[HN Gopher] Notes on Web3
___________________________________________________________________
Notes on Web3
Author : tbolt
Score : 81 points
Date : 2021-11-18 21:19 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (society.robinsloan.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (society.robinsloan.com)
| tshaddox wrote:
| That's weird, was this article edited after being on the HN front
| page a few days ago? I distinctly remember the article mentioning
| social networks being built in SF in South Park, but now that
| section says " I have vivid memories of the ferment of the late
| 2000s, a new social network flaring up every week! I lived in San
| Francisco; they were building them in offices around a narrow,
| scraggly park" which strikes me as odd phrasing.
| tshaddox wrote:
| The old version that mentions South Park is archived:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20211111052337/https://society.r...
| tbolt wrote:
| I submitted this thinking it would show me the discussion so I
| wouldn't be surprised if it was posted before.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Dupe. Submitted a bunch a week ago already.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29188948
| dang wrote:
| On HN, it only counts as a dupe if the story has had
| significant attention already (see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). This one hadn't, so
| the repost is ok. The reason we allow this is to give good
| submissions multiple chances at getting attention. Otherwise
| it's far too random what gets traction off /newest.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| ok fine, thought multiple chances would come from the pool or
| reinvites, not new posters, but ok.
| bserge wrote:
| Web3 for me is going Back to the Future.
|
| Ownership over rent, sharing info without replying/participating
| in social diarrhea, local storage first, no regional restrictions
| (hi, Google fucks), small and slow before big and instant (shove
| your Prime up yours), less is more and all that shit.
|
| I've realized I'm not overcoming thousands or millions of years
| of evolution in a lifetime, so no need to stress over the
| "progress" people made in recent years.
|
| Keep your modern hyperconnectedness, it works great as a
| buttplug.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _Therefore, a good diagnostic question to ask might be: would
| you still be curious about Web3 if those currencies were
| worthless, in dollar terms? For some people, the answer is "yes,
| absolutely", because they find the foundational puzzles so
| compelling. For others, if they're honest, the answer is "nnnot
| reallyyy"._
|
| Can we add group #3, people who are profoundly uninterested in
| this version of Web3 _even despite_ all the money in it?
|
| I was a fan of decentralisation when it stood for federated
| software and the idea that the web should generally be the same
| for hobbyists and professionals.
|
| I really can't see a desirable vision of the future with a web
| based on artificial scarcity, intentional resource waste and
| anarchocapitalism.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| > despite all the money in it?
|
| I wonder about this, because an awful lot of post-2008ish
| technology simply seems to be "like before, but different
| enough that we think we can be the first movers of the Next Big
| Thing, and therefore make a killing."
|
| When you really get down to it, a lot of the popular technology
| isn't all that different from IRC, Usenet, etc., just app-ified
| and Web-ified (and emoji-ified, of course). I'm not sure moving
| to a "Web3" paradigm is going to be all that different, just
| with a new set of Very Important People driving it.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"I really can't see a desirable vision of the future with a
| web based on artificial scarcity, intentional resource waste
| and anarchocapitalism."
|
| You've got my vote on that one.
| austincheney wrote:
| Lame. Web3 used to mean the semantic web. That died. Even before
| that died social media marketers were already using the term
| _Web3.0_ to refer to some advertising nonsense.
|
| Now it seems it is something vaguely related to blockchain. At
| the moment blockchain is directly tied to crypto currency, which
| to almost everybody looks like a giant Ponzi scheme.
|
| Until the concept of blockchain is completely divorced from
| crypto currencies they can name this nonsence whatever they want.
| It won't stick. Nobody cares except for the few people already
| making money off this.
| xg15 wrote:
| I mean, at least they followed current marketing trends and
| rebranded the venerable Web 3.0 into the hipster web3.
| [deleted]
| chrisco255 wrote:
| The builders will win and naysayers will be long forgotten. I
| work full time in this space and it is evolving faster than I
| can keep up with.
|
| DAOs, NFTs, tokens, decentralized file storage, decentralized
| identity via public keys and smart contracts, tokens as
| authentication, on-chain reputation systems, oracles,
| fundraising with no third parties or gatekeepers, etc are all
| here to stay and will evolve further and faster than your bias
| will let you see.
|
| If you have an alternative to the monopolistic web and mobile
| dystopia we find ourselves in, wherein we can only speak within
| the narrow band of corporately acceptable speech and
| expression, and we can only transact with the blessings of
| PayPal's overlords, that doesn't involve crypto or blockchain,
| I suggest you quit your job to build it.
|
| Otherwise, I fear you might be too late at disrupting the
| establishment, as the builders are well under way, working on
| Web3 powered by crypto (in both senses of the word).
