[HN Gopher] Tim Berners-Lee: 'Web3 is not the web at all'
___________________________________________________________________
Tim Berners-Lee: 'Web3 is not the web at all'
Author : TangerineDream
Score : 200 points
Date : 2022-11-04 16:57 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
| otikik wrote:
| Web3 is a series of scams connected together by grift.
| ETH_start wrote:
| Fundamentally, it's being able to control digital assets, like
| a unique name, or digital currency, with your own device.
|
| You can even forego the speculative aspect of it entirely, and
| just hold USDC/DAI. Sending value is as simple as effecting a
| transaction from your browser-based MetaMask wallet.
|
| The technology still has major missing pieces, like privacy
| (which isn't helped by OFAC's recent designation that prohibits
| Americans from using the largest Ethereum-based privacy
| protocol), but the fundamental functionality is a major
| innovation and leap.
| stevenalowe wrote:
| Solid is a great technical idea with no compelling application.
| yet.
|
| web3 is just a terrible idea
| zeroclip wrote:
| Web3 is just "web with a sprinkle of crypto and blockchains." The
| problem space is narrow, and different than what DNS and HTTPS
| tries to solve. But its not useless, and probably will continue
| to grow as part of the web.
| yawz wrote:
| Thankfully it doesn't take to be TB-L to deduce that.
| WFHRenaissance wrote:
| Everyone on HN needs to take a week to actually look into crypto
| projects. Nothing that makes headlines is ever good, and it's
| clear that's where most of the opinions of it on here are sourced
| from.
|
| You're doing yourself a definite disservice by not investing a
| smidgeon of your time.
|
| You are looking at a garden and remarking about the rotten
| veggies on the soil floor.
| ausbah wrote:
| why is it up to me to "learn the rea crypto"? the best things
| coming out the space should be enough to speak about the
| quality of the domain
| pornel wrote:
| You should also spend a week getting into homeopathy and a week
| writing horoscopes.
| mjburgess wrote:
| I count myself as a glad evangelist of the counter-reaction to
| this wave of technobabble charlatanism.
|
| Can we arrange to bankrupt Andreeson? Can we un-fi defi? Can we
| jail them all?
|
| I'd suppose not. I'd hope someone has a match: light it!
| Communitivity wrote:
| I hate Web3...and I love Web3.
|
| Let me explain.
|
| Web3 is akin to SOA. The concept of service-orientation was
| great. We could think of systems as discrete services, each
| single responsibility, and each working with other services to
| accomplish a system. Awesome. And so it became popular. Then
| training courses, certifications, consultants all started to
| appear in order to cash in on this new thing. It took little time
| to get to the point where you could ask 10 people what SOA really
| meant and get 15 different answers, some of them completely
| incompatible with each other.
|
| A similar thing happened with REST. A similar thing happens to
| many ground-breaking technologies that get popular, or make good
| sound-bites.
|
| So..Web3. Web3 started as a bunch of other things:
|
| * VRM - Vendor Relationship Management, the inverse of Customer
| Relationship Management, where the power and data control is
| shifted to the customer
|
| * Decentralized Identifiers - IDs that aren't controlled by some
| third party organization like Google, your company, or the
| government. This has come in different versions, including info:,
| XRIs, SOLID, DIDs.
|
| * DApps - Applications that run within the browser and
| communicate among themselves (and possibly other services) to
| accomplish tasks and save state. Everyone ties DApps to
| blockchain smart contracts, but that is just one implementation
| of the DApp concept.
|
| * DAO - Distributed Autonomous Organizations. This is nothing
| more than a set of cooperating software agents that execute
| control over assets based on a provided policy. Policy could be
| if/else rules, a smart contract, a machine learning CN, or other
| things. So again, not necessarily blockchain. Charles Stross's
| Accelerando has a great example of a DAO.
|
| * Distributed Ledgers - This is where the blockchain comes in.
| However, you don't need to use a cryptocurrency to do a
| distributed ledger, it's just a common way of doing it right now
| that is perpetuated in part because it makes people money. Check
| out the Apache Hyperledger project for more info on distributed
| ledgers.
