Ask HN: Are Web3 and DApps the Future?
Reflecting on my skills as a full stack web developer (senior; in a management position now), I can't help but feel that with all the bootcamps, accelerated courses, all this new talent entering the field, that at some point the market will become saturated and I'll be less valuable especially as a developer.
Now I'm hearing more and more about Web3 and decentralized apps (DApps) all the time and think about when the internet was new, the average layperson had no idea what a "website" was or a "dot com" meant. Yet now it's common knowledge. Is it possible that decentralized apps and blockchain technology is going follow a similar course? And when "classical" web development becomes saturated, these will continue being the highly valued specialist markets?
I guess what I'm asking is, do you feel it is wise and valuable in the long term to begin pivoting one's career to blockchain now rather than staying as a typical web dev?
64 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadThe future of your career is being good at what you do, having social connections, or ideally both.
Trying to jump into a less crowded field is not a long-term career solution, and the blockchain field already has more devs than it needs anyway. It's a gold rush.
Long term is hard to project let alone correctly forecast considering the world upends itself every 10 years or so.
Personally I think the entire web3 thing is going to fizzle out before it goes anywhere useful. It’s already fallen off my radar for the most part
I don’t think a mainstream audience will pay for internet content in this way. Nobody is going to pay to post to Twitter, as an example, and if it doesn’t mean you need to pay to create content in this way then you might as well ditch the web3 part entirely
Intrigued if I’m wrong, but heavily doubtful
[1] “I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems weird and scary to me”
The problem with this field is also that people are pretty much incentivized to be dishonest. You never know if somebody is giving advice based on wanting some part (usually a coin) to increase in value or if they're just tired of all the spam from those same people, or just disappointed in missing out.
My advice to you: try to dig down deep into what has been created and see if that's something you see going somewhere and you see yourself contributing.
Sounds like a great reason to be negative about the field. Who wants to be surrounded by liars in their professional life?
But this incentives a nation to be a good steward so that the international community is comfortable with the work and allows you to continue. Which is the opposite of what the GP said.
That's not cynical or emotional, just a perfectly reasonable outcome based on expertise and, to varying degrees, lived experience.
Dan Boneh teaches cryptography for Stanford and works for a16z crypto.
Silvio Macali is a Turing award winner working full time in a new blockchain.
People like Gavin Wood (CS PhD) and Vitalik are obviously top 1% of engineering talent.
It’s amazing how HN insists crypto people live in a bubble, but upvote the low effort “web3 is a scam” written by nobodies post du jour but choose to ignore all the worlds leading cryptographers excited about web3.
HN is 100x the bubble/ echo chamber than the crypto world is .
One Turing winner’s opinion shouldn’t be given undue weight. Kary Mullis was a Nobel Prize recipient who used his scientific clout to advocate for the once-popular claim that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS even after evidence was overwhelming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis
Excellent scientists can be wrong outside their narrow field of expertise.
Also, bootcamps don’t turn out experienced senior engineers or talented managers. If you’re really good at that, grow your leadership and management skills—those are rarer and more valuable than your ability to hack JavaScript.
Have you found something on Web 3 that supplants how you do things today?
Considering Web3 and DApps are largely marketing efforts, my guess is the marketing dominated portions of the software industry may end up with some variant of the Web3 DApp promises realized in a terminology stretching, primarily profit driven manner. Video games and social media may end up with something, probably just a series of $40 terms forced over what is essentially trading stamps/cards with complicated rules of use. Nobody knows what is going to happen, really, because this stuff is pure mind games territory.
I personally don't think web3 and dapps are going to have that much impact, although others may disagree.
One observation I would make is that trying to identify "the next big thing" is innately risky. You could be right, or it might crash and burn. Do keep learning, growing and pursuing things that interest you.
Blockchain is an append-only big file with no real means to drop past content after a certain amount of time. Distributed (really) software have simply too much overload to work properly.
The REAL hi-tech future is from the '70s: desktops, connected via open protocols no one really own, like emails, usenet etc. Local software, local storage. The short-term future will be a continuous push to the classic mainframe model, the cloud is the actual version, is nearly not sustainable anymore so new model to offload costs and jobs appears (take a look at edge/fog computing for instance). That's just a totalitarian surveillance dream dressed as a Trojan horse to be accepted as a good thing but will not last for long.
If I'm wrong about this, I'll catch up later. I have enough experience in tech now that I'm confident I can become productive in some bizarre future blockchain-infested hell-scape with a few months of dedicated effort if I need to.
I'll have missed out on the chance to become a crypto billionaire the easy way. I'm OK with taking that risk.
