but their aim is collecting on actions on new protocols/standards.
Taking control away from companies for important data like personal data and shared public data may be good, but there is also some trouble ahead and many things to work out. The same type of sharks that capture that data are looking to go lower in the stack and control that area, and extracting fees/tolls on the movement in that structure even if it is an open database. There are pros and cons to all of this.
> In a way with cryptocurrency, the real goal of the investors of web3 is recreating the web with a sort of toll system, that can be good and bad but their aim is collecting on actions on new protocols/standards.
One could argue that today's web is a combination of ad-based revenue and tolls run by (near?) monopolies: app stores, marketplaces, ect... The crypto-like alternatives such as substack and patreon are growing though and will likely have a niche even if/when crypto fails. The centralization of those crypto-like alternatives is a risk though. I recall one substack author giving email-export as a rationale to choose substack but that's a feature that presumably could just be turned off whenever.
What makes these alternatives "crypto-like" other than being less centralized? Are they even less centralized, other than being platforms owned by smaller corporations that choose to (for now) exercise a lighter touch?
Because experienced VCs know web 1.0 also started with decentralized / libertarian ideals, but ultimately early players built walled gardens and gatekeeping around the "world wide web".
They don't want to miss the web3 boat, and they're betting the web 1.0/web 2.0 playbooks still apply.
Upvoting for the use of kabuki in explaining the melodramatic pantomime of crypto hype, if only we were all more artisanal in building out this nascent blockchain tech. Imagine if tcp/ip were invented today with all this pre-marketing by VCs
Some people believe that this type of decentralization could be a force that can't be stopped by traditional companies and want to get in as soon as possible so they don't end up on the losing side of history.
Of course, rich people simply diversify their assets and crypto is just one of many bets they do, so it's not 100% sure this will happen.
I wouldn’t think too far into this. All that is required is the application of experience and appropriate cynicism. The tech isn’t even relevant and neither is the reality.
web3 is a marketing term and is easy to leverage hype on as it implies progression and a new arena of opportunity.
By the time anyone has peeled off the marketing and realised it’s the same old bullshit people will be too far in to admit it and death march over the horizon.
In theory, these web3 platforms would still need to function as a business to continue existing. Moving the platform onto a blockchain removes the need for centralized servers, but it necessitates massive amounts of distributed compute power to keep it going.
Every blockchain project knows that they need to incentivize their miners somehow. This is usually a combination of fees from users and new tokens minted via built-in inflation (yes, inflation ironically powers much of the crypto space and will continue to do so for a long time).
So I always aks:
1) What problem are these web3 platforms solving?
2) Who are they solving it for?
3) Are those people actually willing to pay the blockchain premium to use a web3 platform over a centralized platform?
The theory, of course, is that blockchain will evolve over time to become less resource hungry and therefore cheap enough to compete with incumbents, but that's a long way away. Many projects have started cheating by smuggling centralization into their architecture but emphasizing their blockchain and hoping nobody cares enough about the difference.
But where do VCs come into the equation? They're not setting up the mining operations that will power these businesses and collect the fees in the future. They're investing in tokens that will ostensibly be used to pay the miners in the future.
The whole game is about introducing artificial tokens, quietly giving a huge number of those tokens to founders and early investors (in exchange for actual money, of course), and then hyping the platform to the moon so everyone can cash out their tokens to a new wave of speculators.
> introducing artificial tokens, quietly giving a huge number of those tokens to founders and early investors (in exchange for actual money, of course), and then hyping the platform to the moon so everyone can cash out their tokens to a new wave of speculators.
It's a ponzi-scheme if there's no value behind the hype. it's not inherently a ponzi scheme. It's the same way in the current private equity start-up world just that only VC's and connected individuals are exposed to the all the risk and all the profit.
You could say that there is value behind a Ponzi scheme as long as there are more people willing to get onboard the Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme can make a few "early adopters" rich
The only thing more annoying than libertarian crypto bros is progressives who don’t like crypto because people have made money off it or they see it as inherently right wing technology (the Soviet Union said that about computers originally, you can see how that worked out for them)
Everyone loves to say their politics are just common sense but characterizing all of crypto as “rich libertarians who see crypto as a way to protect their assets from the government” is an inherently political narrative and it simply isn’t true.
There’s also a big difference between valuable emerging technologies that have a lot of speculative investments & charlatans selling snake oil vs “the whole shebang”.
The post I was replying to was asking why some VCs are pumping so much money into crypto. I'm not characterizing all crypto supporters as libertarians, just the VCs who pretend that they're investing in it because they want decentralization and open democratized platforms that are owned by the users.
Ahh yeah I misread that a bit. Still I don’t necessarily think that’s accurate even regarding the VCs. Their investments and goals sort of run counter to the libertarian types in the crypto community who tend to be focused more on monetary policy or privacy concerns. If anything what the VCs are doing imo is subverting cryptos ability to meet any of the goals of libertarians by focusing most of the development effort in crypto on centralized platforms that look a lot more like traditional tech companies.
This rather parochially presupposes the whole world operates on the same basis as the two-bit low-grade binary oppositional shit-flinging that passes for political discourse in the USA, or even cares much about it.
Fortunately, that isn’t how this works. Since I don’t live in the US or read its tattered, overwrought media except by accident, I can comfortably say “what political narrative are you on about mate”, and make my analysis free of whatever baggage that entails.
Which leads me back to saying, no thanks. What’s being peddled here creates no fundamental value, so the only beneficiaries are middlemen, their equivalents, and their proxies.
Repeating a narrative that was crafted with a particular political intent is furthering that intent regardless of how you’re thinking about it internally. And unfortunately us Americans are really good at exporting our shittiest ideas everywhere else (especially Western Europe) so it still has meaning regardless of where you live
Almost all web3 projects issue their own tokens. Before they allow you to buy any of these tokens, they reserve part of the supply to the dev team and VCs. The rest of the supply is issued to the community.
If the project/token is successful, the monetary value of the token rises, which funds the development teams and helps VCs to get a return.
So as always, big capital gets the early access, and us mortal do not.
Still, for a serious project it's not as bad as it sounds. It could still end up meaning the project is 75% community owned, rather than the 0% in a fully central organization.
You should apply scrutiny though to the "decentralized" claim. Most web3 projects aren't very decentralized at all.
It is possible to buy crypto purely peer to peer e.g just 2 people posting on a forum. Yet, most people buy it on an exchange and pay the transaction fees.
It is possible to set up a wordpress server on your home PC or a cheap VPS, yet most people buy it off wordpress.com
It is possible to replicate an ETF with relatively low effort by just looking up their holdings every month and rebalancing, yet most people pay the ETF fees.
It is possible to make great coffee at home yet people go to coffee shops.
