For those involved / interested in Web3, what do you make of the near and long term future for it?
Added the qualifier to the title as web3 understandably earns a lot of eyerolls haha. At the same time, a lot of web3 focused places seem to have a specific mindset about what "should" be done so I wanted to ask here.
I worked in the space at startup (ironically making web2 services to assist in web3 so I’m still an extreme novice). But my time there was a constant push / pull between convention and money and innovation and the unknown. The company I was at would try to appeal to big companies in hopes of finding a product market fit, who looked to us for guidance on what to do in this new space where they hoped to make money. Trend after trend would pass and it would be entertained whether we’d jump on it because product market fit.
The most desirable companies were household names with non-web3 userbases because they meant unprecedented reach. But to make web3 approachable to them, you’d have to define a UX that didn’t exist and would be pulled in a tug of war between two forces. The first mindset optimises for the purest idea of giving the user power— UXs that were obvious about the concepts of transactions and transferrable assets. The other wanted to replicate web2 UXs in web3, to the degree that a user gives temporary control of their wallet to a developer so the developer performs transactions as them.
Then, there is the data and pseudonymity piece. Companies have been taught that data is valuable, and one of the values of a blockchain is an identity that exists outside of any one company. But if all of your assets are on a blockchain— either under your public key or perhaps under a few that might transfer assets only between each other— then your identity can be known (not so private) and also cannot be monopolized and sold (because your data is public).
In the background, as this all happens, is the decentralization argument. At the end of the day, my company used EVM nodes operated by another company (which themselves might be wrappers around something offered by AWS). What is meaningful decentralization alongside specialization of labor? What is decentralization in a world that has billionaires and enormous companies who has the means to buy resources and set up tons of nodes?
Being out of the space now, I do think a decentralized database with immutable scripts, user-managed transferrable assets, and transferrable identity has enormous value. But recently I’ve been wondering how much of that can be accomplished in the private sector. In my time there it felt like the startup needs (enterprise customers, increased ARR) constantly compromised the will for innovation efforts.
I'm "interested" in web3, in the sense of gawking at a car accident on the highway. The following linked in post (not mine) sums up my feelings on it:
So, these are totally valid criticisms! But it's also the top comment, so I figured I'd try responding.
The environmental cost is known and allegedly being improved upon in the space (for example, proof of stake versus proof of work, whatever Solana's proof of history is, L2s). So it's valid, but I hope we also keep the same attitude towards our modes of travel (particularly planes), the foods we eat, or how much computing resources we use in general (whether doomscrolling or bloated Javascript or even just playing a video game).
Valid also, but this is also the nature of trying to make something new, imo. I think this criticism applies to cars over horses or C++ over Assembly.
While innovation often involves revisiting and improving upon existing solutions, web3 is primarily focused on repackaging existing concepts in a way that exacerbates issues like inequality, speculation, and environmental harm. Drawing parallels to advancements like cars over horses or C++ over assembly is misleading; these innovations represented genuine progress in efficiency and functionality, whereas web3 introduces unnecessary complexity and risk without offering substantial, or any, benefits to society at large.
By “environmental harm” do you mean something other than the energy cost of computing? Because it seems like that’s not a problem anymore. (They’re not using Bitcoin.)
I do. Just because solana or ethereum aren't using proof of work, doesn't mean there aren't environmental consequences from the building, disposal, and operating of the hardware used for the still necessary calculations, which, and I can't stress this enough, are entirely unnecessary, in no way better, and in most ways worse, than a traditional RDBMS based ledger.
To be a bit more concrete, there are currently 1770 validators active on the solana network and 2389 RPC nodes. This is currently enabling a transaction volume of about 2500 transactions per second, or a volume that would be easily handled by a single medium sized MySQL server. AWS DynamoDB would charge $8k/month for that volume in write request units.
Solana seems pretty transparent about costs. I did a few calculations to put that in terms I’m familiar with. They say they use 26514 MWh per year, which works out to 2209 per month. At $50 per MWh that’s over $1 million a month just for electricity. So yeah, lots of room for improvement.
Put another way, though, they say a transaction costs about as much as a Google search. They could do 150 transactions using the energy needed to charge an IPhone.
Modern database servers are extremely efficient, it seems.
Compare with Bitcoin at 700 kWh per transaction, which is almost a month of electricity use for a household. It seems Bitcoin is so ludicrously wasteful that they make anything look good in comparison.
I mean that's an insane cost per transaction. Also, not all "transactions" are what they sound like -- voting transactions make up a large percentage of the network activity, relative to transactions that actually move money.
https://solana.com/news/network-performance-report-march-2024
You can see there that voting transactions account for something like 90% of transactions.
I largely agree, but not entirely, because I think comparing to database transactions might be used to prove lots of everyday things to be inefficient. It seems like it might prove too much?
For example, I think a roughly similar argument could be made that doing a transaction with a human cashier in a grocery store is ludicrously inefficient compared to an online purchase where no human is involved. And yet, we do it. Or consider business transactions where a company might fly someone somewhere when video chat would do?
And what is that iPhone used for, anyway? Things like playing games and browsing the Internet. It’s as powerful as supercomputers used to be. What a waste!
What tends to happen as we make computers more efficient is that we find new ways to waste their power. Nowhere is this more true than with AI, but it’s also true of gaming and many other things. Hardly anyone needs a 4k screen or an M1 Mac. These are modern luxuries.
So I’m not sure I want to get too worked up about ordinary wasteful computing, as long as they’re working on improving it. I save my ire for Bitcoin where it’s ludicrously wasteful by design.
I think the difference is, the blockchain is literally nothing besides a database. A distributed database, to be sure, but nothing else. So, if you want to show me a useful blockchain application, then show me one that a regular database can't do better -- and so far, there have been exactly zero such applications. The only conceivably positive thing the blockchain does is enable speculation, which I personally view as a net societal negative.
I think this is too reductive. A database is not a payment system or a currency. At a minimum you need a trustworthy organization to run the system. I don’t know off the top of my head how to estimate that, but it’s not cheap.
This is what all blockchain solutions tend to boil down to. They are, internally, a trustless system. You can validate within the blockchain that everything is above board. If no one has enough control over the particular blockchain you're using to not gain control of validation.
The instant they need to interact with things outside the blockchain, that falls apart. It's why the original whitepaper is solely about currency. Nothing is going in or out. You're simply moving pieces around and the value comes from effectively barter with the "outside" world. Whether that's for currency or services or whatever.
If you're trading information with the "outside" world you are now trusting existing institutions to validate ownership. There is no benefit to using a blockchain for that.
How does Ethereum compare to Solano in terms of electricity cost?
The number they’ve posted is .0026 TWh per year which is 2600 MWh, or about 1/10 Solana. So that’s more like $100k a month on electricity.
