6 ms·

You Don't Own Web3

38 points by whoisninja 5y ago

laputan_machine 5y ago
Can someone explain to me what even "Web3" means? It seems like a nonsense buzzword. I mean "Web 2.0" meant ajax, right? And even then it's a silly difference to make, like calling every new addition to the ECMAscript standard a new version of the web...
- sys_64738 5y ago
  Isn’t Web3 meant to be decentralized sort of like peer to peer? Or it used to but maybe that’s not a thing anymore.
  - eswat 5y ago
    Depends on which “Web3” community you're talking to: ethereum, dApps, wallets etc. vs scuttlebutt, dat, urbit, etc.
    - jazzyjackson 5y ago
      I hesitate to ask, is urbit a thing? are daily active users of daily volume available anywhere?
- longitudinal93 5y ago
  SV luminary Jordan Hall spends some time answering your query in this interview on Rebel Wisdom: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o32x9qx3Umo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o32x9qx3Umo
  - m_ke 5y ago
    How can you take his technobabble seriously?
- manigandham 5y ago
  There are 3 main features: 1) Decentralized apps (dapps) - Backend of websites/service that run as smart contracts on a particular blockchain instead of a centralized infrastructure. More resilient and inherently scalable. 2) Decentralized identity - Instead of creating user accounts for every site, identities are just wallet addresses. People maintain their own data and use their own keys to sign transactions. 3) Decentralized ownership (records) - NFTs are secure records of payment for ownership of a digital asset and can be traded easily. The theme is that everything is available and keeps running without censorship, corruption, or other influence getting in the way, as long as the chain itself is still running. Whether there's serious utility in that is still unknown. I also think it's unlikely given how much we're tied to physical bodies and sovereign nations with their own laws and politics.
- vmception 5y ago
  its mostly talking about how its a platform to build uncensorable products. that's the primary distinction that web3 associated platforms offer. think of it like Shopify apps - the SaaS products that developers try to sell to merchants to make some part of the merchant's life easier. Those developers are just trying to make money. web3 offers a similar kind of platform that isn't dependent on Shopify continuing to care. there are many things to make easier and it is incredibly lucrative to do so. the "decentralized" part is just a distraction to derail conversations, but degrees of decentralization are optional.
starklevnertz 5y ago
Can someone explain what is meant by this?
- treelovinhippie 5y ago
- delnabla 5y ago
  Most of the "web3 VC's" with NFT avis and .eth handles (see Chris Dixon) are obnoxiously tweeting about how "web2" sucks and that you don't have any ownership in it whereas "web3" is a decentralized utopia where you own every single piece of information about yourself and have the ultimate freedom to do anything.
  - arnvald 5y ago
    I can't believe some of the tweets they post. Things like "web3 is the first time you can own a piece of the internet" (I'm paraphrasing) are so bluntly wrong I don't understand why people fall for this.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  It may be related, there is a video making the rounds of a crypto-CEO explaining Web3 to a congressional committee [0][5m56s], the major theme being that owning tokens is part ownership in the platform, the old Web is owned by tech giants, the new web is owned by anyone who holds a token. The whole thing reads to me as sleight of hand, too slick, but I couldn’t place my finger on what the lie/misrepresentation was. Nonetheless, the comments are glowing reviews, best explanation of blockchain ever !!!1! I don’t suppose Dorsey is responding directly to this video, tho at 4M views it is worth contradicting, but “Web3 is owned by the users” is the latest salesmenship for NFT-flippers. [0] https://youtu.be/pSTNhBlfV_s https://youtu.be/pSTNhBlfV_s PS sure would be nice to link to congressional testimony without an ad pre-roll, but alas
  - anaganisk 5y ago
    Ao basically more tokens someone buys more he owns the platform lol, just like how internet was slowly bought by corporates. Do these crypto pedlers even realise what they say? Internet on day one was decentralised, and pretty much owned by none, no regulations. The as people started joining Ads started then hackers joined, then came in scammers, then came in silicon valley unicorns who claim to make world a better place by showing more ads. Now web3 is just a dumb BS, they peddle to make money. If there is money to be made, govts and corporations wont let people have it.
sharmin123 5y ago
jjordan 5y ago
Jack is what we lovingly refer to as a Bitcoin maximalist. They are unmoved by innovations that happen outside of the Bitcoin project and tend to call everything that isn't Bitcoin centralized garbage.
- unmole 5y ago
  > Jack is what we lovingly refer to as a Bitcoin maximalist. What is a not so loving term?
  - tata71 5y ago
    Objectively? "Dinosaur coin lover"
  - malermeister 5y ago
    [flagged]
- yob28 5y ago
- rvz 5y ago
  There you go. Ethereum maximalists will do anything to pump their investments up by screeching 'web3', 'NFTs' and 'DAOs' and Bitcoin maximalists will also do the same thing. Well I ask both of these maxis, can I use either of them to pay for my groceries quickly, efficiently and cheaply without overpaying for the fees and using a complicated contraptions? If it still doesn't make sense to buy popcorn with bitcoin [0] then what hope is there to be better than Apple / Google Pay and everything else with payments? [0] https://ambcrypto.com/is-it-really-ideal-to-buy-popcorn-with-bitcoin-today/ https://ambcrypto.com/is-it-really-ideal-to-buy-popcorn-with...
  - RamblingCTO 5y ago
    Arguing that Ethereum is a currency is just a straw man and you know it.
yob28 5y ago
mnd999 5y ago
Because it doesn’t exist yet. Sure some folks bought too much weed with their bitcoinz and used the name for some crypto-nonsense but that isn’t web3 because web implies mass adoption.
DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
