A large chunk of my internet experience lately has been on web3, and the experience is _wonderful_ despite it's immaturity.
It's incredible to be able to go to different websites (Zapper, Zerion, OpenSea, etc.) and simply have all my data already exist -- without needing to create an account, export/import.
web3 makes me believe in a new era of the internet that isn't full of ads, cookie consent forms, dozens of sign-in services, tracking, etc.
An anonymous version of myself and my data exists everywhere. It's really a hackers dream.
I signed up and paid for an analytics tool subscription by simply clicking “connect with metamask”. Another two clicks to send the payment and I was done.
No email accounts, no sign up forms, no credit card info, nothing.
I’m a lifelong convert to this tech now. I can’t ever imagine going back to sign up forms or sharing my personal data.
I can’t see how anyone who cares about their privacy isn’t hyper bullish about this.
Yeah. I started really digging in earlier this year and what I realized was that web3 offers true ownership over the important parts of your online identity.
For the average user, it’s not exceptionally helpful yet, but for power users like celebrities, politicians and executives, it is extremely valuable.
Where they go everyone else will go. Web3 has a massive future
Yes - completely agree. it is refreshing to go to a website, hit connect, and boom there is all my data! I think we are only brushing the surface of what is possible with web3. Cant wait for login support to sign up for social media sites.
I do hope existing websites eventually support web3 login, but eventually there will be a web3-native/decentralized social network that actually succeeds. there have been a few attempts over the years but nothing has gained much traction.
do you mean the hackers dream of how easy it is to, uh, hack unsuspecting users? because thats basically what the article points out that web3 basically is shadowed by non transparent and opaque processes and if it wants to do anything of value it needs to drop the hackers dream, cause thats not how the web gerew up.
Some do of course throw unnecessary signup pages before allowing you to connect your wallet. I immediately close the tab if I see that. They are the minority.
It's the web, obviously there aren't firm rules. The point is that most of the builders in the space are hackers that want a free and open web void of that nonsense.
And most of the protocols/services are profitable, so the builders have no incentive to track users or sell data.
If "web2" companies start moving into the space, I'm sure they will track and sell data like they do now. The goal is to create free and open alternatives of those products so you aren't forced to endure those tactics.
But with web3 + a VPN or Private Relay, you can probably do a fairly good job staying mostly anon.
Huh, a crypto thread on HN that's not 95% sour grapes? Well, color me surprised. Did a larger part of the usual HN crowd manage to get in at the start of the bull run this time?
It's much easier to criticize than to build an alternative. I don't think anyone at Metamask or in the space in general thinks to themselves that the ecosystem is in a state of full maturity or that there aren't major problems. Despite its shortcomings, MM and Web3 have given us capabilities that simply didn't exist five years ago. And those capabilities aren't just limited to a select number of shadowy super hackers. MM has millions of MAU and that number will only grow as more people see the potential of the tech.
People are building things like renewed web standards (Project Fugu, for example) and P2P networks (Beaker, Hypercore), and light clients (Mighty). These projects don't get any attention from the "Web3" crowd because they don't involve currency speculation.
Why exclude IPFS? That is near and dear to the web3/cryptocurrency space, but can also be leveraged without participating in currency speculation at all.
Can you tell me an example of what simply didn't exist five years ago and now exists bc of Web3? And the potential of the tech? Because i used to work in an agency and we develop apps and smart contracts for Ethereum and what they were doing were the most basic and primitive things, slow, fragile, incapable and very expensive to use. Not to mention all the environmental problems with PoW. Only reason we were developing them was that there were loads of money from all the hype around it. The actual usefulness was zero.
Just today I paid for access to a data tool, icy.tools. I simply connected my Metamask wallet, clicked on “Unlock premium”, confirmed the transaction, and it was done.
Normally, I’d have to make an account (and doge the obligatory “sign up with Google” button), fill a form, enter my credit card info, confirm my otp on the payment site, check my email for an authentication link before using the product.
Along the way, I would have to share my data with multiple third parties - the SaaS tool, my email provider, my credit card company, etc.
With this web3 approach, I don’t have to share this data with anyone. I don’t have to fill out forms. In fact, if I got my Ethereum from a P2P source, I can be completely anonymous.