They do over a million transactions per day. So, dividing 7 MWh per day by a million, that’s .007 kWh per transaction or 25k joules, compared to .658 kjoules claimed by Solana. So, it seems about 50 times higher? But then, Solana has both voting and non-voting transactions, which I don’t understand.
Also, I could have easily screwed up the math, so it would be good to double-check it.
Ethereum has a goal of doing most transactions with level-2 blockchains to cut transaction costs considerably. They made some infrastructure improvements to allow it, but I haven’t heard anything about a level 2 thing becoming popular.
Edit: this article has a claim of 144k joules for Ethereum.
Edit 2: this page estimates Ethereum energy consumption at 5.4 GWh / year and lists some alternative estimates. That’s about 15 MWh per day or about double what I used above.
I think I'm too far outside of my element tbh to address these claims well without more detail. I did want to say though that I appreciated your answers throughout the thread despite you saying you weren't a fan (and it's really what I was hoping for out of Tildes).
But C++ has several advantages over assembly. The only "advantage" that web3 solutions have over already-existing solutions is that they make it easier to financialize just about anything, turning it into a vehicle for speculation.
Maybe I'm wrong, but everything you can do in C++, you could do in Assembly, right? Same with cars and horses. Yes, they get you there faster, but we also already had a means to do it, and were already solved. It wasn't like cars were just in the wild either, people had to put in the time and research to figure out how to make them, mass produce them, and make them accessible to refuel after mass production.
My point was just that a lot of problems were "already solved" but people still work on them and sometimes have breakthroughs (or the conditions that made them solved were changed, and now we have new problems). Maybe the number of relational database implementations would be a better example.
I just viewed this as an inevitability with or without a blockchain, to be honest. I guess in my head, while it's not "better," it's no worse.
I think I've talked about as much as I'm willing to about crypto, so I'm going to leave that part alone. However, on the subject of c++ vs assembly -- honestly, no.
I'm not a coder, but could I ask what sort of situation would necessitate using machine code?
It's not uncommon in embedded systems, where space is extremely limited. I used to work on PIC microprocessors with only 384 bytes of program memory. Security coding, especially writing exploits, often requires hand crafting individual program bytes to get the code past various constraints, eg masquerading as valid UTF-8 data while also being executable code. Writing emulators for other hardware generally means getting down and dirty with specific machine code. Working on weird old stuff, like how they are remote fixing Voyager's code. There are other situations, but it's certainly not common anymore. And of course writing compilers themselves will generally require some machine code.
This is technically true, but only in the most general sense. A really good programmer can do insane things in assembly. Famously roller coaster tycoon was entirely written in x86 assembly. But c++ as an abstraction above assembly enabled complex projects that would not be feasible without a ton of work. The speed and ease of development enables programs to be created that wouldn’t otherwise be created.
For one analogy, spreadsheet programs didn’t allow businesses to do anything they couldn’t before. Businesses would hand write spreadsheets and have calculators (a human paid to do calculations) fill out the calculated columns. Because of the cost and time to generate these spreadsheets, they were used pretty sparingly. Excel functionally couldn’t do anything that a human generated spreadsheet could do; it was just faster and easier. But that simple fact of being faster and easier enabled its use in many ways that it could not be used before.
For your horse/car example, again the speed and ease of use changes the paradigm. Yes, you would always travel long distances. But being able to reliably and quickly travel long distances changes the game. This invention created many things, but one of the big ones was suburbs. An entire class of city that travels to and from another nearby city every day. That is simply not possible on a horse. Suburbs now house a large segment of the population in a way that would not be possible with horses.
Technological innovations rarely make things possible that weren’t possible before. They make one aspect of something much better than before. In doing so, they allow using that thing in a way that is revolutionary.
On the subject of web3, I have yet to see the single aspect it improves on, with the exception of trust. However with trust, the vast majority of people can trust their government/banks/etc. Therefore, web3 is seemingly only useful as a research project and as a way to avoid the government or banks. It doesn’t enable anything we couldn’t do before.
Even for trust, its more a theoretical improvement than a practical one. It only applies to transaction on the blockchain itself and as soon as you interface with anything else the guarantees are gone.
If you pay for some goods with cypto, nothing on the blockchain ensures that you actually get those goods. If you want to sell your crypo for dollars, nothing on the blockchain ensures that money actually ends up in your bank account.
Even for transactions on the blockchain itself, users typically have to trust that no adversarial transactions are possible in every situation. This trust is often misplaced, as can be seen by the constant stream of hacks, bugs and fraud where millions are transferred against the users intentions.
This is hilarious and I love it.
Exactly.
We are apparently in web 2.0 now and it is shitter than web 1.0
I dread to think what web 3.0 is!
Surprisingly active discussion thread! Looks like many still feel pretty strongly about the topic, one way or another.
To establish some credibility: I've written a thesis on the security of (Solidity) Smart Contracts, and then interned at a web3 startup as an engineer dealing with quite low-level nitty-gritty of ERC tokens, deployment and management of Smart Contracts, dapps and such.
Relevant discussions often shift toward ownership concepts, personal freedom, moral values, revolutionary paradigms or whatever else this technology is associated with or is said to represent -- but I always find it a little amusing how much these pale in the face of pure nightmare it is to implement the said technology.
From a software design perspective, once you go into the practical "so how do we actually design this to be reliable, secure and deployable to serious customers", the complexity and shortcomings of web3 become very clear very fast. To summarize it without going into details, web3 tech fails to address the web2 problems to an adequate level, while adding a whole new set of unique problems that we simply don't have good ways to mitigate due to their nature. In a way, you're forced to combine the worst of both worlds if you want to make it adoptable in the real use-cases, and for most of those use-cases this is simply way above the tolerable risk threshold.
As such, I think both the short- and long-term future for web3 is with the things that are already at the top of usage today: money laundering, casinos, scamming, NFT speculation schemes, and so on. In other words, highly niche communities of individuals who are highly motivated to go through all the trouble and accept the risks.
web3 had a very good run in terms of investment/development hype -- now long eclipsed by GenAI, which funnily struggles with similar problems. During that period a whole zoo of different approaches was tried and tested (including high-level architectural changes, proof of X, etc); none too successful, since they're still ultimately only fixing the symptoms. Like with any new big tech hype wave, there was a lengthy "solution in search of a problem" period, and yet with all these startups and initiatives and experiments, I'll be hard-pressed to find anything that actually stuck to the wall.
TLDR; It's a fun but highly, highly problematic academic concept with limited applicability. It may fascinate some people from a philosophical perspective, which is what in my impression the original Satoshi paper was basically aiming at in the first place, but it's not an innovation driver or a world-changer worth spending more human effort or computational power on.
Yeah, this was exactly my experience too. I'm bullish on it eventually finding a solid niche because it's an interesting technology, I'm bearish on it getting the mainstream adoption people imagine due to the paradigm shift expected of both the general public (who is used to the comforts of centralization) and the degens (who tend to be more focused on philosophical purity, even if it might compromise comprehensibility or adoption). But without mainstream adoption, many startups will fail, especially in this market.
