Is Web3 anything?

All of the examples of having to trust the government in this article neglect the fact that trusting the government is not just trusting the government, and it’s not just the government storing a deed or giving you a Social Security Number that makes it real. It’s the whole complex web of laws and regulations that created these policies that make them real, and the people (your fellow citizens) who have collectively decided to run society by these rules. Your recourse when somebody runs afoul of these rules is the courts, which you may feel free to criticize, but pretending they don’t exist is just silly.

People keep saying 'trustless', without realizing the upsetting and very real truth that no mechanism is trustless. Even if you can, if well informed, verify the cryptographic integrity of any communication or data, you are also relying on and trusting the device, UI, and OS that you're using (+myriad stacks, libs, protocols). You are relying on every single medium between you and whatever it is that's verifiable. Let's not kid ourselves. There is no 'trustless'. We just end up assigning the burden of trust to other things. Unless you've built every element from transister upwards, then you're assigning trust. If we implemented, e.g., blockchain based democracy you can bet your bottom dollar that vulnerabilities will be found and utilized.

&gt; what if the neighbors collude and vote that you failed to improve the park despite having done what was specified. The contract could further specify that some neutral third party acts as an arbiter in that case.<p>If there&#x27;s anything that shows that Web3.0, smart contracts and so on are a bad solution in search of a non-existent problem, it&#x27;s this.<p>The ``problem&#x27;&#x27; is apparently that we don&#x27;t trust each other and our institutions. The ``solution&#x27;&#x27; is to create a protocol for trust-less commitments. The bug is that the protocol ultimately relies on the fact that we trust each other and our institutions.<p>Can Web. 3.0 remove some friction from the system? Maybe. Enough to revolutionize it? Highly doubt it.

But is there any case where you&#x27;d actually trust a pile of blockchains more than an existing trust mechanism (whether that&#x27;s neighbourliness, contract law, or something else)? If you&#x27;re not a programmer, getting a programmer to review your smart contract probably costs more than getting a lawyer to review your regular contract. If you are a programmer, you probably know better than to rely on some code being bug-free.

I&#x27;m tired of circular web3 discussions. All I see is people arguing for &quot;but, maybe you shouldn&#x27;t trust the government, maybe you should trust some math that works like a government in this limited scope&quot;.<p>All I see is markets which sidestep all the rules enforced by governments to keep them fair (which prevent things like trading with yourself to create fake transactions), and none of the &quot;park renovation&quot; or &quot;enabling trade for people in oppressed regimes&quot; hypothetical examples. Whatever crypto claimed as values they are not actually being used in practice. The only things it visibly succeeded at were enabling ponzi schemes, enabling dark web trade, making lives easier for ransomware, and using a ton of electricity.<p>I can&#x27;t buy that web3 will deliver on any value it claims based on the monumental screw-up that industry did with cryptocoins. Especially when all values are hypothetical, and deal with abstract things like &quot;trust&quot;.

&gt; Once submitted, that “contract” will be carried out exactly as specified. It is observable to everyone, debuggable, and non-falsifiable.<p>But a centralized database can also achieve this, right? The premise of the general public trusting a blockchain more than an established, centralized 3rd party (e.g. government) seems so feeble.

Nice read. What I don&#x27;t get about all the crypto haters, who will probably make up the majority of replies here, are they really just happy with the status quo? Do they really think the current financial system is great and their online bank account is perfect and nothing radical is worth trying? That usernames and passwords given to each of a million different companies are so great, why would people want to manage their own information?<p>I get it, it&#x27;s hard to see past the memes and bubbles and bullshit and buzzwords in the crypto industry. But there is a very real, very powerful, politically agnostic idea of self-sovereignty at the core to all this stuff. You dictate the terms of your data and your money and your stuff to an ultimate degree.

Web 3.0 was the Semantic Web.<p>The Semantic Web was coming into prominence at the peak of Bittorrent and P2P. It allowed people to publish data in schemas without centralized databases. Protocols in markup. You could declare and share schemas for things, build on top of other people&#x27;s schemas, and remix endlessly. It was powerful.<p>You could define your contact details in FOAF and a client could ingest that and make contacts.<p>You could consume articles as RSS or Atom and use any client you wanted. Clients that were faster and more performant than HTML-based websites. We could have shed HTML and Javascript for many schema-aware applications.<p>If we&#x27;d built Reddit back then, it&#x27;d have been topics and comments that were digitally signed and exchanged p2p, with signed voting, interest graphs, and curated peer groups.<p>Unfortunately, this was just as the VC and ad-money fueled Google and Facebook were coming into prominence. They built centralized systems that were easy to use faster than the Semantic Web community could move. (Semantic Web was much broader - some were interested in predicate logic distributed databases, which were a bit much.)<p>Web 3.0 was the Semantic Web. Do not forget. We can still use the lessons today. This is what the web <i>could have become</i> if the advertising gravity well hadn&#x27;t sucked it in.

