Can anybody tell me why so many people think that Web 3 = NFTs + crypto currencies? NFTs and crypto currencies are a part of what people think the Web 3.0 will be, but they are definitely not synonyms. The author, however, seem to have did that.
For what I gather, Web3 is marketed as a 'generic ownership' ledger, i.e. not just for 'a replacement for money', which was the purpose for which cryptocurrencies were so far perceived in the mainstream public eye. How it connects to NFTs - investors putting real money into Web3 would want to hike on the supposed ability to invent assets out of thin air and sell supposed ownership on them for real money at a profit. There are many people wanting to own NFTs right now (even if many people equals to just %1 of all people and never about it).
As for the legality of it, maybe we can think of it as being a scam as much as companies selling tamagotchis [1] in the 90's are or were a scam. It was somewhat in fashion to own one back then. At one point it was quite profitable to manufacture and sell them. However, now and possibly forever the volumes at the peak of the fad would never be restored. At least right now, in 2022, perhaps the current trend of owning an NFT collection and presenting it to others is somewhat driven by vanity in a similar way. Perhaps it's the future with NFTs.
Can't say I agree with the present situation, and I'm kinda hoping people will find better things to do with their hard-owned money.
Not the author, but an article on web3 from earlier today that was shared in here was almost only focusing on NFTs + money (I guess crypto). I haven't followed the subject all that close but I can't say that I have read other descriptions of it, i.e. something that wasn't focused on how to make money.
Yeah, the other article critical of Web3 currently on the frontpage (written by Moxie) tries to understand the technology and develop an actual thesis. This one is comparatively extremely shallow, and the author seems proud of his ignorance of the topic.
Because cryptocurrency and NFT people are the ones who came up with the current "web3" concept and are the ones pushing the whole thing. Personally, I expect the real "next-generation" of the web will turn out to be something different (who knows exactly what at this point though!), but this small set of people are trying to tie cryptocurrency and NFTs into the very definition of next-generation web.
Then someone drops in to remind this comment that USD and other paper is still preferred and less traceable. These arguments are always the same on both sides.
I hear this all the time on HN, but when I meet people in real life who own cryptocurrencies, they are educated people with real jobs and too many things going on well for going into prison for crimes.
Why is HN so different than my experience? Have you met a lot of criminals who own BTC?
Only until your wallet(s) address become known and then every single transaction you have ever made is visible to the state. This is the least “hidden” system on the planet.
> One could write whole encyclopedias on the many different stacks of technologies that have been built on top of one another under the Web3 umbrella. Some Web3 people probably have. But for this piece we’ll focus on three technologies: First blockchain data structures, second a very specific artifact on blockchains called a non-fungible token (NFT) and third an organizational structure called a DAO. We’ll limit ourselves to this in order to keep this text somewhat brief and somewhat comprehensible for everyone.
Does that mean web3 isn't "just blockchains and NFTs" but also DAOs? That doesn't seem all that different from the initial assumption of it broadly being about cryptocurrencies and NFTs.
I think the most charitable interpretation is a future where you don't have to "export your data" from facebook or google or fortnight, because your data is encrypted on the blockchain: your emails, your social graph, your avatar, your virtual real estate. fwiw I don't think you can provide enough bandwidth, disk space and computes to achieve this, but good luck.
web3 is a marketing term, and this is absolutely how it is marketed.
TBH i think it is a good thing. Web3 and the finance bros that popularize it should die with it, and we should keep working with the truly decentralized fundamentals, not with intermediaries.
The term Web3 was coined by Gavin Wood, Co-founder of Ethereum and Polkadot as well as the Web3 Foundation (https://web3.foundation/about/).
The crypto community is the biggest part of the push for it, so it's natural that people would make that connection.
However, I consider any web tech that has user ownership or decentralization as a principle to be Web3. Some non-crypto examples would be Mastadon, Matrix, GunDB, and IPFS (although IPFS does have crypto-backed pinning services, such as Filecoin and Arweave, IPFS itself is agnostic to crypto).