Apologies ahead for the wall of text ahead — brevity is not my strong trait.
I think I see your point, but it strikes me as cyclical. How can the startups depend on the support given by mainstream adoption, if they’re by definition supposed to be the trailblazers ahead of mainstream adoption? (now that I say it, maybe that’s what killed the whole thing: simultaneously trying to both change the fundamental blocks, and desperately find a business model to sell ahead of time)
That's an interesting point of view that I would like to address.
I think I understand the more philosophical undertone of the "sometimes people have to be nudged towards what's better for them long-term, but the capitalist market is not optimized for that". Getting somewhat quasi-communist, haha. That's not a point I feel qualified to discuss, but having seen the underbelly of both web3 and traditional fintech, I don’t believe the friction of paradigm shifts is the driving reason behind lack of mainstream adoption.
Setting aside the argument on whether web3 actually could deliver on its promises if it were "properly" adopted, it's simply that implementing web3 demands unreasonable upfront investment for too vague or too little a potential value.
I struggle to imagine the tech composition of a world that has truly embraced universal, efficient and secure web3 with tailored infrastructure. There’s way too many fundamental things to change across the whole OSI model, so to speak. Maybe too grandiose of a comparison, but it’s like imagining “what if Von Neumann architecture never became the standard in computers?”. Or maybe less grandiose "what if everyone universally adopted POSIX 40 years ago the way they did with HTTP, and all operating systems including Windows were implemented that way?".
Theoretically it could happen, but who's to make the call on everyone's behalf and force-push such a large-scale experimental change when it didn't work out in its trials stage anyway?
Centralization is certainly not without problems, but it reminds me of that Churchill’s quote: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others”. The "comforts" it provides is a result of decades spent on debugging security and efficiency of such systems -- and we still suck at it, but less.
Web3 as an alternative simply cannot propose a good value+risk+cost formula at bigger scales, or in places that are outside the technobubble of the rich first-world countries (where they can at least afford to spend resources to play around with the concept without redirecting too much from more pressing problems)
It may seem that web3 has never gotten over its early adopters stage, and as such never achieved “full potential”. But my view is that it has, in fact, already captured almost all of its potential userbase — and it’s concentrated in the very same solid web2.5 niches that still exist today
I appreciate it! Especially hearing from someone else who worked in it. (I saw your other post about "I felt like I was working on nothing" and many of the engineers I worked with felt the same-- though it was more a consequence of the leadership.)
This is kind of what inspired the whole thread for me. At the same time, I would like to be convinced otherwise.
I agree with this.
I think it actually makes sense for people in developing countries in cases where centralization fails them (bad instability in government, high inflation). Sometimes I wonder what it would look like if every person who owned BTC (27M addresses, so let's say 10M people) could vote on collective actions, and what the national makeup of that group would be. But I agree that a lot of the use cases I saw working in web3 seemed to be about helping companies sell "collectibles" (and when I brought up localization for people in developing countries where crypto adoption is growing, my coworkers seemed to not care).
To be clear, it's not my POV (although I kind of get it). I'm not totally sure what it is beyond "blockchain is just a technology, and the simple pursuit of technology is 99% of the time good." (I reserve 1% for like, clearly violent tech) And I'm sympathetic to centralization because our larger world is simply centralized. We went from tribes, to major religions, to the modern state, to superpowers, to the UN as it exists today. Any software we build that seeks to impact the larger world is inevitably colored by the centralization of the world itself.
In Web2, there's no reason everything isn't built on Bluesky or ActivityPub. There's no reason we don't require setting up your own server to be a prerequisite to adulthood akin to driving. There's no reason companies can't offer a lifetime-valid physical object when you purchase a movie online. There's no reason companies can't stop collecting data and selling data and bucketing people into profiles. So I think blockchain as realistically implemented will shift some of the paradigm but will probably be implemented to fit in our existing system. What that looks like, I don't truly know. (I think that contributes to my excitement about it.)
Great in-depth reply! I’m curious, and I hope you don’t mind me asking, what are you doing now? It sounds like you’re not in that space anymore.
Thank you! I don't mind at all, and your guess is correct -- I have left the space very quickly a while ago. On a personal note, I didn't expect to be that miserable at that web3 job in the context of "what am I even doing here?". I mean, it's not as objectively world-impacting as working for Lockheed Martin writing missile software would be, but the feeling of colossally wasting time made me really demotivated to continue working in the field even if the money was good.
These days my main role is somewhat closer to a traditional full-stack engineer, at an AI testing/auditing startup. With things like the EU AI Act coming up, the technical+regulatory assessment space is really heating up, but it’s still a “build the car while driving it” situation for everyone involved with a lot of good work yet to be done.
I don't have some of the preconceived notions others clearly have, but I've also yet to see a legit use case.
Block chain, as a concept, has some potential in financial systems, where you could essentially outsource verifying the transactions. However, there are of course serious concerns with ANY hiccup in this, and most financial systems (especially the US) are a pile of garbage left over from forever ago anyways, so it's a huge task to even test.
Web3....i just don't see a use case for? It seems like the sort of thing that doesn't need decentralized computing verification? I suppose the idea could be to sort of make a "mesh network" of sorts based on people serving content, but that's also got a zillion little flaws in it.
If you've got a short "here's why web3 has potential" pitch i'd be interested, but so far all the looking into it I've seen has been questionable at best.
I often think things like this, looking at things from a technical perspective. Blockchains, in theory, solve a problem of reaching a consensus among a group of actors who don't trust each other.
But I'm also mindful of an article I read some time ago that includes this bit:
The financial world has centuries of developed systems to address all sorts of issues with financial transactions. Blockchains maybe offer an alternative to one set of issues, but many blockchain proponents seem to think they only need blockchains and then they promptly run into problems the traditional banking system solved decades ago.
I appreciate the concepts behind blockchains, but I have yet to encounter a real world problem they solve better than existing, less wasteful, approaches.
Honestly, probably centuries ago. I love that story btw.
I agree completely that blockchain and crypto proponents have basically speed run the “scams and downsides in the finical system “ learning section rather that noticing from history.
And that is concerning because I’m very aware it might ONLY help with transaction verification. Banks and financial systems serve all sorts of purposes beyond that and many seem to have these ignorant conspiracy theories as to why they exist. Instead of realizing they’re serving a very real purpose.
Hell one of the most damning things I’d crypto over the years has been the total lack of development and adoption of systems that are actually trying to solve these problems. You can make a token with verification built in, so you can’t just send your transaction into the void. And yet last I looked none of the very few trying have seen much, if any, success.
If it’s been this many years and basic and necessary day one “yeah this is problem for adoption” issues still haven’t been dealt with, well what hope does it have for any bigger use? Btc seems to have found a niche in volatile digital asset, eth as the “well it’s still developed “ alternative, and then a few side cases (i know sol was being looked at by chase but how serious that is I’ve no idea). I mean seriously this would be like if the internet still had people typing in up addresses manually for all navigation.