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The main idea IMO is just relying on people to be willing to buy into whatever new thing has a lot of marketing and hype behind it. They consistently do. Even if web3 is a truly open system, people will remain too apathetic to learn how that system works - they will just go to the most popular platform and pay the fee.
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The other angle IMO is that banks and tradfi in a lot of places really do suck hard. They don't need to innovate at all and rarely do. The only reason they don't have competition is piles of red tape, regulation, lobbying, corruption etc. All it takes is someone to make a half-decent website/app that makes things a little better (e.g Robinhood) and crypto is a way to do that while getting around all the old regulation.
> The main idea IMO is just relying on people to be willing to buy into whatever new thing has a lot of marketing and hype behind it. They consistently do. Even if web3 is a truly open system, people will remain too apathetic to learn how that system works - they will just go to the most popular platform and pay the fee
Then why not do it on web2? Web2, as it relies on trusted authorities, is fundamentally cheaper to run than web3.
> It is possible to replicate an ETF with relatively low effort by just looking up their holdings every month and rebalancing, yet most people pay the ETF fees.
ETFs rebalance without incurring capital gains, which is a massive advantage.
Yeah, from the perspective of someone joining a project rather than creating it, why wouldn’t you use ones that explicitly prevent any kind of outsized return for the creators?
This reads like an obligatory post on the topic with no real substance. I’m on mobile so it’s a good opportunity to succinctly express what I view as the major, near-future positives for Web3:
- identity and trustless SSO via things like ENS and “sign in with {client such as metamask}”
- data sovereignty, or at least less platform lock-in, especially for low/no code users
- grants, crowdfunding, and other financial support for useful open-source projects. This may be the most provably successful outcome to date in Web3; I’m confident I could cite enough sources here with a little homework.
I encourage all readers to disassociate (or rather decouple) the terms “cryptocurrency” and “NFT” from Web3. Web3, while still fairly nebulous, in my current understanding, is mostly protocol-level implementations of web paradigms incorporating decentralized technologies. Like any growing technology, there will be many variations, and the unscrupulous outliers should not overshadow the constellation of fascinating things humanity can speedrun with these new building blocks.
The SSO thing has come up before. Trustless, decentralized, immutable databases are essentially the exact opposite of what you want in an SSO system; it's hard to think of an application where blockchain technology has less promise than SSO, which is about fine-grained policy control, out-of-band account recovery (the hardest problem in SSO), instantaneous revocation, and centralization of controls.
This is a hard problem that needs a fantastic solution. I don't think sign in with Ethereum is better than UniLogin. UniLogin was good, the team was smart, and this was still too much of a problem for them to feel like it was worth their time to solve.
Then there's the significant problem of state expiry. How do you log out? I don't see that they're really addressing this problem. Right now the EIP has the attitude to "push that problem down to the servers". Websites need complete solutions, not more problems. Others have already made progress down this road, and I don't see anything different from what has already been done before.
I think it's really easy to be doubtful about web3, especially given how much BS is floating in the space, and the high amount of pure speculative trades having been made so far.
I still believe that there's something there, but I'm not sure what it is. I am also unsure that the current wave of companies will be able to find it.
The different between the early adoption of web2 and this current web3 cycle is that web2 brought a proper value to its users. I still fail to see how web3 is providing value at all.
Perhaps specific aspects of crypto (e.g. NFT used for real estate transactions) will be the killer app?
In many countries real estate transactions are validated by a notary elite that has a lot of political clout. Technical superiority is not even a factor here.
> Perhaps specific aspects of crypto (e.g. NFT used for real estate transactions) will be the killer app?
I consider myself to be very good at security, offsite encrypted backups, managing private keys, and other opsec details.
But there's no way I'd ever want the ownership of my house or cars or other property controlled by an NFT. If something happens to my private keys, am I stuck with the house forever? If my private keys are stolen, does someone else suddenly own my house because they have the NFT?
In a hypothetical world where NFTs were the token of real estate ownership, governments would simply step in and make sets of laws to override and re-issue the NFTs according to legal outcomes. They would store the overrides and other information in a centralized database that they control, and everyone would be bound to respect the overrides in the centralized database. So the NFT becomes a gimmick.
> But there's no way I'd ever want the ownership of my house or cars or other property controlled by an NFT.
+1. My dad died in 2015 and the lawyer who held his Will had apparently gone out of business in the early 00s. I spent a lot of time in the probate courts but was eventually able to gain access to the assets so I could clear the estate, settle his debts, and put him to rest. Arbitrated reversibility and sanctioned transfer of title is a feature, not a bug...I feel that point often gets lost in the web3 debates.
It really sounds like the big data, machine learning, AI and enterprise blockchain craze from 5 years ago. Where those things were used for the most stupid things just so the marketing department could put it on a powerpoint slide.
Big data, machine learning and AI are massive sectors of the tech economy today. The only thing you demonstrate is that there is a difference between aggressive marketing leeching of the core idea and the motivations behind the core idea itself.
What is the name of this cognitive bias that shows up in all web3 conversations about how internet/web2 ended up being a success and therefore web3 will too? If X led to Y, then Z that (we say) is similar to X will also lead to Y.
The linked post[1], ironically, really helps to cement why I consider web3 to be interesting technologically but mostly nonsense from a product perspective.
> As a first approximation all the big powerful internet companies are really database providers. Facebook is a database of people’s profiles, their friend graphs and their status updates. Paypal is a database of people’s account balances. Amazon is a database of SKUs, payment credentials and purchase histories. Google is a database of web pages and query histories.
This is profoundly, naively, staggeringly wrong. The products that these companies provide to users[2] are not "the databases" - they are "the ability to do useful, meaningful, real-life impactful things". Facebook is not valuable as a service because of its database - it's valuable because I am able to interact with that database in ways that result in other people seeing the thing that I posted. PayPal is not useful to me because of those recorded balances - it is useful because merchants and financial institutions respect those balances are being equivalent to money. And so on - Amazon is useful because things actually show up at my door, Google is useful because it can use those links/queries to serve me the page that I was searching for.
This is, ironically, why many claims of web3's supremacy fall flat. As this[3] long-but-very-worthwhile rant about NFTs in gaming makes clear, simply claiming "ownership" is almost meaningless for anything other than simple financial transactions (which, I callously suspect, is 99% of what web3 is actually intended for anyway). If you want to say that you "own" a video game gun, that's all well-and-good - but to actually use it in a new game, that requires implementation effort from coders and artists, balancing, support, etc. In fact, the pleasant-sounding ideal of "own your digital assets anywhere!" is nonsense - it's meaningless to _own_ something if you can't actually _do_ anything with it. Ironically, it is actually _better_ for the customer to have their data/assets/what-have-you in a single database owned-and-operated by a single company - because then there is a reason for that company to continue to provide support for interactions _with_ that data.