>NFTs and crypto currencies are a part of what people think the Web 3.0 will be, but they are definitely not synonyms. The author, however, seem to have did that.
Regardless of the original or intended definitions of "Web3", it will end up being whatever the masses think it is. To recap some history:
- "web3" circa ~2014 when coined by Gavin Wood covered 3 concepts without mentioning NFTs : (1) hash-ids of static content instead of urls (2) p2p encrypted messaging (3) consensus engine. (One of the earlier essays from 2014: https://gavwood.com/web3lt.html)
- "web3" circa ~2021 emphasizing the "token economy" (e.g. NFTs) popularized by Chris Dixon (a16z VC): this is the current news mania with celebrities selling jpgs, etc
Therefore "web3==NFTs" narrative has overtaken the original Gavin Wood narrative.
Analogous situation of evolution of terms was the "internet". In the 1980s, "internet" included Gopher, telnet, USENET, ftp. (E.g. I used to be able to telnet into public computers before all firewalls and Linux configs shut off telnet access.) But Gopher/USENET/etc faded and HTTP became the dominant idea of what "internet" is.
NFTs now have constant press coverage of eye-popping sale amounts from celebrities and OpenSea founders are now paper billionaires. Therefore, NFTs dominate the meaning of "web3" because getting rich is more sexy to talk about than encrypted-p2p-communications-based-on-hash-identities.
At the moment NFTs + crypto cover up to 95% of web3’s marketing visible functionalities.
Additionally no killer “app” has been shown to the public where it demonstrate an intangible value over previous technology, at least that the public understands it.
This seems incorrect very quickly. When the internet and the web was first encountered, lots of people asked themselves that question. Turns out, protocols and concepts aren't scams, it's people who do the scamming.
I second this. Can't remember when anyone said that internet is a scam. Some people said "it's only usable as an electronic business card", meaning only the html/browser part of it.
No, I remember clearly people in my environment claiming that the web was just to fool people for their money, spending it on things that are worth nothing in real life, like domains for example. Many claimed only criminals would use the internet, or "weird" people, because the rest of us are "normal" hard-working people that can use paper and documents just fine already.
This is partly correct. Many people indeed thought that buying stuff on the internet was a scam. It was a common joke on TV and on newspapers.
Why its partly correct is that the internet back then was almost entirely not about buying and selling things at all. It was information.
Web3 seems today to be entirely about buying and selling. It seems to have none of the original web ideas about it but has the market at it's very centre.
Where are the people on web3? Where are the forums, comments, discussions on the network? They are consumers, participants in a market. That is why it may not be a scam, but it is un-human.
Very much this. I want to talk to the people running the servers. Consensus, Ledger, etc... servers. I want to know who owns what percentage of those servers. I stumbled into this question when watching people go through the development process of implementing blockchain and a few lights came on. It isn't clear to me that web3 could not actually run by the same banking cartels and that they are not just using web3 as a way to side step some regulations, insurance and other protections that have been baked into the banking industry over a long period of battle hardening and mishaps.
People speak of blockchain as if distributed encryption makes it impossible for malfeasance but like any implementation of encryption the devil is in the implementation details and can render encryption into obfuscation by math. Coordinated out-of-band communication between the distributed servers could lead to collusion and that is why knowing who runs these servers matters and that is just the first step.
most things are scams to some degree (the US educational system, degrees from mediocre institutions, US health insurance, corporations like Amazon and Facebook, the meat industry, the prison industry), yet we have to live with them
Wait, web is a form of networking, not "websites". This word got it's meaning from that word. "Web" means spider's web around the globe-like, not html page-like.
It's clearly refering to the same thing as web 1 and web 2.0 otherwise why the 3?
Maybe they're trying to say "this is a better thing than the web"? But that doesn't make sense either because none of the applications can replace any aspect of the web as far as I can tell.
I remember Web 3.0 was first a thing maybe 15 years ago when talking about the 'Semantic web', i.e. interchangeable meta data standards etc. That was mostly boring data stuff to 'normal people', so never really took off into the mainstream like 'Web 2.0' did when referencing social media/user generated content.