But that’s mostly it. The majority of the activity is basically anyone who’s read a history book doing the financial scams greatest hits because it’s an under regulated market where all these flaws (and some strengths) work super well for pump and dumps , outright scams, or whatever else.
I feel the same way, but to be completely fair I tuned out pretty quickly after the most basic explaination of the concept was explained. It sounded like "Let's take this extremely efficient system we have and make it extremely unefficient."
I won't add to the already well articulated practical criticisms of Web3 in the thread.
Instead I have a philosophical one: You can't have it. Not you personally, the crypto bros. It's the world wide web we're talking about. It's a huge part of the digital age and human progress in general. If sanity prevails Web3 will be looked back on as a failed attempt by speculators to co-opt something that is so much bigger than them it's comical.
Web 2 was already just marketing, a term for technologies that had existed for years before it was coined. But at least in that case the technologies were useful and the term had some utility in describing important trends.
Web3 is a joke, not a new major version of the internet.
One thing that keeps rubbing me the wrong way, although that battle is clearly lost, is the misappropriation of the word 'decentralized'. In the old days, decentralized meant that you could publish a website without asking permission from anyone. Just connect your computer to the internet, fire up a web server and bam! Now you have a voice and everybody can hear you.
With web3 there is no such thing. Technically it might not be owned by a single entity, but for me as a regular user there is no difference. I can't connect my laptop to the internet and start publishing things on the chain. I can't start a new chain. I can't do anything. Unless I agree to ask a bunch of third parties to do that on my behalf, and those parties are definitely not neutral in the sense that my internet provider is.
This is very confusing to me. You CAN connect your laptop to the internet and start publishing things on-chain. You CAN start a new chain. You don’t have to ask 3rd parties to do it - you can do it yourself.
Of course it’s not as easy to do as publishing a website…which speaks more to the tools that exist to make this possible. Also - your website can be blocked in any number of ways, so it’s not as decentralized as it may have been in the past.
I remain confused at this example.
The chain is the 3rd party.
You have to pick a chain to centralize on, and trust them to do the relevant validation or whatever services they offer. You have to accept that a majority/plurality of users on the chain can overrule your transactions, for better or worse.
A chain being run by one person is a database that generates more heat.
A web server serving files from your PC requires no trust or validation from anyone.
I think this is false. By your logic isn’t the internet/host the 3rd party between you and someone who wants to view your site? There’s a lot of levels of trust in serving a simple website.
You have trust technology standards like HTML and TCP/IP are being faithfully implemented so that users will find your site and see what you intended them to see. This is not always the case - ISPs will traffic shape, block sites (DMCA takedowns), and even inject their own data in packets running through their servers.
As a consumer, you have to trust the content you’re getting is actually legitimate (something that can be solved with cryptographic signing of content, which is easy on blockchain).
People probably thought that computers doing calculations that people could do by hand a more expensive way to do calculations at one time as well. The benefit of blockchain isn’t tracking transactions, but in allowing anyone to have access to global consensus without Billions in capital and political connections.
You plop a simple web server on your computer and visit it's index.html page at http://127.0.0.1. Visit the local IP from any device on your network and you get that website. Spin up a local DNS server and like magic you can visit http://myfancysite.myfancydomain. Etc., etc. A lot of people and organizations have a lot of uses for intranets, connected to the Internet or not.
DCMA takedowns don't block sites, they're a legal proceeding. And don't matter when you are the host any more than any other cease and desist. They are (unfortunately) an agreement you're obligated not to break to be connected to the Internet. They're also generally toothless unless you get several thousand of them, which is why public sites remove content.
Source poisoning isn't something blockchains are immune to either, but HTML and related tech have been stable for decades at this point. You also have millions of eyes on it, as demonstrated by the "almost" ssh backdoor. Traffic shaping is a concern about the agreement between you and your ISP, not your webserver. Packet injection is only a concern if you're not encrypting anything.
The point was there's no such thing as a "self-hosted" blockchain.
Yeah, Web 2 largely described user generated content, the exchange of data between client and server without POST or other http verbs that require a full page load, etc. It describes a useful shift in the behavior and type of sites and technologies. It was a term coined to describe a phenomena that was already happening. Web 3, as described by the crypto bro's, is a marketing term to try and make something happen.
Haha. I agree and tbh I should have used a different term. To me blockchain is technology and concrete, web3 is marketing. For me, the biggest issue with the term is the vagueness of what it means. Will the internet be more private? Will it be more pseudonymous? Will everything be on-chain? (I mean it won't, because it wouldn't be the best solution to every engineering problem. Architectures will mix.) I suppose the vagueness of the term helps people fill in the gaps as fits in with their biases.
I could write about why I think it hasn’t and probably won’t work (you need to convince people to use a closed system), but I’d be more interested in hearing the experiences of someone who dabbled in such things. Is there anyone like that in Tildes, though? I thought it was dead.
I'd actually like to hear about your thoughts! I wanted to get different perspectives, but the only people who tend to talk in detail about web3 also tend to be in bubbles that don't seem to lend themselves to nuanced discussion (Twitter or Warpcast).
Not everyone who works in the space is an expert either, so I think it's easy to end up with bubble-hype built on misunderstanding. For example, in the decentralized social space (so similar family of tooling such as ActivityPub and BlueSky / ATProto) exists Farcaster, whose Bluesky / Twitter equivalent is called Warpcast. It has made a large impact in the past year. It accomplishes cool things like a clearer way to charge people for storage, as well as a way to embed code in someone's Warpcast feed via a Frame. To people who don't read the documentation / who aren't technical, I think there's a misunderstanding that it's a performant, decentralized network with all messages on chain. In reality, a big part of their architecture is that only select things (like identity) are on chain. Most of your data is can still be stuck on someone's privately run server, because web2 has more reliable performance.
It's... still getting VC investment, but yes, a lot of the people seemed to be hype motivated? During last year's downturn a big joke was that a lot of the "crypto" experts at certain companies now had "AI" in their title. I do not think the technology is dead, though. Last I heard, the hot topic was L2 rollups-- I don't totally get it myself but to my understanding, people batch together different transactions into a block using a given aggregation strategy (implementation by rollup), resulting (ideally) is lower costs and greater throughput.
I haven’t really thought it through, but it would be something along the lines of this article about why NFT’s don’t make sense for games. There’s little reason why a game company would want to allow users to import characters or items rather than making new ones for that game. It’s a lot of trouble and what do they get for it?
I suspect that a lot of web3 things are like that - the kind of cross-vendor scarcity it offers is a solution looking for a problem and there’s little reason for vendors to buy in, versus having their own rare items in their own database. That’s assuming they want rare items at all, which isn’t a given.
Even when you do want rare items, letting them be bought and sold by anyone might not make any sense.
