https://ethereumcatherders.com/
Play with the tools like https://eth-brownie.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
https://www.cairo-lang.org/docs/hello_starknet/index.html
Note these are eth focused, but there is overlap with zcash/cosmos/polkadot and the many evm chains that now exist.
I’d also recommend: https://gov.yearn.finance/ and https://forum.makerdao.com/ for insight into how protocols are managed.
Whatever you'll find under the web3 banner is, unfortunately, complete garbage.
[1]: https://drewdevault.com/2021/09/23/Nitter-and-other-internet...
Some high signal ones are @Bantg from Yearn Finance, @gakonst from Paradigm, @epolynya for Modular Blockchain info, @iamDCinvestor for macro view and NFTs.
You can find a lot more good ones by seeing these individuals replies. And if you like, you can follow me as well @_nd_go, I try to keep my feed fairly high signal
Some would consider learning a old, outdated programming language a waste of time, but sometimes learning something new just to learn something new is just... Fun!
If anyone is interested in the decentralized web without the ponzi-like elements (I say ponzi-like though I should reiterate again that I think defi has value), I'd recommend this talk by Vitalik, "Things that matter outside of defi": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLsb7clrXMQ
- dscvr.one
- oc.app
- distrikt.io
Disclosure: I work at DFINITY.
Sufficiently non-tulipy?
Also, I read the Transitional Gains Trap paper a few years ago and really liked it, but forgot the name and couldn't find it again, so you helped me find it again, thanks!
Ethereum Foundation blog is a good read on technical detail with no price discussion: https://blog.ethereum.org/
Can't they use something "web3" even for this basic task of hosting a git repository (remembering that git itself is completely de-centralized)?
Then look for people with .ETH to their name. A lot of them are technical and Ethereum Foundation members.
> Each week you get...
> A rundown of opportunities
> A new crypto tactic to learn
> A new strategy to consider
> A recap with an action list
Absolutely zero focus on technical details...
Otherwise I generally read CoinTelegraph but it can get very bullish at times.
I'm in 2 months now and only scratched the surface.
In the Developer DAO (which is in founding) we currently plan to make all these web3 learning resources more accessible.
But right now, you can look here for resources: https://github.com/Developer-DAO/resources
AKA I don't see the general public moving away from centralized web2, but I do think it would be nice if developers created a decentralized alternative to Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, etc. which being made by individuals and mostly comprised of other developers, is very similar to old-school message boards.
I don't think this decentralized platform will necessarily involve blockchain, just peer-to-peer interactions. The "web3 movement" could simply be getting more people to join a decentralized network like the Fediverse, and improving said network, so it becomes a common peer-to-peer developer version of Twitter, Youtube, etc. Blockchain makes it easy to pay people for being part of the network, but you could do the exact same thing with stablecoins or Stripe payments.
Right now most techies and developers use YouTube and Reddit and Twitter even though they publicly loath and complain about these platforms (ironically on the platforms themselves). Because it's impossible for a small group to create anything remotely competing with a large centralized platform. But a decentralized platform, just maybe, could attract enough people and produce enough content to not be obscure.
Ultimately, I think most of the interest in web3 comes from nostalgia. Old-school developers look at the rise of "Web 1.0" (the original Internet) and "Web 2.0" (Google, Facebook, YouTube). They remember everything being so new and exciting, and recognize how much opportunity they missed. Well, in the past few years the internet hasn't "really" changed much, supposedly it's been much more boring. People want more novelty and excitement and opportunity, and they think and hope it's going to happen again in something they will call "web3".
Pay people for being part of the network? Where is this money coming from?
Blockchain solutions are more expensive to maintain than centralized solutions. It’s going to cost a lot of money to put all of the photos and other data of a social network into a blockchain and keep it maintained. Certainly far more than it costs hyper-optimized centralized providers like Facebook and Twitter.
There might be a few people out there interested in paying substantially to be part of a decentralized blockchain-based social platform, but it’s certainly a far, far smaller number than the people who are happy to use Twitter or Facebook for free.
It's as fast as a centralized solution (because you have a real database!) but has all the benefits of being decentralized (own your own data! Choose replication servers! Split payment for data between data originators and app developer! Alternate models to advertising for free-to-use apps!)
I assume it's easier to calculate and submit micropayments with a cryptocurrency than to connect with a real bank and do them with real money. Plus peers can trust that they get the correct payment for the amount they contribute to the p2p network, especially if the payment is via a smart contract.
