It’s weird that this article waffles on about PCs and how the author thinks that’s a good analogy. It’s not very convincing because you could easily pick another technology pair and show it the other way (often worse is just worse).<p>But the thing that really seems weird is that all you need to do make it interesting is 1) define what you mean by web3 (it’s a slippery weasel word that changes meaning whenever the people using it needs it to) 2) define a few uses that are obviously better than the alternatives and justify them without hand waving (including explaining why what would appear to be fundamental show stopping flaws are not in fact that)<p>If you can’t do that (and no one seems to be able to) the maybe, just maybe, it is bullshit?
I think that the original idea behind crypto is still the most interesting. It's programmable money. Large swaths of the finance industry exist to make money programmable. Why not build it into the monetary system directly?<p>The general historical trend is to make money more abstract and to be able to perform more complicated functions with it. But fundamentally money is a social technology that consists of three things: An abstract unit of value in which money is denominated, a system of accounts, which keeps track of the individuals' or the institutions' credit or debt balances as they engage in trade with one another and the possibility that the original creditor in a relationship can transfer their debtor's obligation to a third party in settlement of some unrelated debt. [0]<p>Crypto seems to satisfy the essence of that in a pretty cool way. DeFi projects are experimenting with the question of, "can we build the financial instruments and capabilities that a complex economy require on top of, and directly integrated with, this type of monetary system.<p>Like any technology that requires a large network of users to be valuable it has a difficult bootstrapping problem. But it seems to be gradually working its way to larger and more important transactional contexts. First with illegal digital marketplaces and now in countries with weak monetary system like El Salvador (and with unbridled speculation along the way).<p>Maybe all of the current crypto projects will fail but it will be interesting to see the nature of monetary systems in 10, 20 and 50 years from now. What aspects of these current experiments have been adopted?<p>[0] Money: The Unauthorized Biography
> Put differently: it turned out that permissionless publishing alone was insufficient. We also need permissionless data.<p>Has the author ever heard of OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia, or a million other projects like them? I'm also not quite sure "permissionless data" is how I'd describe a database that stores tiny amounts of data at a massive cost. Pay-to-play is permissionless iif you have the money.<p>Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.
Since the ICO craze in 2017 I've seen countless ideas and millions spent trying to use blockchain and crypto for everything you could possibly imagine, and yet I don't see anything meaningful has ever came out of it, apart from get rich quick schemes, ponzis and some virtual novelty items.<p>Bitcoin has been around for 12 years, but in real life I don't know anyone who has ever used something crypto related for anything else than risky investment, or basically gambling. I'm very skeptical.
It's a long article which says that Web3 is a database which nobody owns followed by a lot of hand-wavy stuff that you see everywhere else.<p>The worst part of this is that I feel like I could get dragged into this. That at some point I'll have no choice but to start digging into this and dedicate time to other stacks because the money behind Web3 succeeds in shoving it down everyone's throats.<p>This is someone talking about technology fixing problems, but ignoring the messy real world. For example, we have repeatedly seen how governments can control things which "nobody owns."<p>Another item which stood out was the idea of Web3 taking back control from the big tech companies. But if they are monopolies, then shouldn't it be the government which takes them down?
Dumb questions: Why does "web3" need venture capital. Why are VC (like this author) pushing for web3.<p>Someone suggested it is because they have invested heavily in ETH mining.
People sometimes claim that there's a generational divide in crypto adoption — younger people "get it" while older people (those who came of age with the early web) are stuck in their ways.<p>But there’s a large group of older people who cling to crypto because they think it'll make their ideas sound relevant again. While appearing "disruptive", the crypto space actually privileges those (generally older) folks who already have money to burn (like the Winklevoss twins, whose payout from FB provided more money than they could ever spend on themselves in one lifetime).
