I'm increasingly seeing "web 3.0" as basically a two headed beast:
1) a way to part greater fools from their money until the hype has died out
2) a hot topic to drive clicks and discussions for nerds and, increasingly, the tech press, from other more pressing issues that exist in terms of tech and culture and finance
In other words, its a bullshit scam, can we please move on already?
When I was a young engineer in 2006, the marketing about Web 2.0 was in every tender for IT projects, so much that my boss created the “Web 4.3 dev community” in my city to point out the ridiculousness of it.
Every versioning of that idea is marketing speech.
Web 2.0 and 3.0 are not directly comparable just because they have similar names, a fallacy of equivocation.
Web2.0 might have had a silly name, but the idea of the web as something that the average user and company could contribute back to and use to communicate with in real time
provided explicit value and convenience over existing alternatives (letter writing, door-to-door sales, in-person self-promotion, calling a pizza parlor, renting a physical video, long distance phone calls, physical plane tickets mailed to your house…)
It's a way to authenticate yourself without a centralized authority. So right now it's being used to create exclusive communities, access to which theoretically has some value. In the future, there may be application ecosystems which operate solely against your wallet information, no need for registration. Maybe that has some value too - time will tell.
I don't follow the details of the web3 market closely, so not speaking in support or against here.
We've had "auth without centralized authority" for decades, and 99% of people don't care and won't deal with the hassle involved. see PGP, encrypted email, OpenID, etc etc..
The exclusive communities you mention only have value because of the hype and FOMO and high dollar amounts that people see being made on sales of "exclusive" NFTs or some such. Same as many of the many crypto pumps, same as the dotcom bubble, same as tulips. Same as it ever was.
Like it or not, people are already using their wallets as their username. And they're trading cryptographic assets. And everyone can see it because it's public.
This isn't theoretical.
I've been to PGP key-signing parties. I can assure you that this is not that.
I can't use blockchain to pay pretty much any vendor I buy things from without an intermediary - the intermediary requires me to log in to a website and unless I'm willing to go through a lot of trouble (more trouble than dealing with PGP) an intermediary will also be storing my wallet and have "physical" control of all my "coins." Blockchain works to the extent that you aren't really using blockchain but simply a trusted intermediary.
If you're actually personally managing your wallet keys it's worse than PGP. With PGP if you lose your key you just say so and people figure it out, you have to go to some key signing parties. With Bitcoin if you lose your key you have no money, end of story, no recourse.
This depends what you mean "works", if it's meant on the technical conceptual level that yes, of course, I think no one would disagree. If it's taken to mean had widespread and growing usage at the social level, then I think that's hard to argue.
People don't exchange public keys on the blorkchain, they use username/password to access their wallets, and these have a public key. That in itself doesn't authenticate anyone to anything, the only guarantee is that it is unique.
How do we know who is behind a hash? Because there is a server (aka. a "centralized authority") that has that information.
So how exactly is that different from using my google account to login to some webservice?
that's a very very liberal equivalence to make. decentralized authority in practice is just a collection of servers in aggregate that come to consensus according to a certain protocol.
This is not true. Your key serves as proof you own something and nobody else without your key can claim to it. There is no central poin involved. You can connect to any chain node, yours including, and assert control over it. There is no central authority, that's the whole point. If you're referring to an NFT being a url hosted somewhere other tha. IPFS, nobody is arguing that.
> Your key serves as proof you own something and nobody else without your key can claim to it.
Yes, and what maps that to your physical identity? How is that any different from showing someone a public key you just generated with GPG?
For what it’s worth, I recently read Moxie Marlinspike’s essay on web3, and I think he crystallised one of the most interesting insights I’ve ever heard on that topic:
> We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure. This means architecture that anticipates and accepts the inevitable outcome of relatively centralized client/server relationships, but uses cryptography (rather than infrastructure) to distribute trust.