| sllewe wrote:
| I advise/consult/build technology for a wide range of
| industries. (From AEC Firms to Major league sports teams)
| From my perch, the meaningful proliferation of blockchain in
| those industries has been... _zero_. And that 's not to say
| it hasn't been on the tip of many of their CTO's tongues.
|
| Your giant list of of terminology isn't making much of an
| impact on me. In fact many of those sounds terrible.
|
| So giving your post the benefit of the doubt, when can I
| expect to be disrupted out of a job by even a single item on
| your list?
| echelon wrote:
| Web 4.
|
| Don't paper over history.
|
| The Semantic Web was the first that dreamed of distributed,
| decentralized taxonomies of data shared p2p. Facebook and
| Google sidelined it.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I'm generally wary of anything that tries to make up a web
| version number. Since the internet is a decentralized system,
| attempting to stick a version number on it is inherently a dumb
| marketing exercise. Double so when describing something in the
| future -- maybe you can retroactively say some conventions have
| become so prevalent as to deserve to be called "web 2.0," but
| certainly nobody knows what conventions will become prevalent
| enough to be called 3.0.
| outside1234 wrote:
| We need to get specific. There is no web3. People aren't going to
| just take everything from the crypto ecosystem and instead we
| need to talk about what is good and what is terrible.
|
| Crypto currencies are terrible - or at least I have heard of no
| reason why people need them outside of ponzi scheming,
| ransomwaring, or your drug deal - especially since they are NOT
| cheaper to do transactions in and are NOT anonymous and are
| definitely NOT (yet) even close to green.
|
| That said, things like distributed file storage (IPFS) and
| distributed identity are really interesting. We really do need
| solutions around how we prevent China, Russia, and other
| governments from basically brainwashing folks through turning off
| any part of the internet they don't like. I'm all-in on that
| part.
| leppr wrote:
| Filecoin is a cryptocurrency that is used to incentivize IPFS
| pinning in a decentralized way. There, you have a reason.
| rburhum wrote:
| I keep hearing this (healthy) skepticism, but it does lose sight
| of what is happening in many countries. For a lot of folks (me
| included) Web3 is about using decentralized blockchains in a web
| context to reduce problems that arise with control from
| centralized systems. It makes sense for specific use cases, so
| let me give you 2.
|
| 1) Finance (DeFi). Even for valid (non-criminal) uses cases,
| there are numerous laws and regulations that translate into crazy
| fees to do proper crossboder money transfer. I transfer money
| every month from the US to different countries in LATAM to pay
| employees, and historically you get screwed with various fees
| depending on how you structure the transfer (e.g. to the employee
| directly vs. to an entity in the receiving country that disburses
| the money to different local employees).
|
| During the past few years I have encountered everything:
|
| - unexpected fees beyond the local transfer fee at the receiving
| end (that change some times) (hello folks at Interbank!)
|
| - low-fee provider that canceled our account because the TOS said
| that the service was meant to be used to send money to family and
| not to employees (hello folks at Xoom!)
|
| - holding of money transferred for a week because of some
| threshold passed that triggered some AML check (hello folks at
| BCP!)
|
| - provider that canceled transfer to a particular country for
| political instability (hello folks at Transferwise!)
|
| - etc etc
|
| All that goes away when you use p2p networks (like the ones from
| Binance https://p2p.binance.com/en?fiat=CNY&payment=ALL) and
| stablecoins to transfer money. The fees are low (or sometimes
| non-existent) and the transfer happens in seconds (vs the
| hours/days in a traditional system). Literally millions of cross-
| border dollars get transferred this way every day. Additionally,
| I hear of other folks who have escaped authoritarian regimes but
| still have family in those countries where there are strict
| restrictions to send/receive money. Guess what they are using?
|
| 2) Digital Property/Rights: Whether you want to accept it or not,
| there is an entire market where all kinds of property is being
| transferred through smart contracts. Sometimes the traditional
| digital item (say an NFT) has an associated real-world contract
| attached to it that extends some sort of right/ownership of a
| physical item in the real world. The rights to these items is
| being transferred from person to person every day. That market
| keeps growing, and it is not just "exchanging jpegs" anymore.
|
| For both of these use cases, there are real world scenarios where
| a central authority has been by-passed for a legitimate
| transaction. And it happens every day today. The use cases for
| web3 is not running a "distributed Wordpress instance", but other
| useful real-world use-cases like these that we are starting to
| discover.
| binarynate wrote:
| I'm totally fine with people exploring and getting excited about
| uses for crypto and Ethereum, but I don't like the term
| "Web3"because it suggests that it's the next evolution of the
| web, when really it's a completely different technology.
| Hopefully this Web3 term is just a phase and will get replaced
| with something better.
| defaultname wrote:
| It's a concise, unique label, making it convenient to add to
| block lists.