|
| * Decentralized Web - Am early term that combined some of the
| above. Which of the above depends on who you are talking to, but
| often it included VRM, DApps, Decentralized Identifiers and
| possibly Distributed Ledgers.
|
| Now add hype (lot's of hype) and a hunger for cash (an insatiable
| hunger, think Ghnomb, the troll god of eat from David Edding's
| Elenium series). Both of those things latched onto
| cryptocurrencies and stirred them into the Decentralized Web mix
| of concepts. This amalgam birthed the abomination we know as
| Web3.
|
| But don't worry, Web4 is just around the corner. It'll arrive as
| soon as a new innovative technology arrives that is deemed a
| sufficiently hype-worthy and plump-enough cash cow. My bet is
| that you will start seeing VR/AR as Web4 within the next few
| years.
|
| Barnhill's First Law: Any technology movement with a number in
| it's name is hyper - either ignore it or seek to understand the
| possibly 20% gems within it and throw away the 80% dross (e.g.,
| Web3 and 5G).
| abeppu wrote:
| So, we should ignore Web3. Fine.
|
| But should we ignore Solid? The project started in 2016. Can you
| _do_ anything with it yet? You can "start a pod", but all the
| apps are clearly written to demonstrate the platform features
| rather than to _do_ anything or meet any user need. Of the ones
| listed, I couldn't actually get any to work with a newly created
| pod.
|
| https://solidproject.org/users/get-a-pod
| https://solidproject.org/apps
| pornel wrote:
| It sucks that web3 marketing has hijacked the concept of
| decentralisation.
|
| Suddenly privately hosted data, federation, WoT, or P2P don't
| count as decentralised if there isn't any blockchain involved
| with a token to sell.
|
| They've rebranded private keys as "wallets" and act as if
| cryptography couldn't be done without transferring some
| Monopoly money at the same time.
| ajacksified wrote:
| Hi, I work at Inrupt (Tim's company.) Here's two recent
| examples:
|
| The BBC just announced that they're hosting Solid Pods for
| personal data, allowing users to control access to their
| information[1][2].
|
| The government of Flanders is hosting Solid Pods for citizen
| data[3].
|
| Solidproject.org is a community-led project, but I'd recommend
| trying out going through our docs at https://docs.inrupt.com
| under "getting started" if you'd like to play around with it.
| Feel free to let me know if you have any issues or questions.
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2022-10-social-tv-and-
| personal...
|
| [2] https://advanced-television.com/2022/10/27/bbc-social-tv-
| per...
|
| [3] https://inrupt.com/blog/digital-flanders-reconnects-
| citizens...
| abeppu wrote:
| Hi, thanks for responding. I already created a pod from the
| provider referenced in those docs (i.e. start.inrupt.com). It
| shows me a WebID url and a data storage url. What can one do
| with these? What can one do with a pod? The documentation
| says you can 'view' your pod, and links to some SDKS.
|
| I tried looking at the apps on this page, starting from the
| top: https://solidproject.org/apps
|
| - MediaKraken: If you click the button indicating you want to
| use Solid to store stuff, it presents a box in which to put a
| URL to log in. It won't accept either of the two URLs given
| above. Following experiences with other apps, I sub in
| `https://login.inrupt.com`. I can pass through the login page
| at inrupt, but the redirect brings me to an error page. I can
| repeat this loop ad infinitum.
|
| - Penny: presents a box in which to put a URL to login. I
| can't log in with either of the URLs listed above, but it
| present a modal suggesting I try using `login.inrupt.com`
| instead. After a couple tries, I can get in to browse and see
| that I have no content. Yay.
|
| - Solid IDE: I get a 404
|
| - Solid File Manager: After trying Penny, I know to enter
| https://login.inrupt.com in the login box. I can again browse
| my lack of data.
|
| - Pod Pro (an IDE for editing pods). I can log in and see
| that there's basically nothing to edit. I have no contacts,
| but the files they would presumably eventually go in have
| some markup which I can mess up.