Haha maybe I am in the minority as a dabbler and Tildian. Strange - many of the ideals of web3 are similar to the ones behind the creation of Tildes, so I thought I’d find more blockchain users here.
Re: closed system, the people who use it have been locked out of the traditional system in some way. Criminals, yes, but also those who didn’t fit in for other reasons. For instance many Latin American users who don’t have bank accounts or guarding against inflation. African users who can code/design websites but can’t do video chat because of bandwidth issues. Startup founders who had ideas that couldn’t be funded by traditional VCs.
The blockchain space is full of misfits. Misfits and dreamers. As a technologist, I look at the culture in blockchain and compare it against other tech cultures and sub-cultures: Silicon Valley, VC, AI, and more. The culture in blockchain wins every time for me. From the outside, you see crypto bros, but inside are some of the most inspiring people working today. For me, anyway.
ENS and Peepeth were two efforts I was paying attention to. Both leveraged these new approaches for different but equally positive potential advancements for the general public. However between Peepeth slowly discovering that web3 was a needless bottle neck and backed away from it for most of it's functions, and ENS pivoting away from the low-cost automated smart contact solution it began as to be more centrally managed and having to financially support that management - I've considered the web3 experiment mostly dead. Not to mention the gas costs rising so much that it increasingly made web3 inaccessible to most users. I was really hopeful for the potential of blockchain and automated trust-less smart contacts. But every application I've seen that could have been popular by providing a useful service, has become a dud.
Can you give me something good to search for ENS and the shift to centralization? I don't think I'm getting the right links. I'm pretty interested in this as I thought ENS and asymmetric cryptography + self-issued certs could invalidate the need for centralized certificate authorities (at least when doing TLS). My impression of ENS is that it doesn't want to really augment DNS, though.
I don’t usually talk about web3 online because I get a lot of hate when I do. That being said, I have dedicated the last 3 years of my life to it and still believe it’s a technological revolution on the scale of the internet itself.
People say it’s a scam or gambling or illegal - and they are right. 95% of stuff IS a scam or illegal or gambling. So I don’t recommend it to others. But the 5% that is legit is extremely interesting.
It comes down to ownership. Everything you own is only yours because someone says it’s yours. The government, a private company, the bank, etc. What if you didn’t have to have these intermediaries? How would that change things?
It probably sounds like an academic point. A solution in search of a problem. But the same was true of the internet. « Who cares if you can instantly communicate with someone else in the world? Getting weather online - Ever heard of a newspaper? Online shopping - just go to the mall you nerds! »
Blockchain enables a kind of relationship that we have less of nowadays - a direct, unimpeded relationship. I believe it will create new tools that will revolutionize our society.
Chances are I am wrong. I’m ok with that. The work I am doing every day aligns with my values. Even if I fail I’m still bringing things like self-sovereignty, self-reliance, and self-respect into the world.
This is fiction though. The blockchain doesn't dictate ownership, any more than a piece of paper in a filing cabinet, or a row in an RDBMS does. Ownership is determined by the same entities as before -- the government and the courts. The only thing that can be said about the blockchain is it's hard or impossible for the government or courts to edit it to align with legal reality.
I think there is a distinction to be made here between ownership in a legal framework (de jure) and ownership in a pragmatic sense (de facto). Maybe "control" is a more fitting word for the latter if we want to disambiguate and be concise.
When I say I own a thing, I can mean that I have acquired it legitimately within the legal framework I exist in (de jure ownership), but also that I possess it, have access to it, and am able to use it as I see fit (de facto ownership).
Blockchains do not inherently provide de jure ownership, but inherently nothing does as it is a construct of the legal framework. What blockchains can provide is de facto ownership, but only for the information stored on chain and only with respect to the state of how it is stored on the chain.
Working with extending the scope of that ownership is basically either trying to use it like deeds to declare de jure ownership within the legal framework, or to build systems that enforce de facto ownership of stuff off-chain based on information on-chain.
As a sidenote: for information, encryption in general is enough to provide the same level of de facto ownership. Thus, the use of blockchain is not in the de facto ownership itself, but that it creates a decentralized state of information which participating parties can agree upon, which supports de facto ownership of said information, and which can be used to replicate actions which can be done for tangible assets such as transferring de facto ownership to others.
Yeah, you know what provides de facto ownership of things though? Regular agreements between people recorded in contracts. Which can be stored in, for example, pieces of paper. Or in an RDBMS. The blockchain doesn't improve this situation in any way.
No, using the distinctions I listed a contract gives you de jure ownership, not de facto ownership.
For instance, I can have a contract that says I bought a car for an amount of money, but the seller took the money, disappeared, and never gave me the car. I de jure own the car, but do not de facto own it. Or, in other words, I am legally speaking the owner of the car but I do not possess it, have access to it, or am able to use it.
Yeah, when I buy something online using PayPal it gets recorded in an RDBMS. Then I get the product. Simple, efficient, no problem.
Similarly, I can buy a car with crypto but the seller took the money, disappeared, and never gave me the car.
Crypto isn’t solving a problem here. It’s layering nonsense on top of what we have been perfectly fine doing with ledgers for at least 600 years.
I'm sorry, but did you even read my replies? You are not engaging with the point I was replying about (to me the perceived difference in the usage of "ownership" by you and GoingMerry), and you seem to reply to me with "gotchas" about things that I've not argued or I've already addressed.
Your point is not meaningful. I am aware that the blockchain is decentralized. What I am saying is that there is no need for this decentralization of information. Every current application of a blockchain so far would be done better as a centralized database.
A centralized database can be manipulated and isn't transparent, e.g. lots of people are wary of donating to charities because they don't trust that the money ends up at its intended location. With a decentralized blockchain it could theoretically be possible to publicly verify how much money is donated, and how it's utilized.
You don't de facto own anything on the chain because there's little or no de jure to enforce ownership except the consensus among parties. The various chains are so fragile, both in terms of software architecture and governance, that everyone's stake can evaporate or be stolen at any time, without recourse.
Thank you for at least engaging with what I was talking about.
Admittedly my understanding of these things is mostly based on learning the basics of how Bitcoin works many years ago and sporadic updates since, so there may definitely be blind spots.
First, can you explain why you think (significant) de jure enforcement of ownership is necessary to say you de facto own something? As far as I can tell, this is not the case. Let's say I have an apple in my home. I de facto own the apple. I could eat it if I want. Maybe I took that apple from an apple tree belonging to someone else. If there's no de jure ownership established and no system in place to forcefully return the apple (i.e. align de jury and de facto ownership), by my reading of what you wrote you would say I do not de facto own the apple. But I possess the apple, I can access it, I could use it as I like.
Second, just to make sure I am understanding you correctly, you think that within blockchains (e.g. the Bitcoin blockchain) a user's control of some specific set of information on that blockchain (e.g. the amount of Bitcoin at an address) is so fragile that it could be lost at any moment, that their keys could no longer be used to update the same set of information on the chain? If so, that sounds like a very lucrative opportunity. Is this something you think is inherent to the use of blockchains, or just how they are being used by various parties?