if Web3 were such a success they would cease talking about the future and simply show us _the_ killer app that everyone would immediately jump to. The "Web2" would be an empty space pretty soon. Yet it hasn't happened despite over a decade of hot-air, big techno-gobble-dygook and made up words invented to dazzle an ignorant audience. But there is no such thing as a killer feature that can't be done better with what we have. And they're left with peddling NFT's, cryptokitties or MLM scams a la Dr. Ruja's "OneCoin". It's been "wE aWe vEWy close to bweakthrough" from the Ethereum grifters Buterin & Woods since the first time their garbage polluted the air. The people at IOTA have been selling homeopathic crypto since "Kerl" and "Curl-P" while insisting that collusion resistance isn't the main goal of a hash function. Until today no explanation what has happened to their deals with CISCO, Volkswagen and Microsoft which they one day announced were implementing IOTA in their products (there was no such thing and these companies didn't know anything about these claims). Craig Wright super-grifter continues to claim he is Satoshi and hoping he can bend reality into believing that 2+2=5 instead of simply signing a message with the old key. There are 2 types of people in crypto: the scammers and the suckers, and sometimes they overlap because once you start believing your own scam to be reality it's only a matter of time until you're somebody else's mark. that said, bitcoin is a great technology for drug markets so that addicts no longer have to risk their lives with products where there is no review. It's the next best thing to legalizing drugs in societies that are still far away from that. there are very few applications where blockchains make sense (e-sports and games, the SWIFT banking "backend"). Yet even for those a central database is a better technological, and business fit than coins and blockchains while also not being as environmentally damaging. If all the crypto ecosystem would disappear all at once today nobody would notice (other than some people with aggressive investing habits losing their value). The world would literally just shrug and move on.
- rvz 5y ago
  Exactly. Most of all these cryptocurrencies have failed and they will not survive regulations if they were to come in. > there are very few applications where blockchains make sense (e-sports and games, the SWIFT banking "backend"). Yet even for those a central database is a better technological, and business fit than coins and blockchains while also not being as environmentally damaging. The banks will just use Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) instead and will pick either XRP, Stellar, etc to use for that purpose.
seumars 5y ago
I feel like the only people who take the idea of web3 seriously are those who like to tweet about it.
NoraCodes 5y ago
Web 3.0 means embedded semantic metadata and has since 2012. This nonsense can fuck off. :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
- whoisninja 5y ago
  yes absolutely, these VCs have scams like Ethereum which they claim to be p2p networks but all the people making money of this don't even know where the peers are on this p2p network. The validation nodes run on handful of hosted nodes on a software(ethereum) that changes it's source code and make it backward incompatible all the time, making it centralized at both who develop that code AND the handful of nodes that run it. a16z has no shame perpetuating these total scams.
- RamblingCTO 5y ago
  This tech never really took off and is a stillbirth.
  - whoisninja 5y ago
    it's also a 70% premine token (exactly a security) just that they did it under a Swiss based foundation so SEC can't touch them "yet"
  - mark_l_watson 5y ago
    I wish I could disagree with you. Of my four last jobs, two were semantic web/knowledge graph and two have been deep learning. I get more satisfaction from ML/deep learning work. That said, from a knowledge representation perspective, I love the idea of knowledge graphs, and sometimes they do have real efficacy.
    - RamblingCTO 5y ago
      I totally agree. My thesis advisor was doing semantic search research, I was the one doing ML. I never understood the need to organize information when you can just throw ML at it. But the research might be a stepping stone in AI further down the line, when you need to build exhaustive knowledge instead of "intuitive" knowledge based on pattern matching. So who knows what it's good for.
RamblingCTO 5y ago
I don't understand how you can't see blockchain/crypto as a growing tech where they might succeed, evolve and grow into the promises that contributors hope for. Why are most people taking a stance either in the crypto bro corner or in the "I can't buy popcorn with it, mah energy hurr durr" corner? The internet wasn't perfect from day one. How about seeing what sticks, what evolves, what problems are being worked on? It's also totally ok that we might not have the best problems to solve with blockchains, that's how science itself also works. Let's be critical but open to something new? How bout dat?
- vmception 5y ago
  People also miss how much money they can make... actually helping those things reach their promises! It's like, how can a person working at a Web 2.0 nation destabilizing ad conglomerate really lob criticism at the people trying?
- satyrnein 5y ago
  I think the "wait and see" crowd just doesn't comment as much, because they have no strong assertions to make (yet).
  - shatteredgate 5y ago
    I used to be a "wait and see" person until I actually took a hard and critical look at a lot of things in the crypto space. It seems evident now that most of it is just poor reinventions of existing financial services, and in some cases (NFTs) just abject scams.
    - tablespoon 5y ago
      > I used to be a "wait and see" person until I actually took a hard and critical look at a lot of things in the crypto space. It seems evident now that most of it is just poor reinventions of existing financial services, and in some cases (NFTs) just abject scams. It's pretty obvious that "crypto" (e.g. blockchain stuff) is just clever technology in search of a problem to solve. Its touts keep inventing problems for it, but of out all of them, the only one that's actually stuck is "speculative investment to throw cash at." I don't think they'll ever succeed, because the problems they identify are already solved by existing technologies and their solutions make worse tradeoffs.
xhkkffbf 5y ago
It just so happens I purchased an NFT of a gif with the letters "Web3" in it. So, yes, I do own it. :-)