What I'm trying to figure out about blockchain in general is how people think it will avoid the inevitable consolidation that efficient economies drive towards. A few examples:<p>- In the early days of the automobile there were hundreds of car companies. Now there are essentially what, 10 worldwide?<p>- In the early days of personal computing there were hundreds of competing platforms, PC brands, etc. Now there are essentially what, 10 worldwide?<p>- In the early days of the internet there were hundreds (thousands?) of dial-up and last mile internet providers (sometimes literally some person in your neighborhood with a T1 and modems in a garage). Now there are what, 10 in the US?<p>- In the early days of the internet there were hundreds of web hosting companies, e-mail providers, etc. Now almost all of the internet runs on what, three?<p>These examples go on and on (mobile devices, cell providers, pretty much anything and everything).<p>Point being it's extremely unlikely (to me) that as the immutable blockchain ledgers all of this is built on grow endlessly (storage, compute, bandwidth, etc) and attempt to scale to any meaningful application, transaction rate, etc beyond the toy level it's at now "decentralized" will almost certainly turn into a handful of power players that can bring the advantages offered by massive economies of scale.
> When (now Sir) Tim Berners-Lee invented the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) he unleashed what we now think of as permissionless publishing.<p>1. Retconning<p>2. As always, web3 and crypto is the next WWW, and the next Internet, and the next car, and the next wheel. Even though literally all signs are pointing to it being the next Juicero or the next Enron.<p>> We also need permissionless data. Why do we need this? Because otherwise we are left with a few large corporations ... We of course know where this winds up and that’s why pretty much everyone hates their cable company and their electric utility.<p>That's quite a logic leap. We need permissionless data because that's why everyone hates their cable company.<p>> prior to the Bitcoin Paper we literally didn’t know how to have permissionless.<p>1. We did.<p>2. Retconning yet again. Bticoin paper is literally this:<p>--- start quote ---<p>A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online
payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a
financial institution.<p>We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network.<p>--- end quote ---<p>The etire paper mentions permissions or permissionless exactly zero times.<p>> It is difficult to overstate how big an innovation this is.<p>Yes, you have. Yoi have just significantly overstated how big it is.<p>> As such Web3 can, if properly developed and with the right kind of regulation, provide<p>Ah yes, regulations. Which, if I remember from just a few paragraphs above "then leads us to all sort of regulatory contortions aimed at rectifying the power imbalance but in practice mostly cementing it. "<p>> And if widely adopted Web3/crypto technology will also start to improve along other dimensions. It will become faster and more efficient.<p>And that will surely happen just because you say it will happen. Also because innovation I guess?<p>> And much like the PC was a platform for innovation that never happened on mainframes or mini computers, Web3 will be a platform for innovation that would never come from Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc.<p>Innovation never came from Juicero either. Somehow, your web3 is surely the next Internet, and not the myriad of failed "innovations".
99% of the foundation of crypto seems to be grift. Just waiting for the bubble to pop when they run out of suckers. Lets see how much their ugly JPEGs are worth then.
The author makes a great case for creating protocols such as http and xmpp and the like, which as protocols, are decentralized already.<p>Why add magic number guessing for financial gain to something like a photo sharing platform?<p>Maybe your answer is micro transactions, but then how do you protect consumers from fraud and abuse with reversibility and dispute resolution? This seems like a feature and not a bug of our current financial system.<p>Things like Patreon and Kickstarter exist already and seem to do a fairly good job of this. Why do we need all of the downsides of cryptocurrency to do something that already works well for billions of people?
<i>Ok, so how is this remotely the same as PCs being cheaper? Well because to some people this matters a great deal. Why? Because much of the power held by large companies (and by governments) comes from the fact that they operate and control databases.</i><p>What a naive and short sighted world-view this is, it's almost grotesque. No company or government derives its power from holding a big database. By the same argument it would follow that Venezuela must be a really wealthy country because it's got lots of oil. And it's the same kind of argument as saying Stripe or Paypal or some other Fintech got big because they had the idea of "enabling payments on the internet".<p>Power is derived from getting others behind a cause and then executing on it. That's it.