|
| So far, I've yet to encounter an app that actually seems to
| do anything useful. Upon creating my pod I was shown 2 URLs
| and it turns out that none of the apps I encountered will
| accept them for anything.
|
| I'd love for this to be a vibrant ecosystem of actually
| useful stuff. But so far it seems like an empty room that's
| awkward to get into. I think my new pod will be as neglected
| as my urbit planet, and for the same reasons.
|
| Years ago I remember talking to someone about whether
| hadoop/mapreduce could help address some problem they were
| encountering -- but they had neither the data collection
| infrastructure or data analysis knowledge. It's not that
| mapreduce wasn't a good tool, but to him of course a
| framework that can run jobs he doesn't have and doesn't know
| how to write on data he doesn't yet have was pointless. A
| framework can need a lot of enabling conditions to be useful.
| I'm not sure what those are for Solid.
| wmf wrote:
| Solid is probably not going to happen and it does give TimBL
| the appearance of a conflict of interest, but if you can put
| that aside his point stands.
| krapp wrote:
| It stands either way.
|
| One can have a conflict of interest, or even be a hypocrite,
| and still be correct.
| abeppu wrote:
| I don't think there's a 'conflict of interest' here; he has a
| startup, was talking at a web conference, and expressed an
| opinion about the landscape. I don't take issue with his
| points about web3.
|
| I would like to see _something_ that moves towards
| decentralization (or at least weaker centralization / greater
| portability), and if it's not Solid, I hope something else
| will step into that gap. But I am genuinely confused why
| there's not at least _something_ useful built on that
| framework after several years.
| throw7 wrote:
| "Personal data stores have to be fast, cheap and private."
|
| Uh yeah. That's called a Personal Computer - "PC" if you haven't
| heard of it.
|
| The problem is that technology came along and gave us a "PC" in
| our hand (cell phones) that wasn't a "PC". What we need is an
| actual "PC" in our hand. That is: a cell phone that is under the
| control of the user (and no, a "global single-sign on" sounds
| absolutely worse than "web3" <- whatever that is).
| bhauer wrote:
| For a decade now, or perhaps longer, I've been wanting a first-
| class general purpose computer in the form factor of a cell
| phone. Microsoft has danced ever-so-close to providing us this,
| through several iterations of rumored "Surface Phones," and in
| showcasing the promise (if not necessarily the execution) of a
| viable dockable phone in the Windows 10 Mobile era. A few Linux
| flavors of the same concept have circulated through history as
| well, but none particularly viable.
|
| Failing that, I'd like a computing model that I call PAO,
| Personal Application Omnipresence, where all of my devices are
| terminals to my own application server [1].
|
| [1] https://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao
| constantcrying wrote:
| Blockchains just are not a particularly good datastructure for
| most applications.
|
| In cryptospace you will easily find projects where the creators
| took an idea and inserted a blockchain instead of a traditional
| database. Web3 is the same idea. But this idea is obviously
| really bad, blockchains are an extremely niche datastructure.
| They are write only and established by consensus. Most databases
| shouldn't have these properties and forcing them in will lead
| into a giant mess.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| And now... we've also hit the ricochet point where now people
| are taking things backed by a regular centralized database and
| using blockchain marketing terms for it. Because that's
| apparently where the $$ is.
|
| I'm crying too :-)
| chrisco255 wrote:
| They are not write only. Ethereum is a VM. Smart contracts are
| not databases, they are objects, classes, methods, and
| applications. They can be thought of as in memory applications
| or long lived processes.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >They are not write only. I guess you _can_ delete data from
| a blockchain by having a rollback.
|
| The etherium blockchain also is much more than a "block
| chain". But it is still very much a solution in search of a
| usecase.
|
| Digital money is the only area where a blockchain is a
| sensible choice from a _technical_ point of view, that I know
| of. Although I am entirely unconvinced that bitcoin or
| etherium actually are even close to a viable interpretation
| of digital money. Say what you want about paypal, it isn 't
| distributing my payment details publically.
| superkuh wrote:
| I'd go further than this and suggest that web applications, sites
| that don't display anything without executing code, are not web
| at all. They just use web protocol to transfer the executable.
