It's incredible to be able to go to different websites (Zapper, Zerion, OpenSea, etc.) and simply have all my data already exist -- without needing to create an account, export/import.
web3 makes me believe in a new era of the internet that isn't full of ads, cookie consent forms, dozens of sign-in services, tracking, etc.
An anonymous version of myself and my data exists everywhere. It's really a hackers dream.
No email accounts, no sign up forms, no credit card info, nothing.
I’m a lifelong convert to this tech now. I can’t ever imagine going back to sign up forms or sharing my personal data.
I can’t see how anyone who cares about their privacy isn’t hyper bullish about this.
For the average user, it’s not exceptionally helpful yet, but for power users like celebrities, politicians and executives, it is extremely valuable.
Where they go everyone else will go. Web3 has a massive future
Did you mean people with a lot at stake in regards to their public image?
https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/16/22627435/twitter-bluesky-...
I hope it remains that way.
Some do of course throw unnecessary signup pages before allowing you to connect your wallet. I immediately close the tab if I see that. They are the minority.
It's the web, obviously there aren't firm rules. The point is that most of the builders in the space are hackers that want a free and open web void of that nonsense.
And most of the protocols/services are profitable, so the builders have no incentive to track users or sell data.
If "web2" companies start moving into the space, I'm sure they will track and sell data like they do now. The goal is to create free and open alternatives of those products so you aren't forced to endure those tactics.
But with web3 + a VPN or Private Relay, you can probably do a fairly good job staying mostly anon.
You need an actual sepeculative market to price and offer these services.
Most of open source fails because they don't acknowledge this reality.
Normally, I’d have to make an account (and doge the obligatory “sign up with Google” button), fill a form, enter my credit card info, confirm my otp on the payment site, check my email for an authentication link before using the product.
Along the way, I would have to share my data with multiple third parties - the SaaS tool, my email provider, my credit card company, etc.
With this web3 approach, I don’t have to share this data with anyone. I don’t have to fill out forms. In fact, if I got my Ethereum from a P2P source, I can be completely anonymous.
At this point in the internet, if you can avoid giving Google et al your data, its an absolute win.
Things progress in many ways, and that is really important. Diversity of ideas and implementations of ideas spark real advances in unpredictable ways. What matters is that new things are being imagined, built and experience with them is being gained.
When I first got internet, it was 56 kbps, a single page took minutes to load, and it was so expensive that I couldn’t stay online for more than 30 minutes per day.
It took 5 years for my town to get “broadband” at 256kbps, and another 5 years to get 2mbps.
Maybe I should have given up on the internet back in 1996 to…
- Chatrooms
- Maps and directions
- Newspapers from around the world, free (even WSJ didn't put up a paywall until 2005).
- IT troubleshooting information that didn't require calling the surly clowns at your local computer shop.
Does Web3 have something like that that makes it a must-have?
This was the first thing I've read about web 3, so I didn't need to grep my brain to find and remove any existing notions about it. As someone coming in late to the party, I agree that installing a browser extension seems like a deal breaker. Web 2.0 was about getting rid of browser extensions. It also sounds like web3 is missing a killer app. For web 2.0, Gmail and Google Maps and YouTube were all immediately useful to all web users. Web 3 doesn't sound all that compelling to a lay person.
When "Web 2.0" was named, most of the techniques had been used for over a decade, and social networking side of it was well established too. Even "AJAX" was coined years after some sites were already using that technique, without that name.
Web 3 is an attempt to portray p2p, cryptocurrency, IPFS and similar types of networks as on an equal footing to the evolutionary changes that vaguely made up Web 2.0.
In particular, the name implies it's "the" (singular) next version of the Web after 2.0.
But it's too early to be sure of that. Most people aren't using it, most sites aren't using it either and don't plan to. The real successor to Web 2.0 that things evolve to en masse might be quite different than Web 3 proponents are describing at the moment.
anecdotally, people seem to be moving to wallet connect smartphone wallets (eg rainbow) recently as they are nicer than browser extensions + you can use mobile websites/apps with them. Metamask is a bit of a mess tbh.
I've been in the space for a few years now so i find it really hard imagining a non-cryptocurrency/web3 internet at this point. It's such a big part of my use of the internet at this point. Hanging out in various dao chats in discord from chess clubs to running gallery spaces, voting in snapshot is a daily activity. Its basically like being in wow guilds, but with a completely open-ended design space to play in.