Web3 is 'the future' if you're invested in crypto.<p>If you're not (or have been and got out), then it's nothing but the delusion of a sect of believers who want to wish it into existence.<p>Being invested fundamentally changes the way people think and allows them to come up with any justification for their investment. It's not just crypto, but pretty much everything else where people expect easy returns at the expense of other people, nature, other countries, the future, etc.<p>There is nothing special or magical about this technology. Just because it uses an immutable data structure called 'block chain' and cryptographic hashes left and right, doesn't automatically make it useful or needed. In fact, the opposite is true due to the POW being a race to burn as much (mostly) coal for the benefit of very few.<p>The fact that the vast majority of crypto enthusiasts, who have absolutely no idea how it works and what it represents, decided to part with their fiat in the hope that money grows on Merkle trees and pushed the price to astronomical levels does not validate the technology itself, but rather is an example of human psychology and greed at work.<p>I hope the whole crypto delusion crumbles as quickly as possible before it takes down the whole world economy with it. Or maybe that is exactly what must happen so that the world wakes up to reality. Maybe that is the whole point of it.
I just find it a little concerning that there are people out there, who are blindly following this Web3 "trend" by spending their money on digital "art".<p>For the average person, there is no real use for Web3 because there is no actual definition for it.<p>My impression is that Web3 is being praised as decentralized, yet it is people with a lot of money who are the one's regulating the pace right now.<p>And that is a tad bit concerning to say the least, because if I invest millions into something (whether as an individual or a VC) - I'd like to feel a sense of "ownership", otherwise that money could have been spent helping real causes.<p>I'd go as far as saying that for most people, including those entrenched in spending their hard earned money, the word Web3 is immediately associated with NFTs, not the actual blockchain technology. And that says a lot.
Publishing a website is not permissionless. You have to get a public IP address and register a domain name with an ICAAN provider, and various ISPs have the power to block your site. Actually promoting your site, scaling your site, integrating with common services, require more centralized servers, they're just just more implicit and you can choose from multiple providers (e.g. AWS or Azure). But you can choose to post to Facebook or Twitter.<p>The problem isn't centralization. It's centralization through a company which exerts too much of its own influence and censorship and monetizes your usage for its own benefit. Plenty of centralized databases allow free speech and don't seem to monetize your data: look at HN or if you're more radical, 4chan.<p>Idk if all centralized services are doomed to be corrupt so decentralized is the best we can do, like all monarchies are doomed to be corrupt so democracy is the best we can do. But unlike monarchies that hasn't really been shown. Maybe if someone invents a more efficient way to serve decentralized data the web will transition, but until then most decentralized services are most useful only as a backup to centralized services.
A constant crypto-person refrain seems to be, essentially, “technology X was quite bad, yet hyped, at first (there is a tendency to overstate the badness), and then took over the world, therefore crypto-stuff, which is quite bad, yet hyped, will naturally also take over the world.”<p>Counterpoint: remember 3D TVs? Or those chatbot things that briefly received all the VC money a few years back?
It's a rule of mine to avoid any financial area that looks, acts, and talks like a mania after reading Charles Mackay's "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)," which I discovered at random in a strip mall bookstore in Rhode Island. Reading it saved me over $300,000 dollars before the dotcom crash because I sold everything and got out (my timing was very lucky.)<p>Crypto, NFT's, blockchain & web3 are currently in a mania phase so my 2022 resolution is to aggressively ignore them so I don't get sucked in before the inevitable correction. I can't afford to be stuck with a pile of tulip bulbs.
So what you are saying is that the internet should be built on a model where people can upload children pornography or propaganda from state actors and nobody can do anything to stop it? Thanks I pass. I'm also curious about how to provide distributed storage that competes with google in terms of size, reliability and performance.<p>The fun thing about cryptography is that allows building internet services that can beat the blockchain. There is nothing preventing you from creating a service where people upload encrypted stuff that is only associated to a key id. In fact there are already services that kind of do this.