| And pretty soon most web applications will switch to using HTTP/3
| implemented on QUIC so they won't even be using HTTP.
| notyourwork wrote:
| Ding, ding, ding! We started diverging from the "web" long ago
| with the introduction of SPA.
| lolive wrote:
| Funnily, the fact that Google can only index
| resources/documents associated to a URL has saved the whole
| concept of the web (for now).
|
| Note: and the fact that there is no search engine inside
| companies has led them to disregard the concept of
| permalinks. All SPAs there simply never change the URL in the
| address bar. Which is an HORRIBLE experience as a user!
| foobarian wrote:
| > Funnily, the fact that Google can only index
| resources/documents associated to a URL has saved the whole
| concept of the web (for now).
|
| That's a great point. You wouldn't believe the hemming and
| hawing that ensues at work when teams encounter SEO-driven
| constraints.
| samwillis wrote:
| The web platform, HTML/js/css in a browser, is one of the
| greatest inventions of all time. Its versatility is
| immeasurable. The fact we have one toolkit that scales from a
| simple text based publishing platform to full application
| development environment, is insane. It covers all paradigms of
| computing, from thin client to full offline enabled local
| computing.
|
| It is incredible that the community have built this general
| purpose platform, and that it's not only versatile but also
| incredibly performant.
|
| Modern JS engines are only 50% the speed of native C, no
| compiler or toolkit needed. How insane is that!
|
| CSS/HTML is growing from strength to strength, it's a gui
| toolkit with so much power universally supported on all
| computing platforms, from phones to desktops. It has so many
| features, and is so extendable, but anyone can use it anywhere.
| There's no limit to its capability, or who can use it to build
| their inventions.
|
| The same toolkit can be used by small children to explore the
| ideas around "programming" all the way up to the best
| developers in the world.
|
| Honestly the argument that we have somehow gone wrong with
| html/css/js is absurd. What this platform has contributed to
| humanity is immeasurable.
|
| The "original vision" of the web as a publishing platform for
| text may be dead. But it lives on as a publishing platform for
| human invention, ingenuity and creativity.
| kaba0 wrote:
| While I absolutely agree regarding the immeasurable
| contribution to humanity part, I feel it happened _despite_
| HTML /CSS, not because of it. I still think that it is a very
| inefficient and bad abstraction for general purpose layouts
| and only recently with flexbox/grid did it basically got
| feature-parity with things like.. WinForms.
|
| Js used to be pretty bad as well, but hats down, they did
| alleviate many of the shortcomings and made it into a decent
| language (though I do get grumpy when it is overused at
| places where it has no reason to be)
| beebmam wrote:
| This is beautifully said and absolutely true. The HTML/js/css
| platform is truly incredible. Looking forward to seeing how
| people can use WASM in incredible ways!
| samwillis wrote:
| Absolutely, and like all new things some of the original
| uses will not work out but what it brings to the table is
| awesome. (I'm unconvinced by trying to "speed up" normal
| web apps with it)
|
| The two places I'm most excited about it is using it in
| combination with WebGPU for games/engineering/ai/science,
| and with the "origin privet file system" enabling client
| side databases such as SQLite and DuckDB. I think it's the
| final peace of the jigsaw to make PWAs take off like a
| rocket.
|
| Honestly, PWAs are the true future of the web, the perfect
| extension of its vision.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I have somewhat mixed feelings on WASM... you can't "peak"
| into it nearly as much as JS... but even JS has gone past
| the point of being really decipherable by humans in
| production sites for a while.
|
| I know there's some boundary issues with performance and
| hope that it can be worked out in a meaningful/reasonable
| way. I think WASM gets much more interesting in server
| hosted platform environments. You get largely portable code
| that can run wherever (x86, arm, risc-v, etc) and is in a
| secure environment, read-only into itself.
| cmckn wrote:
| > soon most web applications will switch to using HTTP/3
| implemented on QUIC so they won't even be using HTTP.
|
| HTTP/3 is definitely still HTTP. QUIC is replacing _TCP_.
| hiidrew wrote:
| > His new startup aims to address this through three ways: A
| global "single sign-on" feature that lets anyone log in from
| anywhere. Login IDs that allow users to share their data with
| others. A "common universal API," or application programming
| interface, that lets apps pull data from any source.
|
| Cool to see his project is centered around these goals, but also
| funny because these are some of the few aspects that I find
| interesting about Ethereum. Much more interested in the
| identity/SSO potential vs the financial stuff.