I feel like web3 continues the trend (in a good way) of the financialization of everything.<p>The primitives of web3 effectively enable the fine grained economic measurement and distribution of every element of value-exchange, and gives folks the ability to participate in these cashflows where they were previously not able to.<p>Now that there&#x27;s standards for representations of value &#x2F; governance &#x2F; etc (ERC-20) now any protocol that supports ERC-20 tokens can be applied to any ERC-20 token. Ditto for NFTs.<p>As an example, if you want to split cashflows from any source based on some pro-rata ownership of tokens: there&#x27;s a off-the-shelf battle tested contract for that. This composability and remixability of economic value flows has never existed before. Mix that with governance concepts in DAOs and you effectively have a parallel system of capital allocation and investment decision making.<p>p.s. Charles Stross was amazingly prophetic in Accelerando where the Superintelligent AIs create a system of economics called Economics 2.0, which is indecipherable to humans. Reminds me of smart contracts interacting :)

The examples he gives don&#x27;t work very well in practice:<p>&gt;How do you prove you own a house?<p>The crypto idea of having a private key to a token goes wrong when you lose the key or get hacked, and then say to the court the house is still yours which it is in law<p>&gt;you want to fix up your local neighborhood’s park. You have the time, but doing so will take a few thousand dollars in supplies. You could go to your neighbors ...<p>You might just get your neighbours to go on some fixmypark.com site and contribute normal dollars. Getting them all to buy crypto and transfer to smart contracts is not going to happen in the near future.<p>The whole interaction between crypto and the physical world is very clunky. It seems to work better for flipping virtual assets like jpegs and imaginary coins.<p>If web3 is a thing it&#x27;ll probably be more stuff like funding websites by selling NFTs to have ape avatars by your account rather than interacting with parks and houses. But selling imaginary stuff and images and the like can be powerful. I mean US$ are largely imaginary things represented by 0s and 1s in some databases and they do a lot of stuff.

End users don&#x27;t care about government trust or privacy as much as we would want them too. Had it been the case Signal would have already replaced Whatsapp. Unless Blockchain based product solves a real problem it would be hard to see larger adoption.<p>What makes it worse is most of the web3 products are always centered around coins, why do I need a coin to use a decentralized social network? It makes users feel like it&#x27;s a financial scheme and early adopters have incentives to sell it.

This is a system dreamed up by those who have been on the right side of hard power for long enough to forget it exists.

Authors point about trustless commitments, ignoring the semantic arguments posed in the comments, is important.<p>Not mentioned but I would argue as equally or of greater importance is interoperability. If you lose trust in the commitment you&#x27;ve made, you can move your capital&#x2F;identity&#x2F;etc. To the new thing relatively seamlessly. This is the DeFi experience already built that&#x27;s so amazing to interact with relative to traditional banking and capital markets. If you apply that same functionality to other markets, such as social media or healthcare (using zero knowledge rollups to protect private data), I think that&#x27;s inevitably an a-ha moment.<p>It&#x27;s like the Amazon API mandate - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nordicapis.com&#x2F;the-bezos-api-mandate-amazons-manifesto-for-externalization&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nordicapis.com&#x2F;the-bezos-api-mandate-amazons-manifes...</a> - if you build with interoperability at the core, the knock-on effects can be exponential. It&#x27;s a game changer. The consumer is no longer captive to walled gardens.<p>Drop play money into a low fee blockchain, stick to a stablecoin, and mess around with some of the DeFi apps. I think it&#x27;s easy to become a believer if you do that and compare to your normal banking experience.

Escrow services do exist, and usually one of the parties has more power over the transaction than the other. Either the buyer or the seller can cheat the other one out of their money or goods. How do you prove that the package didn’t just contain a heavy brick instead of the promised tablet? I‘m not convinced this can be solved by any kind of contract.

Is Web3 even a thing? Outside HackerNews, I only see it mentioned in crypto-circles, but on HN there’s another article at the top every day.