The one big advantage of blockchain I know of, is that a group of people can negotiate some sort of payment (e.g. I do X work I get Y coins), and once they agree, nobody can break the negotiation. So assuming everyone understands what they're doing, they will get automatically payed and nobody will run off with all the money (of course if people don't understand what they're doing, they can get scammed like the many many crypto scams we've seen so far).
It’s easy to imagine where the money goes out, but where does the money come in?
Obviously the answer is “the users” but that’s the problem: Not many users are going to be interested in paying ongoing fees just to exist on a social network when they can get the same thing for free.
There will always be a core group of true believers who will pay for these networks, but the networks aren’t very useful if it’s limited to a small group of people willing to go through all of the trouble and keep paying just to exist on it.
This is the big question that a lot of the web3 conversations conveniently sidestep: How much is it going to cost? Everyone seems to assume some hypothetical future blockchain that costs very little, but the bottom line is that you still have to incentivize all of the nodes and peers to keep the data and you need to do so in a decentralized manner that will always be orders of magnitude less efficient than hosting on a standard cloud server. That inefficiency is expensive.
Take storage, for example, this is folks paying to rent space (perhaps to do backups) from folks that have excess space.
The one part I grudgingly do like with NFTs is it gives people ownership of data that escapes platforms. NFTs are imperfect at this as they lack privacy, are ruinously expensive and complex to untangle from the entities that created them. Also all the usecases so far are more about speculation than defeating platforms. The non-blockchain alternatives like Pods and so on seem more compelling to me.
But yeah to me we’ll see more decentralisation naturally when users are in charge of their own data. I also think this is going to only really take off when we solve digital identity and on boarding that isn’t horrendously technical.
This is nothing but snakeoil trash dreamed up by people that are purely interested in get rich quick schemes. This has nothing to do with the spirit of the "old web".
*note that OP isn't saying a decentralized version would become more popular: "But a decentralized platform, just maybe, could attract enough people and produce enough content to not be obscure."
I guess the old adage that either people complain or don't use the software still holds true.
I do, once the next major social network launches with crypto at it's core and the early adopters get an airdrop it's pretty much over for web2 social media.
A whole generation will consider it antiquated to "do work for free" posting on the old networks when the next generation rewards them.
Anyone who isn’t looking in this direction is going to get left behind over the next few years.
Crypto currencies are terrible - or at least I have heard of no reason why people need them outside of ponzi scheming, ransomwaring, or your drug deal - especially since they are NOT cheaper to do transactions in and are NOT anonymous and are definitely NOT (yet) even close to green.
That said, things like distributed file storage (IPFS) and distributed identity are really interesting. We really do need solutions around how we prevent China, Russia, and other governments from basically brainwashing folks through turning off any part of the internet they don't like. I'm all-in on that part.
Technology won't defeat policy.
We can't code our way out of laws that govern information, whether that be copyright law or censorship laws.
We can probably have obtuse systems like TOR... So long as they remain obtuse :)
That would put policy people in a dilemma wouldn't it?
Technology shapes policy, but policy is always the one calling the shots.
I'm joking a bit.. but my first thought is: ad companies would love it, if I couldn't turn off ads.
Some autocrats would happily shut down the internet because someone hurt their feelings.
If you take the bad parts of every cryptocurrency and made them into one single bad cryptocurrency, then yes, you would be correct, but all of these things are better in certain cryptocurrencies than traditional financial systems.
Cryptocurrency doesn't mean only Bitcoin or Ethereum.
Stripe is an American company. Why should Iranians be bared from participating in the decentralized web?
citation needed
As a whole I agree with your statement objectively, but this cannot be said for each blockchain uniformly.
We also don’t need the internet to communicate, gift cards are used to pay scammers, there are other much larger consumers of oil like cars and planes. It’s disingenuous to dismiss this technology for these reasons, there are definite upsides worth exploring that you have alluded to.
A good part of financial "regulation" is not for consumer protection - it's not for consumers at all, it is for governments. The US government is free to regulate the dollar, because it is a currency they issue. Given their track record of mismanaging fundamental economics, I have no interest in a value store issued by a notoriously incompetent entity that is also inconvenient, volatile, unreliable, being actively hyper-inflated, and not even under my control to begin with.
This whole "you dont need crypto unless you are ponzi, ransom or drugs" shill is getting really old. We all know how "if you're innocent, you have nothing to hide" plays out logically and ethically. I haven't held onto USD for more than a day after getting paid in over three years now, other than what is absolutely necessary for transactions that still rely on USD. I'm a software engineer with no criminal record/affiliations, and strong morals as well as ethics - which is why I still pay all the taxes I should in USD, and circumvent the otherwise technologically inferior and fundamentally unethical method of value exchange for everything else. So please, give me a single reason to use a dinosaur bank over crypto that is actually in my own best interest.