At this point in the internet, if you can avoid giving Google et al your data, its an absolute win.
To be fair, in the article I at least outline alternative approaches. And in any case, I believe that by building a commercial product like MM, their makers unwillingly shut the door a bit more for a more standardized approach. Not actively, but simply just by mere existence.
Things progress in many ways, and that is really important. Diversity of ideas and implementations of ideas spark real advances in unpredictable ways. What matters is that new things are being imagined, built and experience with them is being gained.
Tim, thank you for commenting on your article!
I'm curious about your reasoning here: would you mind walking us through how you come to the conclusion that building a product like MetaMask, closes the door for a more standardized approach?
The criticism of this ecosystem is just absolutely short sighted.
When I first got internet, it was 56 kbps, a single page took minutes to load, and it was so expensive that I couldn’t stay online for more than 30 minutes per day.
It took 5 years for my town to get “broadband” at 256kbps, and another 5 years to get 2mbps.
Maybe I should have given up on the internet back in 1996 to…
I was around for web 2.0, and it felt like a substantial change over how the web worked previously. It was the first glimpse that the web was capable of replacing the desktop apps we were accustomed to, while simultaneously adding new capabilities that didn't exist in desktop apps. There was a lot more to it, but to the casual user that was the most obvious difference.
This was the first thing I've read about web 3, so I didn't need to grep my brain to find and remove any existing notions about it. As someone coming in late to the party, I agree that installing a browser extension seems like a deal breaker. Web 2.0 was about getting rid of browser extensions. It also sounds like web3 is missing a killer app. For web 2.0, Gmail and Google Maps and YouTube were all immediately useful to all web users. Web 3 doesn't sound all that compelling to a lay person.
That's because "Web 3" is more of a marketing term, whereas "Web 2.0" was a descriptive term coined for something that had already emerged in the preceding years from countless independent implementations, evolving together.
When "Web 2.0" was named, most of the techniques had been used for over a decade, and social networking side of it was well established too. Even "AJAX" was coined years after some sites were already using that technique, without that name.
Web 3 is an attempt to portray p2p, cryptocurrency, IPFS and similar types of networks as on an equal footing to the evolutionary changes that vaguely made up Web 2.0.
In particular, the name implies it's "the" (singular) next version of the Web after 2.0.
But it's too early to be sure of that. Most people aren't using it, most sites aren't using it either and don't plan to. The real successor to Web 2.0 that things evolve to en masse might be quite different than Web 3 proponents are describing at the moment.
metamask has 10MM monthly active users, opensea at half the volume of ebay last month...
anecdotally, people seem to be moving to wallet connect smartphone wallets (eg rainbow) recently as they are nicer than browser extensions + you can use mobile websites/apps with them. Metamask is a bit of a mess tbh.
I've been in the space for a few years now so i find it really hard imagining a non-cryptocurrency/web3 internet at this point. It's such a big part of my use of the internet at this point. Hanging out in various dao chats in discord from chess clubs to running gallery spaces, voting in snapshot is a daily activity. Its basically like being in wow guilds, but with a completely open-ended design space to play in.
Im not sure what people will be satisfied with as a killer app? what is the measure of success? it feels like its already here and successful to me. After a dull period of the internet feeling like it was disappearing under FAANG it feels alive and chaotic and fun again.
What physical products, if any have you purchased with crypto?
I'm not doubting your touting of Web3, it's just....your description just sounds like you found a community of like minded people online. Those things have come and gone on the clear web many times. It's not something that's unique to Web 3.
This is the problem here. What kind of lay people care about this at all? I'm having a hard time being convinced myself, and I could not imagine trying to get 90% of the population remotely excited about this. There's nothing new for them, like you said, no killer app.
The age of worrying about the browser extension hurdle was in 2017. That ship has sailed. Enough people use it that you can launch any viable web 3.0 enabled business with it now for recurring revenues. Also, that user experience has improved such that browser extensions are not necessary. Many people use their mobile phone wallets to authentic mobile and desktop websites.
There is also substantial room for greater improvement. This actually might be a place to focus your energy and you actually might find it fulfilling.