Then several years later I heard about 'Web 3.0' again, but this time most referring more to the 'internet of things', which seemed to get a bit more traction for a short time, usually around mundane household devices like internet connected fridges and toasters before also disappearing as most of those things never really took off with consumers.
Now for whatever reason it's come back again, but this time rebranded as 'web3' probably to sound more contemporary as web 3.0 sounds very mid 2000s now. This time whoever is driving this is trying to make it about crypto/decentralization etc. as if it's a new thing even though I feel that's kinda been a thing for a quite while now.
It’s a rebranding that’s underway mostly driven by US actors having decided to make this mainstream in the next 3-5yrs. It’s pretty well executed, look at eg recent senate hearing with crypto high rollers
> Are centralized APIs used in order to access the "decentralized" Ethereum blockchain?
(I was looking at this stuff a few years ago, it may be different now).
"web3" is an object provided to JavaScript by either the browser (e.g. Brave[0]) or a browser extension (e.g. MetaMask[1]). In the case of Brave it uses a local ethereum client to access the ethereum blockchain. In the case of MetaMask it uses MetaMask's centralised servers, but the API presented to the web page is the same in either case.
Re the complexity of the TODO app: I don't know that a TODO app is particularly a good use case. But for comparison, I once wrote a toy Dapp that would handle escrow (i.e. person A makes a payment to person B, but it only goes through when person C allows it, alternatively person C can send it back to person A). It was maybe 20 lines of code for the smart contract and a similar amount for the user interface.
Web3 will be a web where everyone has anonymous identity, meaning they are identified by their crypto-wallets. There is no need to authenticate yourself except once, to your crypto-wallet. You don't have to create accounts anywhere, your crypto-account is all you need.
Of course you can have multiple separate identities, meaning multiple separate crypto-wallets, if you wish.
You can be anonymous but you can't do much without creating accounts all over the place because companies want to know about you and get paid.
But if you pay with crypto-currency you are in effect authenticated everywhere where crypto is accepted.
Identity is history. You could have multiple separate "anonymous" identities on the web, but that is not the same thing as no identity because associated with each account there is history. Think about credit history. You want good credit history. You don't want anonymity. But banks etc. don't really care who is paying the bills as long as they are being paid on time your credit history gets better.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadAs for the legality of it, maybe we can think of it as being a scam as much as companies selling tamagotchis [1] in the 90's are or were a scam. It was somewhat in fashion to own one back then. At one point it was quite profitable to manufacture and sell them. However, now and possibly forever the volumes at the peak of the fad would never be restored. At least right now, in 2022, perhaps the current trend of owning an NFT collection and presenting it to others is somewhat driven by vanity in a similar way. Perhaps it's the future with NFTs.
Can't say I agree with the present situation, and I'm kinda hoping people will find better things to do with their hard-owned money.
[1] - A Brief History of Tamagotchi | Innovation | Smithsonian Magazine - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/keeping-tamagotchi...
It's been what, 15 years? I'm still using € and $.
Why is HN so different than my experience? Have you met a lot of criminals who own BTC?
There are a lot of people who think they can swim with the sharks. Good luck with that.
Does that mean web3 isn't "just blockchains and NFTs" but also DAOs? That doesn't seem all that different from the initial assumption of it broadly being about cryptocurrencies and NFTs.
"85 terabytes per year is totally fine" -vitalik https://twitter.com/zndtoshi/status/1478387674335559681
TBH i think it is a good thing. Web3 and the finance bros that popularize it should die with it, and we should keep working with the truly decentralized fundamentals, not with intermediaries.
The crypto community is the biggest part of the push for it, so it's natural that people would make that connection.
However, I consider any web tech that has user ownership or decentralization as a principle to be Web3. Some non-crypto examples would be Mastadon, Matrix, GunDB, and IPFS (although IPFS does have crypto-backed pinning services, such as Filecoin and Arweave, IPFS itself is agnostic to crypto).