I agree, it's too slow, but how does crypto get us all of these things, which we need to prevent total chaos.
At the end of the day, things like drug and human trafficking don't happen because the people behind them are able to launder money - they happen because of a complete and utter failure on the behalf of our government. All of these issues were here long before crypto, and while yes, CC definitely does not help these issues go away - quite the opposite, actually, and that part is unfortunate ...but it's not the root cause of the problem. And the half-assed solution currently in place is so inadequate that even otherwise sane individuals resort to scapegoating things like crypto. Is the current precedent of "lots of drugs are coming out of [XYZ] country, let's destroy everyone's lives in it unilaterally with sanctions in an attempt to hinder those responsible" really something you are okay with?
For example: the US goes to war with a country I have family in, and now I can't support my loved ones. I could not care less about the economic policy, because enabling my grandparents as well as great grandparents to buy food and basic life necessities is far more important to me. In some parts of the world, even Western Union and those services restrict this - or charge exorbitant fees which make CC transaction fees look tame in comparison. Choosing a geographic location and unilaterally destroying the standard of living there through economic sanctions might as well be mass genocide.
That, and utilizing wallets as proof of identity, is so mindnumbingly simple compared to OAuth+OIDC for authentication and varying strategies for authorization. Granted the project is a small scale project, but with web3 architectural changes, it is empowering me to create a 2 person project (I am the only engineer too), that would be much more daunting of a project in traditional web architecture.
It's very exciting stuff, and I hope that people are able to see the tech for the possibilities it provides, especially when it comes to the NFT space. An NFT is just simply a single issue token, it can do whatever the developer wants, despite the common misperception being it is solely a link to a static image file on arweave / IPFS. Unfortunately the market is completely saturated with low-effort projects so it is very, very difficult to get eyes on innovative projects, but I hope that can change, and hope that I can create a project that allows even a small amount of people to see that there is so much more to the technology than what people have considered in 2021.
It's so fascinating to me to realize that users being owners of their own private keys allows for us to create websites that don't rely on traditional registration flows, SSO, email addresses, password handling, or anything. It almost feels like cheating compared to the pain I've had to deal with in the corporate world implementing services like IdentityServer4 or Keycloak.
Have you also looked into Zero Knowledge?
It lets someone prove that they know or have something without giving up any information about what they know or have.
Not Boring did a good piece on it. https://www.notboring.co/p/zero-knowledge
---
Adding to OP's comment a bit of context:
As someone deep into ZKPs related to blockchain I should note that ZKPs have nothing to do with blockchain in their origin; the cryptography behind them was developed in the 80s (even protocols like zkSNARKs). Many applications are also not specific to blockchain and a lot of work on their mathematics does not relate directly to blockchain either
That said, a decent chunk is now directly for applications in that field. For instance, key decisions around the cryptography used by Circom (a zkSNARK language) are predicated on the idea they will be used in EVM smart contracts. Same is true of snarkjs that exports Solidity verifiers.
Had to work on an old project for a client that was using oauth2 and it felt so archaic.
For the authentication side:
authentication, is simply connecting your wallet. Since each user has to have a wallet to interact with blockchain tech, that just simply means each user is the owner of their own private key. You can utilize this fact by connecting user's wallets. Once a user connects their wallet, you have proof of identity. If you need to verify it further, you can also have them sign a message and validate the signature on your backend.
I've been working with Solana, and some of the wallet providers I've been integrating with (specifically Phantom wallet) have very easy to use APIs that allow for requests to sign a message. It uses Ed25519 for signing, so it is an incredibly quick operation to verify that the signed message is a legitimate message signed by the wallet they claim to be. You can even add something like a timestamp or whatever to the message, to avoid static message signatures phished from other sites.
Once you have verified their identity by connecting their wallet, you can simply use these facts to retrieve whatever data they require.
On the authorization side:
I can really only use the example for my NFT project for authorization, but there are certainly many other ways to implement authorization. I have a service that I've created that I wanted to lock down to only be accessible to owners of a specific NFT. Since NFTs are essentially a proof of ownership concept natively, to provide access to my service I decided to implement the following:
1. Authenticate the user via connecting their wallet
2. Using the same signature method I mentioned above, sign a message, and verify the signature.
3. Once I have verified the user is who they claim to be, I check the token balance for the NFT that exists in their token account. Since NFTs are single issue, all I need to do is verify the user is holding the token they are attempting to use for accessing this service.