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| decentralization of X does not and cannot exist without
| decentralized funding of X.
|
| this is why there is simply no way to separate blockchain (as
| an implementation of decentralized X) from tradeable
| cryptocurrency derived from units of X.
|
| this is not in any way a defense or support for cryptocurrency,
| only that it is nonsense to claim decentralization of function
| can exist independently from decentralization of funding. that
| cryptocurrency is designed to explicitly realize this principle
| doesn't excuse its failure to do so.
| wmf wrote:
| _decentralization of X does not and cannot exist without
| decentralized funding of X._
|
| An essential observation. It's easy to design some kind of
| decentralized utopia but the future can't run on a trickle of
| Patreon donations. Decentralized business models that don't
| rely on pump-and-dumps are very thin on the ground.
|
| I wonder if we'll run out of volunteer Mastodon sysadmins at
| some point.
| robin_reala wrote:
| Your point would perhaps be better made if you gave any
| explanation of why this is the case.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| I generally agree with him, although there are exceptions.
| You can't generally replace the functionality that
| centralized servers provide without some sort of mechanic
| to compensate and incentivize the decentralized nodes
| themselves. If you relied on VISA or Paypal and charged a
| fee for the service in that sense, well you now have to
| stand up an organization that gets to straddle the network
| and effectively control it. And now that organization has a
| legal surface area, as well as an administrative surface
| area that is attackable and can compromise the network
| itself.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Truth be told, while a legend of his time Tim Berners-Lee is a
| dinosaur who while likely has great insight also comes from a
| different generation. He's not much different than other
| blockchain cheerleaders each pushing their own solution. IPFS is
| the closest we've came to Web3 or whatever you want to call it,
| but there is still a lot of issues. Where blockchain solutions
| fall short is none of them are really decentralized. An ideal
| Web3 IMO would be a distributed storage that you can contribute a
| certain amount of storage on practically any device and it is
| able to predict and allocate resources efficiently to scale at
| datacenter level performance.
| trollerator23 wrote:
| Old man yells at cloud!
| chrisco255 wrote:
| > Where blockchain solutions fall short is none of them are
| really decentralized.
|
| Of course they are. If this is a no true Scotsman argument
| please advise so I can move on to more productive discussions.
|
| Filecoin or Arweave are essentially what you describe, but of
| course they don't achieve data center performance. That doesn't
| mean they aren't decentralized. There are trade-offs to
| decentralization.
| valdiorn wrote:
| So, basically Pied Piper Net?
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Yep.. from what I remember. It is definitely the dream but
| still not a reality.
| amelius wrote:
| Web3 is an online casino.
| jandrese wrote:
| I don't even understand what Web3 is. Whenever I try to learn
| about it the discussion digresses into blockchain pyramid schemes
| that clearly won't scale and other such nonsense. Certainly Web3
| isn't just crypto-bros trying to take over the web? Why would
| anybody outside of the crypto scam sphere care about it if that
| were the case?
| koromak wrote:
| Deploying a whole ass web application on small, immutable smart
| contracts seems inane to me. Reminds me of something
| programmers do not because its powerful, but because its hard
| and it makes them feel cool.
| SrslyJosh wrote:
| They won't, because they can't. Executing a smart contract
| costs thousands of times more than executing a normal piece
| of software. Everything you see would still be served by an
| ordinary web server, and interactions with the blorpchain are
| all mediated by one or two centralized API services.
|
| It's a potemkin village.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| > Executing a smart contract costs thousands of times more
| than executing a normal piece of software.
|
| No, not necessarily. For one let's qualify that statement.
| Smart contracts on Ethereum are executed 100,000+ times by
| every node on the network, which is providing security and
| uptime for the network.
