The blog headline is "dope shit only", but this blog entry is the lamest account of a lame "industry" with the lamest "point" (if there even is one?) I've ever seen.
Web3 is like Professional Wrestling with its own concept of kayfabe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayfabe). If you're in the industry, you know that it's fake, but you have to keep appearances to engage and grow. Those that were convinced that Web3 isn't an act end up being "marks" -- they just feed the money to those in the know.
I think the relevant distinction is that the fans of Professional Wrestling also know it's fake. Nobody is defrauded or misled by this[1].
By comparison, the Web3 (and broader cryptocurrency sphere) is largely predicated on two downstream sources of money: cynics attempting to profit on greater fools, and the greater fools themselves.
Those cranky old developers, some of them are just cranky old developers. Some of them know the game is wider and deeper than most people realize. We discard and recycle more old ideas than the fashion industry.
There are plenty of legitimate web3 and defi projects out there. The ethereum network, on-chain real world assets like USDC, protocols like Uniswap and AAVE, interesting stuff happening in the DID space. This blog post just reads like someone (who is this, by the way? this is a single post on a bear blog- why are we taking this so seriously?) who got caught up in and then burned by an overhyped NFT project.
Lens Protocol, some DID stuff like disco.xyz, there are a few that gate access to interesting communities (more than just "here's a jpg"), I think benddao.xyz will be good for borrowing against IP (defined as NFTs). All still very fledgling, but I think these are the types of use cases that will last.
What makes disco.xyz more meritorious than a simple subscription? Regarding bendao.xyz, borrowing against worthless things doesn't seem less worthnless than worthless things.
It has utility nonetheless. You can't just measure things on "how many utilities/much utility" something has.
It has utility nonetheless.
Just find it funny how HN instead of embracing the utility/technology advancements that come with Crypto, it appears to undermine the significance of Crypto in an attempt to gain an edge in the competitive landscape on what is now popular.
> You can't just measure things on "how many utilities/much utility" something has.
You very much can unless you're completely out of touch with reality. For instance plenty of real world metrics show that ChatGPT has proved more useful within its first 15 days than cryptocurrencies have been in 15 years.
> HN instead of embracing the utility/technology advancements that come with Crypto, it appears to undermine the significance of Crypto in an attempt to gain an edge in the competitive landscape on what is now popular.
If haters on HN can "undermine" your technology then you've admitted it's shit.
> You very much can unless you're completely out of touch with reality. For instance plenty of real world metrics show that ChatGPT has proved more useful within its first 15 days than cryptocurrencies have been in 15 years.
No you cant. Both are tools. You can't say "An hammer is useless because it's just used to bang stuff, while a knife can be used to open stuff up, cut, etc"
Also, AI has existed for 50+ years and only in the last decade it has found actual utility.
>If haters on HN can "undermine" your technology then you've admitted it's shit.
Lol, "my technlogy". I'm not in some sort of team. That's what I'm mocking. And what do you mean by that?
The aversion to blockchain and cryptocurrency is because they're a scam.
There's literally no use case for crypto that makes sense. Nothing that couldn't be better done without a distributed blockchain.
Blockchain is a way to set up a really slow, really limited, and hard to manage database that's hosted among multiple untrusted entities. Literally every use case would be better handled by using a single trusted database and cryptographic signatures for verification (as opposed to "crypto", which really means blockchain. I hate how words get co-opted.).
AI at least has positive uses, even if it's also being hyped well beyond its actual usefulness.
Even though there are scams, Blockchain have a lot of utilities.
You don't have as many scams in AI just because it doesn't involve money, but there are countless cases of people labeling stuff with "AI" or just some other shady stuff using AI to preform scams, spam and other malicious stuff.
Saying that "would be better handled by using a single trusted database and cryptographic signatures for verification", is the same as saying that "AI could just be replaced with Ifs and Elses and other algorithms, and all you are doing is just optimal solutions".