For example, if a user X is attempting to access the service for token Y, it's as simple as:
1. Verify the user is who they say they are
2. Verify the user holds the token they claim to be holding.
This is how I've been implementing authentication and authorization on my project. I think it's been really fun to architect this solution, we haven't gone live yet but I think that it'll work how I am expecting.
Authorizing the service itself to act on the users behalf is a little trickier and usually involves contract signing.
I'm hoping that my project will be able to be featured on one of these marketplaces, but it's been rough out there. I think once I finish up and polish our roadmap and goals for the project, in addition to the already existing website and short video preview, we'll be able to get in on one of those. Fingers crossed, at least :)
https://stratechery.com/2021/unity-buys-weta-digital-an-inte...
So as far as I'm concerned the name is perfect, in that it stands for hype and hazy thinkfluencing that is trying to puff itself up into looking like foundational change.
It's entirely probably they'll merge at some point if they haven't already.
Think about what it would actually take to implement such a thing:
- Call of Duty and Battlefield - rival games from rival companies - would need to agree to an integration at a VERY deep level
- They would have to share the same asset formats, such that an asset designed for one game could be used in another
- Issues of balance would have to be resolved: just sharing 3D models wouldn't be enough, they would need to agree on a system for modelling damage, armour piercing capabilities, visual effects...
- Then they would have to add blockchain integration deep enough that weapons a player obtains in the game are represented in a way that the other games can see.
- ... not to mention figure out some kind of exchange rate / add some kind of additional economy to their games, which would need to be shared across different games such that e.g. a pistol in Battlefield wasn't worth the same as a machine gun in Call of Duty
That's just off the top of my head.
And... they're supposed to be games! Game design is about balance - creating a set of rules that players enjoy.
Allowing some cryptocurrency-billionaire to jump into any game they like with the best possible guns and armour doesn't sound any fun at all.
Pretty much every idea I see coming out of this space has the same problem: it sounds plausible in a high-level hand-wavy, but collapses the moment you start to dig into the details of how it would work.
(My absolute favourite bad idea is still real estate on the blockchain, where presumably if I forget my password I can no longer sell my house)
Around 2014 I looked, out of curiosity, into Ethereum and its EVM before Ethereum came out. Back then I even ran a node on... a Raspberry Pi (!). If I remember correctly even in 2014/2015, the official Ethereum client/node, written in Go, called "geth", was already using the term "web3" everywhere.
I'm not saying it's good or bad that people are using that term but all I'm saying is Ethereum using the term "web3" predates the "Metaverse" announcement by at least seven years IIRC.
It may be "en vogue" now but credit where it's due: Ethereum was using that term a long time ago already.
Semantic web, 3D web, and whatnot.
The confusion is the point, actually.
This is about hyping something that nobody wants except for people who want to use it to exploit the rest of us in some way and the pool of marks who think they're going a A) get rich off of it or B) reap some vague future benefit that you don't actually need a blockchain for.
No dog in this flight.
And yes, I know that terms in English get overloaded and that's part of life. Fine... but at least do it when there's a good reason for it. There's no particular reason to call this crypto/blockchain/ethereum/smart-contract/defi stuff "Web3". It could just as easily be "Web 4.0" or "Web 5.0" or "Fzbnnng^ztttzz@)@lyzmkizt" or whatever.
It is amazing how much more cogent and actually interesting tech twitter is when you remove all of the "Will this make me rich and important, and quick?" web3 noise. It's the most fetch thing out there right now.
On the flip side, at least it drowned out the "Miami is the new silicon valley" noise (though humorously almost the same set of people are behind both)
The point is that the data about the assets should outlast the interest of the current owner. It should outlast the physical assets themselves.
Hard to get another architecture which can manage data beyond the lifetime of any given market actor.
Why? What does this accomplish?
One of them is half a million years old, but still made by human(ish) hands.
Preserving the data for future generations is part of the job.
Now it seems it is something vaguely related to blockchain. At the moment blockchain is directly tied to crypto currency, which to almost everybody looks like a giant Ponzi scheme.
Until the concept of blockchain is completely divorced from crypto currencies they can name this nonsence whatever they want. It won't stick. Nobody cares except for the few people already making money off this.
DAOs, NFTs, tokens, decentralized file storage, decentralized identity via public keys and smart contracts, tokens as authentication, on-chain reputation systems, oracles, fundraising with no third parties or gatekeepers, etc are all here to stay and will evolve further and faster than your bias will let you see.
If you have an alternative to the monopolistic web and mobile dystopia we find ourselves in, wherein we can only speak within the narrow band of corporately acceptable speech and expression, and we can only transact with the blessings of PayPal's overlords, that doesn't involve crypto or blockchain, I suggest you quit your job to build it.