|
| Some software transactions have external costs associated
| with them, such as financial transactions. Doing an
| international bank transfer may simply boil down to a
| credit in one SQL database and a debit in another SQL
| database but it still can cost dozens to thousands of
| dollars depending on the amount, and the situation. Even a
| VISA credit card transaction costs 1.5-3%. You as a
| consumer don't see that cost, the retailer is eating it
| though, and marking up their products and services to
| accommodate that fee.
|
| But ETH transaction fees do not scale with the value of the
| transaction, it simply scales with the demand for the
| limited block space.
|
| Ethereum community has been actively developing solutions
| for this problem, by developing optimistic rollups and zero
| knowledge rollups, which are effectively able to compress
| transactions and scale the network throughout by 100-1000x.
| Innovations like this will get Ethereum to Visa scale plus.
|
| This technology is still early, but rapidly improving.
| Currently deployed rollups are in the 10-100x scale
| improvement range.
|
| Some rollups currently in production:
|
| https://arbitrum.io/ https://www.optimism.io/
| https://starkware.co/
| miracle2k wrote:
| And yet, Tornado Cash is still running.
| m00dy wrote:
| I'm just wondering what would happen if there is a court
| order to take down a smart contract.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| It is powerful. The contracts run 24/7 with 100% uptime.
| Hayden Adams created Uniswap with about 1000 lines of code
| using an elegant xy=k formula to create the first good
| automated market maker, Uniswap. It essentially replaces much
| of the functionality of an order book on a stock exchange,
| except it's decentralized, global and permissionless. Plenty
| of other good examples in web3.
|
| https://app.uniswap.org/
| WalterSear wrote:
| > Put bluntly, the Ethereum "world computer" has roughly
| 1/5,000 of the compute power of a Raspberry Pi 4!
|
| https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/web3-fraud
| zeroclip wrote:
| Who said Ethereum aims to be as fast as a regular
| computer, or even a raspberry pi?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| ^ Basically sums up what Ethereum is and isn't
|
| If a Pi solves your use case, _for God 's sake don't use
| the EVM._
|
| If a Pi doesn't solve your use case, because {particular
| reason}, then consider the EVM as an option.
| leonsegal wrote:
| are there any non-crypto examples?
| miohtama wrote:
| Web3 was the term created 2014 to originally describe three
| properties (protocols) that decentralised networks can bring to
| web without need to rely on centralised service providers. Web
| + 3 = web3:
|
| - eth: making transactions with smart contracts
|
| - bzz: decentralised storage - save files
|
| - whisper: peer-to-peer messaging, chat, etc.
|
| More about the history of web3 in my Twitter thread here:
|
| https://mobile.twitter.com/moo9000/status/148446388922402406...
|
| However the usage of the term and it meaning has corrupted over
| the years, especially when marketing people took it over.
| paxys wrote:
| > Whenever I try to learn about it the discussion digresses
| into blockchain pyramid schemes that clearly won't scale and
| other such nonsense
|
| Congratulations, you understand exactly what web3 is.
| SrslyJosh wrote:
| > Certainly Web3 isn't just crypto-bros trying to take over the
| web?
|
| That's exactly what it is. They don't want anything new or
| innovative, they just want to be able to levy a tax on what
| everyone does online.
| sdiacom wrote:
| It's a bit sillier than that, since for the time being,
| crypto-bros are making money not by levying a tax on what
| people do online, but by speculating on the potential future
| income from levying a tax on what people do online.
|
| Convincing others that there's imaginary future money on
| taxing online interactions is where the real present money is
| actually made. In a way, this turns their biggest weakness
| (they can't actually achieve their goal) into their biggest
| strength (their audience is people who aren't tech-literate
| enough to understand that they can't actually achieve their
| goal)
| kobieyc wrote:
| This gives you a good overview of what web3 is
| https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
| moffkalast wrote:
| Guy decides to build a couple of dApps... and immediately
| makes a pyramid scheme.
|
| I just can't, hahahah
| janalsncm wrote:
| Seems like "web3" has completely missed the mark and is
| actually highly centralized, arguably more so than web2. If I
| had to guess, it's because expediency requires it. If you're
| in the middle of a gold rush, first principles like
| decentralization are quickly supplanted by principles like
| "line goes up".