Don't get me wrong - the commodification of customer data by Big Tech enrages and unsettles me, too, and I feel uncomfortable with the fact that we mostly rent internet services rather than owning them. But I've yet to see a convincing argument that Web3's notion of "ownership" actually results in anything tangible, anything other than bragging rights. If there's a way of effecting that ownership such that you can actually _do_ something with it (other than selling it), I'll be interested.
[2] Obviously, those databases are valuable to advertizing, targeting, marketing, etc. companies, but I'm focusing on the customer experience here. You can't build up a valuable database if you cannot attract customers - and, anyway, isn't one of the whole points of web3 that customer data _isn't_ for sale? (A likely story...)
Appreciated your third paragraph and 3rd link. I'm struggling with my own articulation about how NFTs dont intrinsically themselves add value and yet are being treated/described as such, and this helped clarify it a bit for me.
Honestly, the linked article about NFTs in Video Games was what really helped me with my articulation. It's long, but I really recommend it.
The situation makes me sad, because I think that Web3/NFTs/etc. are some really interesting technologies, and I really align the aims that they _claim_ to be supporting (whether all proponents actually _do_ support those aims, or are merely claiming to do so in order to make a quick buck, is a different question). But the implementations that exist, and the environmental damage that they currently cause, make them utterly unsupportable to me.
The legitimacy of a worldwide database can be solved if the UN decides to run a MySQL instance, creates APIs for transactions between individuals, and agrees on a worldwide legal framework for transactions. In the eyes of many this would look more legitimate than the "network of terrorists and CP". I don't think that argument is enough
why not sell an existing service as a new one by swapping the current database for a private centrally controlled blockchain? Think of all the cheddar.
Let's say all crypto goes down in value 10% year after year in 2022 indefinitely.
This shouldn't necessarily affect the value or necessity (or lack thereof) of Web3. Can Web3 practically succeed under these conditions?
Unfortunately after engaging with many in person and on this forum, I've yet to hear a coherent strategy or purpose for Web3 that doesn't rely on centralized entities at any part of the chain, or rely on crypto going up.
Consider that lots of companies have relatively small market caps relative to their profit mandate, and yet they still provide a crucial value to their customers.
GE with a workforce of over 174,000 employees sells 75 billion dollars in goods and services, yet has a price to sales ratio of 1.37.
> Unfortunately after engaging with many in person and on this forum, I've yet to hear a coherent strategy or purpose for Web3 that doesn't rely on centralized entities at any part of the chain, or rely on crypto going up.
Did you want to respond to the person? Or just chime in with a random anecdote about GE.
The crux of web3 is the UX, last mile, and/or listing problem: even if you, hypothetically, could find a decentralized solution for every centralized one, the last interface to this mechanism will be centralized.
Your UI (e.g. mobile app) is centralized so the best UI will eventually win because most end users care about UX or will enter this interface because they see a well paid ad. If this UI (e.g. a decentralized search engine interface) wants to censor some content then it will win over the decentralized protocol behind it.
Why would UI need to be centralized? Even in normal SPAs the client is making most of the work, the UI is fairly trivial to decentralize and there were a few examples on hn already.
This is very simple: imagine you have decentralized Uber/Lyft so now all the logic occurs in a decentralized way.
Now, Uber^2 publishes a great mobile app, the mobile app is obviously centralized and they can decide to use or not and how to use the decentralized mechanism because they are the winners as the UX.
Oh you're thinking that centralized apps would always produce better UX for some reason?
I think centralized apps are making UX necessarily worse, because they implement dark patterns in order to milk their users, while in a decentralized ones you can just make your own. For example, matrix vs discord, one I can customize and interact with however I want the other is garbage and if I change anything I will get banned.
Mainstream adoption is independent if the app is centralized or not. You are ignoring the people who use Netflix, TikTok, Instagram, etc. People care about the brand offering not if they are decentralized or not.
You're right that the UX layer could be centralized. However, the data that the UX is built on would not be centralized. In the Uber example, it's as if the ride-hailing backend were available to anyone.
The centralized UX could censor transactions like you say, but the barrier to entry is low for another UX, built on the same decentralized data, to emerge and challenge the centralized UX. That's because the data is available to everyone.
I don't agree. I think excellent UXs have a super high barrier of entry. Look at apps such as Google Docs, TikTok, etc.
A company could build an UX without even thinking about being decentralized and users will care about the UX but not about "decentralization politics". If an excellent decentralized UX is built, you just copy the interesting parts and add you proprietary ones, sell you brand and success!
Google Docs - not just a UX, built on the Google ecosystem with its existing network of users and massive amounts of data
TikTok - not just a UX, but a massive social network, again with lots of data.
In a decentralized world, there will be a decentralized social network like TikTok. The UX would interact with that social network; it wouldn't create the social network itself. To give another example, it's as if Facebook's social network was open to anyone to build a UX on top of and interact with. Much lower barrier to entry.
I read this as yet another article stating how great web3 is going to be and how important the decentralization aspect is, without making it clear exactly why this is the case, and what concrete examples of things we'll be able to do with it (that we're unable to do today) are.
Web3 sounds to me like one of those soap opera startups PG talks about. They sound like a great idea when you propose them, but do people really want them in reality?
It was "sitcom" startups[0], something like "uber for dogs". I guess some of web3 qualifies, but I don't think something like Ethereum would fit that category at all.
That only works because of the “web2” aspects of the current NFT implementation. The actual content is simply hosted on a traditional web2 service. Once the data moves to a distributed store, it becomes a much more intractable problem that depends on a lot of traditional “centralized” parties. Random network participants will become liable in lawsuits for storing/replicating blocks of data, which will lead to all sorts of compliance issues, which will result in what we have today: centralized services operated by experts on behalf of the lay customer.
So, either nothing changes, or something changes. You can’t have it both ways.
> “We were not aware of the likeness laws in NFTs as the market is not regulated,” the post reads.
Hahahahaha. This is the dumbest excuse, you are not immune to existing rules just “because crypto”. The likened laws don’t need to mention crypto specifically to apply, did they even stop to think for a single second before they did this?
If the crypto community wants to be taken seriously and not constantly regarded as a joke, they ought to do themselves a favour and at least try to be a bit competent.
Yes, I don't want twitter users to determine who can use the internet and who can send/receive money. That's a job for governments, not self-important people with blue check marks next to their names.
P.S. you can have moderation without censorship. That's how Mastodon works.
public data isn't going to keep things decentralized because data isn't the only thing that matters, if anything it matters less and less. Core part of what large internet services do is process data and provide services built on top of a lot of compute.