Otherwise, I fear you might be too late at disrupting the establishment, as the builders are well under way, working on Web3 powered by crypto (in both senses of the word).
Your giant list of of terminology isn't making much of an impact on me. In fact many of those sounds terrible.
So giving your post the benefit of the doubt, when can I expect to be disrupted out of a job by even a single item on your list?
99% scam. The remaining 1% is either more efficient and scalable in literally any other tech, or are busy re-inventing all the centralised institutions that come from, you know, the need to operate in reality.
> Otherwise, I fear you might be too late at disrupting the establishment
By saying "too late at disrupting the establishment" you're implying that the establishment is already disrupted. It's objectively not.
However I still have yet to be convinced of any real value or need of an NFT. For example let say I am the owner of a famous “Tweet”. This NFT shows exactly what … a unique token saying it’s mine ? A token with no legal recourse to stop others from using what I purchased? If you think about it from an opposing viewpoint in many ways you really own nothing except what people believe you own … which in this case is a small minority of people. A very small subset of people will currently even recognize what an NFT is and an even smaller subset will acknowledge and believe I own anything … reducing its value. Further the information and value of the “Tweet” (or digital art, or whatever) is not contained in the NFT at all.
Let’s say I buy the NFT to some cool digital artwork. Nothing is stopping anyone else from using this artwork… I have no legal recourse to say “heh I own this”. Only a small subset of people will recognize this as any form od ownership at all.
Sorry from my point of view NFT’s seem like a get rich quick fad… maybe am just a grumpy old dude at this point but honestly just don’t much real lasting value here.
Don't paper over history.
The Semantic Web was the first that dreamed of distributed, decentralized taxonomies of data shared p2p. Facebook and Google sidelined it.
I do. I am working on it as a side project. It isn’t blockchain or IPFS.
To me it was just yesterday that the idea of that curated list of web links called Yahoo seemed neat, ebay is some social experiment from across the bay, and then this ugly looking Google kid comes in and blows everyone away with actual relevant search results. Or those SMS messages from that SMS service Twitter or finding old friends on friendster... I can't recall any recent high impact "new thing" except maybe crypto.
Uber is literally life-changing. Remember needing to call people and ask them for a ride when something unexpected happened?
> I cannot begin to understand what it's like for a 20 year old to have been born in a world where Google is already established, Social networks are mainstream, and Amazon is our all encompassing commerce overlords.
20-year-olds have had life-changing technology adopted around them multiple times. It's just not on your radar because you weren't 10 years old in 2011.
Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite are examples. As people are saying: the metaverse already exists to some extent, and young people have been living in it daily since they were small children.
I might be only 26 years old, but even I have memories of my parents easily flagging down taxis in Manhattan. More convenient? Absolutely. "Literally life changing" seems a bit much, though.
Where I live, the only form of non-personal (your own car or bike) transport was the bus, which comes by 5 times a day, only once on saturdays, and never on sundays. Uber and its local equivalents have allowed me to participate in social events that the long and restrictive bus rides would not allow, and which taxis would be too much of a luxury.
I think that for me it is fair to say it was life-changing. Maybe not as life-changing as other things, but if it wasn't for this kind of service, I wouldn't have some of my best friends.
As someone from Manhattan, you live(d) one of the most unusual existences in human history.
And maybe you have lived places where this wouldn't mean anything to you, but you couldn't do this in most of the US before Uber.
Even in some well-known cities, your chances of getting a cab in < 30 min (if you could get one at all) were close to zero. There wasn't a single number to call -- you had to call many numbers and hope someone actually showed up. You couldn't track progress.
Where I grew up, my parents couldn't even get to the airport without asking a relative (and this is the biggest city in our home state).
A functioning, 24/7, predictable taxi system was absolutely not available in most of the US before Uber.
I can still remember pretty well my life before I was always connected. My earlier life was quieter, calmer. I have fun memories of my old Nokia 5800 :)
I am not sure I live modern technology that much different than older people. Just like many people grew up with home appliances or cars being the norm.
I think the underlying direction is the right way, I just really dislike how it moves more towards more capital and commerce focused than social good.
The interoperability is what we've lost in the Web 2.0 era. Even such quintessential thing as a web API has no well defined standard or protocol, just a very vague concept of REST or RPC.
I want Web 3.0 to get interoperability back. We badly need commonly accepted standards and decentralized protocols: for web APIs, for identity management, for message queuing, for web callbacks (webhooks), for online transactions, for semantic web and ontology, etc.
Take, for instance, web APIs. It's barely usable nowadays. Imagine if you had to write a special browser every time you need to connect to a new website. But this is what already happens with APIs. Accessing programmatically any web-service requires custom coding an API. Insane!