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > What surprised me about the standards was that there's no
| hash commitment for the data located at the URL.
|
| Me too. I'm an outsider, but can anyone understand why they
| _didn 't_ do this? If you were designing NFT's, wouldn't this
| be an obvious thing to do?
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Applications centered on user ownership created from
| decentralization of the data models and hosts themselves.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I get it. It sounds good.
|
| But I come from the generation that knows information wants
| to be free.
| jfghi wrote:
| ?, Most of the websites visited have powerful servers serving
| them with data that is held privately.
| zeroclip wrote:
| There is no single company driving the PR and marketing for
| Web3, so the term is whatever somebody wants it to be. But the
| vague way to describe it is an approach to building web apps
| with decentralized public blockchains and smart contracts, like
| DeFi or ENS.
| WalterSear wrote:
| It's more than just crypto-bros trying to take over the web.
|
| It's an italian serial conman in a dark room somewhere,
| pressing "print" on software that generates ostensibly a
| dollar-equivalent crypto currency out of thin air, wrapped in a
| network of criminal enterprises that is currently using special
| 'insider only' versions of those tokens (tether-trons, vs
| tether-eths) to facilitate the theft of the life savings of a
| generation of middle class chinese, wrapped in a nesting doll
| of scams and pyramid schemes, wrapped in the greed, hubris, and
| legitimate desperation of a generation of 1st world hustlers,
| all wrapped in crypto-bros trying to take over the world.
|
| If it was just crypto-bros, there wouldn't be anywhere near so
| much smoke to confuse/conflate with fire: the market
| manipulation being facilitated by the dirty (and clean, albeit
| grifted) money entering the system makes the whole thing seem
| financially bigger than it really is. But despite all the smoke
| making, it is still just a fart in a colander: the entire
| crypto market cap, as fanciful and hyperbolic as it is, is
| still less than the market cap of Apple.
|
| The really astounding part is that so much of this activity is
| being recorded on publicly accessible server ledgers, in real-
| time.
| ETH_start wrote:
| >>It's an italian serial conman in a dark room somewhere,
| pressing "print" on software that generates ostensibly a
| dollar-equivalent crypto currency out of thin air,
|
| There is zero evidence for the Tether conspiracy theories..
| But I gotta give you marks for creative writing.
| muxator wrote:
| > It's an ITALIAN serial conman...
|
| Wow. I have been guilty of this very same blunder many times
| and I understand it's just a joke, but please realize that it
| is not pleasant to be on the wrong side of a joke for no
| reason.
|
| I'll be more careful with my generalizations in the future. I
| am confident you will be, too.
|
| Thanks.
| cbozeman wrote:
| Well I won't.
|
| Italian corruption is so thorough and pervasive they have
| books, movies, television, and video games telling stories
| of the corruption and illegality.
|
| If you don't want your group of people - whatever that
| group of people happens to be - to be stereotyped, then
| don't fall prey to those stereotypes and rise above them.
|
| Or don't.
|
| And then don't complain about it.
| hervature wrote:
| Following HN guidelines, I assumed they meant that Italy is
| aiding and abetting the effort. My low effort search
| yielded [1] immediately.
|
| [1] - https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/10/05/italy-has-
| a-regis...
| nwah1 wrote:
| It is worse than that because the "market cap" in the context
| of crypto scams is meaningless.
|
| Spot price times the number of tokens means nothing if the
| tokens have no intrinsic value.
|
| Apple may be overvalued, but they have enormous assets and
| revenue backing their price. Their P/E ratio is a rational
| number.
|
| Crypto could fall to zero at any time and all the hodlers are
| left holding nothing but the bag.
|
| And of course a lot of the tokens are just locked away, keys
| are lost, etc.
| blueprint wrote:
| Can't you just say the same thing about the fiat currency
| that you say Apple's holding? It could also "go to zero".