We have big internet companies because processing that amount of information is computationally expensive and thus centralization is the economic solution. Not even traditional p2p solutions have yet been able to compete with large entities, and 'web3' with its crypto solutions is substantially worse because it's computationally more expensive by design.
Not to mention there's also the fairly obvious point that a lot of those companies exist by processing data that is inherently private because users demand it to be so. Nobody is willingly going to put their chat messages on the blockchain to be read by the public.
Global finance will eventually be eclipsed by large-scale economic planning systems. It will probably take a couple decades for finance to go the way of alchemy, but the signs of its irrelevance are there: hilarious schemes like SPACs, DeFi, NFTs. Totally divorced from the underlying economics.
I'd be interested too. I've seen takes loosely along these lines before, but my familiarity is pretty shallow and I don't remember specific sources. There's a line of thought that traditional pro-capitalism analysis of the "economic calculation problem" would tell us that a massive corporate retailer like Walmart should be mired in inefficiency compared to retailers with more localized authority (e.g. regional or franchised chains). Since that's not what we see, something must be missing from the analysis. For example, some have proposed that technological advancements (in fields including telecommunications, logistics, and accounting) have made centralization radically cheaper and more effective since the 1980s or so.
I was being provocative -- finance will not totally disappear, but it will play a greatly diminished role in human economies. Successful national economies will adopt a tech-driven, centralized approach to economics. The global, eternally-fungible USD, and all the problems it brings, will cease to exist.
Non-transferable, expiring, digital currencies may be employed in limited domains, for example "food credits" or "fuel credits". This means that free markets will still exist much like today, you can shop for whatever food you want, but you now can't use your "food money" for e.g. financial speculation or buying a new car. This unlocks UBI as a practical solution to many societal problems. You can give everyone $250 foodbucks a week with 1 month expiration and not worry about massive financial fraud & waste. Price mechanism still works, food industry is still competing for your foodbucks which would be converted into some other representation of economic value upon purchase.
Libertarians will lose their minds at this, but frankly the nations that adopt a centralized tech-driven economy will vastly outperform those still based on legacy financial systems. In fact, they already are beginning to. There is so much waste in the current American economy and yet most Americans are still struggling to pay rent and put food on the table.
The alternative future is the one described by DeFi/web3 crowd, which is essentially based on a deep misunderstanding of what finance and money is about and how they relate to the actual economy. They tend to view economics as a subset of finance ("fix the money, fix the world") when really it's the other way around, and finance itself is nonessential.
What an articulate description of your views. Thank you!
I know it was only a subset of your comment, but I’m very curious how an expiring subcurrency would function in an real economy.
How would you propose regulations work for a food credits “black market”, e.g. I will pay you 150 general-purpose capital credits for your 200 food bucks?
Would non-digital cash be completely done away with? What about objects of value that could be given to others? Would the transfer of expiring assets for non-expiring assets be prohibited? What about favors and more subtle ways of transfer?
How would food credits be legitimately redeemed? Would a small shop that complies with policy be able to instantly convert a food credits profit into capital that they could use to expand their business?
All of these limited currencies would exist on a centralized government platform; no physical currency.
There would be no third-party ability to create/transform these currencies. So all swaps/trades would have to be done on the official platform or via its APIs, which you could of course integrate into third-party websites. The govt could even run markets (with tariffs to discourage volatility) to swap between different currencies.
Frankly, >90% of the tech infrastructure is already here in America between corps like Amazon and Stripe. We just need to go the extra mile to "nationalize" these corps and integrate them into one huge economic system. A monumental task, to be sure. But the road is already being paved by less liberal nations.
I posted a while ago a comment that large tech companies and their investors are not really motivated for decentralized systems, but that they have to tell the markets they are. Otherwise they will face increasing regulatory and liability pressure due to how they wield control and power over their platforms and customers / users (products). On the one hand they want to be shielded from the effects of running large, centralized systems, but on the other hand, they don't want to give up their walled gardens, customer lock-in, captive audience, no right-to-repair benefits. [0]
* two years ago: "bitcoin! bitcoin! bitcoin!" - tech community: "bitcoin is a pyramid scheme and also bad for the environment."
* a year ago: "crypto! crypto! not bitcoin, there's others and also fintech loves blockchain!" - tech community: "nope, still a pyramid scheme, financial community goes whereever there's hype and $$$, they couldnt care less about 'tech'"
* 6 months ago: "nfts! nfts! look there's an actual thing associated with it!" - tech communuty: "but you don't actually own anything. obvious speculation scam"
* 2 months ago: "web3! web3! it's vague! except it's all about those things above we just make it less obvious and more buzzwordy!" - tech community: please leave
Want to share where I can read the unified opinion from the "tech community"? I'd consider myself as part of the tech community, but never said anything of those things, are you sure you can speak for everyone in the community?
HN is such a small slice of the "tech community", if we see the definition the same way (people who work in "tech"). I don't think you should take anything you read here as "majority of people in tech thinks like this", because the size is so small.
My experience is that the ratio of crypto skeptics here on hn more or less mirrors that of any non-crypto focused tech community (ex: coworkers, SIGs, etc)
What other online tech communities are there out there that I can check out? If you say this is such a tiny one, I’d love to see the “bigger than HN” community you must be referring to.
Twitter is an “online tech community”? I think we have different definitions of the term.
To elaborate, I think there’s too much non-tech people on social media for you to say that it’s a better representation of the “tech community” than HN. HN has at least some self-selection towards people who are interested in tech, whereas Twitter/FB/etc has way too much noise from non-tech uninformed crypto fetishists to say it’s representative of the “tech community”.
(That is not to say that non-tech people’s opinions don’t matter, or that twitter/FB/etc are not good places in general, but the subject of this thread of discussion is “what the tech community thinks of crypto/web3” and I don’t think “everyone on twitter” is great to use as a counter-example.)
It feels like something or other cryptocurrency related floats on the front page of Hacker News every other day, and discussion about it is welcomed. I would call that the opposite of "please leave".
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That simply isn't true. There has been consistent and widespread criticism of crypto enthusiasm on the majority of stories posted here recently.
What simply isn't true? I said discussion about it is welcomed here, and you're telling me that critical discussion is "consistent and widespread". It sounds like we agree.
It'd be preferable for users and developers to gravitate towards a web built on community standards, rather than one built on an exploitative ecosystem. Dave Winer notes "web3 is venture capital wanting a new bubble to inflate so they can get the kinds of returns they used to get." (https://twitter.com/davewiner/status/1475876218905976843)
The problem with this "web 3.0" proposal is that the tech is web 2.0. RSS, diaspora, pump.io and friendica have all been around for ages.