Im not sure what people will be satisfied with as a killer app? what is the measure of success? it feels like its already here and successful to me. After a dull period of the internet feeling like it was disappearing under FAANG it feels alive and chaotic and fun again.
I'm not doubting your touting of Web3, it's just....your description just sounds like you found a community of like minded people online. Those things have come and gone on the clear web many times. It's not something that's unique to Web 3.
There is also substantial room for greater improvement. This actually might be a place to focus your energy and you actually might find it fulfilling.
> It also sounds like web3 is missing a killer app.
Sounds unfalsifiable as its not clear what standard there will be if you and your lay grandma aren't both interested in it. From my perspective there are many killer apps which I'm not interested in. Check out any list of "gas guzzlers" to see what people are paying to use any given day. I'm not sure how to gauge the free-er activity on layer 2 systems. But don't forget about other chains. Its a lot of activity.
[1] https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/2009/01/mco2009010...
I think you're doing a real disservice by characterizing this as “mindless”. For most people, decentralization is an anti-feature — it adds cost, risk, and performance issues while usually making the UX worse. The web has become more centralized over time because that allows people to build more compelling services, and much as that is disappointing from the perspective of the dreams many of us had in the 90s it's hard to argue that, say, a primary driver of the re-centralization of email wasn't the difficulty of controlling spam in a decentralized system.
This intersects well with the blockchain advocacy: this post mentions a lot of terms which the VCs like to hear but there's a conspicuous absence of anything which normal users care about. There can be an argument for robustness in the case of an outage for a shared service but that's very far from a given and could only be measured by comparing specific examples since no two systems have the same failure mode.
Surprisingly few regular people thought they wanted a PC before the World Wide Web. They still don't care about the technical details.
Web 3.0 is obviously an aspirational name for what is still mostly a vision at this point. But developers need their moitivators. :)
Yes it's a dumb name, and this article certainly doesn't cover all of the issues, shit just look at the confirmation page for metamask, it literally just asks you if you want to spend X to submit a byte array. No link to the contract, the method you are calling, any avaliable adudits etc.
But if you as a reader have any passing interest I'd really encourage you to check out what's happening in the space, the thing that got me excited was the permissionlessness and composability.
Going to uniswap, locking up some funds in an AMM and then depositing that elsewhere to liquidity farm shows off the composability, then the fact that you can see it all tracked on a dashboard like zapper.fi or debank.com really drives the point home.
Word of warning, Ethereum it's self is now so clogged up with NFTs and people constantly arbitraging or performing liqudiations that it's far too expensive to play around with. There is plenty of cheaper EVM based chains though, like Fantom or Polygon
Also, what is the value add that can be explained to someone who just wants to use the web and leaving the jargon like permisionlessness and composability aside? What reason would anyone have to start using this as a consumer?
All of this is early enough that it's all currently exposed to the user. The fact of the matter is that cryptocurrency is still quite technical and under heavy development (well bitcoin isn't, but you can only do one thing with it). Hopefully as these technical solutions are rolled out wallet software will start abstracting across them so the user doesn't need to worry about whether they are transacting on a roll-up.
The current state is really not ready for general adoption. It's easy to lose all of your funds to some sort of hack or rug-pull, if you lose your keys you've lost your funds, it's hard to determine what is trust worthy, tax day is a nightmare etc.
I participate because I find it fascinating and can stomach the technical complexity and risks
I'm so excited to see that we are in the VERY early stages of blockchain value networks, and I hope I live the next 20 years to see this technology when it gets to the "500mbps" equivalent of what we've got now for 'the internet'
even more broad, i think web3 is just where the database is decentralized. blockchain is one solution.
• data storage and/or backend computation taking place in/on a decentralized / distributed-locus-of-control system,
• where these systems are exposed directly to browsers via regular-web HTTP gateways,
• and where there are well-defined general APIs (these being the "web3" APIs) such that these gateways are interchangeable in the access they provide;
• where a web app can choose to have a relationship (e.g. a paying customer relationship) with their own gateway provider, rather than having one forced upon them;
• and where the user-agent can further enable the user to have their own relationship with different gateway provider, overriding the website's choice of gateway, in a way invisible to the web app. (Just like how UA stylesheets override site stylesheets, in ways invisible to the web app.)