38 points by whoisninja 5y ago

Can someone explain to me what even "Web3" means? It seems like a nonsense buzzword. I mean "Web 2.0" meant ajax, right? And even then it's a silly difference to make, like calling every new addition to the ECMAscript standard a new version of the web...

sys_64738 5y ago
Isn’t Web3 meant to be decentralized sort of like peer to peer? Or it used to but maybe that’s not a thing anymore.
- eswat 5y ago
  Depends on which “Web3” community you're talking to: ethereum, dApps, wallets etc. vs scuttlebutt, dat, urbit, etc.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    I hesitate to ask, is urbit a thing? are daily active users of daily volume available anywhere?
longitudinal93 5y ago
SV luminary Jordan Hall spends some time answering your query in this interview on Rebel Wisdom: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o32x9qx3Umo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o32x9qx3Umo
- m_ke 5y ago
  How can you take his technobabble seriously?
manigandham 5y ago
There are 3 main features: 1) Decentralized apps (dapps) - Backend of websites/service that run as smart contracts on a particular blockchain instead of a centralized infrastructure. More resilient and inherently scalable. 2) Decentralized identity - Instead of creating user accounts for every site, identities are just wallet addresses. People maintain their own data and use their own keys to sign transactions. 3) Decentralized ownership (records) - NFTs are secure records of payment for ownership of a digital asset and can be traded easily. The theme is that everything is available and keeps running without censorship, corruption, or other influence getting in the way, as long as the chain itself is still running. Whether there's serious utility in that is still unknown. I also think it's unlikely given how much we're tied to physical bodies and sovereign nations with their own laws and politics.
vmception 5y ago
its mostly talking about how its a platform to build uncensorable products. that's the primary distinction that web3 associated platforms offer. think of it like Shopify apps - the SaaS products that developers try to sell to merchants to make some part of the merchant's life easier. Those developers are just trying to make money. web3 offers a similar kind of platform that isn't dependent on Shopify continuing to care. there are many things to make easier and it is incredibly lucrative to do so. the "decentralized" part is just a distraction to derail conversations, but degrees of decentralization are optional.