This is a huge claim that doesn't match reality. We still use browsers, HTTP clients still respect mediatypes, and websites still return HTML. We have even more standards now than we did at the beginning of Web 2.0, with things like microdata, opengraph, etc. Even non-HTML HTTP APIs are even more standard with things like grpc, json-api.org, and graphql.
Maybe since my job is to literally do this I have a different take.
You have a point that the interoperability that existed pre-Web 2.0 is still here and wasn't taken away (except for things like RSS).
My point is that we didn't move significantly ahead with interoperability and stuck with centralized proprietary services and niche protocols.
>grpc, json-api.org, and graphql.
You're totally missing the point. With an email client I can connect to any IMAP service (and there are tens of thousands of them). With an SFTP client I can connect to any SFTP server (and there are thousands of them) and download files. Again, without coding, just by configuring the connection.
What public service can I connect to with a GraphQL client (do they even exist?) without coding, just by configuring the connection settings like with an email client?
What public service can I connect to with a GraphQL client (do they even exist?) without coding
This is especially true for public user generated content. Any public content should be accessible without limits, but that is not the case with web2(twitter, public Instagram, forums etc).
ofcourse, there are some server costs but the primary reason the walled-gardens do this is more business related than to reduce costs.> Any public content should be accessible without limits,
This is not related to the discussion, even if I did agree with it.
> but that is not the case with web2(twitter, public Instagram, forums etc).
Twitter and "forums" are all completely accessible via a browser, which is literally what the original claim suggests we've "lost". You don't need to read twitter with a special twitter client, you read it with the any HATEOAS client.
I urge developers to actually read some history.
As far as I understand Web3 is mostly presented with descentralisation in mind.
> We badly need commonly accepted standards and decentralized protocols
In my opinion "standard" and "descentralization" does not work good to support the same argument.
Here is one among many possible ways the future might unfold: a totally descentralized internet might be completely controller by few corporations. The reason is simple in my opinion: The normal user does not care about this. The normal user cares to talk with their family and their family are all using the web3-chat from BigOrg. Because BigOrg can give it for free and it works on all devices. Now as everything is descentralized BigOrg is also pushing a new browser. But this browser is showing only content from BigOrg through BigOrg descentralized servers. They have their own Web3-Smart-Blockchain-Ready-NoNSdeletion-DNS that is used only by their own browser that displays only websites that are registered there.
Now try to switch that normal user to another provider. That will be hard thing to do.
I think users will be _more_ captive than they are now as switching between descentralized services is hard. No business yet has an incentive to make a descentralized service and in the same time use a standard.
Of course I am missing maybe some web3 tech and I am in no way an expert in what web3 is or it will be.
Check out Homescreen: https://homescreen.hns.siasky.net/
It's a decentralized front-end in a decentralized cloud for Web3.0 apps.
Pretty much every app we use, system integration, anything really that has to communicate with third-parties, is driven by web APIs. If you think that they are barely usable, then I don't know what usable means to you.
> We badly need commonly accepted standards and decentralized protocols
Maybe , but there's a bunch of protocols today that make everything work quite nicely:
* authorization/delegation between third-parties: OAuth
* identity: OpenID Connect
* data exchange format: JSON and many other media-types like XML, protobuffers, messagepack etc.
* presentation layer format: HTML5
* data schemas: JSON-Schema, GraphQL, RDF...
Integrating decentralization stacks with these technologies is totally possible, and that's what, e.g. Solid is trying to do: https://solidproject.org/developers/tools/
The desire to "start from scratch" and invent new protocols for "web3" is understandable, as the OP mentions in the blog post... but that's highly unlikely to be the best way to go about it, and inventing new technologies and throwing away all of the experience we've gained over the first few decades of Internet history is bound to fail everytime, IMHO.
> Imagine if you had to write a special browser every time you need to connect to a new website. But this is what already happens with APIs.
Well, browsers only work because they are user agents. If your API required an user agent, it would not need a special client: just assume a user-agent is on the other side and it will work exactly was with any website. However, people seem to think it's possible to automate any API like that: that's patently false. Have you tried to use REST as it's actually meant to, with hypermedia-driven discovery, zero-knowledge clients which only need to be pointed at an URL and nothing else, to implement your common backend-to-backend interactions? Do you think it's even possible to do it?
I am currently working on something on those lines, but when you think a little bit about that, you quickly realize clients need to be written specifically to know what to do with the data they are given in a pretty hard-coded way. Until we have "intelligen" clients that can think like a human , only user-agents can benefit from hypermedia-driven flows, which explains why only browsers (and a few special-purpose user applications that are analogous to web browsers, but for very specific domains) are designed on those lines to this day.