I'm just mocking the fact that HN seems to have the idea of "AI Good, Crypto Bad", even thought that both are just Trendy tech
> As someone who also was (and still is) a crypto skeptic and (stupidly) chose to cofound a web3 startup with some acquaintances
And none of this was relevant to the article. There was no description of cult, no details about how hard it is to leave the cult. The whole article is about trashing a project I've never heard about that even someone who never cofounded or worked in the area could have written.
My understanding of web3 is based on the idea of P2P first, and removing cloud based services as much as possible. Effectively torrent, IPFS, etc. I don't understand why people conflate currency (which HN despises) with that concept, because it's not a necessary aspect.
Also, this post doesn't really say anything at all about the tech, or solutions they provided in their company, but simply complains that the marketing folks didn't provide anything. Shouldn't that have been their job as a dev? You can't complain about an idea taking off that you were supposed to develop and simply didn't. If it was a bad idea, then change it and do something else.
Web3 morphed to mean "things that use a distributed blockchain." That's why we hate it. (It's not just currency either; it's anything blockchain, including NFT.)
A friend with an existing successful "lifestyle" web business asked me for advice on potential web3 avenues for his company. We talked about it, mostly focused on the aspects you mention here. For us, that's what web3 meant, that and effectively letting the users be in control of as much as possible, enabled by blockchain tech.
We had a number of discussions about it, and found a potential route forward, but it was a very different business model from how he is making money now. In the end, he decided he didn't want to risk the money he's making now for a more uncertain path.
It was an extremely useful exercise, though, and a good way to understand what's out there and how it can be used. I think the version of web3 you mention is possible, but it's so different from how businesses operate now that it will take a very successful high profile company built from the ground up around web3 for the ideas to go anywhere. The risk just feels too high for existing companies, and even most new startups. You're turning over a lot of control and trying to succeed anyway.
> The risk just feels too high for existing companies, and even most new startups. You're turning over a lot of control and trying to succeed anyway.
Which is also what leads to the parasocial relationships crypto enthusiasts wind up having with web 3 projects and their founders
The founders need economic incentives and the successful ones do that to great efficacy, and all the other participants have far more risk and fewer resources to make anything with the new protocol, so they dont
It requires incredible privilege to be able to launch something for free, and its equally laughable for web 3 communities to suggest that
So the market moves towards these big token sales and everything else is tolerated fallout
This still doesn't make sense. P2P is web3? What does Blockchain have to do with it? Maybe git like Merkle trees can be involved a bit, which are quite similar to blockchains. I'm not understanding the hatred.
I share the same sentiment as other commenters, my issue is that web3 got inextricably attached to blockchain-something. Even IPFS which I think is a very interesting idea got a "Filecoin" attached to it under the same company, while the idea of decentralisation is appealing, the blockchain side got a bad rap after multiple years of large scams being pulled using the platform.
Unfortunately most people require trust to get into something new and unknown, and the "web3" moniker has lost that ages ago. Sometimes a rebrand of the best of the crop is not a bad idea, we need a filter to all the bullshit that was bombarded around this the past decade... I was excited by it in 2012, I'm exhausted to wade through all the bullshit by now, so I simply ignore it until the signal to noise ratio gets better.
Web3 was doomed from the start and we all knew it. Instead of strictly focusing on the decentralization of the web, it became shorthand for, “here’s how we turn http into another ICO/NFT grift!” It should have been a peer-to-peer document share, almost a bit-torrent for the 21st century. It could have been impactful, instead it will fade into obscurity just like the swaths of goddamn useless blockchain product diarrhea we got to enjoy until ChatGPT came along and the world fell in love with LLMs.