IMO the core problem with block chain here is that the "guarantee of de jure" can't be appealed - let's say someone steals your crypto wallet: you have no recourse, you lost your everything.
This is a common problem that crypto doesn't and can't solve, by design, but that the traditional banking system does: they're designed to be reversible in exactly this case. Yes, common scams route around this (e.g. by insisting you transfer by wire), but they also mark themselves as sketchy by that very nature. Also, the scams only change the de-facto here, there's nothing the scammers can do to block your de jure claim other than show they aren't scammers. In contrast, block chain scammers can steal your de jure, because you've explicitly defined de jure as what's written on the blockchain.
I agree with you in general about the lack of recourse, but I think that's also central to the point of discussing the different viewpoints or usage of "ownership" here.
Specifically, it appears to me that people in general would agree with a statement like "I should be able to keep owning what I own", the difference is in their opinion on how to achieve that.
One path is what we generally have, a system of intangible rights, i.e. de jure ownership, set up so that it can forcefully change the de facto ownership to align the situation de jure and de facto. The advantage is that a victim of theft, scams, or frauds can more easily be made whole, which I think most people agree is a positive.
The risk here at least tends to be that such power cuts two ways, and it could be misused against you. Think for instance scams where people fraudulently claim they haven't received what they ordered and a payment processor or shopping site reverses the charge.
In other words, this approach is stronger against someone fraudulently gaining de facto ownership, but weaker against someone fraudulently claiming de jure ownership.
The other path then is to make it so that no external force has the ability to change the de facto owner, only the de facto owner themselves. You generally lose the ability to recover stolen value, but you also ensure that the de jure enforcement cannot be unjustly used against you.
In other words, this approach is stronger against someone fraudulently claiming de jure ownership, but weaker against someone fraudulently gaining de facto ownership.
I think this difference is at least part of what GoingMerry was getting at, and that it is a contributing reason to why people misunderstand each other when talking about ownership.
(Text in brackets above are editorial clarifications according to my understanding.)
In other words, what if, for better or for worse, you were in total control of what you de facto own? What could we build on such a system? Are there benefits or opportunities we haven't considered or discovered?
Sidenotes:
I don't think I've explicitly defined that what is on the chain is the de jure state. De jure state will be defined by legal systems on how to treat these things, and you may very well have de jure ownership of an amount of cryptocurrency whether or not the legal system is able to enforce that if it's stolen.
After all, I'm pretty sure that fraudulently getting someone's cryptocurrency is still illegal and de jure ownership does not change, it's just that if you can prove it you might rather be compensated with something of equal value according to the legal system, such as national currency if the crypto cannot be seized and returned.
I would also like to make it clear that I am not arguing for or against the specific use of either of these paths here, only trying to build my own understanding of these things.
In general I agree with you - you need governments to “back” any physical asset for ownership. Or have another way to stop people taking those assets by force. This is what people in crypto call “real world asset” use case (or RWA). I’m not very interested in this use case (yet).
But there ARE ways to own digital assets using blockchain right now. You can own currency. You can own access to digital goods and spaces. You can own vaults which hold currencies and digital keys. And that last one enables is ownership of online communities which is what really interests me. Essentially you can make a smart contract that will disburse stored assets whenever certain rules are met (ie at least 50% of tokens vote to disburse).
That’s pretty cool! Because the rules are programmable, you can start to experiment with different kinds of communities and token mechanisms. That’s what’s really interesting to me.
Regarding RWA: I’ll be honest and say EVENTUALLY I believe governments/institutions (including banks) will use blockchain to “back” real-world assets. Perhaps a blockchain that has not yet been invented. Why? Global consensus. People say blockchain could be replaced with a $5 AWS server, and technically that is true…but you would be hard-pressed to find anyone willing to trust that $5 server to hold their transaction records. Banks currently spend billions of dollars securing their own networks and connecting to other bank networks. It’s a hodge podge of technology to allow you to transfer value from one bank to another (even in the same country).
Global consensus is a solved problem on Bitcoin and Ethereum. And it’s an environmentally-friendly solved problem on Ethereum.
So yeah, I am still bullish on RWA long term. And short term the current use cases are really interesting to me anyway.
Pet peeve time, sorry.
The early internet was never a solution in search of a problem. Universities, the military etc. had computers. They found that they could more things with their computers networked together.
Doing even more things by connecting those networks together was not a big leap of logic. Email was a killer app from day one, as was file sharing.
The innovative idea was to keep the network dumb, to push all the capabilities to the endpoints, and that together with the WWW providing a user friendly interface lead to the explosion of usage, where a lot of things, some of them stupid, were tried. Many failed, some got wildly successful. But there was never a period of uselessness.
Yup, and blockchain was never a solution in search of a problem - people used it immediately to start sending money p2p without interference.
And many people said the internet was a solution in search of a problem despite all the people using networked computers. I lived through it. For a long time it was just a thing nerds used to send pictures and documents (and porn) to each other. Not worthy of notice of “normal people” - perhaps worthy of scorn.
The way people talk about blockchain feels the same as they way they talked about internet, to me. I’m just one person tho.
Maybe it's because I'm in the EU, more specifically the SEPA area. I was sending money to people without interference before the blockchain. ^^
And even here in Germany, where many people could not imagine why a non-company entity (vulgo: person) would want to have a website, having an email address was considered very useful. (Maybe those people didn't consider email to be a part of the internet? I don't know.)
Oh, and a small nitpick: You aren't sending money on the blockchain. You are putting numbers into a database. The day I can pay my taxes in Bitcoin it is money, but not before. (Yes, "fiat money" is also just numbers in a database, but the powers that be say that is money and until the Libertarian Uprising it will stay that way.)
I have to admit this thread was a little tougher than I expected lol.
I agree with this. A lot of crypto stuff makes me cringe (the users / sexism and some of the applications). It's also really interesting to think about the potential even when I don't always know how to get there. To work in blockchain feels like being early to a change that has yet to happen. And for better and for worse, there are no true rules or norms.
This is different from your direct relationship interest. However, I've noticed a lot of people are (reasonably) skeptical of how the valuation capabilities make it easy to turn it into another finance clusterfudge. I feel like it's kind of inevitable, and that everything already has a value we don't see or pay. It'd be interesting to me if most of our interactions could be modeled as transactions with publicly verifiable code. (Of course, it also sounds a bit dystopian that everything can be ascribed a value. And we'd all need to learn how to manage different identities, unless we want to get social engineered to hell and back.)
Right? Tildes was founded on some of the same espoused values on web3 (self-sovereignty, transparency), so you’d think you’d find more users here.
There seems to be irrational hatred for it. I’m not sure why. Even with AI doing things like taking people’s jobs and IP, discussions never seem to get as emotional as quickly as when you talk about blockchain.