> some proponents who present web3 as bringing about a libertarian nirvana.<p>What bothers a lot of us isn't the libertarian nirvana ideal, it's the fact that most loud proponents have a financial interest and stand to gain by increasing adoption, even if only temporarily. Even if they truly believe the technology is pointless and has no future, they are incentivised to pretend that it is revolutionary in order to increase the value of their investments so they can offload their holdings. This makes it difficult to trust anybody writing positively about cryptocurrency-related topics. It's like knowing a manufacturer pays people to write positive reviews about their product and then suddenly seeing lots of blogs and comments raving about how great the products are with little justification.<p>If you can separate the distributed database technology from the financial speculation then I will be a lot more enthusiastic about it. However, without the get-rich-quick aspect I suspect such a technology won't get nearly as much excitement overall. Mastodon and Diaspora are already working examples of decentralised social networks and this article doesn't state what advantage web3-based products would have over them and people generally don't seem very excited about them.
It misses that Tim Berners-Lee and early internet architects perhaps were thinking of decentralised and also peer-to-peer in the same way that web3/crypto guys do. What TBL had no interest in was the container (DB or server, whatever). Some 20 years later Tor people got interested in the decentralised and redundant storage for HTML and IPfS for files. So this is kind of… already invented. But not anywhere near to mass adoption.<p>While I agree that FB, twitter and alike are just big content holders and providers, I cannot agree that vast majority (of users) even understand the implications or care to go decentralised and redundant (in respect to content).<p>So it seems the appeal of the so called web3 is still very weak. And btw It’s not even a web, really. It seems to me rather an extremely bloated approach to ‘torrenting’ assets. And extremely energy-pricey.
Well, where are the killer apps?<p>Where are the mass usage use cases beyond "get rich quick" schemes?<p>We have had the technology for years and all we got are NFC schemes, speculation and hot air.
This is technical wishful thinking, or an abstract tech, if you wish.<p>In the old times we called this "a solution in search of a problem", but these solutions are imaginary.<p>This, probably, hints the the top of a couple of bubbles.
<i>"A blockchain is a worse database. It is slower, requires way more storage and compute, doesn’t have customer support, etc. And yet it has one dimension along which it is radically different. No single entity or small group of entities controls it ..."</i><p>No, blockchain in itself doesn't mean it's not controlled by a single entity. There are many permissioned and private blockchains:<p><a href="https://www.foley.com/en/insights/publications/2021/08/types-of-blockchain-public-private-between" rel="nofollow">https://www.foley.com/en/insights/publications/2021/08/types...</a>
It misses the point of <i>why</i> PC's were adopted, which was spreadsheets. No-one put a PC on your desk because you needed a PC. They put a PC on your desk because you suddenly needed to be able to use a spreadsheet to do your job [0].<p>And the reason we all got internet connections in the mid-90's wasn't Web0. It was email. Web0 was a toy thing that only us geeks played around with, that came free with your email account. All the "serious" stuff that we use the web for now was in the walled gardens (CompuServe or AOL).<p>Web3 needs a "killer app" like email or spreadsheets. Still not seeing one.<p>[0] Source: I had this happen to me. Working a desk job as an admin clerk in a transport company, and suddenly our monthly budget/financials had to be sent to head office in Lotus 123 instead of paper. So I got a PC (286, 4Mb of memory woot!) and learned Lotus 123. Fun times :)
I'm generally a web3 skeptic, turned off by all the hype and ideology, but the interesting thing about "web3" is you a potentially critical mass of zealots working together and building on ideas. I'm sure something interesting will emerge out of that. Will it require crypto? Maybe, but probably not. In fact, I think what will likely happen is interesting ideas will come out of web3 but then they'll just end up implemented without crypto/decentralization.
I have a dumb question that keeps nagging me, and wonder if someone here has a good answer. What does Web3 necessarily have to do with the web? Couldn't an iOS app which uses blockchain technology as a decentralized database be just as good an example of what Web3 is trying to achieve? Or a technically oriented command line app for finance using a blockchain which does not involve a web browser?<p>Are Web3 people just using "web" as a stand-in for the internet?
Web3 is just an excuse to still shilling crypto while using it as a payment system has not taken off. They need to hype the next empty buzzwords to keep parade going.