I do believe distributed hash tables as used in IPFS and webtorrent are enabling some futuristic anti-censorship tech, and using metamask for identity is pretty cool, but smart contracts are very stupid - just post the source code and let anyone run it, why does the source need to be stores forever on everyone's computer?
There are some really bad incentives with ETH contracts apecifically - the number of instructions your code compiles to determines the gas fees to run the code every time - want to add a type check, range check, write code a little more verbose so its easier to understand ? all of that adds multiple-dollars-per-api-call. That's one reason multi-million dollar hacks are so common. Check out https://rekt.news , they do a good balance between technical and laymen-accessible about how these hacks happen.
Part of the problem is confusion around the word decentralized. If I have a website billprin.com , in a sense it’s decentralized because there’s a million websites and that one is my little corner and you have your corner.
But in another sense it’s centeralized since I get to be the sole arbiter of truth on billprin.com
On ethereum, everyone runs the same code and has the same state so nobody is the sole source of truth.
Blockchain is way slower and more expensive that a centralized db but it has this key feature that no single party controls it. This enables us to write applications like automated market makers that require no trust in a centralized party or more choice in whom to trust and more granular control over trust.
It also has the nice side effect of making a lot of stuff more transparent and programmable.
When do we prefer not to have to trust a party? Many people don’t trust Wall St entities so are excited about potential ways to decentralize finance.
Others don’t trust big tech companies and are excited about ways to decentralize identity and communication.
And the future is hard to predict , it feels plausible that a big blank canvas will lead to more applications that are hard to predict.
The key is realizing that the core feature is not having to trust a centralized entity.
There’s technological challenges , and ways in which the current landscape doesn’t live up to the ideology. The money both incentives early adoption and development and turns it into a casino. But hopefully that helps clarify why some people are excited about the underlying potential.
Opportunity lies at the edges of technology, maybe in this vein you could dig into wasm instead.
It’s also highly a dynamic environment, keep that in mind between different Blockchains and DLTs.
Do what you’re passionate about and strive to be the top 1% at it, nothing else will matter.
Investing in crypto is very similar to learning to win at poker. It's totally possible to make a lot of money in crypto, but there is no positive impact on the world.
Because of this, nobody invests in a certain crypto because they think it will have a positive impact on the world. They only invest to make money. "Successful" Web3 startups will be the ones that focus on making their coin go up instead of focusing on making the world a better place.
Personally, I don't see a reason to invest time/money in something that doesn't help people.
Maybe you can't do it with bazillions from VC, but you're certainly free to try.
I see your point though. nobody will care about your project until they see $$$ themselves...
Sad late capitalism is sad
It’s not a hypothetical, it already has billions in daily volume.
It’s true that , for any blockchain app, you could trust a third party who could use traditional database to do it faster and cheaper.
What the web3 detractors repeatedly refuse to understand is that not needing to trust a third party is a feature many people care about. By handing trust to a third party over important things like your money and your identity, you hand over a massive amount of power over yourself to them.
It’s also true that all this tech is still nascent. Big picture, ~10 years is really not that long. In many ways, technological limitations means a lot of these projects are still “toys” , just like microcomputers and Linux once were. But there is a ton of cryptography research and application that _might_ transform these from toy to the future. And again, with billions in daily volume, calling it a toy is unfair, it’s in between a toy and the future.
To clarify “not needing to trust a third party” - it’s better to phrase it as “needing to trust fewer parties and having more choice in who you trust.”
I’m amazed people can watch scam after scam from Wall St financiers and struggle to understand why some find axing the middlemen appealing.
Anyone can list 100 reasons why it won’t work long term. The question is do you use that list as a reason to write it all off, or a list of problems to solve as an engineer. HN obviously leans towards the former.
I think this is overblown. Most DeFi is illegal so people are using it because of regulatory arbitrage, not because it's trustless.
Just because not every use case lives up to the big picture ideology and long term goals doesn’t mean there is no big picture long term goals.
A lot of modern AI exists because of GPUs which exists because people wanted higher quality zombies to shoot in their FPS games.
Personally I would not do a hard pivot into crypto. If you are interested in it, by all means learn about it and maybe dip your toes on some side projects. But in terms of your career, focus on moving up the value chain rather than chasing fads. A foundation of solid web dev skills will always serve you well, but specific tech know-how has a half-life (which gets shorter the higher you go in the stack), and you don't want to find yourself competing on pure coding prowess once you have >10 years experience. Think about your strengths that can't be replicated just by grinding code, and what you've learned over many years of experience across different environments.
Long story short: If you don't know which horse will win and you have enough money (time), bet a certain amount on the most promising ones.