> It also sounds like web3 is missing a killer app.
Sounds unfalsifiable as its not clear what standard there will be if you and your lay grandma aren't both interested in it. From my perspective there are many killer apps which I'm not interested in. Check out any list of "gas guzzlers" to see what people are paying to use any given day. I'm not sure how to gauge the free-er activity on layer 2 systems. But don't forget about other chains. Its a lot of activity.
It's kind of amusing to see them attempting to use Web 3 / 3.0. Web 3.0 was supposed to be the semantic Web, more than a decade ago [1] (an attempt which generally failed to be realized, and was silly vague regardless). I suppose enough time passed that someone decided the term could be repurposed since the last attempt to match the term to a new technology inflection point didn't come to much.
I think it's poorly named. It's not a new major version of the web. Forget the fact that the vast majority of the web's users don't care about decentralization vs. centralization even a single bit. People will continue to mindlessly use WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Coinbase because decentralization is not a concern for _most_ users. Most users of these apps just want to socialize with friends and family, show off / humble brag / argue, and gamble.
> Forget the fact that the vast majority of the web's users don't care about decentralization vs. centralization even a single bit. People will continue to mindlessly use WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Coinbase because decentralization is not a concern for _most_ users.
I think you're doing a real disservice by characterizing this as “mindless”. For most people, decentralization is an anti-feature — it adds cost, risk, and performance issues while usually making the UX worse. The web has become more centralized over time because that allows people to build more compelling services, and much as that is disappointing from the perspective of the dreams many of us had in the 90s it's hard to argue that, say, a primary driver of the re-centralization of email wasn't the difficulty of controlling spam in a decentralized system.
This intersects well with the blockchain advocacy: this post mentions a lot of terms which the VCs like to hear but there's a conspicuous absence of anything which normal users care about. There can be an argument for robustness in the case of an outage for a shared service but that's very far from a given and could only be measured by comparing specific examples since no two systems have the same failure mode.
The difference here though is that web 3 really is just 'technical details' to most people. PC's had potential, they were getting cheaper, faster, and more software was being written for them every day. People could play video games, and show off to their friends. Web 3 has none of that, it's all just technical details that 90% of the population doesn't care about one bit.
I like to chat with other devs as we work out problems on community code bases. Web 1 would suffice since much talk is still in irc. But we would miss stuff like git/obs...
It was only this year that I actually got excited about Ethereum specifically because of what "web3" enables.
Yes it's a dumb name, and this article certainly doesn't cover all of the issues, shit just look at the confirmation page for metamask, it literally just asks you if you want to spend X to submit a byte array. No link to the contract, the method you are calling, any avaliable adudits etc.
But if you as a reader have any passing interest I'd really encourage you to check out what's happening in the space, the thing that got me excited was the permissionlessness and composability.
Going to uniswap, locking up some funds in an AMM and then depositing that elsewhere to liquidity farm shows off the composability, then the fact that you can see it all tracked on a dashboard like zapper.fi or debank.com really drives the point home.
Word of warning, Ethereum it's self is now so clogged up with NFTs and people constantly arbitraging or performing liqudiations that it's far too expensive to play around with. There is plenty of cheaper EVM based chains though, like Fantom or Polygon
Your last phrase is really what gets me. Why should any web delivery platform get "clogged up" by content? If this becomes popular, then it just gets slower and more painful to use in ways that aren't fixed by adding more infrastructure?
Also, what is the value add that can be explained to someone who just wants to use the web and leaving the jargon like permisionlessness and composability aside? What reason would anyone have to start using this as a consumer?
Long term ethereum is looking at adding more 'infrastructure' but it's early stages, the current paradigm is to move transactions to "roll-ups" that inherent their security from the mainchain. Rollups are expected to increase throughput ~100-1000x (so optimistically getting back to ~1 cent per tx)
All of this is early enough that it's all currently exposed to the user. The fact of the matter is that cryptocurrency is still quite technical and under heavy development (well bitcoin isn't, but you can only do one thing with it). Hopefully as these technical solutions are rolled out wallet software will start abstracting across them so the user doesn't need to worry about whether they are transacting on a roll-up.