This whole &#x27;smart contracts&#x27; thing is stupid.<p>The issue is trust. Smart contracts as a solution are a sad attempt at solving that issue. There&#x27;s always edge cases you can&#x27;t code in.<p>E.g. in the example of the neighbour buying goods; What if the other neighbours don&#x27;t really like this guy, and conspire against him?<p>The solution to trust, isn&#x27;t codifying every possible variable and putting in on some silly unmodifiable chain. That solution just shifts the trust. Instead of trusting humans, we&#x27;re now trusting some poorly written code...<p>The solution to the trust issue is good ethics, mindfulness and good upbringing. If someone violates your trust, it&#x27;s probably due to some stress factor in that person&#x27;s life. We need to create a better world for everyone and actually help the people that our violating our trust, and show them the way.

I have yet to see a good example of what “web3” is useful for… honestly this just smells like it’s going to be the next major hype train of 2022.<p>Just like VR&#x2F;AR and ML&#x2F;AI of yesteryear. Note that both of these examples are wonderful pieces of tech but they were blown wildly out of proportion by everyone.

I do think that the best critique of &quot;web3&quot; is that it&#x27;s shifting the trust into a different and less well understood space. There are advantages and disadvantages to using computers instead of analog processes to resolve conflicts, but biology is kind of unavoidably analog. In the long term I&#x27;m bull(ish) on blockchains - I think they have some uses, but most of the excitement I&#x27;m seeing now feels like it&#x27;s scammy or mistaken.<p>I&#x27;m very skeptical about any claims about the correctness or the health of the blockchain ecosystem because, if you&#x27;re interested in using flaws to take money, it&#x27;s obviously much easier to scam people than to go after the fundamentals. Imagine you&#x27;re a Superhacker who Only Cares About Money and you have found a flaw in crypto. You could make some money breaking the whole system, but you can probably make a lot more money taking crypto from poorly setup exchanges or individuals and maintaining the value of the things you took.<p>We are well aware of the problems of using legal and social systems to adjudicate disagreements. People feel excited because we have found math that helps us adjudicate disagreements in a new way and I also think it&#x27;s exciting - but it all feels too early.

More than &quot;disparate ideas&quot;, web3 seems a bunch of &quot;desperate ideas&quot; to make blockchains useful.

I like crypto, it’s interesting, from a technical perspective.<p>And if you e ever had to send money to a foreign currency and pay exchange rates then sending a bit of crypto is like “huh, so that’s how that should feel”.<p>However, the argument that you need it to be free from government and society troubles me because it all runs on electricity and other infrastructure. Maybe solar panels and satellites will help in the short term, but we’d need a bit more of a robust internet solution.<p>I really like cardano’s approach. Trial in places that aren’t developed countries. That will teach you a lot.<p>Everyday on hacker news there is a new shit-on-web3 post on the fp. To me this would be a strong signal to buy some.

Implicit assumptions always seem to be that trust authorities are a bad thing, something that exists for the lack of a better alternative. It is kept implicit that if we can go around trust authorities, we definitely should. But should we? I truly wonder if that is actually the case. I can imagine there to be also quite some benefits to trust authorities. This whole web3 thing seems very similar to centralized&#x2F;decentralized movements that always end up being a sine curve. For me any analysis like this always ends up with the same question in my mind: what problem are we trying to solve here?

To me its just the open deployment and one time payment. Other development and cloud environments do not compete, from a founder or developer perspective. Users pay to use with no convincing necessary.

I think Web3 is interesting for authorities and notaries. Authorities can still perform identity checks and detect money laundering schemes. But still use web3 underneath, which still has benefits for interoperability with other countries and other companies as well. For example you could potentially have a decentralized global real estate ETFs, where the cost of joining many markets would be (potentially) lower. I do personally believe for consumers it is better to have services helping with security and advice.

An interesting angle to look at Web3 is the media angle. How it is talked about in the media.<p>It seems it is:<p>1: A very popular topic<p>For example, it comes up very often here at Hacker News.<p>2: A very controversial topic<p>On one side, there are many people who expect it to change the world in a fundamental way. Investors are investing billions of dollars into it.<p>On the other side, there are many people who call it useless, a fraud and outright evil.<p>3: This has been going on for years now.<p>Has there ever been any other technology for which 1,2 and 3 held true?

&gt; The government issues you a deed declaring that some parcel of land and whatever is on it is yours.<p>Small nitpick but this is not how deeds work, at least not in the US. In the US the seller provides you with a deed. The government simply records it, and the title company insures it based on their research of the chain of title. The government doesn&#x27;t issue deeds unless they are the seller or grantor of the land.

&gt; But I think it’s a mistake to see the current mechanisms and lose sight of the actual capability they’re attempting to provide.<p>This is magnitudes wiser than the typical sentiment of crypto here or in other skeptical communities. When the potential is first recognized, the criticisms then build toward that potential rather than simply having the purpose of tearing something down. Thanks for the piece, Chris.