That happened not because web3 failed but because mainstream redefined what "web3" is. It went from IPFS to blockchain to NFT. NFTs make exciting headlines, IPFS does not.
this is entirely a factor of undiscerning consumers, companies that should have been ignored simply arent
and that has nothing to do with the technology where parasocial relationships arent needed. there are plenty of web3 projects that provide utility and without the parasocial relationships described here
(and yes, tools for speculators are utility, people really act like they never heard of financial services as soon as someone mentions crypto/web3 and utility in the same sentence)
It matters more about what any 1 person gets utility out of, than the distinctions you’re aiming for, some examples
I get utility out of Multisender.app and similar competitors because it saves me time and money repeatedly in batch sending
I get utility out of zapper.fi and debank because it saves me time and money in accounting
I get utility out of Filecoin because the nodes pin IPFS links, solving a costly problem for me as all the Web 2.0 pinning services like Pinata are costly subscriptions
Snapshot for offchain voting has been a helpful coordination tool for communities that dont want to burden with transaction fees, and its been useful for me to see the results of votes quickly
I exist in the real world and these are successful businesses in the real world extracting a little value by providing a convenience
I had a conversation once with a developer that had built an interesting crypto thing. I was asking about the hard details of how the pieces interacted and eventually just went and read it because his answers were close to useless.
One thing he said during that conversation when it became clear he only understood it well enough to put big lego blocks together was "oh it's hard to talk to you web2 guys". Just 0_0 lol what.
That's about my take of what web3 has meant to me ever since. The evm ethereum virtual machine is interesting in it's own right as well as some adjacent things. I don't really want to make any claim as to if any of that stuff is 'going anywhere'. He couldn't elucidate any of that to me in person, just an ol web2 guy, sadly.
What was this interesting crypto thing? A lot of people in tech are not good communicators, so I wouldn't conflate this with some grift scheme just because of that.
I was big into the concept of web3 around 2016 when the hype had barely started rolling. If you compare the vision then to now it's not hard to realize that the vision is dead.
"Ethereum" was going to be a suite of tools of which what we call Ethereum today was only one. There was supposed to be a swarm protocol to enable distributed transfer of files, a message transport protocol, a human readable naming system (ENS does exist but it is not quite what was defined early on) and all coming together in Mist browser.
So then we got IPFS, which replaced Swarm, and the EF decided to focus on the EVM and let the community develop other compoenets that could become web3. Ok, cool, why reinvent the wheel. They ditched Mist and stopped maintaining a reference implementation, again, letting the community build. Then Metamask came out, and the rest is history: "web3" is now just websites that pitch you NFTs.
Today, Ethereum is cool; it's a place to launch unregistered securities that cannot be stopped, to trade assets in a decentralized manner. It gives everyone censorship resistance for finance. Some cool things have been built in the process, liquidity pools are revolutionary. But web3? Where is it? I can't even see it being over the horizon no matter how hard I squint. It's a bunch of webdevs pitching tokens to get rich.
Who is this, and why do so many people care they got burned by an (even at the time) obviously overhyped NFT project? There's nothing of substance here. Certainly nothing technically compelling enough to warrant the HN front page.
Hacker News' paradigm of "blockchain bad - I upvote" to me has been one of the biggest signals that the community is getting stuck in non-productive circle jerks.
The article feels unsubstantive. It starts out with a short sentence of personal experience, then just throws around some generalizations about "web3" startup culture and later goes on to the a small and weird niche of avatar NFTs. The point the author is trying to make eludes me - "I was once in a web3 project and bad projects are bad, look at Azuki!".
There are lots of startups trying to combine technologies in different ways, they should be looked at individually on their own merit. Those who are just trying to profit off a hype should be eschewed, that's pretty much end of story. That some made the mistake of taking on an unpopular tag like "web3" is unfortunate but not a reason to vilify.
To zoom out a little bit I think a lot of us would agree that the internet is broken in some way - a small number of entities have control over all of our data. I do not know what the solution to that will look like but it will certainly involve some re-arrangement of incentives. Internet is driven by money, in the current system largely by money generated through advertising. So whatever a solution to internet ailments will be it necessarily has to do with how money flows. To some technologists blockchain is part of the puzzle. Unfortunately to them the technology often has speculative value, but in a way it is a byproduct of experimentation with money and who and how pays for computing resources. But there are other technologies, some revolving around how internet data is retrieved (IPFS). Some are focusing on identity via novel cryptographic method (sometimes using crypto wallets, but without actually using the chain, like disco.xyz for example).