The current state is really not ready for general adoption. It's easy to lose all of your funds to some sort of hack or rug-pull, if you lose your keys you've lost your funds, it's hard to determine what is trust worthy, tax day is a nightmare etc.
I participate because I find it fascinating and can stomach the technical complexity and risks
It reminds me of 90s internet: First, there was the web. Then we got images slowly downloading at 56kbps. Then we got MODs and Midi , and suddenly we had MP3s clogging the existing 56kbps infrastructure. Until we started getting ISDN and broadband: 128k , 256k ! And we got RealVideo ... which kept 'buffering' and clogging the infrastructure. Later we got mp4, bittorrent and whatnot. This absolutely clogged our low speed broadband. Nowadays we've got CDNs, gigabyte size game updates, ultra hi def netflix a d 500 Mbps connections.
I'm so excited to see that we are in the VERY early stages of blockchain value networks, and I hope I live the next 20 years to see this technology when it gets to the "500mbps" equivalent of what we've got now for 'the internet'
Some valid arguments, but in reality web3 is just the web where the backend is something on the blockchain. It makes sense to talk about how to make this experience more secure, but to say the whole thing is a stupid idea doesn't benefit anyone, because a lot of people want it and are going to use it. By the way, most web wallets have hardware support, so you can add an additional layer of security that way.
Sure; I would describe the technical requirement for something to be "web3" as:
• data storage and/or backend computation taking place in/on a decentralized / distributed-locus-of-control system,
• where these systems are exposed directly to browsers via regular-web HTTP gateways,
• and where there are well-defined general APIs (these being the "web3" APIs) such that these gateways are interchangeable in the access they provide;
• where a web app can choose to have a relationship (e.g. a paying customer relationship) with their own gateway provider, rather than having one forced upon them;
• and where the user-agent can further enable the user to have their own relationship with different gateway provider, overriding the website's choice of gateway, in a way invisible to the web app. (Just like how UA stylesheets override site stylesheets, in ways invisible to the web app.)
The gateways are a necessary part of the definition, because HTTP is fundamentally a protocol for talking to specific servers, so Web -three, then, is 90% about the particular way in which we hitch decentralized stuff up to that centralized model.
The fact that the website and the user get choice in their gateway, is what makes this a decentralized system, rather than being something like X.509 that's nominally decentralized (anyone can be their own CA root authority for their own DAG-of-trust) but where in practice there's only one public DAG-of-trust forced on everyone by a consortium of browser and OS manufacturers.
1. consensus networks,
2. data storage networks,
3. messaging networks.
(1) includes Ethereum and other blockchain and distributed ledger tech.
(2) includes IPFS, FileCoin, GUN, etc.
If you're storing data on the blockchain apart from the bits needed in relation to consensus ops, you're probably doing it wrong.
(3) includes Waku (Status), Matrix ... depends a bit on whether you think this category should only include p2p networks or federated networks of servers qualify.
There are many other projects that could be listed for those categories, those are just off the top of my head.
If it's just when the database is decentralized, why even call it web3? Why should web standards even care about implementation details of the database?
We didn't move to "web3" when db sharding became a big thing, or when NoSQL caught on.
Really wish progressive enhancement was chosen as the first thing, want to get rid of the backend db? ok, two APIs,
store to extension-managed DB (e.g. flatfiles in the home directory, or shunted onto something managed with LDAP, or loaded onto some weird coin thing on a local light node, or etc),
or in environments where extensions are fussy / overcomplicated, store to another website via a http api (la https://remotestorage.io/, or if one wants to overcomplicate it again, a remotestorage-to-weird-blockchain-thing-shim)
- - -
For the article itself, deriding web3 as "Money websites" and then basically asking for "Lightweight money websites" is a bit pointless. Storing stuff on "Money" is a big overhead, If you were to decide to write your data onto a gold ingot, you'd probably not enjoy the process of going to the bank safe deposit box each time to make a change or read a change, likewise, money websites are going to be encumbered with risk, endless layers of crypto math un-understanding, and stress.