It&#x27;s not supposed to mean something.<p>It&#x27;s supposed to mean anything, so your imagination, excitement and greed can inpaint the rest.<p>&quot;Then they go up one more level: people send files, but web browsers also “send” requests for web pages. And when you think about it, calling a method on an object is like sending a message to an object! It’s the same thing again! Those are all sending operations, so our clever thinker invents a new, higher, broader abstraction called messaging, but now it’s getting really vague and nobody really knows what they’re talking about any more. Blah.<p>When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don’t know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don’t actually mean anything at all.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28353157" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28353157</a> — Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You (2001) (joelonsoftware.com)

&gt; Most of the descriptions I’ve seen focus on mechanisms - block chains, smart contracts, tokens, etc - but I would argue those are implementation details ... The real question is what fundamental capability are people pointing to when they talk about web3?<p>That&#x27;s exactly the change in focus needed in order for discussions of this topic to be more rational&#x2F;sober&#x2F;productive, imo.

I appreciate Chris’s Clojure work.<p>I wish what people call web 3 would be called web 4.<p>For me, Web 3 was the (mostly failed) semantic web. That said, ideas and tech behind the semantic web are alive and well in knowledge graphs. Life is good.<p>I would welcome more opportunities for decentralization and privacy in Web 4, I hope it works out!

This sentence is key:<p>&gt; This is ostensibly what the legal system provides, but anyone who’s actually tried to go through small claims court knows that the reality of that route is… painful. And it often ends unsatisfactorily<p>And it is in fact a key feature of the contemporary modern world: the people don&#x27;t have a realistic access to court anymore, and this deeply undermines the legitimacy of the State.<p>This immediately reminded this article[1] which explained how the Taliban have rebuilt their power in Afghanistan in recent years, especially outside of their original ethnic group (Pashtuns): by appointing judges in every provinces, available for free, with no delay and hassle.<p>A quick DeepL translation of the most relevant part of the article:<p>&gt; From a material point of view, these courts are rudimentary. The judges, dressed without distinctive signs, sit in village mosques, in private houses or under the cover of trees. “The Taliban courts operate in a very simple way, said one of them. The Taliban judge sits with a cup of green tea in front of him, he receives the requests in person. Then he calls a member of the movement and tells him to go and ask the people against whom a complaint has been filed to come the next day” The judges interview witnesses, examine the documents brought by the disputing parties, and render their verdict, often after a few days - at most a few months for the most sensitive cases. Most disputes concerned land or matrimonial matters, but judges also punished theft, murder and adultery, sometimes with very severe penalties (executions, amputations, stoning). […]<p>&gt; The same motivation was found in a relative of Mr. Faizal Akbar, governor of Kounar province between 2002 and 2005. Despite his political opposition to the Taliban, he was forced to turn to them for a theft of cattle because, since the regime&#x27;s judges were &quot;corrupt,&quot; the costs of filing a complaint with the police and of an official trial would have far exceeded the value of the stolen cattle.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.monde-diplomatique.fr&#x2F;2021&#x2F;09&#x2F;BACZKO&#x2F;63487" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.monde-diplomatique.fr&#x2F;2021&#x2F;09&#x2F;BACZKO&#x2F;63487</a> (in French)

The term &quot;Web3&quot; was hijacked by ethereum.<p>web 3.11 (crypto optional edition) as I see it is about decentralised services over p2p networks (which may include crypto&#x2F;blockchain).

&gt; this isn’t about removing trust, it’s about increasing what you can do at a given level of it<p>I think this is at the center of a lot of arguments. The proponents come from circles where trust is a dirty word, so they don&#x27;t want to say too loudly that they need it. The critics see this as an unnecessarily extreme position, which isn&#x27;t the kind of thing you back down from, so they end up arguing that new tech is unnecessary&#x2F;incapable when applied to this task.

Blockchain solves the &quot;how do we keep track of everything?&quot; problem.<p>We already had databases for that, but OK, blockchain is decentralized.<p>The much harder problem of &quot;how do we bridge data &amp; reality?&quot; is mostly unsolved, and sometimes especially unsolved when blockchain is involved. (eg. paying via Apple&#x2F;Google Pay will generally go OK in many stores, but paying via a blockchain-based cryptocurrency not so much...)

With the neighbors example, don’t you need to trust your neighbors to actually confirm you did the work?<p>What happens if you put in begonias and they wanted daisies? Or they just don’t want to pay you $200 and see they can back out and have you holding the bag.<p>More generally, I still don’t understand how the “third party oracle” issue (ie how do you make real world add to blockchain) doesn’t undermine the trust less idea.

