[HN Gopher] What is Web3? Interview with Gavin Wood, who coined ...
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What is Web3? Interview with Gavin Wood, who coined the term in
2014
Author : conanxin
Score : 16 points
Date : 2021-12-21 14:03 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| knorker wrote:
| > The Father of Web3
|
| I didn't know yet another pump and dump scam or pyramid scheme
| reinvention required a "father".
| woodruffw wrote:
| The "father" terminology is consistent with other attempts at
| technical mis/reappropriation in the cryptocurrency community
| (cf. "crypto," "trustless," &c).
| Alex3917 wrote:
| IMHO my definition here is both better and earlier, and also
| better nails the key promise of distributed ledger technology, in
| terms of it being a mechanism for better allowing large
| organizations and societies to reach consensus:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1550059
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Do you really still think that is what's happening still in our
| horizon?
|
| Web3 seems to promise smaller, balkanized services, compared to
| social media monoliths we have now, in the service of,
| presumably, creating self-governing groups
| communities/businesses.
|
| At least I think that's the idea? Isn't twitter already society
| expressing ideas? If anything this idea is "better" by being
| more vague.
| cmckn wrote:
| Blockchains are, by design, incredibly inefficient. I'm not
| talking about mining; take storage as an example. The consensus
| may be distributed, but the data is purely redundant. The
| majority of nodes in the network will have to hold a complete
| copy of the entire chain. If Web3 takes off, it will become more
| difficult (read: expensive) to operate a node in the network --
| doesn't that seem backwards? I haven't seen a protocol address
| this in a meaningful way, it seems to be shrugged off as a bridge
| to be crossed at a later date. Storage is cheap! But I don't see
| how these systems could scale to be truly impactful while
| remaining so inefficient.
| knorker wrote:
| What do you mean? It has negligible performance overhead
| according to the "Performance" section here:
| https://github.com/zhuowei/nft_ptr
|
| /s
| yaomtc wrote:
| Web 3.0 is a concept being pushed by fans of cryptocurrency. And
| it sure is going great. https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
| knorker wrote:
| > Yes and no. I think trust in itself is actually just a bad
| thing all around. Trust implies that you are you're placing some
| sort of authority in somebody else, or in some organization, and
| they will be able to use this authority in some arbitrary way.
|
| This is just such a fantasy land.
|
| There's a guy who wrote The Knowledge, a book that (for fun,
| basically) describes the knowledge we would need to rebuild
| society if we suddenly forgot everything. Like when and how do we
| grow crops. What do effective tools for sowing look like?
|
| Like if we instantly forget everything, this book is what we need
| to bootstrap quickly.
|
| He was asked "what about government?". His answer was "there's no
| point. The guy with the biggest gun will be the government".
|
| And that's true today. And it's why web3 is idiotic.
|
| "Truth" won't help you, and "trust" doesn't matter, when the
| government (in the form of the police) knock on your door and say
| no, actually, your smart contract is an illegal scheme and we are
| going to put you in a locked room for a while now.
|
| You neither have to believe in the government, nor trust it, for
| it to force society's will upon you.
| berberous wrote:
| The world is not black and white, and I think you are missing
| the point.
|
| While what you are saying is true to an extent, we can still
| decrease trust and replace it with verifiable and auditable
| mechanisms at the margins.
|
| For example, the Fed currently states that they target a 2%
| annual inflation. Well, the US could just adopt a virtual
| currency, and hard code a 2% inflation amount that was
| verifiable in public code. Note that I'm not saying this
| contrived example is necessarily good or bad, but let's just
| assume everyone agrees 2% inflation is good and hard coding a
| 2% money increase rate is equivalent and it's not better to
| give the government flexibility. This change has the effect of
| reducing our need to trust that the government will act
| consistent with its messaging; we can prove it. And while the
| men with guns can always change the rules (and maybe they
| should in some scenarios), it's easy to see when the rules are
| being changed, and it's likely harder to do so if it's not a
| good idea since there are structural forces that make it more
| difficult.
|
| The US government is filled with mechanisms to reduce trust (eg
| checks and balances).
|
| And the reduction of trust is not just a government point.
| Twitter grew by having a great public API which it then knee
| capped and harmed the developers who trusted them. Would it not
| be better to have a protocol incentive that you could more
| readily trust would not be changed under you? What if the
| Twitter API had a governance token where the indie developers
| had owned a large stake of such tokens?
| knorker wrote:
| Your example is a great example of how absolutely
| catastrophic and disconnected from reality blockchain people
| are.
|
| This idea that we can pre-commit to ideas, and not only that
| we should pre-commit to a course of action with no option to
| change as new data comes in, but that we are actually able to
| correctly codify this perfectly, is preposterous.
|
| A bug in a smart contract can make murder legal, or loophole
| an interest rate to be a billion percent. It's delusional to
| think that anyone would want this.
|
| A court or legislative body simply has to be able to undo
| bugs, to overrule.
|
| Maybe we can't trust the government very well, but we KNOW
| that we can trust smart contracts to completely fuck us with
| no recourse.
| dvt wrote:
| > "Less trust, more truth."
|
| What a neat platitude that means absolutely nothing. As a
| society, over, oh I don't know, like 15000 years, we figured out
| the the best way to enforce truth is via some sort of
| _centralized_ institution: the court of law.
|
| > They could, right. They sort of do--there's the star thing that
| you can only do once per day. But guess what? They're a profit-
| motivated company. So if you pay Tinder enough, you can just send
| as many stars as you want.
|
| Wait, crypto miners _aren 't_ profit-motivated? Maybe we should
| introduce Mr. Wood to flashbots[1] -- a "sub-network" of Ethereum
| miners (a fork of geth) who's entire purpose for existing is
| front-running (for a price, of course). Truth as long as you can
| pay for it -- got it. Web3 is end-stage capitalism and we've been
| down this road in the early 1900s. Yawn.
|
| [1] https://github.com/flashbots/pm
| Yhippa wrote:
| I'm going to go ahead and coin the term Web4. I'm reserving the
| name with the right to fill in what it means at some undetermined
| point in the future.
|
| I will take no further questions at this time.
| adoxyz wrote:
| Dibs on Web5
| mkaic wrote:
| Only if I get web 6.283, or Webt as the cool kids are calling
| it these days.
| brutal_chaos_ wrote:
| Claiming Web7. :)
| jdblair wrote:
| It's going to be called WebV (like RISC-V). Then we go back
| to Arabic numerals for web6.
| Yhippa wrote:
| Why didn't I think of that :-(
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