I still don't understand how Web3 doesn't become centralized like Web2 did. While services like email are technically decentralized we see that they are highly centralized on Web2 because almost everyone uses GMail. We see similar centralization with other types of services. I understand Web3 is also trying to decentralize not only the services, but the hosting. I still don't see why the big main players like AWS wouldn't just continue to host the majority of the servers. I feel like a lot of Web3 evangelists are asserting decentralization but not explaining a good mechanism for it to be so. Web2 has clearly shown us (as most of history) that momentum is powerful and that there is a positive feedback loop in systems like these. That power begets more power. So what's the mechanism for maintaining decentralization?<p>As for the crypto parts, I'm all for making everything possible cryptographically secure by default and E2EE.
> A blockchain is a worse database. It is slower, requires way more storage and compute, doesn’t have customer support, etc. And yet it has one dimension along which it is radically different. No single entity or small group of entities controls it – something people try to convey, albeit poorly, by saying it is “decentralized.”<p>Is it true that major blockchains out there are really not controlled/controllable by a small number of people?<p>I read that top 10,000 account holders hold over a third of all bitcoin [1]<p>Assuming same thing happens with other blockchains, isn't that the same problem as top 10,000 Facebook shareholders owning a third of its shares? Basically the system is decentralized on paper, but in reality massive centralization happens driven by economic incentives, same as in non-blockchain world.<p>[1] <a href="https://time.com/6110392/bitcoin-ownership/" rel="nofollow">https://time.com/6110392/bitcoin-ownership/</a>
As someone who has just heard the name Web3 over and over again, is there anything tangible that I can try? I have tried IPFS, but I don't know if it's "web3".
I stayed away from crypto coins despite having a lot of friends get into this very early and I even refused gifted bitcoins. I still have zero interest or regrets.<p>That being said I have no ideea where this tech is going. Maybe it will tranform enough times it becomes useful to me. A better analogy for me is the gold rushes. A lot of bad things happened during those but it also encouraged migration and settlement of some unexplored regions.<p>If I don't get involved it doesn't cost me very much that other people try. Let them do the work and take the risks. If they produce anything useful I will profit. If not...<p>(I know about the environment cost)
This author fundamentally misunderstands PCs and HTTP, and then goes on to make bogus claims about what can be done on a blockchain. “Permissionless” is wildly misleading description of the blockchain. You can’t change anything in the ledger besides things you already own. There’s also the implicit lie that blockchain means everyone is on equal footing. If that were true, VCs would not be racing to pour billions into Coinbase, et al. If anything, blockchain makes you more reliant on the intermediaries, and everything that web3 promoters resent about web2 will return, only worse.
Here's a good analogy for crypto that I think helps close the loop on people who don't seem to want to understand it.<p>If I have a tungsten cube sitting on my table, it is theoretically possible that I could track that tungsten cube backwards through time. It's sitting on my desk now, but before that it was in a box on a UPS truck, before that in a foundry somewhere, before that it was in the earth, before that the elements were in a supernova which themselves could be traced back all of the way to the origin of the universe.<p>So the fact of the cube sitting on my desk is really just an expression of all of the events <i>leading</i> to it sitting on my desk, and this isn't something that can be fabricated no matter how much authority you have (you could like, but the universe would know it as a lie).<p>Blockchain is <i>that</i>. I have some value in my wallet, but that value can be traced all of the way back through various transactions to when it was mined/minted/whatever, and actually the <i>entirety</i> of the various crypto ecosystem could be traced back to, literally, the genesis block.<p>That is a Very Big Deal. It means that the block chains are internally consistent universes of their own, with no central authority. That's a big deal for gaming, for ownership proxies (like NFTs), for currency, and for really anything else that exists within our own universe.<p>To say it in a somewhat flowery way: our own universe is a physical blockchain.