The gateways are a necessary part of the definition, because HTTP is fundamentally a protocol for talking to specific servers, so Web -three, then, is 90% about the particular way in which we hitch decentralized stuff up to that centralized model.
The fact that the website and the user get choice in their gateway, is what makes this a decentralized system, rather than being something like X.509 that's nominally decentralized (anyone can be their own CA root authority for their own DAG-of-trust) but where in practice there's only one public DAG-of-trust forced on everyone by a consortium of browser and OS manufacturers.
1. consensus networks, 2. data storage networks, 3. messaging networks.
(1) includes Ethereum and other blockchain and distributed ledger tech.
(2) includes IPFS, FileCoin, GUN, etc.
If you're storing data on the blockchain apart from the bits needed in relation to consensus ops, you're probably doing it wrong.
(3) includes Waku (Status), Matrix ... depends a bit on whether you think this category should only include p2p networks or federated networks of servers qualify.
There are many other projects that could be listed for those categories, those are just off the top of my head.
We didn't move to "web3" when db sharding became a big thing, or when NoSQL caught on.
store to extension-managed DB (e.g. flatfiles in the home directory, or shunted onto something managed with LDAP, or loaded onto some weird coin thing on a local light node, or etc),
or in environments where extensions are fussy / overcomplicated, store to another website via a http api (la https://remotestorage.io/, or if one wants to overcomplicate it again, a remotestorage-to-weird-blockchain-thing-shim)
- - -
For the article itself, deriding web3 as "Money websites" and then basically asking for "Lightweight money websites" is a bit pointless. Storing stuff on "Money" is a big overhead, If you were to decide to write your data onto a gold ingot, you'd probably not enjoy the process of going to the bank safe deposit box each time to make a change or read a change, likewise, money websites are going to be encumbered with risk, endless layers of crypto math un-understanding, and stress.
Don't worry, someone might make a contract to provide that fine grained API you want, and that contract might not have bugs, and the tooling used might not be able to be tricked to use some other contract as an api since you know, decentralized, shouldn't be able to use only 1 implementation right
Or, if you remove money from the equation, like, hell, replace it with text files or something, even if users need to exchange text files with each other to update each other's pages (ok a bit overkill, webrtc should suffice, still requires both people online at the same time though), it still removes a lot of emotional stress
Why do crypto enthusiasts feel the need to use gold as a strawman? The vast majority of non-crypto people use digital money (in local currencies), and have never touched gold in their lives. Digital money works great, and doesn’t need a blockchain.
Well, at least the US, the government treats crypto as property, at least tax-wise (actually it's taxed just like real estate or gold). It's just that crypto is much more easily transferable than real estate or gold.
> The vast majority of non-crypto people use digital money (in local currencies), and have never touched gold in their lives. Digital money works great, and doesn’t need a blockchain.
I understand this argument. The traditional financial system is quite mature, and works pretty well. I do have a few concerns with it though:
•Negative interest rates in some parts of the world
•Ever increasing sovereign debt throughout the world, with no intent of ever paying it back
•Lack of ability for 24/7 payments, or even instant payments (at least in the US, however, this fortunately seems to be changing with things like FedNow)
•No APIs for banks which make things like screen scraping necessary for data aggregation, i.e. Mint, or verification tools, i.e. Plaid (and I know this opens a can of worms because banking data should be regulated and private, but still, I've seen this API complaint on HN before, and crypto is a more open system, that could also have layers of permission added to it)
This leads me to another point, which is actually a question. How do people here beat inflation? Stocks? Sure, I have some stocks, too. But crypto yields are some of the highest right now, and it isn't all just some manipulation or leverage or something. Take a look at proof of stake coins, you can stake say, Polkadot, on Kraken, for 12% APR [1]. You can also stake Polkadot, directly, without using an exchange as an intermediary, it just requires more technical skill. The staking return on proof of stake coins is a reward for helping secure the proof of stake network.
I've heard Charles Hoskinson, the creator of Cardano and co-founder of Ethereum, say in one of his videos that we need a new asset class in order to make up for this inflationary environment. And also, I would add, that we need that to accommodate for what I consider to be a war on cash. I'd be happy to keep fiat in a savings account, and I did for many years, until the rates on savings accounts went to basically zero. Now people are basically forced to hold riskier things like stocks, or if they have an even higher appetite for risk, crypto.