I think he’s correct, and the cryptocurrency of the future – the one which actually takes off as a medium of exchange – will do exactly what we’re arguing about here. It will use purely cryptography as its mechanism, instead of large groups of servers acting as the gatekeeper. You’ll be able to send money to someone with purely a public key, no servers required, just you and them as peer-to-peer. And, as a corollary, you’ll be able to prove your balance with only a key and the encrypted data of your past transactions. I’ve barely stopped thinking about my envisioned implementation for the past couple of weeks.
inefficiency here can actually be useful, it's similar to password stretching. If you know someone had to burn $10 of electricity to make an authentication, it hurts more to get banned.
Except for the tons of CO2 that get pumped into the atmosphere in the process, or the blackouts its causes, or the fact that there are tons of more useful applications for that energy, like heating homes, running air conditioning, charging electric vehicles ...
> It's a way to authenticate yourself without a centralized authority.
Can someone provide me with a clear example of this being implemented? AFAIK accessing blockchain from a traditional client(website/app) still requires going through a central node.
Did something change with 'Web3'? Pardon me for not being up-to-date but it's like one day I woke up and Web3 is all over the place it seems like well-coordinated, heavily funded campaign. How else can we explain this seemingly sudden trend of Web3?
I would like to create an online application which people could use by paying for its usage in bitcoin.
I assume it would make the application much simpler because there would not need to be any or very little user-account management, no sending bills or charging credit-cards. Just gimme them bitcoins. The user-state could be stored on the client-machine, unless they especially want to pay for us backing it up on the cloud. Still it could be backed up anonymously, identified by the wallet.
No more hacking, if there were no user-accounts or passwords there would be nothing to hack.
How do you inagine "giving you bitcoins" will work without you doing something equivalent to sending bills or charging credit cards?
Sure, you can publish your wallet address and tell them to send you money. How do you give them access to your content after they have sent their money? How is Bitcoin helping compared to you publishing your IBAN account number and asking for money to be sent directly there?
I'm not very far on my project at all but I assume that a public ledger could tell me that somebody transferred money to the wallet associated with my application.
I wouldn't need to "send bills" because I wouldn't know who my users are. Except that when they login with their crypto-id my application will do work for them, because they have crypto-paid for it.
I wouldn't need to charge credit-cards since they transfer the bitcoins to my account. I only need to know their id and that they have paid me a specific amount of crypto, and that id has used a certain amount of my application.
There needs to be the infra-structure associated with crypto-currency, but not much else. That would make things simpler, I assume. That's my point. Crypto can presumably make payments and user-accounts management simpler. The less you know about your users, the less there is to manage.
If you want to take a credit card, you need to open a bank account, sign up with a payment processor and integrate with them (stripe makes this easy, what if you can’t or don’t want to use stripe?), handle chargebacks, etc.
If you want to accept bitcoin, you run a piece of software and write a few lines of code.
Yes, and for these extra steps the money I earn is realistically not in danger of losing 20% of value overnight, can't be lost because the harddrive that held my password-safe got corrupted, the transactions are done instantaneously instead of whenever some miner feels like including them in his block, and the amount of energy required to process the payment, is probably not much more than I currently use to write and send this post.
Yep. Want to accept onchain bitcoin? When a customer wants to pay, generate a fresh address. Store that address in a dab associated with the customer id. When they come for the service, see if that address has received payment. Easy peasy. You can run your own node and do this all yourself, or you can use services that run the software for you and work on callbacks or api calls.
Want to accept lightning (bitcoin over a low cost and high speed payment network)? It’s an api call to generate an invoice and another api call to see if that invoice has been paid. Again you can run everything yourself or use a managed service. Bitcoin make programmatic payment processing SO MUCH EASIER than traditional payment rails.
This. Building a webshop with crypto is the most trivial thing.
Complying with all the legal regulation that buyer and seller are bound to is the actual complex part. Insanely complex.
i suggest learning it properly before jumping to conclusions. everything has pros and cons. e.g. cars pollute but would you want to go back to riding horses? judge less, learn more
This is always the defense: “you obviously don’t understand it”. Or, maybe there is a good reason this type of article pops to the top of HN every other day. The skeptics have good reason to doubt the viability of all the hype.
is calling out oversimplifcation is also oversimplifying? i'm not arguing that there is no good reason to be sceptic, i'm calling out against forming a strong opinion strongly held on little understanding
But you haven’t verified little understanding and crypto proponents never do. It’s always “skeptic of crypto = little understanding”. You’re doing that exact thing here.