| And certain "tokens".. specifically, let's say something
| like Bitcoin or Monero, actually _do_ have what you would
| call "intrinsic" value since they require the expenditure
| of actual, physical energy to obtain, unless you know of a
| viable attack on those proof of work systems that you're
| not telling us about.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Ni Bu Ming Bai
| twic wrote:
| I am also skeptical of it. I think the idea is that if you have
| pervasive microtransactions, and smart contracts which can
| participate in them, then you can easily create web
| applications where revenues are shared with users, in a
| transparent and predictable way.
|
| Consider Facebook. Facebook is an advertising platform:
| advertisers pay money in exchange for users looking at ads;
| users look at ads. But the users don't receive the money!
| Facebook keeps the money. A Web 3.0 version could pass some
| fraction of the advertisers' money on to each user; the amount
| passed on could be based on various aspects of the user's
| activity, to incentivise them to do things which increase the
| value of the ads (looking at ads, attracting other users to the
| site, etc), and to not do things which decrease the value of
| the ads (driving other users away from the site, posting
| naughty content, etc).
|
| The fundamental theorem of Web 3.0, as i understand it, is that
| this is both better for users (they get paid), and also better
| for site operators (users will be attracted by the prospect of
| getting paid).
|
| There are problems with this, even on its own terms. Firstly,
| every site now has to be structured around some sort of
| transaction, where somebody is prepared to pay. You can't just
| have people hanging out aimlessly. Now, maybe that just means
| that Web 3.0 isn't universal, and there are sites where it
| doesn't make sense. But the best places on the net have always
| been places where people hang out aimlessly, so this seems like
| a substantial lacuna. Secondly, detailed, mechanically applied
| incentives often end up driving behaviour that isn't what the
| setter really wanted; you end up with everyone breeding cobras
| etc. Web 3.0 sites might end up not being better for users or
| operators. Thirdly, a Web 3.0 site will be less profitable for
| its operator than an equivalent Web 2.0 site, so it will
| (often) be less attractive as a thing for an entrepreneur to
| build. I suppose the theory predicts that Web 3.0 sites will
| outcompete Web 2.0 sites, so entrepreneurs won't have a choice.
|
| Then there are problems where the theory interacts with
| reality. We already have transactions, without using
| cryptocurrencies, and as long as users are happy to batch up
| payments and withdrawals, transactions on sites themselves can
| be arbitrarily micro. We don't have smart contracts without
| blockchains, so users would have to trust operators to apply
| incentives fairly; but people already trust all sorts of
| companies to do that (credit card rewards, supermarket loyalty
| points, MMORPG XP, etc), so this isn't a real obstacle. If we
| wanted to build sites like this, we already could!
|
| And then there are the general cryptocurrency / blockchain
| problems. For every one genuine and sensible attempt to build a
| site like this, there will be a hundred which are genuine but
| ill-conceived, and ten thousand which are scams. This is pretty
| much a market for lemons.
|
| So i'm not sure there is any reason for anybody outside of the
| crypto scam sphere to care about it. It won't take off, and if
| it did, it would be crap.
| musicale wrote:
| > I don't even understand what Web3 is.
|
| > blockchain pyramid schemes
|
| Sounds about right.
| felipellrocha wrote:
| Web3 are browser-based wallets (or mobile based) that can
| authorize transactions in a blockchain securely because it's
| separate from the web page itself. When I use metamask to buy
| something on the chain, it'll ask me to confirm if that's ok or
| not. That's all that the developer of the page can do, they can
| ask metamask to confirm the transaction is safe. Once it's
| confirmed, a one-time unique token for the transaction is
| created, and used to execute the transaction. This can work
| because the browser provides the secure separation between app
| and wallet. Otherwise, no one would trust a 3rd party to run
| transactions for them on the blockchain.
| dwaite wrote:
| Is Apple Pay considered Web3?
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| _> This can work because the browser provides the secure
| separation between app and wallet._
|
| I thought the app and wallet were the same thing. What's the
| difference here?
| RadixDLT wrote:
| web3 is multiversX https://multiversx.com/
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