The point I guess I am trying to make is that a lot of people are trying to improve the internet in a lot of ways and we should be supportive, even if skeptical. If blockchain is not to stick around it has funded great leaps in cryptographic research, it has disseminated cryptographic wallets to more people in the world than anything has and a whole generation of people is growing up with an understanding what a cryptographic signature is, it has fueled research into cooperative organization and probably much more that we will only see in hindsight. Throwing anybody who is associated with blockchain or "web3" or whatever it is into the same heap as Azuki is doing a disservice to everybody who has ever used the internet. We will not make progress this way.
48 comments
[ 0.15 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadBy comparison, the Web3 (and broader cryptocurrency sphere) is largely predicated on two downstream sources of money: cynics attempting to profit on greater fools, and the greater fools themselves.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8C4lK41SX-Q
aka Smart Marks
(For some mysterious reason it’s a right-wing tic to write English nouns with random importance-based capitalization, like people did 300 years ago.)
You very much can unless you're completely out of touch with reality. For instance plenty of real world metrics show that ChatGPT has proved more useful within its first 15 days than cryptocurrencies have been in 15 years.
> HN instead of embracing the utility/technology advancements that come with Crypto, it appears to undermine the significance of Crypto in an attempt to gain an edge in the competitive landscape on what is now popular.
If haters on HN can "undermine" your technology then you've admitted it's shit.
No you cant. Both are tools. You can't say "An hammer is useless because it's just used to bang stuff, while a knife can be used to open stuff up, cut, etc"
Also, AI has existed for 50+ years and only in the last decade it has found actual utility.
>If haters on HN can "undermine" your technology then you've admitted it's shit.
Lol, "my technlogy". I'm not in some sort of team. That's what I'm mocking. And what do you mean by that?
Is your point like this because you don't know what you're talking about or are you conflating AGI research with AI as a whole?
There's literally no use case for crypto that makes sense. Nothing that couldn't be better done without a distributed blockchain.
Blockchain is a way to set up a really slow, really limited, and hard to manage database that's hosted among multiple untrusted entities. Literally every use case would be better handled by using a single trusted database and cryptographic signatures for verification (as opposed to "crypto", which really means blockchain. I hate how words get co-opted.).
AI at least has positive uses, even if it's also being hyped well beyond its actual usefulness.
You don't have as many scams in AI just because it doesn't involve money, but there are countless cases of people labeling stuff with "AI" or just some other shady stuff using AI to preform scams, spam and other malicious stuff.
Saying that "would be better handled by using a single trusted database and cryptographic signatures for verification", is the same as saying that "AI could just be replaced with Ifs and Elses and other algorithms, and all you are doing is just optimal solutions".
I'm just mocking the fact that HN seems to have the idea of "AI Good, Crypto Bad", even thought that both are just Trendy tech
And none of this was relevant to the article. There was no description of cult, no details about how hard it is to leave the cult. The whole article is about trashing a project I've never heard about that even someone who never cofounded or worked in the area could have written.
Old man yells at cloud.
"P2P web" needs a new name.
We had a number of discussions about it, and found a potential route forward, but it was a very different business model from how he is making money now. In the end, he decided he didn't want to risk the money he's making now for a more uncertain path.
It was an extremely useful exercise, though, and a good way to understand what's out there and how it can be used. I think the version of web3 you mention is possible, but it's so different from how businesses operate now that it will take a very successful high profile company built from the ground up around web3 for the ideas to go anywhere. The risk just feels too high for existing companies, and even most new startups. You're turning over a lot of control and trying to succeed anyway.
Which is also what leads to the parasocial relationships crypto enthusiasts wind up having with web 3 projects and their founders
The founders need economic incentives and the successful ones do that to great efficacy, and all the other participants have far more risk and fewer resources to make anything with the new protocol, so they dont
It requires incredible privilege to be able to launch something for free, and its equally laughable for web 3 communities to suggest that
So the market moves towards these big token sales and everything else is tolerated fallout
Unfortunately most people require trust to get into something new and unknown, and the "web3" moniker has lost that ages ago. Sometimes a rebrand of the best of the crop is not a bad idea, we need a filter to all the bullshit that was bombarded around this the past decade... I was excited by it in 2012, I'm exhausted to wade through all the bullshit by now, so I simply ignore it until the signal to noise ratio gets better.