I build dApps and solidity contracts with hundreds of millions of USD in TVL. But that's besides the point. It's not a contest of who's more knowledgeable, I'm arguing against ignorance through quick judgements and assumptions
> I'm arguing against ignorance through quick judgements and assumptions
Yes, but you're arguing that against someone -- someone whom you haven't shown is making "quick judgements and assumptions". You're just assuming that.
That is the problem GP was pointing out: Crypto-"currency" proponents always jump to that conclusion. Stop doing that.
Read the article by moxie on NFTs. It is so poorly designed that a jr JavaScript developer with 6 months experience would be ashamed of it. Don't "Go-and-lean" us. We are technology people here not your non-tech crowd that'll get scared and silenced by "go and learn"
there is no arguing that the world of crypto is full of scams. just like the internet. we can learn and adopt new technologies while keeping down its externalities by understanding the pros and cons, not by slapping overgeneralised labels of "good" or "bad" on everything to cover for the lack of rounded understanding
I actually would prefer riding horses if it were feasible and safe in my community, thank you very much =).
I've learned enough at this point to know a scam when I see one, and I definitely don't need to go thru my history w/ software and tech bubbles and cryptocurrencies to explain why web 3.0 is full-on bullshit.
well i guess it's simpler to live with fast and decisive conclusions to new information. personally i try to manage my prejudice and keep giving chances for someone or a new piece of information to change my mind, in case i have the wrong understanding
Oh wise one can you tell us more? We're dying to learn from the smart ones who can tell based on their past what the future holds. Or maybe you don't know, which is true, since none can predict future. Therefore you're talking out of your ... and not contributing to the conversation. Now you can say that I'm not contributing either, but it has the same place as your statement...
I've yet to see a "pro" for blockchain or NFTs that doesn't conform to the characterization you're trying to dispute. Care to offer one? I'm eager to learn.
Blockchain and crypto are related yet distinct concepts. I was lining up for a PCR test in Thailand the other day, and it was a huge mess. The lack of streamlined systems between invoicing, identity verification, etc means very long queues, people running back and forth to get their documents printed. The testing scheme is private run but I assume it needs to interface with governmental departments (i.e. Immigration and the police) to initiate quarantine in case i'm positive, and change my eligibility status for travel outside the sandbox area if i'm negative, or to arrest me if i fail to take the test within the specified time.
I thought about why so many centralizsed systems failed, or failed to be built, for streamlining processes in the real world. I think that it's because typically such systems would be built on SQL databases and backend servers that are prone to hacks and downtimes, and the APIs built by different developers often cannot integrate with one another.
What if, instead of databases and custom APIs, a blockchain with smart contracts is used? What if we can also sign documents such as receipts with hashes that can be verified off-chain and off-line? We'd have a fault-tolerant, always-available systems, and also a "unified" protocol in which other systems can interface to.
Instead of having different databases and APIs that are hard to integrate with one another, a blockchain could be the central storage and transactions handler that different systems interface to.
The PCR test system would be something along the line of:
- Booking through a smart contract, paying the PCR test fee, and obtaining a receipt signed by the contract in the form of a hash
- Upon arrival in the test center, they check the validity of this signature offline by using a public key to verify your payment.
- An identification service can keep a hashed version of your personal data on-chain. You can provide your name, DOB, place of birth etc, and this can be checked against the identification service by decoding the hashed data with a one-time key you generated
There's no DB that can be hacked or go corrupt, no BE servers that can be DDOS'd.
There are of course questions to be answered. But I see many use cases in my everyday life.
> Instead of having different databases and APIs that are hard to integrate with one another, a blockchain could be the central storage and transactions handler that different systems interface to.
That's a common refrain that seems to associate blockchains with standards and common APIs, it doesn't resist closer inspection. To take your example, I can easily design two PCR test systems completely incompatible with each other, and leaving no way for anyone else to implement a compatibility layer between these two, even if they both use the same blockchain.