Why do you think that is?
I don’t understand why you think tildes and web3 have the same founding principles. In every way I can think of, tildes is strictly the opposite of what you say. It is entirely controlled by 1 person. People do not have self-sovereignty. We get complaints here every so often that tilderinos don’t “own” their topics, insofar as the title and tags can be edited by other people. The handful of times deimos does ban someone, it’s usually a very quiet affair with very little transparency. All of these traits are explicit ideals of tildes. I don’t see how any of this is identical to web3.
Tildes is also a response to the over-monetisation of the internet (source: blog post 1), whereas web3 is in large part about further monetising the internet.
I'm pretty sure the 95% scam ratio is doing the heavy lifting. In fact I think that percentage is treating the whole blockchain industry a bit too leniently. I have yet to hear of a useful blockchain-related product. Every time anyone explains what one of the good ones is supposed to do it's all "decentralized transparency freedoms" and no indication of why not just use a database. Or why build this at all (every NFT-adjacent product ever).
AI can be threatening but it can at least also be funny. Blockchain stuff seems like everyone involved is hoping to offload their digital tulips to some other moron right before the bottom drops out of the market.
If I had to guess… I think Tildes probably optimises for skeptical, utility-oriented people. The bar to justify a new technology is high. (I’ve also noticed similar, though not as passionate dismissals on like, pet projects people share on Hackernews— a lot of people just asking "why bother?") Plus, I think crypto probably does attract the kind of people I don’t like to interact with in tech (hype-chasers and scammy types). I assume it’s the same for everyone else.
As far as the general polarization (not Tildes specifically), I am thinking it’s such a broad category that people champion what they’ve gathered from others but like, but don’t necessarily learn much afterwards (not unreasonably if they’re wary of the scam potential). For me, I remember having to rethink how I thought about trust and had to look past NFT monkeys before I could appreciate the vision of what people try to craft when they design a blockchain protocol or L2. And although I’m interested in it today, it’s such a big space that I still struggle to fully engage in all topics around it— so I think it’s hard to passively develop an opinion. You really have to sit down, read about it, and contextualize it in the way assets and identity work and function today. Then you have to ground yourself and ask whether centralization is desirable / inherent or not for the use case in mind. It’s hard!
What are your thoughts on it?
Replying to this comment but wanted to thank @paolia @weldawadyathink and @jess for responding in good faith as well.
Personally I think the people who are in the space are the ones who “need” it for one reason or another. They can’t use the traditional financial system (ex: criminal, unbanked, poor) or they bought in early and have their identity wrapped into it or they are true believers for whom blockchain is the change they want to see in the world (I’m in that last camp btw).
Outside of those who need it, of what use is blockchain? None at all. You can say this about ANY technology (ie I don’t yet need AI), blockchain is just early enough that the use cases aren’t there yet for a mass audience.
That being said, I do believe those use cases are coming, eventually. I look at our institutions and it feels like they have failed us. COVID and climate changes are “solved problems” scientifically and economically- and yet the way society’s incentives are set up we can’t actually take optimal long-term paths for these global issues.
I’m building a project that is simply NOT VC-fundable. It’s a public good (non-profit). I could have decided to walk away, but instead I harnessed the energy in the blockchain community to make it work. Now we are in public beta. Many other creators in blockchain are like me - non-VC backable. I find energy in being around people with similar struggles.
I’ll stop here, but I’ll just say I understand the criticism of blockchain but I still don’t understand the negative emotion in most online comment threads. Maybe that’s more about online comment threads than blockchain, though.
I understand the appeal of blockchain, but I still don't understand the positive emotion. The negative emotion is backlash against the apparently unwarranted positive emotion.
I will assume, against statistics, that you mean something that is actually legitimately useful to the public, and not "generic blockchain startup that happens to be structured as a non-profit". What does this mean?
Do you mean you got a bunch of people excited enough about your thing to give you funding? That seems unrelated to blockchain, except to the extent that the people you got excited happened to also be excited about blockchain.
Do you mean you got funding sent to you via cryptocurrencies? I don't consider this interesting; you just as easily could have gotten wire transfers of fiat money.
Do you mean that you made a blockchain thing that interested people who are interested in blockchain? That's too tautological to say your thing is interesting in any other way.
Do you mean you made your own currency/token/etc. and gathered funding that way? That's a variant of the other cases.
I ask these not for answers (though I'd be interested to hear them if you care to provide them), but in an attempt to spell out exactly why I find blockchain proponents' arguments uncompelling: the parts that are useful are already done better by existing financial technology, and the rest is hype. I think blockchain people often conflate the two.
Public beta is no joke! Just wanted to say congrats: it's great that you're making something in the space and doing it outside of the VC / typical investor paradigm. I think it's the only way to move the needle for an early technology and indie hacker types really inspire me.
There is no other entity I would trust to arbiter ownership aside from the democratic state. With all its biases, abuses and imperfections, it is still the res publica, the public matter. The state is our collective property. It is the only entity to which we grant the monopoly of power, so therefore the only entity that can send men with guns if someone tries to live in your house.
What you're saying is true, but that's been true of all society. Things are only mine because society agrees they're like, and the enforcer of that is state violence. I'm not all that interested in changing that core concept.
TL/DR - Still nearly fully untapped potential long-term, and I dare you to convince me otherwise.
I’m no Web3 engineer, just a nerd who still believes the internet is a net positive and has and will make the world a better place. So, at risk of restating the obvious here, I’d like to kind of flip some of what @unkz was talking about on its head. Can someone here break my hope in the promise of blockchain by explaining why blockchain ISN’T a massive groundbreaking shift in technology with huge potential to do good?
Setting aside what I believe are short-term innovation/technical issues (financial transactions, scams, speculation, and environmental impact), below is a basic summary of my understanding of how blockchain (and smart contracts) work, and why it’s a.huge f***ing deal and ultimately will do real good. Please keep in mind I am nerdy, but no engineer, so while I have a limited understanding of Level 2, gas prices, and rollups, I don’t know what validators or RPC nodes are.
Here we go… as I understand it, the fundamental innovation of blockchain/web3/smart contracts is that it brings the capability of what I believe is called a “trustless” system in computing to the internet itself.
It enables global, programmatically-created, math-based, perfectly trustworthy 3rd entities against which we can verify conditions and base decisions. At the most fundamental level, internet communications that have been going from A to B can, with blockchain, be VERIFIED using the internet itself (or more specifically, data shared/viewed/verified to be true across the network by all parties involved in said blockchain, thereby making it a perfect truth to check against). This is an entirely new ability. Previously there was a need for some human-led third party.
This is why It’s a major paradigm shift. It’s also some of the same fundamental concepts that have made BitTorrent unstoppable. This core concept is why I still am buying the promise of it. It’s such a fundamental “add” to the internet - turning it from a communications protocol into something more by way of the unique collective nature of networks - that I just can’t believe it’s not a major net good.