In short, I don't think everything in digital fiat is going perfectly well. If it was, I don't think I'd find crypto as attractive.
Firstly, it's about building networks and systems that serve us instead of what we have today: big, monolithic networks that profit off our rage and addiction.
Secondly, it's about building a model of democracy that is fundamentally more scalable than what we have today: people with differing opinions and values being forced into a single echo chamber and fighting in a zero-sum game to take control of the chamber.
Decentralization won't solve all our problems, but I believe it's a more natural and scalable way to organize on the web.
We're still sort of there, but the dream of QR & NFC codes for everything hasn't been fleshed out yet. Web 3.0 could also be simply an assortment of apps? I think we need more app stores, not the two monopolies we have currently (Play and Apple Store).
The dream of having everything happen in the browser could die if it wanted. No more trying to makes sites have an 'appy' feel which has been the main agenda for well over the last decade and a half now.
It's up to Android and iOS (and others) to make sure QR codes are not an 'easy' attack vector.
Why should it be the case that sending an SMS with a (malware-loaded) bit.ly link takes over your phone?
If the phone OS does `principle of least privilege` and sandboxing, and other mitigations then the user should be fine.
Flat networks are a thing of the past, when you could keep the whole Internet in a paper directory on your desk. Blockchains may be used for settlement and accounting within small networks of international firms, but they will never service the latency and throughput needs of 8 billion netizens.
I think of the current state of crypto as a kind of a wild west situation, there's still so much to be discovered and there's a lot of competition between different tokens to see who can do something better than the others. Saying that it's too slow right now doesn't mean it still will be a couple years down the line.
Solana: "Many [Solana] clusters may coexist. When two clusters share a common genesis block, they attempt to converge. Otherwise, they simply ignore the existence of the other."
Continuing my analogy, now they've gone and reinvented NAT/"IP federation", and destroyed the global P2P nature of Bitcoin. They've readded middlemen to online payments. Remind me what problem they are solving?
You're not wrong if you assume technology is fixed. But it ain't.
That could be solved by splitting into local blockchains so the global network only handles transactions between local banks but that seems like it's basically giving up most of the benefits claimed in blockchain marketing.
Please address my argument instead of this unconstructive purity-testing nonsense.
I've seen fake decentralization in other areas in the very dodgy cryptocurrency ecosystem. A lot of times it's "we'll decentralize this eventually when we figure out some issues" but that never happens. After the ICO or coin offering or whatever nothing else happens in the repository and Tesla sells some more high-end cars.
The web was simple and its core still mostly is. It has a ton of extensions and newer protocols but you don't need all that to use it for its original document store purpose.
Examples:
* Cash -> Bank Deposit Account
* Email (host your own mail server) -> Gmail
* Rack your own server -> AWS
* Everybody is a DNS node -> Root Servers/ISPs/Cloudflare/OpenDNS, etc.
* BitTorrent -> Pirate Bay
* Git -> GitHub
* Bitcoin -> Coinbase
It would be easier to let me know what web3 technology is not subject to Google's whims!
Always assumed Metamask and web3.js was interfacing with the network directly in a decentralized way until I dug in and started coding with it myself.
Still think the promise of an identity you can truly own and authenticate with that has finance built in is important in taking the web back from the megacorps.
We built OpenBazaar (decentralized marketplace using cryptocurrency) as a p2p network on top on IPFS with it's own client. It eventually failed and everyone asked for a web version and a mobile app (which we built but wasn't truly decentralized thus negating the entire point).
I agree that the current web3 approach is often more decentralized in name than in practice, but it seems to be a tradeoff most people are happy with.
Everything that matters goes through a phase of the idea being great and inspiring and powerful, but the tooling being utter garbage. The latter is fixable.
They're not at the stage to be usable yet but it seems that is where we are going. It just takes more de-platformings, bans, hostile takeovers, suspensions etc to accelerate the need for this.
How so? The problem is that many humans are greedy. How do "Blockchains like Ethereum" fix that? The existence of a technology that's completely orthogonal to the problem isn't "part of the solution" although marketing it as a solution certainly does help move worthless tokens.
You do realise Ethereum is a blockchain ecosystem and not just a coin? So ENS isn't part of the solution then?
Perhaps you yourself have your own better solution then?