There are various ERC20 tokens that should in theory implement the same interface, but turn out to be subtly incompatible with each other because of how imprecise the specification is. Standardization is hard, even when people try, and blockchain doesn't even enforce a modicum of effort in this direction.
Another way to see it: as a software development constraint, "the system has to live in a blockchain" is akin to "it has to be written in C" or "it has to use functional programming": maybe the end result will be more alike, maybe it'll be easier for a dev to understand one system based on the knowledge of the other, but that's pretty much it.
> There's no DB that can be hacked or go corrupt, no BE servers that can be DDOS'd.
Smart contracts can be vulnerable (and ensuring they are not is very expensive, if possible at all), private keys get lost and some external system has to update the smart contract (you can never really get rid of all external systems, something lives outside the blockchain, if only the human operators), transaction fees are high enough that getting protection from a DDOS mitigation service would be cheaper than using a blockchain in the first place.
I agree with you that not everything has to be done a certain way. Programs don't have to be written in C or functional programming for it to work well. But there are places where those excel in terms of performance and/or reducing complexity.
I am also not arguing that incompatible APIs will disappear with blockchain usage. But things like an EVM can be used as a template to build underlying blockchains to provide a common datastore and execution layer for multiple systems to work together. It is harder to achieve with traditional SQL databases, which shouldn't be publicly accessible.
Also an advantage I thought of is it would be harder in this case for corruption to take place in the PCR testing regime since all transactions are immutable, and transparency ensures that the public would be able to check against those if they so wish. A closed system would allow the government or participating platforms to manipulate data records for their benefit, with less chance of scrutiny.
I agree with your points about the vulnerability of smart contracts and private keys. These are challenges that I hope will continue to be addressed as we try to figure out how to make blockchains accessible for mass usage. I think that smart contracts auditing is still far from mature, but the immutable nature of contracts would allow audited contracts to remain secure, as opposed to some code running on some company's server.
In the end as with everything in life, there are trade offs. It's about picking the right tool for the right job, and to continue experimenting with potential improvements that new technologies can bring and to reduce their externalities.
> But things like an EVM can be used as a template to build underlying blockchains to provide a common datastore and execution layer for multiple systems to work together.
Substitute EVM for JVM and you end up with a similar statement that looks just as correct, but it's still not clear what the EVM brings that the JVM doesn't.
> it would be harder in this case for corruption to take place in the PCR testing regime since all transactions are immutable
In your system, the blockchain would replace the database, not everything around it. That's also something I keep seeing in these discussions: blockchain provides some guarantees, so you assume the system you'll build on top of it will inherit from these guarantees, without questioning the composability further. But the interfaces of the blockchain component of these systems you're trying to conceive are precisely where the guarantees break down.
To take your example, you'd basically replace a database (and just a database) with a smart contract, which would ensure immutability and transparency. But:
2. using blockchains still imply that you're trusting the people holding the keys and interacting with the smart contract, so you haven't changed your trust model (the interface problem I mentioned above).
> the immutable nature of contracts would allow audited contracts to remain secure
The immutable nature of contracts is also what makes them unfit for evolving systems that have to be regularly updated to address new requirements.
[0]: to be clear, I'm talking about permissionless blockchains such as Ethereum
First of all, let me say that I understand where you're coming from. I too try not to use the latest fad just because of it. I use systemd instead of k8 when it's enough. I use plain JS instead of react when it's enough. I run cronjobs that updates jsons served by nginx instead of building graphql APIs.
But there's a good reason things like k8 and react become overused for everything these days, because they provide a standard that works for a relatively large spectrum of cases.
The argument of "you don't need X to do Y" is not wrong, but it doesn't make X absolutely useless. Your points are not really invalid imo, but i think you're missing the point of the continuum between centralised and decentralised systems
> i think you're missing the point of the continuum between centralised and decentralised systems
I'm mostly missing the point in this continuum where I can start listing pros instead of just cons. There are fundamental reasons why we haven't reached this point and may never reach it, as I (and many others) highlighted before, and these haven't changed for the past 5 years.