|
| It is amazing how much more cogent and actually interesting
| tech twitter is when you remove all of the "Will this make me
| rich and important, and quick?" web3 noise. It's the most fetch
| thing out there right now.
|
| On the flip side, at least it drowned out the "Miami is the new
| silicon valley" noise (though humorously _almost the same set
| of people_ are behind both)
| cle wrote:
| Random meta-observation from years of HN lurking: nobody ever
| likes the name of any new paradigm. And submissions that
| mention the name will be dominated by people complaining about
| the name, instead of the content.
| binarynate wrote:
| On a side note, in Ben Thompson's Stratechery interview with
| the CEO of Unity this week, the Unity CEO used the term "Web 3"
| multiple times, but he was referring to a 3D/XR-enabled web
| rather than developments related to crypto. And I'm sure there
| will be many more takes to come on what the next version of the
| web will be.
|
| https://stratechery.com/2021/unity-buys-weta-digital-an-inte...
| k__ wrote:
| I heard people claiming web3 since web2 was coined.
|
| Semantic web, 3D web, and whatnot.
| nkellenicki wrote:
| I find it similar to the two currently in-vogue uses of the
| world "Metaverse" - you've got the crypto/web3 people using
| it to describe a world where NFT's are usable and recognised
| across software (ie. Armor you buy in Call of Duty is useable
| in Battlefield), and Facebook/Meta, trying to build a social
| VR environment not entirely unlike the vision of Ready Player
| One.
|
| It's entirely probably they'll merge at some point if they
| haven't already.
| simonw wrote:
| This idea, "Armor you buy in Call of Duty is useable in
| Battlefield", to me illustrates so much that is frothy and
| unrealistic about this space.
|
| Think about what it would actually take to implement such a
| thing:
|
| - Call of Duty and Battlefield - rival games from rival
| companies - would need to agree to an integration at a VERY
| deep level
|
| - They would have to share the same asset formats, such
| that an asset designed for one game could be used in
| another
|
| - Issues of balance would have to be resolved: just sharing
| 3D models wouldn't be enough, they would need to agree on a
| system for modelling damage, armour piercing capabilities,
| visual effects...
|
| - Then they would have to add blockchain integration deep
| enough that weapons a player obtains in the game are
| represented in a way that the other games can see.
|
| - ... not to mention figure out some kind of exchange rate
| / add some kind of additional economy to their games, which
| would need to be shared across different games such that
| e.g. a pistol in Battlefield wasn't worth the same as a
| machine gun in Call of Duty
|
| That's just off the top of my head.
|
| And... they're supposed to be games! Game design is about
| balance - creating a set of rules that players enjoy.
|
| Allowing some cryptocurrency-billionaire to jump into any
| game they like with the best possible guns and armour
| doesn't sound any fun at all.
|
| Pretty much every idea I see coming out of this space has
| the same problem: it sounds plausible in a high-level hand-
| wavy, but collapses the moment you start to dig into the
| details of how it would work.
|
| (My absolute favourite bad idea is still real estate on the
| blockchain, where presumably if I forget my password I can
| no longer sell my house)
| pylon wrote:
| What problem was "real estate on the blockchain" trying
| to solve?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Same as other supply chain blockchain efforts, a single
| (usually still decentralized) public ledger indicating
| ownership. Though not all are aimed at decentralization,
| more at creating a public ledger with some cryptographic
| methods used to ensure its validity.
| pylon wrote:
| Are there big issues with the current system that exists
| today to prove ownership of a property you bought? Is
| real estate fraud common enough?
| adnzzzzZ wrote:
| I mean, I'm an indiedev and while I think that line of
| thinking, of re-using items between games, is pretty weak
| generally, I can see some use cases for it.
|
| This already happens partly with asset stores like
| Unity's https://assetstore.unity.com/, where you can just
| buy assets to use in your games and multiple developers
| end up using the same assets. There's nothing preventing
| "popular NFT asset packs" from being a thing that, on top
| of helping devs make their games faster, would also end
| up helping indiedevs attract people to their games, since
| they'd be implementing certain NFT packs and users who
| own those would be more likely to check those games out.
|
| Like I said, I think it's a pretty weak idea but it's not
| that crazy or ridiculous to imagine it happening to some
| degree.
| babyshake wrote:
| Where better to utilize NFTs (digital art, mainly) than
| virtual and augmented reality?
| wpietri wrote:
| I'll note that the "Semantic Web" was the first contender for
| being "Web 3": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
|
| So as far as I'm concerned the name is perfect, in that it
| stands for hype and hazy thinkfluencing that is trying to
| puff itself up into looking like foundational change.
| larsiusprime wrote:
| I predict that "web3" will follow the same trajectory as
| "ML/AI" -- keep stuffing more and more completely different
| models and techniques and technologies in under the same vague
| heading until one of them eventually starts to do something
| really useful and then credit that to the nebulous term itself.