The real problem is a lack of incentives for those in power (generally those with large marketing departments) to adopt or support them. We see this every time a major service slowly kills off their API. Data portability and interoperability are nice for gaining adoption, but the first thing you kill when it outlives its usefulness to the centralized entity.
And the average user doesn't care about this, and probably also doesn't want to do the research to understand decentralized federation. People already unlearned that gmail is distrinct from email, and here we ask them to yet again anchor their trust in even smaller entities than your average email provider to curate their social feed and keep their instance up.
It is a much better vision of the future of the internet than web3 - even through web3 sells the blockchain as the magic silver bullet to these issues. But it will fail for the same reason.
HN meta: funnily enough, I made an extension that highlights keywords on HN and I added "web3" to the list this morning after reading this 3-week old comment: "It feels as if 5 similar articles [about web3] reach the HN top page every day like this. The same arguments are made, the same rebuttals are made, the same comments are made ad nauseam, every single time, with no apparent conclusion. Are we officially living in a simulation? What's happening?" [1]. 2 hours later, I refresh the frontpage and here we go.
You're not kidding. I could swear I've read some of the comments in here, word for word, in past web3 posts. I wasn't even sure it was a new post at first, the comments (and the replies to those comments!) have been so similar.
Why? Web3 is an idea/concept, much like the web itself or the internet (neither are "an actual spec, service or product"), but we can still discuss the web and the internet no?
The Web and the Internet are the sum of it's protocols plus the infrastructure build on top of it plus the untangible social effects it has.
This is true for Web3 as well, but the protocols are in their infancy, the infrastructure is sparse and the sociale effects (as of now) concentrated in the blockchain space.
The parent comment wants to discuss those three topics (maybe minus the social implications) with regards to what amounts mostly to a buzzword right now, precisely because Web3's protocols, infrastructure and social implications are far to under developed to warrant serious discussion concerning long-time stable solutions to real-world problems.
I sympathise with earlier comments, that would like to seperate Web3 from blockchain and crypto-coins precisely to discuss the possible merits or protocols actually fullfilling what the crypto space right now fails to deliver on.
I wish I could separate decentralized database from volatile investment. I understand that it can provide an incentive to get paid for essentially hosting part of the database. Is your average person benefiting from this or did we just give most of the centralization to mining farms where electricity is cheaper?
Is web3 crypto money? Is it peer to peer? Is it blockchain?
Does the blockchain really make sense for something like a HN clone or an instagram?
If I were trying to proselytize web3 I would be promoting tech demos and convincing people why it is better. Like the Rails blog video that blew all of our minds in the past. We all wanted to use Rails after that. The benefits were clear.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 381 ms ] threadMy real question is: why would an investor want to put money into a company that doesn’t “own” the data from their customers? Do they even _have_ customers? What is their business model?
I know, I know - they make commissions on all those billions of transactions that will happen on the blockchain. Right? Is the value simply coming up with new ways to add cost to transactions?
I’m lost. Even when web2 was in an eyeballs race, I understood that you could monetize eyeballs with advertising (in what I considered a worst-case model). And SaaS was an obvious model, even if Marc Benioff seemed to yell about it a lot.
What is a web3 business model outside of currency exchange?
My #1 principle is cost minimization so that I don't need to worry about what it costs to run.
Futurists circa 1970 expected that people would be getting their news from something like cnn.com in the Early 1980s
https://www.niemanlab.org/2013/08/summer-reading-2013-the-in...
In some sense it came true in that you could access the AP newswire on Compuserve and the Source and that there were teletext services in Europe.
All of these faced bad economics. The cost of CompuServe was astronomical. The only one that came close to mass market was Minitel in France and that was because the phone company saw they could save money on directory services.
The web came along because technology had progressed an order of magnitude past feasibility to the point where people could publish stuff on the web and not worry about what it costs. That act of closing the circle and making it financial sustainable really trashed it.
If, on the other hand, the database is an open public database that is not controlled and administered by a single company, but instead is a truly open system available to all, then that kind of market power cannot be built up around a data asset" So why are they flowing billions of dollars into this ? If there is no locking what will create outsized returns for them?
Eh, how would that work exactly?
> Or the easiest business model of them all, sell ads on your org site
That's great, but I can ensure you: none of us in the cryptocurrency ecosystem wants anything to do with ads. Also, can't really build a big business by having ads on your website.
If we're just making up "business innovations" willy nilly, why not just create a company that prints money from used t-shirts instead, I guess that would make a lot of money for the business.
Why not go bigger and get paid any time people say anything?
Outsider contributions are submitted publicly, while features developed by the company start in secret and can remain secret as long as possible. The company's contributions are rammed through while outsiders contend with endless bikeshedding with no guarantee they will get anything they need.
In the end there is no sensible reason for any other entity to partner with the controlling company. The partner finds they are prevented from innovating while being bogged down by the "process." The controlling party then seeks to cannibalize the partner's product during this time by shelving any of their unique features and ideas. Once the partner moves on, the requisite changes and fixes to the specification are magically pushed through.
I wouldn't call this a core business model as much as an enhancement to one. Fundamentally it's an attention grift -- a bamboozle of complex rules, procedures and processes, cloaked in goodwill, and furnished by a large interest and future hope at any given time.
So does that mean I can be the next Facebook with one click of a deploy button ?
Google Chrome for example
company does not own anything nor database?
I think just coins?
Other blockchains make decentralization tradeoffs to process more transactions on-chain per second. For example, Ethereum requires better hardware: larger storage, better CPU and more memory. Solana makes even larger tradeoffs: expensive server hardware costing up to $25000, making it pretty much a central service controlled by the few.
The key innovation of Bitcoin is the decentralization; almost anyone can participate and no one can control it. Sacrificing this for negligble is not worth it. Especially since there are smarter ways to scale the system. Even if you could improve throughput by 100x by making the system slightly less decentralized you would still not reach VISA levels of TPS.
The correct way to scale these systems is using off-chain solutions like the Lightning Network. This way you can process millions of transactions per second.
Good luck convincing people that every time they logging into their account or literally do any action will cost them some fees. Refreshed the page? Oops that'll cost ya!
And then eventually that cache will be a database.
And then eventually that database will have some additional data.
And then eventually we will back to where we are today.
Structures and versioning become harder when that is distributed at the protocol/standard level. Right now the web is already distributed, the protocols/standards are open and versioning data/content/apps/endpoints on top of that is easy, but updating protocols/standards takes time. Apps are a second layer to that, versioning is harder as you have to roll out updates and the OSs/standards they are built on are the slower changing part, web3 is even harder as updates and versioning of the protocol/standards AND the data/content on top will need to propagate and there may be pushback and splits/forks as we are seeing ETH being difficult to change core protocols/flows. There may be innovations on this as we go but also turbulence until that is realized.