A much more interesting news in the space, not being discussed on HN: polygon just acquired Mir for 400 million $. They are slowly acquiring every zero-knolwedge teams in the space.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blockworks.co&#x2F;polygon-acquires-mir-in-400m-deal-to-scale-ethereum-and-web3&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blockworks.co&#x2F;polygon-acquires-mir-in-400m-deal-to-s...</a>

&gt; trust-less commitments seem to be at the heart of what web3 really is and that feels much harder to dismiss than owning JPEGs or speculating on currencies<p>This <i>is</i> indeed the core feature of this whole genre but arguably makes it easier to dismiss in its entirety as concept and philosophy.<p>Technology should enable <i>building</i> trust. Simply enabling a trust-less society to limb along in a transactional way reveals the libertarian bitcoin roots of web3 that actually believes &quot;there is no such a thing as society&quot;.<p>Designing institutions that are authoritative while democratically accountable is a continuous struggle against power grabbing insiders but it is not impossible.

How about we pause for reflection before the next iteration. It seems like the web is dying. I&#x27;d happily return to web 1.x

All of these systems are pay-to-play systems, and just like pay-to-play games favor whales and their large wallets. Proof-of-work just means more bots hard at work. Voting systems will botted. Swarm investments will seem like democracy to the average user, but all orchestrated from a single source.

What’s missing from this discussion is that you are trusting a blockchain. So if someone goes around and raises money from a bunch of people they are exchanging currency for some crypto asset. How do they know that crypto asset is actually genuine Etherium and not Etheriumm?

Ultimately you do have an issue with who controls the browser. You would think that web3 people would invest in Firefox so that you do not have a duopoly owning the browser space between apple and google.

There is certainly some hope: for example Decentraland joining Blender as a sponsor equal to Aws, Facebook, or Nvidia. It&#x27;s all about who controls the money

Every disastrous technology&#x2F;standard has been when people have shoehorned different agendas into one thing. The shorter the keyword and catchier the better.<p>Web 3 is shaping up to be excellent for this! Prepare your resume. Start early, add Web 3 in there.<p>To marketers, it means better targeted advertising (more is just a side effect they love). To hackers, it means decentralization and going back to 1.0... IRC, but better, Usenet, but better, Blogs, but better... To Megacorps, it means more control, more moneeeeey. To governments, more control, more transparency. To humanists, absolutely nothing. This is shaping to advance humanity in absolutely no way better than 1.0 did.<p>So get the popcorn ready, update your resumes and join the penthouse of the jaded.

&gt; Unfortunately with trust in low supply these days...<p>This is at the core of the issue: no technology, but especially not web3, is just a tool. Tech is inherently political because of both these kinds of underlying assumptions about the world, and how it shapes habits and beliefs of people using it.<p>Creating tech which accepts &quot;trust is in low demand&quot; and proceeds to fix it by making trusting people unnecessary, is a very effective way to promote right-libertarian policies.<p>So I understand why right-libertarian people support &quot;web3&quot;. What I don&#x27;t understand is why so many people with very different political values do.<p>IMO we need tech that promotes trusting each other, not tech where we can make do with a war of all against all.

Crypto, in its current form, is a brainstorm of half-thought-out, half-spec&#x27;d and soon-to-be-replaced-with-something-better implementations that has stumbled upon the web in its never ending task of enticing more converts to invest in its hype train, thereby justifying the previous investors&#x27; investments. We&#x27;ve seem to be inundated with articles talking about web3&#x27;s vacuous nature, as if crypto&#x27;s blackhole has enveloped the idea of web3 and now, in its place, leaving nothing but a vacuum.

Are we getting one of these every day now? They all use the term Web3 unironically, which means in my opinion they’ve already lost.

I am starting a campaign for web4. Optionally decentralised internet with no trust. It is simple, you can browse anything anywhere anytime and you can never trust any of it. It can be static forever or dynamic so it always changes. It can use blockchain as a way to verify history or as anonymous messages as you can make them. No obligations, no commitments. Free or not. Just do it!

Indeed, good luck convincing a corporation or some government to sign up. Not impossible, but very hard

meta comment (npi), i find it really odd that very very often on crashes &lt;x&gt;, you really notice an increase in criticizing articles about &lt;x&gt;.

I wonder if HN is missing out in the new trends.

Is Web3 GPG finally going mainstream?

These comments brought to you by the community that dismissed Bitcoin while it was still trading at sub $1k.<p>You could create a viable investment strategy based around doing the opposite of what HN thinks and you would do extremely well.

This is the guy who ditched light table. Personally, I can&#x27;t think of someone I despise more. I thought light table was the most innovative and slick products I&#x27;d ever seen on a computer.