Or, the provider, namely the government, can write the code to orchestrate these API calls even if these APIs are managed by disparate entities.
It's not pretend like it's not a solved problem. It's just that you're trying to eliminate the central provider in this case and you want to replace that with a blockchain which is excruciatingly slow
A colleague of mine once disagreed to use git because it was easier for him to copy paste the project's folder every now and then to keep "versions" of his work.
There are trade offs, but having data and core business logic in an open and transparent network would allow for better interoperability imo. Not saying there aren't fundamental issues to be solved with using blockchains, but it's a new path to be explored.
The speed of the blockchain doesn't necessarily have to be slow. It depends on how decentralised and safe it needs to be. It's possible to create a "private" blockchain for some use cases. I don't see web3 as open in the sense of open to the whole world, but open to whoever the stakeholders are.
> Instead of having different databases and APIs that are hard to integrate with one another, a blockchain could be the central storage and transactions handler that different systems interface to.
Couldn't this be done with something like an enterprise service bus, without the blockchain?
> Booking through a smart contract [...] There's no DB that can be hacked or go corrupt
But you have moved the hacking problem to the smart contract instead, and last time I looked those seemed a lot harder to make secure.
I see more and more of this attitude these days: "Stop spreading disinformation. Educate yourself"
A useful contribution would be to point out how exactly the GP is wrong.
I can imagine the current international banking system get upgraded with a blockchain like technology such that you don't need a central bank of central banks.
But the web3 guys simply want to compare detractors to luddites
my argument isn't that the GP's information is wrong per se, but that gross oversimplification through slapping labels like "scam" and "bullshit" against the merits of a technology is blind, just as blind as people who worship the blockchain.
my argument is for us to make our cases in an enlightened and civilised way instead of calling out names
And still, you have utterly failed to tell -- either in an "enlightened and civilised" or in any other way -- why and how this whole "Crypto" fad isn't scam and bullshit.
Until somebody does, the null hypothesis remains that it is. (Use some cuter name if that makes you feel better, but it is what it is.)
The fallacy of false dichotomies. Things aren't either totally useful or totally a scam. That's what I'm trying to say, we shouldn't jump into quick conclusions one way or the other, especially without trying to really understand first.
I have my views on positive use cases for the blockchain and/or cryptocurrencies, and I got that by learning and building stuff with it. On whether the technology is a net good or bad to society, I don't know.
One can refuse to participate in anything without completely dismissing its merit. But that's the polarised world we live in :/
Yadda, yadda. Who said I'm 100-0 on the "Scam!" side? I could be 99-1, or maybe even 90-10. Even if I were 60-40, what do you expect -- that I should argue for how it's not a scam?!?
But, hey, you seem to be closer to 100-0 than to 99-1 in favour of "Utopia!".
You would be a lot more persuasive for that side if you didn't natter about meta shit like "fallacies" or "false dichotomies" but in stead presented some actual arguments.
It's funny how HN is negative towards crypto and web3 (see all upvoted articles on the topic, and related comments). Yet can't seem to stop talking about it.
I get it, you don't like it.
So I agree with your last point: let's all please move on.
I’m pretty much convinced that crypto stuff is a scam. Still, I want to question the mob. We only get better understanding, doesn’t take anything away.
I like hashing things out but whenever there is a huge bandwagon effect, I am increasingly getting more skeptical. Happy to be wrong but we need skeptics that question mob mentality.
There are several recent examples of this: 1) Inflation 2) COVID origins (Lab leak) 3) Zero-COVID policies and lockdowns.
I always question these things - what if we are wrong?
Well as long as there is a lot of tech hype about it we will continue attempting to cut through the bullshit buzz words and point out the good and the bad and the worse.
1) a way to part greater fools from their money until the hype has died out
2) a hot topic to drive clicks and discussions for nerds and, increasingly, the tech press, from other more pressing issues that exist in terms of tech and culture and finance
In other words, its a bullshit scam, can we please move on already?