For some areas like personal data and ledger data not changing much is good. For anything beyond that it makes it harder to change. Versioning and iterative change is already difficult in some cases when a company has full control over the structures. Getting multiple companies to agree on standards is harder, especially when that impacts revenues on those systems. The same will happen with web3 maybe more intensely. Right now even open standards are actively killed off because they share data. Right now "web2" could have shared databases, and there are some, but companies push away from that and actively look to own data which is a problem. However the same will happen with web3 at additional levels including the protocols/standards now.
What may happen is APIs public facades/interfaces/signatures are more atomic/stable and less changing which is always nice to have, with the guts of the structures being more keyed/document data formats. I am always a fan of iterative change that doesn't nuke the public interfaces/facades unless absolutely necessary. It may lead to "cleaner" more generic public interfaces potentially, but it may also lead to stagnate iterations and infighting like current web standards. In a way, web3 is more about standards than what is built on it. Standards can be flexible or not, both with their pros and cons.
In a way with cryptocurrency, the real goal of the investors of web3 is recreating the web with a sort of toll system, that can be good and bad but their aim is collecting on actions on new protocols/standards.
Taking control away from companies for important data like personal data and shared public data may be good, but there is also some trouble ahead and many things to work out. The same type of sharks that capture that data are looking to go lower in the stack and control that area, and extracting fees/tolls on the movement in that structure even if it is an open database. There are pros and cons to all of this.
One could argue that today's web is a combination of ad-based revenue and tolls run by (near?) monopolies: app stores, marketplaces, ect... The crypto-like alternatives such as substack and patreon are growing though and will likely have a niche even if/when crypto fails. The centralization of those crypto-like alternatives is a risk though. I recall one substack author giving email-export as a rationale to choose substack but that's a feature that presumably could just be turned off whenever.
They don't want to miss the web3 boat, and they're betting the web 1.0/web 2.0 playbooks still apply.
Some people believe that this type of decentralization could be a force that can't be stopped by traditional companies and want to get in as soon as possible so they don't end up on the losing side of history.
Of course, rich people simply diversify their assets and crypto is just one of many bets they do, so it's not 100% sure this will happen.
web3 is a marketing term and is easy to leverage hype on as it implies progression and a new arena of opportunity.
By the time anyone has peeled off the marketing and realised it’s the same old bullshit people will be too far in to admit it and death march over the horizon.
1.Where is the controlling part. 2. what facebook internal advantage/motivation to create and hire more engineers and give dopemine to more people?
Saying company facebook own coin which has no value what does this even mean?
Explain to me.
Every blockchain project knows that they need to incentivize their miners somehow. This is usually a combination of fees from users and new tokens minted via built-in inflation (yes, inflation ironically powers much of the crypto space and will continue to do so for a long time).
So I always aks:
1) What problem are these web3 platforms solving?
2) Who are they solving it for?
3) Are those people actually willing to pay the blockchain premium to use a web3 platform over a centralized platform?
The theory, of course, is that blockchain will evolve over time to become less resource hungry and therefore cheap enough to compete with incumbents, but that's a long way away. Many projects have started cheating by smuggling centralization into their architecture but emphasizing their blockchain and hoping nobody cares enough about the difference.
But where do VCs come into the equation? They're not setting up the mining operations that will power these businesses and collect the fees in the future. They're investing in tokens that will ostensibly be used to pay the miners in the future.
The whole game is about introducing artificial tokens, quietly giving a huge number of those tokens to founders and early investors (in exchange for actual money, of course), and then hyping the platform to the moon so everyone can cash out their tokens to a new wave of speculators.
In other words a Ponzi-scheme
But what's the value ?
I am still after a few years now trying to understand what it actually is.
Some coins, mebe there's some lulz??
But that's it.
Yer lulz worth that much to you?
2. Because they're rich libertarians who see crypto as a way to protect their assets from the government
Criticising the whole shebang as a bunch of charletans pitching snake oil to the gullible isn’t “progressive”, it’s common sense.
There’s also a big difference between valuable emerging technologies that have a lot of speculative investments & charlatans selling snake oil vs “the whole shebang”.
Fortunately, that isn’t how this works. Since I don’t live in the US or read its tattered, overwrought media except by accident, I can comfortably say “what political narrative are you on about mate”, and make my analysis free of whatever baggage that entails.
Which leads me back to saying, no thanks. What’s being peddled here creates no fundamental value, so the only beneficiaries are middlemen, their equivalents, and their proxies.
The assertion that anyone who disagrees with (whatever) must have been brainwashed by something they read is pathological for debate.
If the project/token is successful, the monetary value of the token rises, which funds the development teams and helps VCs to get a return.
So as always, big capital gets the early access, and us mortal do not.
Still, for a serious project it's not as bad as it sounds. It could still end up meaning the project is 75% community owned, rather than the 0% in a fully central organization.
You should apply scrutiny though to the "decentralized" claim. Most web3 projects aren't very decentralized at all.
It is possible to buy crypto purely peer to peer e.g just 2 people posting on a forum. Yet, most people buy it on an exchange and pay the transaction fees.
It is possible to set up a wordpress server on your home PC or a cheap VPS, yet most people buy it off wordpress.com
It is possible to replicate an ETF with relatively low effort by just looking up their holdings every month and rebalancing, yet most people pay the ETF fees.
It is possible to make great coffee at home yet people go to coffee shops.
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The main idea IMO is just relying on people to be willing to buy into whatever new thing has a lot of marketing and hype behind it. They consistently do. Even if web3 is a truly open system, people will remain too apathetic to learn how that system works - they will just go to the most popular platform and pay the fee.
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The other angle IMO is that banks and tradfi in a lot of places really do suck hard. They don't need to innovate at all and rarely do. The only reason they don't have competition is piles of red tape, regulation, lobbying, corruption etc. All it takes is someone to make a half-decent website/app that makes things a little better (e.g Robinhood) and crypto is a way to do that while getting around all the old regulation.
Then why not do it on web2? Web2, as it relies on trusted authorities, is fundamentally cheaper to run than web3.
> It is possible to replicate an ETF with relatively low effort by just looking up their holdings every month and rebalancing, yet most people pay the ETF fees.
ETFs rebalance without incurring capital gains, which is a massive advantage.
Because you need something new and abstract to attract the rubes
Controlling consensus through proof of stake would give them an advantage.
- identity and trustless SSO via things like ENS and “sign in with {client such as metamask}”
- data sovereignty, or at least less platform lock-in, especially for low/no code users
- grants, crowdfunding, and other financial support for useful open-source projects. This may be the most provably successful outcome to date in Web3; I’m confident I could cite enough sources here with a little homework.