- Residential Internet connections are asymmetrical. That's a problem and renders many clients as leeches.
- It is unreliable for long tail files. If a file is never read, it will never be replicated and will eventually disappear.
- Once the universities started cracking down on BitTorrent usage, it was game over. Dorms were practically the CDNs of the torrent world.
It's also way more efficient to use CDNs. I doubt the internet has the bandwidth for a decentralized Youtube.
Imagine (granted, a ideal world and maybe not actually possible) a world where every routes and computer is a node that both serves and receives data. Suddenly, your ISP can start to aggressively serve traffic from their edge-nodes. If a video goes viral, your local network can fetch it directly from your neighbors network instead of reaching out to the internet to fetch it. We'll be reducing the traffic massively.
But yes, it's a ideal world and probably not possible to execute in reality as the market forces behind paying for bandwidth is so strong.
My understanding is that Hypercore is the successor to dat and also operates along similar lines, but I'll admit that the details are over my head. https://hypercore-protocol.org/
Beaker Browser originally built on top of dat, underwent a significant rewrite and now uses Hypercore instead. https://beakerbrowser.com/
If it works how I think it works, then I can pay a one time fee to host my application, migrate the few APIs that my next.js app is using to be purely onchain Solana programs, then figure out some DNS solution to point it to the right place, and then I don't have to pay monthly hosting, and users can be sure that the value my app provides won't be taken down because I decided to no longer pay for hosting.
It's all theory at least for me right now, but I think it is possible.
Can we add group #3, people who are profoundly uninterested in this version of Web3 even despite all the money in it?
I was a fan of decentralisation when it stood for federated software and the idea that the web should generally be the same for hobbyists and professionals.
I really can't see a desirable vision of the future with a web based on artificial scarcity, intentional resource waste and anarchocapitalism.
https://onezero.medium.com/why-decentralization-matters-5e3f...
What made the early web great was all the weird stuff people did for fun and self-expression and what made it worse was when lots and lots of money got involved.
I don't see how getting more monetization involved would make anything better.
I wonder about this, because an awful lot of post-2008ish technology simply seems to be "like before, but different enough that we think we can be the first movers of the Next Big Thing, and therefore make a killing."
When you really get down to it, a lot of the popular technology isn't all that different from IRC, Usenet, etc., just app-ified and Web-ified (and emoji-ified, of course). I'm not sure moving to a "Web3" paradigm is going to be all that different, just with a new set of Very Important People driving it.
I have no doubt the future successful decentralized networks will use or evolve from cryptocurrencies, but not being inspired by the current crypto landscape is completely understandable. The Ponzis drown everything out these days, they cloud the judgment of too many, making the public discourse around this field unpalatable. In percentage terms, almost nobody in crypto today care about what they're actually building or what for. It's all about raising money, or pushing a Ponzi in which they are invested.
Doesn't matter if it's PoW, PoS, PoWhatever - fundamentally, crypto is about ensuring that there is a certain group of participants (miners) that can alter the shared state, while everyone who does not belong to this group cannot.
Furthermore, the group must become ever more entrenched over time because security relies on the fact that getting into this group is hard - so supposedly, those who are in the group have no interest in acting harmfully to the network. (Which is a big assumption by itself, btw)
I find it a bit weird that blockchain tech has pretty much captured the term "decentralisation" for itself, as it has some fundamental drive to centralisation built into its core.
Yes, it's decentralised in the sense that in theory everyone can become a miner. Except this is not true: If everyone could become a miner, so could adversaries and the append-only property would be gone.
This and the specific assumptions how a monetary system and an economy should work, which are also deeply baked into the tech.
When a miner finds a block, they can put transactions in it and submit it to the other miners, in order to acquire the transaction fees and the block reward for themselves.
These transactions are signed, miners can't impersonate participants. They are also incentivized to include actual transactions instead of their own thanks to the miner fee. If they try to censor a transaction, the next miner to find a block could include the transaction in the chain anyway, so they have little incentive to withhold transactions for non-economical reasons.
They can't rewrite the history, they can only push one block on top of it.
If I understand you correctly, the "centralization" you're talking about is the whole point of a consensus protocol: to get 'decentralized' participants to agree on a single 'centralized' state.
You've got my vote on that one.
With that said the crypto folks have had some legitimate heavy hitters quietly building another generation of the technology and it’s just now starting to go live. Take a look at the Haskell / distributed systems bench at IO-HK: Standard Chartered would love to employ that group of people. And while it’s still a little early, Substrate is powering Kusama-bonded chains on delegated PoS + finality gadget in the wild, today. The Parity people are also not screwing around.