| rvz wrote:
| > Ethereum should inspire anyone interested in the future(s) of
| the internet, because it demonstrates, powerfully, that new
| protocols are still possible.
|
| Yes it should. Hence the reasons why there are alternative
| blockchains that not only aim to supersede Ethereum but they are
| specifically designed to scale and handle more applications and
| use-cases with cheaper transaction fees and are also EVM
| compatible.
|
| The only reason that they have decided on something unscalable
| and expensive as Ethereum is because they missed out on Bitcoin.
| So the Web3 crowd decides to hype it everywhere.
|
| I still cannot use Ethereum to buy my groceries. Therefore it is
| completely useless for that case.
| leashless wrote:
| So I've built a market for physical assets using the
| Ethereum/IPFS.
|
| The point is that the data about the assets should outlast the
| interest of the current owner. It should outlast the physical
| assets themselves.
|
| Hard to get another architecture which can manage data beyond the
| lifetime of any given market actor.
| leashless wrote:
| (and I should mention we use semantic web tools to describe the
| physical assets: parametric search)
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I like the _idea_ of Web3, but the problem is immediately
| apparent when I want to go play with some Web3 technologies:
| Everything requires money up front, and it 's often a non-trivial
| amount. NFT based games are selling items for hundreds or
| thousands of dollars and I just want to screw around in the game
| for fun.
|
| A big part of the problem here is that the high cost of crypto
| transactions and NFT minting means many Web3 things literally
| can't afford to let people get started for free.
| robot_no_419 wrote:
| The solution is layer 2 protocols like Loopring and Polygon
| that will sit on top of the Ethereum stack and offer much
| faster/cheaper ways to interact with the Blockchain.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The Media Lab would know the Semantic Web was supposed to be "Web
| 3.0". Somehow the blockheads didn't notice.
| hnbad wrote:
| FWIW the idea of the Semantic Web pre-dates Web 2.0 by quite a
| bit, so even the idea of it being Web 3.0 was a bit of an
| attempt to bandwagon on the success of Web 2.0.
| simmanian wrote:
| Does anyone know where I can see the latest developments on web
| 3.0 without most of the tulip mania? It takes so much effort to
| filter out blog articles and youtube videos on why <insert name>
| is going to be the next big thing when I just want to see the
| current state of things.
| clippablematt wrote:
| If you want a programmer/documentation approach then GitHub and
| developer forums are where you will get the best shill free
| discussion, read the eips/ercs on github and the eth cat
| herders forum.
|
| https://eips.ethereum.org/
|
| https://ethereumcatherders.com/
|
| Play with the tools like https://eth-
| brownie.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
|
| https://hardhat.org/
|
| https://www.cairo-lang.org/docs/hello_starknet/index.html
|
| Note these are eth focused, but there is overlap with
| zcash/cosmos/polkadot and the many evm chains that now exist.
|
| I'd also recommend: https://gov.yearn.finance/ and
| https://forum.makerdao.com/ for insight into how protocols are
| managed.
| JarekS wrote:
| Try Bankless https://banklesshq.com/
| k__ wrote:
| It's very vast field, and by the day there is new stuff
| happening.
|
| I'm in 2 months now and only scratched the surface.
|
| In the Developer DAO (which is in founding) we currently plan
| to make all these web3 learning resources more accessible.
|
| But right now, you can look here for resources:
| https://github.com/Developer-DAO/resources
| leppr wrote:
| You plan to make learning resources more accessible by gating
| them behind a limited supply NFT? Interesting.
| ghostwreck wrote:
| Consider diving into tulip land (without any major investments
| of course). Mint an NFT, write a coin contract, it's actually a
| very fun and easy way to learn the basics of web3.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| Fun way to waste your time.
| sali0 wrote:
| Twitter is very good for this, but you must follow the
| builders. Wholly agreed, there is too much trash if you just
| search for crypto. I'd recommend finding the founders and devs
| of a crypto organization or protocol you find interesting and
| follow along.
|
| Some high signal ones are @Bantg from Yearn Finance, @gakonst
| from Paradigm, @epolynya for Modular Blockchain info,
| @iamDCinvestor for macro view and NFTs.
|
| You can find a lot more good ones by seeing these individuals
| replies. And if you like, you can follow me as well @_nd_go, I
| try to keep my feed fairly high signal
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| The very first "high signal" account you mentioned has one of
| the latest tweets shilling something called Hegic which seems
| to be a risky options trading platform + coin built by a
| grifter.
| larsiusprime wrote:
| My colleagues and I write about this now and then for Naavik:
| https://twitter.com/larsiusprime/status/1459191090100244483
|
| Sufficiently non-tulipy?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-11-18 23:00 UTC)