Don't worry, someone might make a contract to provide that fine grained API you want, and that contract might not have bugs, and the tooling used might not be able to be tricked to use some other contract as an api since you know, decentralized, shouldn't be able to use only 1 implementation right
Or, if you remove money from the equation, like, hell, replace it with text files or something, even if users need to exchange text files with each other to update each other's pages (ok a bit overkill, webrtc should suffice, still requires both people online at the same time though), it still removes a lot of emotional stress
> If you were to decide to write your data onto a gold ingot
Why do crypto enthusiasts feel the need to use gold as a strawman? The vast majority of non-crypto people use digital money (in local currencies), and have never touched gold in their lives. Digital money works great, and doesn’t need a blockchain.
> Why do crypto enthusiasts feel the need to use gold as a strawman?
Well, at least the US, the government treats crypto as property, at least tax-wise (actually it's taxed just like real estate or gold). It's just that crypto is much more easily transferable than real estate or gold.
> The vast majority of non-crypto people use digital money (in local currencies), and have never touched gold in their lives. Digital money works great, and doesn’t need a blockchain.
I understand this argument. The traditional financial system is quite mature, and works pretty well. I do have a few concerns with it though:
•Negative interest rates in some parts of the world
•Ever increasing sovereign debt throughout the world, with no intent of ever paying it back
•Lack of ability for 24/7 payments, or even instant payments (at least in the US, however, this fortunately seems to be changing with things like FedNow)
•No APIs for banks which make things like screen scraping necessary for data aggregation, i.e. Mint, or verification tools, i.e. Plaid (and I know this opens a can of worms because banking data should be regulated and private, but still, I've seen this API complaint on HN before, and crypto is a more open system, that could also have layers of permission added to it)
This leads me to another point, which is actually a question. How do people here beat inflation? Stocks? Sure, I have some stocks, too. But crypto yields are some of the highest right now, and it isn't all just some manipulation or leverage or something. Take a look at proof of stake coins, you can stake say, Polkadot, on Kraken, for 12% APR [1]. You can also stake Polkadot, directly, without using an exchange as an intermediary, it just requires more technical skill. The staking return on proof of stake coins is a reward for helping secure the proof of stake network.
I've heard Charles Hoskinson, the creator of Cardano and co-founder of Ethereum, say in one of his videos that we need a new asset class in order to make up for this inflationary environment. And also, I would add, that we need that to accommodate for what I consider to be a war on cash. I'd be happy to keep fiat in a savings account, and I did for many years, until the rates on savings accounts went to basically zero. Now people are basically forced to hold riskier things like stocks, or if they have an even higher appetite for risk, crypto.
In short, I don't think everything in digital fiat is going perfectly well. If it was, I don't think I'd find crypto as attractive.
To me, web3 isn't about building everything on some blockchain.
Firstly, it's about building networks and systems that serve us instead of what we have today: big, monolithic networks that profit off our rage and addiction.
Secondly, it's about building a model of democracy that is fundamentally more scalable than what we have today: people with differing opinions and values being forced into a single echo chamber and fighting in a zero-sum game to take control of the chamber.
Decentralization won't solve all our problems, but I believe it's a more natural and scalable way to organize on the web.
Readit News
It's incredible to be able to go to different websites (Zapper, Zerion, OpenSea, etc.) and simply have all my data already exist -- without needing to create an account, export/import.
web3 makes me believe in a new era of the internet that isn't full of ads, cookie consent forms, dozens of sign-in services, tracking, etc.
An anonymous version of myself and my data exists everywhere. It's really a hackers dream.
No email accounts, no sign up forms, no credit card info, nothing.
I’m a lifelong convert to this tech now. I can’t ever imagine going back to sign up forms or sharing my personal data.
I can’t see how anyone who cares about their privacy isn’t hyper bullish about this.
For the average user, it’s not exceptionally helpful yet, but for power users like celebrities, politicians and executives, it is extremely valuable.
Where they go everyone else will go. Web3 has a massive future
Did you mean people with a lot at stake in regards to their public image?
https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/16/22627435/twitter-bluesky-...
I hope it remains that way.
Some do of course throw unnecessary signup pages before allowing you to connect your wallet. I immediately close the tab if I see that. They are the minority.
It's the web, obviously there aren't firm rules. The point is that most of the builders in the space are hackers that want a free and open web void of that nonsense.