starklevnertz 5y ago

Can someone explain what is meant by this?

treelovinhippie 5y ago
delnabla 5y ago
Most of the "web3 VC's" with NFT avis and .eth handles (see Chris Dixon) are obnoxiously tweeting about how "web2" sucks and that you don't have any ownership in it whereas "web3" is a decentralized utopia where you own every single piece of information about yourself and have the ultimate freedom to do anything.
- arnvald 5y ago
  I can't believe some of the tweets they post. Things like "web3 is the first time you can own a piece of the internet" (I'm paraphrasing) are so bluntly wrong I don't understand why people fall for this.
jazzyjackson 5y ago
It may be related, there is a video making the rounds of a crypto-CEO explaining Web3 to a congressional committee [0][5m56s], the major theme being that owning tokens is part ownership in the platform, the old Web is owned by tech giants, the new web is owned by anyone who holds a token. The whole thing reads to me as sleight of hand, too slick, but I couldn’t place my finger on what the lie/misrepresentation was. Nonetheless, the comments are glowing reviews, best explanation of blockchain ever !!!1! I don’t suppose Dorsey is responding directly to this video, tho at 4M views it is worth contradicting, but “Web3 is owned by the users” is the latest salesmenship for NFT-flippers. [0] https://youtu.be/pSTNhBlfV_s https://youtu.be/pSTNhBlfV_s PS sure would be nice to link to congressional testimony without an ad pre-roll, but alas
- anaganisk 5y ago
  Ao basically more tokens someone buys more he owns the platform lol, just like how internet was slowly bought by corporates. Do these crypto pedlers even realise what they say? Internet on day one was decentralised, and pretty much owned by none, no regulations. The as people started joining Ads started then hackers joined, then came in scammers, then came in silicon valley unicorns who claim to make world a better place by showing more ads. Now web3 is just a dumb BS, they peddle to make money. If there is money to be made, govts and corporations wont let people have it.

sharmin123 5y ago

jjordan 5y ago

Jack is what we lovingly refer to as a Bitcoin maximalist. They are unmoved by innovations that happen outside of the Bitcoin project and tend to call everything that isn't Bitcoin centralized garbage.

unmole 5y ago
> Jack is what we lovingly refer to as a Bitcoin maximalist. What is a not so loving term?
- tata71 5y ago
  Objectively? "Dinosaur coin lover"
- malermeister 5y ago
  [flagged]
yob28 5y ago
rvz 5y ago
There you go. Ethereum maximalists will do anything to pump their investments up by screeching 'web3', 'NFTs' and 'DAOs' and Bitcoin maximalists will also do the same thing. Well I ask both of these maxis, can I use either of them to pay for my groceries quickly, efficiently and cheaply without overpaying for the fees and using a complicated contraptions? If it still doesn't make sense to buy popcorn with bitcoin [0] then what hope is there to be better than Apple / Google Pay and everything else with payments? [0] https://ambcrypto.com/is-it-really-ideal-to-buy-popcorn-with-bitcoin-today/ https://ambcrypto.com/is-it-really-ideal-to-buy-popcorn-with...
- RamblingCTO 5y ago
  Arguing that Ethereum is a currency is just a straw man and you know it.

yob28 5y ago

mnd999 5y ago

Because it doesn’t exist yet. Sure some folks bought too much weed with their bitcoinz and used the name for some crypto-nonsense but that isn’t web3 because web implies mass adoption.

DyslexicAtheist 5y ago

if Web3 were such a success they would cease talking about the future and simply show us _the_ killer app that everyone would immediately jump to. The "Web2" would be an empty space pretty soon. Yet it hasn't happened despite over a decade of hot-air, big techno-gobble-dygook and made up words invented to dazzle an ignorant audience. But there is no such thing as a killer feature that can't be done better with what we have. And they're left with peddling NFT's, cryptokitties or MLM scams a la Dr. Ruja's "OneCoin". It's been "wE aWe vEWy close to bweakthrough" from the Ethereum grifters Buterin & Woods since the first time their garbage polluted the air. The people at IOTA have been selling homeopathic crypto since "Kerl" and "Curl-P" while insisting that collusion resistance isn't the main goal of a hash function. Until today no explanation what has happened to their deals with CISCO, Volkswagen and Microsoft which they one day announced were implementing IOTA in their products (there was no such thing and these companies didn't know anything about these claims). Craig Wright super-grifter continues to claim he is Satoshi and hoping he can bend reality into believing that 2+2=5 instead of simply signing a message with the old key. There are 2 types of people in crypto: the scammers and the suckers, and sometimes they overlap because once you start believing your own scam to be reality it's only a matter of time until you're somebody else's mark. that said, bitcoin is a great technology for drug markets so that addicts no longer have to risk their lives with products where there is no review. It's the next best thing to legalizing drugs in societies that are still far away from that. there are very few applications where blockchains make sense (e-sports and games, the SWIFT banking "backend"). Yet even for those a central database is a better technological, and business fit than coins and blockchains while also not being as environmentally damaging. If all the crypto ecosystem would disappear all at once today nobody would notice (other than some people with aggressive investing habits losing their value). The world would literally just shrug and move on.