I encourage all readers to disassociate (or rather decouple) the terms “cryptocurrency” and “NFT” from Web3. Web3, while still fairly nebulous, in my current understanding, is mostly protocol-level implementations of web paradigms incorporating decentralized technologies. Like any growing technology, there will be many variations, and the unscrupulous outliers should not overshadow the constellation of fascinating things humanity can speedrun with these new building blocks.
Alex Van de Sande, the co-founder of ENS, posted in 2018 an interesting demo with UniLogin, "[Universal Logins demo for Ethereum](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5t94cCg6XE)". [The project was abandoned in 2020](https://medium.com/universal-ethereum/out-of-gas-were-shutti...).
This is a hard problem that needs a fantastic solution. I don't think sign in with Ethereum is better than UniLogin. UniLogin was good, the team was smart, and this was still too much of a problem for them to feel like it was worth their time to solve.
Then there's the significant problem of state expiry. How do you log out? I don't see that they're really addressing this problem. Right now the EIP has the attitude to "push that problem down to the servers". Websites need complete solutions, not more problems. Others have already made progress down this road, and I don't see anything different from what has already been done before.
I still believe that there's something there, but I'm not sure what it is. I am also unsure that the current wave of companies will be able to find it.
The different between the early adoption of web2 and this current web3 cycle is that web2 brought a proper value to its users. I still fail to see how web3 is providing value at all.
Perhaps specific aspects of crypto (e.g. NFT used for real estate transactions) will be the killer app?
I consider myself to be very good at security, offsite encrypted backups, managing private keys, and other opsec details.
But there's no way I'd ever want the ownership of my house or cars or other property controlled by an NFT. If something happens to my private keys, am I stuck with the house forever? If my private keys are stolen, does someone else suddenly own my house because they have the NFT?
In a hypothetical world where NFTs were the token of real estate ownership, governments would simply step in and make sets of laws to override and re-issue the NFTs according to legal outcomes. They would store the overrides and other information in a centralized database that they control, and everyone would be bound to respect the overrides in the centralized database. So the NFT becomes a gimmick.
+1. My dad died in 2015 and the lawyer who held his Will had apparently gone out of business in the early 00s. I spent a lot of time in the probate courts but was eventually able to gain access to the assets so I could clear the estate, settle his debts, and put him to rest. Arbitrated reversibility and sanctioned transfer of title is a feature, not a bug...I feel that point often gets lost in the web3 debates.
I fear more posts relating to said nonsense will only legitimize those topics in the eyes of the uninformed.
All it says is: Web 3.0 matters because I say so. And we will prove it,
Yes.. and?
> As a first approximation all the big powerful internet companies are really database providers. Facebook is a database of people’s profiles, their friend graphs and their status updates. Paypal is a database of people’s account balances. Amazon is a database of SKUs, payment credentials and purchase histories. Google is a database of web pages and query histories.
This is profoundly, naively, staggeringly wrong. The products that these companies provide to users[2] are not "the databases" - they are "the ability to do useful, meaningful, real-life impactful things". Facebook is not valuable as a service because of its database - it's valuable because I am able to interact with that database in ways that result in other people seeing the thing that I posted. PayPal is not useful to me because of those recorded balances - it is useful because merchants and financial institutions respect those balances are being equivalent to money. And so on - Amazon is useful because things actually show up at my door, Google is useful because it can use those links/queries to serve me the page that I was searching for.
This is, ironically, why many claims of web3's supremacy fall flat. As this[3] long-but-very-worthwhile rant about NFTs in gaming makes clear, simply claiming "ownership" is almost meaningless for anything other than simple financial transactions (which, I callously suspect, is 99% of what web3 is actually intended for anyway). If you want to say that you "own" a video game gun, that's all well-and-good - but to actually use it in a new game, that requires implementation effort from coders and artists, balancing, support, etc. In fact, the pleasant-sounding ideal of "own your digital assets anywhere!" is nonsense - it's meaningless to _own_ something if you can't actually _do_ anything with it. Ironically, it is actually _better_ for the customer to have their data/assets/what-have-you in a single database owned-and-operated by a single company - because then there is a reason for that company to continue to provide support for interactions _with_ that data.
Don't get me wrong - the commodification of customer data by Big Tech enrages and unsettles me, too, and I feel uncomfortable with the fact that we mostly rent internet services rather than owning them. But I've yet to see a convincing argument that Web3's notion of "ownership" actually results in anything tangible, anything other than bragging rights. If there's a way of effecting that ownership such that you can actually _do_ something with it (other than selling it), I'll be interested.
[1] https://continuations.com/post/671863718643105792/web3crypto...
[2] Obviously, those databases are valuable to advertizing, targeting, marketing, etc. companies, but I'm focusing on the customer experience here. You can't build up a valuable database if you cannot attract customers - and, anyway, isn't one of the whole points of web3 that customer data _isn't_ for sale? (A likely story...)
[3] https://t.co/0X0mMRFD2O
The situation makes me sad, because I think that Web3/NFTs/etc. are some really interesting technologies, and I really align the aims that they _claim_ to be supporting (whether all proponents actually _do_ support those aims, or are merely claiming to do so in order to make a quick buck, is a different question). But the implementations that exist, and the environmental damage that they currently cause, make them utterly unsupportable to me.
This shouldn't necessarily affect the value or necessity (or lack thereof) of Web3. Can Web3 practically succeed under these conditions?
Unfortunately after engaging with many in person and on this forum, I've yet to hear a coherent strategy or purpose for Web3 that doesn't rely on centralized entities at any part of the chain, or rely on crypto going up.
GE with a workforce of over 174,000 employees sells 75 billion dollars in goods and services, yet has a price to sales ratio of 1.37.
Did you want to respond to the person? Or just chime in with a random anecdote about GE.
Your UI (e.g. mobile app) is centralized so the best UI will eventually win because most end users care about UX or will enter this interface because they see a well paid ad. If this UI (e.g. a decentralized search engine interface) wants to censor some content then it will win over the decentralized protocol behind it.
Now, Uber^2 publishes a great mobile app, the mobile app is obviously centralized and they can decide to use or not and how to use the decentralized mechanism because they are the winners as the UX.
Isn't this obvious?
The centralized UX could censor transactions like you say, but the barrier to entry is low for another UX, built on the same decentralized data, to emerge and challenge the centralized UX. That's because the data is available to everyone.
I don't agree. I think excellent UXs have a super high barrier of entry. Look at apps such as Google Docs, TikTok, etc.
A company could build an UX without even thinking about being decentralized and users will care about the UX but not about "decentralization politics". If an excellent decentralized UX is built, you just copy the interesting parts and add you proprietary ones, sell you brand and success!
TikTok - not just a UX, but a massive social network, again with lots of data.