And most of the protocols/services are profitable, so the builders have no incentive to track users or sell data.
If "web2" companies start moving into the space, I'm sure they will track and sell data like they do now. The goal is to create free and open alternatives of those products so you aren't forced to endure those tactics.
But with web3 + a VPN or Private Relay, you can probably do a fairly good job staying mostly anon.
You need an actual sepeculative market to price and offer these services.
Most of open source fails because they don't acknowledge this reality.
Normally, I’d have to make an account (and doge the obligatory “sign up with Google” button), fill a form, enter my credit card info, confirm my otp on the payment site, check my email for an authentication link before using the product.
Along the way, I would have to share my data with multiple third parties - the SaaS tool, my email provider, my credit card company, etc.
With this web3 approach, I don’t have to share this data with anyone. I don’t have to fill out forms. In fact, if I got my Ethereum from a P2P source, I can be completely anonymous.
At this point in the internet, if you can avoid giving Google et al your data, its an absolute win.
Things progress in many ways, and that is really important. Diversity of ideas and implementations of ideas spark real advances in unpredictable ways. What matters is that new things are being imagined, built and experience with them is being gained.
When I first got internet, it was 56 kbps, a single page took minutes to load, and it was so expensive that I couldn’t stay online for more than 30 minutes per day.
It took 5 years for my town to get “broadband” at 256kbps, and another 5 years to get 2mbps.
Maybe I should have given up on the internet back in 1996 to…
- Email
- Chatrooms
- Maps and directions
- Newspapers from around the world, free (even WSJ didn't put up a paywall until 2005).
- IT troubleshooting information that didn't require calling the surly clowns at your local computer shop.
Does Web3 have something like that that makes it a must-have?
This was the first thing I've read about web 3, so I didn't need to grep my brain to find and remove any existing notions about it. As someone coming in late to the party, I agree that installing a browser extension seems like a deal breaker. Web 2.0 was about getting rid of browser extensions. It also sounds like web3 is missing a killer app. For web 2.0, Gmail and Google Maps and YouTube were all immediately useful to all web users. Web 3 doesn't sound all that compelling to a lay person.
When "Web 2.0" was named, most of the techniques had been used for over a decade, and social networking side of it was well established too. Even "AJAX" was coined years after some sites were already using that technique, without that name.
Web 3 is an attempt to portray p2p, cryptocurrency, IPFS and similar types of networks as on an equal footing to the evolutionary changes that vaguely made up Web 2.0.
In particular, the name implies it's "the" (singular) next version of the Web after 2.0.
But it's too early to be sure of that. Most people aren't using it, most sites aren't using it either and don't plan to. The real successor to Web 2.0 that things evolve to en masse might be quite different than Web 3 proponents are describing at the moment.
anecdotally, people seem to be moving to wallet connect smartphone wallets (eg rainbow) recently as they are nicer than browser extensions + you can use mobile websites/apps with them. Metamask is a bit of a mess tbh.
I've been in the space for a few years now so i find it really hard imagining a non-cryptocurrency/web3 internet at this point. It's such a big part of my use of the internet at this point. Hanging out in various dao chats in discord from chess clubs to running gallery spaces, voting in snapshot is a daily activity. Its basically like being in wow guilds, but with a completely open-ended design space to play in.
Im not sure what people will be satisfied with as a killer app? what is the measure of success? it feels like its already here and successful to me. After a dull period of the internet feeling like it was disappearing under FAANG it feels alive and chaotic and fun again.
I'm not doubting your touting of Web3, it's just....your description just sounds like you found a community of like minded people online. Those things have come and gone on the clear web many times. It's not something that's unique to Web 3.
There is also substantial room for greater improvement. This actually might be a place to focus your energy and you actually might find it fulfilling.
> It also sounds like web3 is missing a killer app.
Sounds unfalsifiable as its not clear what standard there will be if you and your lay grandma aren't both interested in it. From my perspective there are many killer apps which I'm not interested in. Check out any list of "gas guzzlers" to see what people are paying to use any given day. I'm not sure how to gauge the free-er activity on layer 2 systems. But don't forget about other chains. Its a lot of activity.