But I’m not mad, just disappointed.
and that has nothing to do with the technology where parasocial relationships arent needed. there are plenty of web3 projects that provide utility and without the parasocial relationships described here
(and yes, tools for speculators are utility, people really act like they never heard of financial services as soon as someone mentions crypto/web3 and utility in the same sentence)
I get utility out of Multisender.app and similar competitors because it saves me time and money repeatedly in batch sending
I get utility out of zapper.fi and debank because it saves me time and money in accounting
I get utility out of Filecoin because the nodes pin IPFS links, solving a costly problem for me as all the Web 2.0 pinning services like Pinata are costly subscriptions
Snapshot for offchain voting has been a helpful coordination tool for communities that dont want to burden with transaction fees, and its been useful for me to see the results of votes quickly
I exist in the real world and these are successful businesses in the real world extracting a little value by providing a convenience
One thing he said during that conversation when it became clear he only understood it well enough to put big lego blocks together was "oh it's hard to talk to you web2 guys". Just 0_0 lol what.
That's about my take of what web3 has meant to me ever since. The evm ethereum virtual machine is interesting in it's own right as well as some adjacent things. I don't really want to make any claim as to if any of that stuff is 'going anywhere'. He couldn't elucidate any of that to me in person, just an ol web2 guy, sadly.
What is your standard though?
Whether you can you build a business that extracts value from activity?
Whether its supposed to have a profound impact on the world?
"Ethereum" was going to be a suite of tools of which what we call Ethereum today was only one. There was supposed to be a swarm protocol to enable distributed transfer of files, a message transport protocol, a human readable naming system (ENS does exist but it is not quite what was defined early on) and all coming together in Mist browser.
So then we got IPFS, which replaced Swarm, and the EF decided to focus on the EVM and let the community develop other compoenets that could become web3. Ok, cool, why reinvent the wheel. They ditched Mist and stopped maintaining a reference implementation, again, letting the community build. Then Metamask came out, and the rest is history: "web3" is now just websites that pitch you NFTs.
Today, Ethereum is cool; it's a place to launch unregistered securities that cannot be stopped, to trade assets in a decentralized manner. It gives everyone censorship resistance for finance. Some cool things have been built in the process, liquidity pools are revolutionary. But web3? Where is it? I can't even see it being over the horizon no matter how hard I squint. It's a bunch of webdevs pitching tokens to get rich.
There are lots of startups trying to combine technologies in different ways, they should be looked at individually on their own merit. Those who are just trying to profit off a hype should be eschewed, that's pretty much end of story. That some made the mistake of taking on an unpopular tag like "web3" is unfortunate but not a reason to vilify.
To zoom out a little bit I think a lot of us would agree that the internet is broken in some way - a small number of entities have control over all of our data. I do not know what the solution to that will look like but it will certainly involve some re-arrangement of incentives. Internet is driven by money, in the current system largely by money generated through advertising. So whatever a solution to internet ailments will be it necessarily has to do with how money flows. To some technologists blockchain is part of the puzzle. Unfortunately to them the technology often has speculative value, but in a way it is a byproduct of experimentation with money and who and how pays for computing resources. But there are other technologies, some revolving around how internet data is retrieved (IPFS). Some are focusing on identity via novel cryptographic method (sometimes using crypto wallets, but without actually using the chain, like disco.xyz for example).
The point I guess I am trying to make is that a lot of people are trying to improve the internet in a lot of ways and we should be supportive, even if skeptical. If blockchain is not to stick around it has funded great leaps in cryptographic research, it has disseminated cryptographic wallets to more people in the world than anything has and a whole generation of people is growing up with an understanding what a cryptographic signature is, it has fueled research into cooperative organization and probably much more that we will only see in hindsight. Throwing anybody who is associated with blockchain or "web3" or whatever it is into the same heap as Azuki is doing a disservice to everybody who has ever used the internet. We will not make progress this way.