Regardless of the original or intended definitions of "Web3", it will end up being whatever the masses think it is. To recap some history:
- "web3" circa ~2014 when coined by Gavin Wood covered 3 concepts without mentioning NFTs : (1) hash-ids of static content instead of urls (2) p2p encrypted messaging (3) consensus engine. (One of the earlier essays from 2014: https://gavwood.com/web3lt.html)
- "web3" circa ~2021 emphasizing the "token economy" (e.g. NFTs) popularized by Chris Dixon (a16z VC): this is the current news mania with celebrities selling jpgs, etc
Therefore "web3==NFTs" narrative has overtaken the original Gavin Wood narrative.
Analogous situation of evolution of terms was the "internet". In the 1980s, "internet" included Gopher, telnet, USENET, ftp. (E.g. I used to be able to telnet into public computers before all firewalls and Linux configs shut off telnet access.) But Gopher/USENET/etc faded and HTTP became the dominant idea of what "internet" is.
NFTs now have constant press coverage of eye-popping sale amounts from celebrities and OpenSea founders are now paper billionaires. Therefore, NFTs dominate the meaning of "web3" because getting rich is more sexy to talk about than encrypted-p2p-communications-based-on-hash-identities.
At the moment NFTs + crypto cover up to 95% of web3’s marketing visible functionalities.
Additionally no killer “app” has been shown to the public where it demonstrate an intangible value over previous technology, at least that the public understands it.
Why its partly correct is that the internet back then was almost entirely not about buying and selling things at all. It was information.
Web3 seems today to be entirely about buying and selling. It seems to have none of the original web ideas about it but has the market at it's very centre.
Where are the people on web3? Where are the forums, comments, discussions on the network? They are consumers, participants in a market. That is why it may not be a scam, but it is un-human.
People speak of blockchain as if distributed encryption makes it impossible for malfeasance but like any implementation of encryption the devil is in the implementation details and can render encryption into obfuscation by math. Coordinated out-of-band communication between the distributed servers could lead to collusion and that is why knowing who runs these servers matters and that is just the first step.
I mean I dislike the giant ponzi scheme but they do have a cool name, I'll give them that.
Maybe they're trying to say "this is a better thing than the web"? But that doesn't make sense either because none of the applications can replace any aspect of the web as far as I can tell.
Web3 is all about people buying and selling things.
The bad smell is strong.
Then several years later I heard about 'Web 3.0' again, but this time most referring more to the 'internet of things', which seemed to get a bit more traction for a short time, usually around mundane household devices like internet connected fridges and toasters before also disappearing as most of those things never really took off with consumers.
Now for whatever reason it's come back again, but this time rebranded as 'web3' probably to sound more contemporary as web 3.0 sounds very mid 2000s now. This time whoever is driving this is trying to make it about crypto/decentralization etc. as if it's a new thing even though I feel that's kinda been a thing for a quite while now.
How complex is that source code?
Are centralized APIs used in order to access the "decentralized" Ethereum blockchain?
(I was looking at this stuff a few years ago, it may be different now).
"web3" is an object provided to JavaScript by either the browser (e.g. Brave[0]) or a browser extension (e.g. MetaMask[1]). In the case of Brave it uses a local ethereum client to access the ethereum blockchain. In the case of MetaMask it uses MetaMask's centralised servers, but the API presented to the web page is the same in either case.
Re the complexity of the TODO app: I don't know that a TODO app is particularly a good use case. But for comparison, I once wrote a toy Dapp that would handle escrow (i.e. person A makes a payment to person B, but it only goes through when person C allows it, alternatively person C can send it back to person A). It was maybe 20 lines of code for the smart contract and a similar amount for the user interface.
[0] https://brave.com/
[1] https://metamask.io/
Of course you can have multiple separate identities, meaning multiple separate crypto-wallets, if you wish.
But if you pay with crypto-currency you are in effect authenticated everywhere where crypto is accepted.
Identity is history. You could have multiple separate "anonymous" identities on the web, but that is not the same thing as no identity because associated with each account there is history. Think about credit history. You want good credit history. You don't want anonymity. But banks etc. don't really care who is paying the bills as long as they are being paid on time your credit history gets better.