[1] https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/2009/01/mco2009010...
I think you're doing a real disservice by characterizing this as “mindless”. For most people, decentralization is an anti-feature — it adds cost, risk, and performance issues while usually making the UX worse. The web has become more centralized over time because that allows people to build more compelling services, and much as that is disappointing from the perspective of the dreams many of us had in the 90s it's hard to argue that, say, a primary driver of the re-centralization of email wasn't the difficulty of controlling spam in a decentralized system.
This intersects well with the blockchain advocacy: this post mentions a lot of terms which the VCs like to hear but there's a conspicuous absence of anything which normal users care about. There can be an argument for robustness in the case of an outage for a shared service but that's very far from a given and could only be measured by comparing specific examples since no two systems have the same failure mode.
Surprisingly few regular people thought they wanted a PC before the World Wide Web. They still don't care about the technical details.
Web 3.0 is obviously an aspirational name for what is still mostly a vision at this point. But developers need their moitivators. :)
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Yes it's a dumb name, and this article certainly doesn't cover all of the issues, shit just look at the confirmation page for metamask, it literally just asks you if you want to spend X to submit a byte array. No link to the contract, the method you are calling, any avaliable adudits etc.
But if you as a reader have any passing interest I'd really encourage you to check out what's happening in the space, the thing that got me excited was the permissionlessness and composability.
Going to uniswap, locking up some funds in an AMM and then depositing that elsewhere to liquidity farm shows off the composability, then the fact that you can see it all tracked on a dashboard like zapper.fi or debank.com really drives the point home.
Word of warning, Ethereum it's self is now so clogged up with NFTs and people constantly arbitraging or performing liqudiations that it's far too expensive to play around with. There is plenty of cheaper EVM based chains though, like Fantom or Polygon
Also, what is the value add that can be explained to someone who just wants to use the web and leaving the jargon like permisionlessness and composability aside? What reason would anyone have to start using this as a consumer?
All of this is early enough that it's all currently exposed to the user. The fact of the matter is that cryptocurrency is still quite technical and under heavy development (well bitcoin isn't, but you can only do one thing with it). Hopefully as these technical solutions are rolled out wallet software will start abstracting across them so the user doesn't need to worry about whether they are transacting on a roll-up.
The current state is really not ready for general adoption. It's easy to lose all of your funds to some sort of hack or rug-pull, if you lose your keys you've lost your funds, it's hard to determine what is trust worthy, tax day is a nightmare etc.
I participate because I find it fascinating and can stomach the technical complexity and risks
I'm so excited to see that we are in the VERY early stages of blockchain value networks, and I hope I live the next 20 years to see this technology when it gets to the "500mbps" equivalent of what we've got now for 'the internet'
even more broad, i think web3 is just where the database is decentralized. blockchain is one solution.
• data storage and/or backend computation taking place in/on a decentralized / distributed-locus-of-control system,
• where these systems are exposed directly to browsers via regular-web HTTP gateways,
• and where there are well-defined general APIs (these being the "web3" APIs) such that these gateways are interchangeable in the access they provide;
• where a web app can choose to have a relationship (e.g. a paying customer relationship) with their own gateway provider, rather than having one forced upon them;
• and where the user-agent can further enable the user to have their own relationship with different gateway provider, overriding the website's choice of gateway, in a way invisible to the web app. (Just like how UA stylesheets override site stylesheets, in ways invisible to the web app.)
The gateways are a necessary part of the definition, because HTTP is fundamentally a protocol for talking to specific servers, so Web -three, then, is 90% about the particular way in which we hitch decentralized stuff up to that centralized model.
The fact that the website and the user get choice in their gateway, is what makes this a decentralized system, rather than being something like X.509 that's nominally decentralized (anyone can be their own CA root authority for their own DAG-of-trust) but where in practice there's only one public DAG-of-trust forced on everyone by a consortium of browser and OS manufacturers.
1. consensus networks, 2. data storage networks, 3. messaging networks.
(1) includes Ethereum and other blockchain and distributed ledger tech.
(2) includes IPFS, FileCoin, GUN, etc.
If you're storing data on the blockchain apart from the bits needed in relation to consensus ops, you're probably doing it wrong.