This article does a decent job at casting the decentralized database argument as disruptive innovation without resorting to hype. But I wonder about the other fundamental drawbacks of blockchain for developing new applications:<p>- Immutability: building any software requires iteration, and therefore mutability. How do you build a startup if you can't ALTER TABLE on your database (or it requires a new database)?<p>- Irreversibility: if there are any bugs, or mistakes in the code, you can't fix it later (and in fact, someone may be able to steal a lot of your tokens)<p>- Dependency on real-world data sources: even if smart contracts are ironclad, they can dependent on potentially erroneous or manipulable data sources<p>- Off-chain centralization: many of these blockchain apps such as the play-to-earn games have a lot of centralized control that is not on the blockchain and under the discretion of the developer. Probably because of the reasons above<p>At a meta level, the hardest problems are people problems and not solvable by technology. Trying to solve people problems with ironclad code seems like a fool's errand. If there was a killer app that wasn't handicapped by the issues above, that would make me a believer.
> Ok, so how is this remotely the same as PCs being cheaper? Well because to some people this matters a great deal. Why? Because much of the power held by large companies (and by governments) comes from the fact that they operate and control databases.<p>The key point here is "Some People". But to make meaningful change a majority of people have to switch to a new system. The sad truth is: 90% of people do not care.<p>The best example for this is podcasts. They started out as a decentralized utopia. Self hosted files, self hosted feeds, multiple apps to listen to them, improvements of existing formats (mp3 chapters were not really a thing before podcasts), there were even talks about enabling BitTorrent distribution.<p>Fast forward a few years, now Spotify seems to accumulate most of the podcast universe and a lot of the existing podcast use them as a distribution platform. And their exclusive content is drawing in more and more users.<p>So my question here is: if we have a decentralized system that works but people willingly use a centralized alternative of that, how can you claim that decentralization is remotely popular?<p>You need to address this social issue before coming up with any kind of technology to solve it.
I think people don't care enough about "I am the true origin" internet. Web3 is, IMHO, a waste of time.<p>At the end of the day, an internet server will (and should) be managed by a single entity (person or corporation). Why? Well, why not? Why should _I_ host _your_ website (IPFS)? Just so that some granny with a laptop can cryptographically prove it's yours as originally intended?<p>For example, I personally don't care what FB (now Meta) does with my data - my likes aid in teaching an algorithm to understand humanity better than humans themselves? That's fucking awesome!<p>How would Web3 change this even?<p>There'll always be a need in understanding people in ways no one can imagine yet, and to do so, someone has to leverage your data in ways you might not like (mostly because you don't understand the need, or you're just a sheep in a herd screaming "that's mine!"). This is inevitable.<p>P.S. I am still struggling to understand Web3, please bear with me and my rant.
I am astonished at the adolescent boy level of gee whiz rationalization, here. The damning aspects of Web3 are barely being mentioned because of the emotive appeal to scary corporations controlling you.<p>Web3 does not solve the problem of being bullied or controlled. It makes it worse. You can dislike Facebook, but it is a legal entity that the state can hold accountable. Who is held accountable in Web3? What recourse does anyone have if things are published about them that harm them in Web3? Russia created a well-funded agency to troll the web and manipulate public opinion. It seems to me they will love Web3.<p>Entities that will vie to control Web3 will be rich, powerful, and better protected from legal moves against them.<p>We already have a decentralized web. It called the Web. Anyone can connect a server to it.
> A blockchain is a worse database. It is slower, requires way more storage and compute, doesn’t have customer support, etc.<p>Please Mr Albert Wenger. You are a VC and not a technical expert on what is a database or a blockchain.<p>It makes absolutely no sense to compare a database to a blockchain. These things are completely different and have entirely nothing in common except that they persist data. You wouldn't compare a file to a database to make a point, would you? Also, you don't have the authority anyways to make that comparison as I doubt you know the technical details that differentiate a database from a blockchain.<p>Databases aren't blockchains and blockchains aren't databases. Stop comparing them for your ignorance's sake.