In a decentralized world, there will be a decentralized social network like TikTok. The UX would interact with that social network; it wouldn't create the social network itself. To give another example, it's as if Facebook's social network was open to anyone to build a UX on top of and interact with. Much lower barrier to entry.
Web3 sounds to me like one of those soap opera startups PG talks about. They sound like a great idea when you propose them, but do people really want them in reality?
0 - http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
That’s what they really want. They want a system that, in their minds, won’t be subject to regulation or social pressure.
They are still mad that Reddit blocked certain groups. That parler got banned from public clouds.
Those are the things that made them “wake up” to the need for web3.
Deleting data and social accountability are important features that they find abhorrent.
A collection of NFTs got deplatformed, moderated, and even accepted accountability yesterday
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29714296
But the image that is being communicated is Web3 is decentralised and impervious to the kinds of moderation we have today.
So, either nothing changes, or something changes. You can’t have it both ways.
> “We were not aware of the likeness laws in NFTs as the market is not regulated,” the post reads.
Hahahahaha. This is the dumbest excuse, you are not immune to existing rules just “because crypto”. The likened laws don’t need to mention crypto specifically to apply, did they even stop to think for a single second before they did this?
If the crypto community wants to be taken seriously and not constantly regarded as a joke, they ought to do themselves a favour and at least try to be a bit competent.
P.S. you can have moderation without censorship. That's how Mastodon works.
We have big internet companies because processing that amount of information is computationally expensive and thus centralization is the economic solution. Not even traditional p2p solutions have yet been able to compete with large entities, and 'web3' with its crypto solutions is substantially worse because it's computationally more expensive by design.
Not to mention there's also the fairly obvious point that a lot of those companies exist by processing data that is inherently private because users demand it to be so. Nobody is willingly going to put their chat messages on the blockchain to be read by the public.
Non-transferable, expiring, digital currencies may be employed in limited domains, for example "food credits" or "fuel credits". This means that free markets will still exist much like today, you can shop for whatever food you want, but you now can't use your "food money" for e.g. financial speculation or buying a new car. This unlocks UBI as a practical solution to many societal problems. You can give everyone $250 foodbucks a week with 1 month expiration and not worry about massive financial fraud & waste. Price mechanism still works, food industry is still competing for your foodbucks which would be converted into some other representation of economic value upon purchase.
Libertarians will lose their minds at this, but frankly the nations that adopt a centralized tech-driven economy will vastly outperform those still based on legacy financial systems. In fact, they already are beginning to. There is so much waste in the current American economy and yet most Americans are still struggling to pay rent and put food on the table.
The alternative future is the one described by DeFi/web3 crowd, which is essentially based on a deep misunderstanding of what finance and money is about and how they relate to the actual economy. They tend to view economics as a subset of finance ("fix the money, fix the world") when really it's the other way around, and finance itself is nonessential.
I know it was only a subset of your comment, but I’m very curious how an expiring subcurrency would function in an real economy.
How would you propose regulations work for a food credits “black market”, e.g. I will pay you 150 general-purpose capital credits for your 200 food bucks?
Would non-digital cash be completely done away with? What about objects of value that could be given to others? Would the transfer of expiring assets for non-expiring assets be prohibited? What about favors and more subtle ways of transfer?
How would food credits be legitimately redeemed? Would a small shop that complies with policy be able to instantly convert a food credits profit into capital that they could use to expand their business?
There would be no third-party ability to create/transform these currencies. So all swaps/trades would have to be done on the official platform or via its APIs, which you could of course integrate into third-party websites. The govt could even run markets (with tariffs to discourage volatility) to swap between different currencies.
Frankly, >90% of the tech infrastructure is already here in America between corps like Amazon and Stripe. We just need to go the extra mile to "nationalize" these corps and integrate them into one huge economic system. A monumental task, to be sure. But the road is already being paved by less liberal nations.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29449724
* two years ago: "bitcoin! bitcoin! bitcoin!" - tech community: "bitcoin is a pyramid scheme and also bad for the environment."
* a year ago: "crypto! crypto! not bitcoin, there's others and also fintech loves blockchain!" - tech community: "nope, still a pyramid scheme, financial community goes whereever there's hype and $$$, they couldnt care less about 'tech'"
* 6 months ago: "nfts! nfts! look there's an actual thing associated with it!" - tech communuty: "but you don't actually own anything. obvious speculation scam"
* 2 months ago: "web3! web3! it's vague! except it's all about those things above we just make it less obvious and more buzzwordy!" - tech community: please leave
a good place to start would be the majority of replies on this thread
But then there are (believe it or not) communities outside of the internet as well. Actual people working actual jobs in real life.
To elaborate, I think there’s too much non-tech people on social media for you to say that it’s a better representation of the “tech community” than HN. HN has at least some self-selection towards people who are interested in tech, whereas Twitter/FB/etc has way too much noise from non-tech uninformed crypto fetishists to say it’s representative of the “tech community”.
(That is not to say that non-tech people’s opinions don’t matter, or that twitter/FB/etc are not good places in general, but the subject of this thread of discussion is “what the tech community thinks of crypto/web3” and I don’t think “everyone on twitter” is great to use as a counter-example.)
[original] That simply isn't true. There has been consistent and widespread criticism of crypto enthusiasm on the majority of stories posted here recently.
https://write.as/matt/what-would-a-real-web3-look-like
It'd be preferable for users and developers to gravitate towards a web built on community standards, rather than one built on an exploitative ecosystem. Dave Winer notes "web3 is venture capital wanting a new bubble to inflate so they can get the kinds of returns they used to get." (https://twitter.com/davewiner/status/1475876218905976843)
The real problem is a lack of incentives for those in power (generally those with large marketing departments) to adopt or support them. We see this every time a major service slowly kills off their API. Data portability and interoperability are nice for gaining adoption, but the first thing you kill when it outlives its usefulness to the centralized entity.
And the average user doesn't care about this, and probably also doesn't want to do the research to understand decentralized federation. People already unlearned that gmail is distrinct from email, and here we ask them to yet again anchor their trust in even smaller entities than your average email provider to curate their social feed and keep their instance up.
It is a much better vision of the future of the internet than web3 - even through web3 sells the blockchain as the magic silver bullet to these issues. But it will fail for the same reason.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29484941
Also if you looking for recent past threads about web3: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&query=web3
Points to slowest / lowest throughput / most expensive database ever designed
Sigh.
Is web3 crypto money? Is it peer to peer? Is it blockchain?
Does the blockchain really make sense for something like a HN clone or an instagram?
If I were trying to proselytize web3 I would be promoting tech demos and convincing people why it is better. Like the Rails blog video that blew all of our minds in the past. We all wanted to use Rails after that. The benefits were clear.