(3) includes Waku (Status), Matrix ... depends a bit on whether you think this category should only include p2p networks or federated networks of servers qualify.
There are many other projects that could be listed for those categories, those are just off the top of my head.
We didn't move to "web3" when db sharding became a big thing, or when NoSQL caught on.
store to extension-managed DB (e.g. flatfiles in the home directory, or shunted onto something managed with LDAP, or loaded onto some weird coin thing on a local light node, or etc),
or in environments where extensions are fussy / overcomplicated, store to another website via a http api (la https://remotestorage.io/, or if one wants to overcomplicate it again, a remotestorage-to-weird-blockchain-thing-shim)
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For the article itself, deriding web3 as "Money websites" and then basically asking for "Lightweight money websites" is a bit pointless. Storing stuff on "Money" is a big overhead, If you were to decide to write your data onto a gold ingot, you'd probably not enjoy the process of going to the bank safe deposit box each time to make a change or read a change, likewise, money websites are going to be encumbered with risk, endless layers of crypto math un-understanding, and stress.
Don't worry, someone might make a contract to provide that fine grained API you want, and that contract might not have bugs, and the tooling used might not be able to be tricked to use some other contract as an api since you know, decentralized, shouldn't be able to use only 1 implementation right
Or, if you remove money from the equation, like, hell, replace it with text files or something, even if users need to exchange text files with each other to update each other's pages (ok a bit overkill, webrtc should suffice, still requires both people online at the same time though), it still removes a lot of emotional stress
Why do crypto enthusiasts feel the need to use gold as a strawman? The vast majority of non-crypto people use digital money (in local currencies), and have never touched gold in their lives. Digital money works great, and doesn’t need a blockchain.
Well, at least the US, the government treats crypto as property, at least tax-wise (actually it's taxed just like real estate or gold). It's just that crypto is much more easily transferable than real estate or gold.
> The vast majority of non-crypto people use digital money (in local currencies), and have never touched gold in their lives. Digital money works great, and doesn’t need a blockchain.
I understand this argument. The traditional financial system is quite mature, and works pretty well. I do have a few concerns with it though:
•Negative interest rates in some parts of the world
•Ever increasing sovereign debt throughout the world, with no intent of ever paying it back
•Lack of ability for 24/7 payments, or even instant payments (at least in the US, however, this fortunately seems to be changing with things like FedNow)
•No APIs for banks which make things like screen scraping necessary for data aggregation, i.e. Mint, or verification tools, i.e. Plaid (and I know this opens a can of worms because banking data should be regulated and private, but still, I've seen this API complaint on HN before, and crypto is a more open system, that could also have layers of permission added to it)
This leads me to another point, which is actually a question. How do people here beat inflation? Stocks? Sure, I have some stocks, too. But crypto yields are some of the highest right now, and it isn't all just some manipulation or leverage or something. Take a look at proof of stake coins, you can stake say, Polkadot, on Kraken, for 12% APR [1]. You can also stake Polkadot, directly, without using an exchange as an intermediary, it just requires more technical skill. The staking return on proof of stake coins is a reward for helping secure the proof of stake network.
I've heard Charles Hoskinson, the creator of Cardano and co-founder of Ethereum, say in one of his videos that we need a new asset class in order to make up for this inflationary environment. And also, I would add, that we need that to accommodate for what I consider to be a war on cash. I'd be happy to keep fiat in a savings account, and I did for many years, until the rates on savings accounts went to basically zero. Now people are basically forced to hold riskier things like stocks, or if they have an even higher appetite for risk, crypto.
In short, I don't think everything in digital fiat is going perfectly well. If it was, I don't think I'd find crypto as attractive.
[1] https://www.kraken.com/en-us/features/staking-coins
Firstly, it's about building networks and systems that serve us instead of what we have today: big, monolithic networks that profit off our rage and addiction.
Secondly, it's about building a model of democracy that is fundamentally more scalable than what we have today: people with differing opinions and values being forced into a single echo chamber and fighting in a zero-sum game to take control of the chamber.
Decentralization won't solve all our problems, but I believe it's a more natural and scalable way to organize on the web.