>We should stop building key-management plugins and start thinking about a standardizable web API. We must stop training our users to install shitty browser plugins!
"standardizable web API" is a total pipe dream. The space moves too quickly for standards. Why is installing a browser plugin bad? Is metamask shitty? The millions of MAU must not have noticed.
>We need to make light clients work as soon as possible and become independent from third-party services like thegraph and Infura.
What does this mean? You can use metmask and web3/ethers.js with your own node. When $$$ is on the line (as with Uniswap, et. al.), it makes sense to farm out your infra to someone else. Should we also be moving away from AWS and its reliability / productivity gains to appease the author?
>We need to improve our client libraries (ethers.js and web3.js) by dramatically simplifying them and making them bug-free (god damn it!)!
Yes, first good point of the article. People are working on this. Could be said about ANY technology. Web3 is still VERY early.
>We need to take advantage of some of the blockchain's fundamental properties. Most data is immutable so let's start caching things.
Not sure what this means either. What are we caching? Where? Why? Are you aware we already (kinda) do this with the strata of different ETH nodes via say syncmode in geth? Or are you talking about front ends, many of which are already distributed via IPFS?
Many startups have tried building add-ons and other solutions for this, but it doesn't seem to be a very attractive proposition to a larger user base. People seem to prefer subscriptions rather than nickel-and-diming each piece of content. (Consider how Spotify and Netflix triumphed over the iTunes Store model of 99-cent transactions.)
The blockchain backing of so-called "Web3" is not a great fit for micro-transactions because fees are very high and the networks are congested. You'd be paying several dollars in transaction fees for that 25-cent purchase, and waiting several minutes for it to go through.
Of course this can be mitigated by a centralized solution that can handle higher volumes. But then it's no different from all the micro-transaction startups that already failed.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402
Edit: forgot about the cherry on top "NFT" another layer of shit on what I thought would be pure and innovative. Grifters all the way down.
2. There'll always be subpar devs, and those that make too many calls etc. There's freedom on the web, that's hardly a fault of the idea. In fact the whole article is complaints are about some of the current sites rather than anything more (and many of them aren't bad). The vision if you believe people with cryptopunk avatars is vaster than that already.
3. Some of the complaints like you not having MetaMask to interact with a MetaMask-based website are just odd. Do you complain that users without a phone can't be called?
4. Ethers.js is a lot simplified compared to web3.js. People are working on all those complaints.
5. There's non-extension wallets, too. Solflare doesn't make me install an extension to interact with sites. The extensions just have benefits - everything is fully local but easily integratable so they aren't a bad solution to my eyes.
Brave already integrates these things by the way.
Seey I've been building in the crypto space since a long time and this post was also a way to express my impatience. I'd like some things to have progressed further by now. Particularly all the web standardization points...
If you need to connect to a fullnode which is running in a datacenter somewhere whose sole purpose is to service these kinds of requests, surely it's just a server.
Web2 happened for a lot of very good reasons.
this blogger is thinking way too hard about it after some slight disillusionment after a lot of excitement about it, and accurate assessment of its current and future capabilities.
its totally okay to criticize how much people rely on Infura. that has nothing to do with an inflammatory title just to get the attention of some Gen-X blockchain skeptics that are just looking for a venue to write their unrelated blockchain skeptic comment.
What does it mean 'to pool' ether?
I'm not familiar with using it as a verb.
Or rather, if its just a transaction, what is the mraning of the choice of the word pool for such an event.
- staking
- automated market makers
- p2p lending/borrowing
E.g. the compound.finance whitepaper explains some technical details well.
One incomplete definition could be that you submit your money temporarily to the control of a mart contract.
for instance, you can "pool" money to provide liquidity for trades on the ethereum blockchain via uniswap.
Interestingly Solid also used to have an authentication system based on in-browser certificates (WebID-TLS), then switched to an OIDC-based system (Solid-OIDC).
Bitcoin is older than React.js. Ethereum has been around for as long as TikTok. Uber was founded in the same year as Bitcoin and has essentially destroyed a worldwide industry.
At some point these things aren't young or early, they're just stupid.
It's also unclear how you're measuring success. By market cap, Bitcoin beats out all three of your examples (React, TikTok, & Uber). But it's also a bit weird to compare Bitcoin to two of the fastest growing consumer companies in recent memory. It's apples & oranges.