> The canonical example here is the personal computer (PC). The first PCs were worse computers than every existing machine. They had less memory, less storage, slower CPUs, less software, couldn’t multitask, etc. But they were better at one dimension: they were cheap. And for those people who didn’t have a computer at all that mattered a great deal. It is exactly this odd combination that made existing computer manufacturers (making mainframes down to mini computers) ignore the PC.<p>Wow. There are so many factual errors in these sentences that I’m not even sure where to start.<p>I’ll start by giving the author the benefit of doubt and assume that by „personal computer” they meant the IBM PC (1981) and its family. (Otherwise we’d have to assume that they completely ignore the existence of pre-PC home computers, many of which were both less powerful and significantly cheaper.) It’s also not true that the PC was unable to multitask (remember Concurrent CP/M-86?)<p>First, note that IBM, at the time of introducing the PC, was – and continued to be, well into the 21st century – _the_ major purveyor of mainframes. So saying that they „ignored the PC” implies that they ignored themselves, which doesn’t make sense.<p>Second, the initial PCs were just not powerful enough to compete with mainframes or minicomputers. The sets of usecases of „big” computers vs. PCs were almost completely disjoint until perhaps the 1990s. There were reasons why the PC exploded in popularity in the 1980s (open architecture being the #1 reason), but the author is silent about that.<p>I know this is tangential, but I see a lot of handwaving in this post and, frankly, not much else. Why should I listen to someone who can’t get their facts straight? Why bother, indeed?
You need to separate web3 and cryptocurrencies.<p>Cryptocurrencies are necessary. A parallel monetary system secured by cryptography and codified by algorithms, is highly necessary for nations with corrupt regimes. Being able to move fiat money into stablecoins and get a loan against it within seconds is necessary and has real utility.<p>Web3 does not really have utility. It's all driven by token price speculation right now. The big thing is if you think about the general population, nobody really cares about decentralization. They just want a good user experience. A centralized but good user experience is good enough for 99% of the population.
The concepts and ideas about web3 are interesting, but the comparisons with how web1 and web2 came to be are ludicrous. Both were fueled by real needs of real people and companies, and came to prominence slowly as people figured them out. It took a long time before it was profitable and money came into the picture.<p>Lee’s web1 started in universities and it took years until people believed in it. Web2 came slowly as companies wanted to let their users interact more with their websites. I guess *AMP software was a major turning point in this, open source and available to everyone. You can be a part of web2 and never even know the name of a single VC.<p>What is happening right now is the absolute opposite. Money is at the very center of the discussion to begin with. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a socialist, but I understand that a revolution such as web1 or 2 cannot be steered by money. If it happens (or when it happens I guess) it is probably going to be in a completely different way as what is being discussed on Twitter today.
So, yeah, most crypto people don’t have the faintest clue how it works. And it’s kind of weird to embrace this very hyped/vc’d tech, while remaining mum on all the already decentralized tech that’s the bedrock of the internet. And exchanges + crypto is basically legacy decentralized web tech + Google/Meta.<p>But one thing that I do have to say is interesting about the tech is embedding smart contracts. This is legitimately interesting and novel, and probably the best justification for web3 tech.
I really don't get it. What is the appeal? Is it an anonymous web like existing darknets? They exist and work already. Obviously, so long as there is a more convenient/cheaper/more accessible non-dark-web, the only people who will be on the dark web are criminals.<p>What is the connection between "web3" and "NFTs" and "Cryptocurrency"? I mean <i>apart</i> from all being loosely related to the same underlying blockchain tech - are there other points of contact?
Am a fence sitter. I think new technology and innovation is interesting. I think exploring new ideas is interesting. Theres enough capital to go around.<p>Will be interesting to see how this develops
Not commenting on TFA's content but... It's using:<p><pre><code> text-align: justify;
hypens: auto;
</code></pre>
That is, IMO, underrated. I'm reading this on a M1 MacBook Air: maybe at "retina" pixel density we can, at last, use <i>text-align: justify</i> and have pages looking (nearly) as nice as book pages.<p>I'm not going to force justification for people on small devices (it looks bad on these) but it sure is pleasant to me on a high-density, kinda large, screen.
> 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.<p>This is painfully wrong. <i>Almost</i> true for Facebook, but in general these companies most valued assets are their <i>systems</i> and operations, not the data itself.<p>Also I’m pretty sure the first PCs weren’t cheaper at all.