Forgive me for that long basic-bitch retelling of the crypto-bro’s songbook, but it’s this core idea that I want gunned down, if anyone can put it in a way I can understand. Consider this a gauntlet thrown. ;-)
This is basically just wrong. Every mathematical “guarantee” in dapps breaks down as soon as you introduce oracles, and without oracles dapps are basically useless. The only thing you can trust is that the dapp will accurately execute the contract under the assumption that the oracle is trustworthy. Also, oracles are as human led as any other transaction manager in the real world.
Don’t take my word for it though, the oracle problem is well known and here it is explained in the ethereum documentation:
https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/oracles/
After a quick look, that seems like the same old “how do we trust anything on the web” issue, not a failure of the core idea of checking against a blockchain. I can fully see how it limits dapp development… but of course any app or dapp is only as good as the data fed in. So I’m failing to see how it’s wrong in any sense of it being a blockchain tech issue.
Yeah, the point is the blockchain doesn't do a single thing to improve this situation. There is no magic trust bullet in the blockchain. The blockchain doesn't do anything useful.
I'm sure you've seen this documentary recommended before, but I'd point you to Folding Ideas' Line Goes Up. I've included a time-stamped link to a discussion of DAOs because I feel that section best explains how blockchain technologies fundamentally don't change anything about how the real world works.
If the underlying technology was truly so transformative, I feel like there would be bigger adoption outside of scams, money laundering, and speculative assets. It's cool tech. I just don't think it's that important. It hasn't done much in the past decade, and I don't see any major changes coming down the pipeline that would cause my opinion to change.
I might have a new favorite YT channel- I’d heard of the channel before- I bookmarked that thread on YT recommendations a while back and this was on there, but never looked into it. I like him. And holy crap was that damning of DAOs. Now I’m not sure what to think. A good chunk of that criticism is justifiably aimed at scam culture, and it sure sounded on point. I can’t tell anymore whether the arguments about added layers of complexity outweigh the benefits is just a temporary issue or if it’s a full stop dealbreaker. I do believe the startup and scam economies are definitely not helping to get any real-world implementations off the ground.
Does anyone know of ANY blockchain implementation that is part of real world work- like verifying logistics in distribution channels or any of those early-day startup pitches?
Yeah that YT channel is one of the few where I immediately drop everything when there's something new out. Everything he's done in the past several years has been great, definitely watch his other stuff.
I’m with you buddy. TBH I am not sure why ANYONE would defend our existing system of verifying things. Banks are objectively terrible. Identity systems (government-issued, credit ratings, cookie tracking) are objectively terrible.
The idea that blockchain is a lateral move in terms of capability is a red herring. The benefit isn’t additional capability (even though blockchain definitely allows more capability), the benefit is to have open, public systems instead of closed, private systems.
Fully agree. This reminded me of how long Linux sucked at being a daily-driver workstation. Maybe the real issue is just that collaborative open systems just take years to fight through the hucksters? I like that idea.
What catches on will catch on and what doesn't won't. The Fediverse and other p2p hosting seems like it has a niche, and depending on how open the internet is going to remain in the upcoming years, might be something to keep an eye on. NFTs on the other hand are just Xbox avatar t shirts that promise to be compatible with third party markets who recognize the ownership of Xbox avatar tshirts and allow you to display them on your digital person, without having to rebuy them on their own PlayStation store or having a disagreement with Nintendo if their pants are depicted with the Xbox shirt. In between those are probably something that's going to change the world, and yet another hundred ways you can rebuy your music collection.
I'd like a simple, concise, logical explanation of Web 3.0 without a host of buzzwords tbh.
One that simply answers two questions: What is it and what does it do?
The core idea of web3 is a mechanism to have a tamper-proof database.
The way to make the database temper proof is essentially to share it between a lot of people and make it in everyone's self interest to be part of the majority consensus of the current state of the database. The pioneer here is Bitcoin which stores the current owners of all the Bitcoins in its database. To incentivize people to participate in maintaining the database and keep every individual's self interest aligned with the majority, people get some Bitcoin for doing so.
That mechanism of creating a tamper-proof database is extended by web3 to add more information to the database. They all use basically the same "digital currency" mechanism as Bitcoin to create a tamper-proof database, but they store additional things in the database. Notably for example Etherium stores small programs in the database that can be used to manipulate the data (think "stored procedures" if you are familiar with databases).
Using some variation of such a database is the defining feature of web3.
Since the basic foundation of all of these databases is a "digital currency" mechanism derived from Bitcoin and that digital currency is used as an incentive to keep the database running and tamper-proof, monetization and speculation with the things using that database comes naturally. Often that promise of potential value is a main selling point to users and why those things are built in the first place.
For an alternative approach, you could read about certificate transparency, which is a decentralized system that secures encrypted connections to websites. It uses cryptographic signing to make certain kinds of shenanigans by certificate issuers easy to detect.
No cryptocurrency is involved and it doesn't outright prevent shenanigans, but it does seem to keep certificate issuers honest in practice. I think it's pretty neat and I'd like to see this approach used more.
Interesting. Thanks very much.
It should be noted that the phrase "Tamper Proof" is probably a bit misleading as there is plenty one can do to tamper with a blockchain outside of the chain itself and the "Tamper Proof" nature just makes it so that there's no recourse when the outside the chain tampering goes down.
If you give someone 10,000 Bitcoin in exchange for a couple pizzas and they just take the Bitcoin and disappear without providing any pizza, you've lost your Bitcoin and there's no mechanism to get it back, whereas your purchase of pizza via a debit card has protections that will "Tamper" with the ledger to ensure that you get your money back when due pizza does not materialize. This has been mentioned elsewhere here in the thread, but it's called The Oracle Problem and it basically boils down to the fact that you can only trust a blockchain to be accurate about itself, it can't do anything to square its internal state with reality AND MORE IMPORTANTLY it can't do anything to make reality conform to its internal state. The fact is that there's more than enough that lives outside the chain (almost everything in actual fact) to make that a rife playground for troublemakers and it's why literally no other system in the history of society has evolved to fill this niche, it assumes a lot of spherical cows to function as intended. It demands a TON of trust (I'd argue more than what our traditional system does) for what's supposed to be a trustless system.
Regardless, Randall Munroe said it best all the way back in 2009: https://xkcd.com/538/
If the Government wants to "Tamper" with your ledger, they're not going to be thwarted because you have great crypto protecting you and they probably don't actually care about you to begin with so the whole exercise is a farce. (Humorously enough, Randall was probably wrong about the wrench in the alt-text, this bad boy adjusted for inflation would have been $4.80 back in 2009: https://www.harborfreight.com/14-in-steel-pipe-wrench-61349.html)
Thanks very much. Very interesting info.
I've always marvelled at the trust issue crypto people go on about. In my view you have to trust someone and that is a very good point about the amount of trust needed.