rvz 5y ago
Exactly. Most of all these cryptocurrencies have failed and they will not survive regulations if they were to come in. > there are very few applications where blockchains make sense (e-sports and games, the SWIFT banking "backend"). Yet even for those a central database is a better technological, and business fit than coins and blockchains while also not being as environmentally damaging. The banks will just use Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) instead and will pick either XRP, Stellar, etc to use for that purpose.

seumars 5y ago

I feel like the only people who take the idea of web3 seriously are those who like to tweet about it.

NoraCodes 5y ago

Web 3.0 means embedded semantic metadata and has since 2012. This nonsense can fuck off. :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

whoisninja 5y ago
yes absolutely, these VCs have scams like Ethereum which they claim to be p2p networks but all the people making money of this don't even know where the peers are on this p2p network. The validation nodes run on handful of hosted nodes on a software(ethereum) that changes it's source code and make it backward incompatible all the time, making it centralized at both who develop that code AND the handful of nodes that run it. a16z has no shame perpetuating these total scams.
RamblingCTO 5y ago
This tech never really took off and is a stillbirth.
- whoisninja 5y ago
  it's also a 70% premine token (exactly a security) just that they did it under a Swiss based foundation so SEC can't touch them "yet"
- mark_l_watson 5y ago
  I wish I could disagree with you. Of my four last jobs, two were semantic web/knowledge graph and two have been deep learning. I get more satisfaction from ML/deep learning work. That said, from a knowledge representation perspective, I love the idea of knowledge graphs, and sometimes they do have real efficacy.
  - RamblingCTO 5y ago
    I totally agree. My thesis advisor was doing semantic search research, I was the one doing ML. I never understood the need to organize information when you can just throw ML at it. But the research might be a stepping stone in AI further down the line, when you need to build exhaustive knowledge instead of "intuitive" knowledge based on pattern matching. So who knows what it's good for.

RamblingCTO 5y ago

I don't understand how you can't see blockchain/crypto as a growing tech where they might succeed, evolve and grow into the promises that contributors hope for. Why are most people taking a stance either in the crypto bro corner or in the "I can't buy popcorn with it, mah energy hurr durr" corner? The internet wasn't perfect from day one. How about seeing what sticks, what evolves, what problems are being worked on? It's also totally ok that we might not have the best problems to solve with blockchains, that's how science itself also works. Let's be critical but open to something new? How bout dat?

vmception 5y ago
People also miss how much money they can make... actually helping those things reach their promises! It's like, how can a person working at a Web 2.0 nation destabilizing ad conglomerate really lob criticism at the people trying?
satyrnein 5y ago
I think the "wait and see" crowd just doesn't comment as much, because they have no strong assertions to make (yet).
- shatteredgate 5y ago
  I used to be a "wait and see" person until I actually took a hard and critical look at a lot of things in the crypto space. It seems evident now that most of it is just poor reinventions of existing financial services, and in some cases (NFTs) just abject scams.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > I used to be a "wait and see" person until I actually took a hard and critical look at a lot of things in the crypto space. It seems evident now that most of it is just poor reinventions of existing financial services, and in some cases (NFTs) just abject scams. It's pretty obvious that "crypto" (e.g. blockchain stuff) is just clever technology in search of a problem to solve. Its touts keep inventing problems for it, but of out all of them, the only one that's actually stuck is "speculative investment to throw cash at." I don't think they'll ever succeed, because the problems they identify are already solved by existing technologies and their solutions make worse tradeoffs.

xhkkffbf 5y ago

It just so happens I purchased an NFT of a gif with the letters "Web3" in it. So, yes, I do own it. :-)