I think web3 means, most generally, decentralized Internet without big tech. How can this be achieved? By people sharing their computer/internet resources instead of relying on big tech servers. Why would they do that? Because they will receive incentives in the form of digital currency. Who will pay those incentives? People investing dollars into digital coins with speculative purposes and people providing services for digital coins.
Decentralization and taking power out of the hands of large corporations is no guarantee of success - otherwise Napster would have to dominate the music streaming market today and not Spotify.<p>> prior to the Bitcoin Paper we literally didn't know how to have permissionless<p>Simply not true. Torrents allow you to store and retrieve objects from a decentralized object "database" without an individual having control over it.
The author implies the assumption that over time, distributed data will get quicker and cheaper, like the CPU and memory on a PC.<p>It won't.<p>It can't.<p>The problem is that validating transactions on a blockchain must be expensive. If they were cheap, then I could spend a few bucks, take over a blockchain, and say that my transactions are the valid ones.<p>There's no way around this issue.
I'm slowly coming around to web3 as an idea after giving it a lot of thought. For me, MMOs are a great boostrap for thinking about this. People pay real money for in-game items and currency...usually from the developer, but web3 enables players to buy/sell directly (and allowing this can be a product draw, much like APIs were for Twitter). Web3 technologies can enable an ecosystem for this without a bunch of bespoke work that likely isn't core to what a business is trying to achieve.<p>However, I don't see it as a "web3 all the things" like web2 was, but as a set of protocols for certain kinds of behavior we're beginning to see online more and more. We'd probably add it in without thought (like we did Facebook's share buttons 10 years ago) if the tech weren't so complicated and the energy concerns so pernicious.<p>A lot of the success will come down to how successful everyone is at standardizing on schemas. In a decentralized world, I'm skeptical of that working out better than it did for web2, but I wish everyone luck.
It seems like the VC's are coming to harvest crypto. They will try to regulate it and squeeze out all the tech and profit for themselves, but at least they will counter the much worse regulation that would submit crypto under the control of central banks.
So basically web3 is the solution to money-hungry super companies centralizing power? Then why is it that we only seem to be discussing it after big names on Twitter decided to talk about it?
A novel platform that can’t block its users from deploying on it, or commerce, and people have trouble seeing some value in that?<p>Even the somewhat centralized platforms have so much high speed commerce on them that they don’t disrupt anyone. Even people that quickly exit to the bridges are not stopped and couldn't be, on the centralized-ish ones.<p>That’s a lot of alpha and value extraction to miss. Especially if you invest in the bridge :)<p>Don’t worry you’ll read about it late, in 2030, ngmi
I don't agree with this perspective. Crypto is designed to be a poor technology, the slowness, waste and scarcity are part of what lead to increasing prices, which is the only reason people have interest in it. If PCs were traded like beanie babies, with less regulation and bigger asset bubbles, then maybe this analogy would make sense. But PCs are designed to be useful, not only traded like commodities to increase fiat.<p>If this take, "crypto is bad technology but we're at the very start of it, it will get faster and more efficient," shouldn't Bitcoin Cash have won a long time ago? Few seem to care about actually using cyrpto for anything other than increasing fiat. It's 90% wash trading.
I rememeber someone on Twitter describing the invention of public blockchains by way of an analogy of computers being invented as part of an effort by someone to invent pong.<p>A permissionless database was invented as part of an effort to create p2p electronic cash.
One person in the comments there asked about how its better from a corporate marketer’s angle, I think Web3 has the perfect funnel.<p>For any application The funnel is practically nonexistent, except to the luddites that still need onboarding into a wallet. No different than trying to show an existing experience to an AOL user in 1995 versus showing it to the people writing editorials questioning what the World Wide Web was. <i>“Is there any useful application on the World Wide Web, why has nobody convinced me for me, why has everyone started ignoring my bait about what useful means! I swear I wont move the goalpost if you talk to me, this time!”</i><p>For marketing theory its matches perfectly, get a user to pay $1 and you’ve found the audience that would pay more, while bouncing the freeloaders. Any web3 application has authorized payments built in and users prepared to create a transaction with a fee.