It will be at a minimum interesting to see how mature technology alters the fundamental “crypto” equation.
P.S. If you want to point web3.is at a modern chain, Moonriver seems like your best bet right now, but it’s early days.
Yes it does, look at rollups.
What possible motivation could I have for shilling a coin?
You're better than this, and HN is too.
And to your point, centralized services do have better performance.
I'm not trying to be a downer- I think centralization can be incredibly valuable for building trusted systems. But they are not to be confused with trustless networks like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Chia.
Ethereum in 2016 had the famous attack where 12 million ETH were stolen, and a rather centralized foundation was able to perform a hard fork to undo the transaction and recover the funds. This of course led to the split of Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.
Nowadays, I believe that such a fork would be nearly impossible for Ethereum to pull off, due to the decentralization of the hash rate and the differences in the power the Ethereum Foundation has on the chain, due to the maturity of the chain. Whether or not that is a good thing that it could not roll back such a transaction is almost a philosophical question lol.
In my mind, Solana is in a somewhat similar state to how early ETH was in terms of centralized power and control of the chain. It would not surprise me that as time marches on, Solana naturally decentralizes. It's not guaranteed by any means of course, but that is what I am expecting.
And to be quite honest, for most applications, I would rather have a degree of centralization than pay > $100 for gas fees. I am aware of the existence of Layer 2 solutions, but I'm not too sure that by making a somewhat complicated layering solution to solve scalability concerns on the network that it can achieve mass long-term adoption.
We'll see of course, just wanted to share my opinion on this.
That is the best explanation of Web3, it is like one of those Reddit April's folks events, just a social game.
https://www.notboring.co/p/the-great-online-game
I think it captures a lot of the current culture with crypto and NFTs. A lot of it reminds me of when reality TV began. Suddenly we had a new class of celebrities who weren't singers or actors. Reality TV stars, famous people whose claim to fame was being famous.
Circular logic. Positive fedback loops. You should "invest" in this NFT collection because look at how many other people are buying this NFT collection.
Web3 is more than speculative NFTs and I expect we'll see some important things come out of it, just with a lot of surprises and broken expectations along the way.
Like... what?
It’s been almost 15 years, you’re getting left behind.
1) Finance (DeFi). Even for valid (non-criminal) uses cases, there are numerous laws and regulations that translate into crazy fees to do proper crossboder money transfer. I transfer money every month from the US to different countries in LATAM to pay employees, and historically you get screwed with various fees depending on how you structure the transfer (e.g. to the employee directly vs. to an entity in the receiving country that disburses the money to different local employees).
During the past few years I have encountered everything:
- unexpected fees beyond the local transfer fee at the receiving end (that change some times) (hello folks at Interbank!)
- low-fee provider that canceled our account because the TOS said that the service was meant to be used to send money to family and not to employees (hello folks at Xoom!)
- holding of money transferred for a week because of some threshold passed that triggered some AML check (hello folks at BCP!)
- provider that canceled transfer to a particular country for political instability (hello folks at Transferwise!)
- etc etc
All that goes away when you use p2p networks (like the ones from Binance https://p2p.binance.com/en?fiat=CNY&payment=ALL) and stablecoins to transfer money. The fees are low (or sometimes non-existent) and the transfer happens in seconds (vs the hours/days in a traditional system). Literally millions of cross-border dollars get transferred this way every day. Additionally, I hear of other folks who have escaped authoritarian regimes but still have family in those countries where there are strict restrictions to send/receive money. Guess what they are using?
2) Digital Property/Rights: Whether you want to accept it or not, there is an entire market where all kinds of property is being transferred through smart contracts. Sometimes the traditional digital item (say an NFT) has an associated real-world contract attached to it that extends some sort of right/ownership of a physical item in the real world. The rights to these items is being transferred from person to person every day. That market keeps growing, and it is not just "exchanging jpegs" anymore.
For both of these use cases, there are real world scenarios where a central authority has been by-passed for a legitimate transaction. And it happens every day today. The use cases for web3 is not running a "distributed Wordpress instance", but other useful real-world use-cases like these that we are starting to discover.
DeFi would have to follow those laws, right, and would be just as much of a pain to use after it has all of that compliance built in?
Otherwise, what you're doing is just illegal, and the alternative you should be comparing crypto to is something like "hiding money in carseat cushions", not TransferWise, right?
Does it? Do you have any examples of this? How does the ownership get enforced?
This seems to address the most salient criticism of NFTs which is that the only thing which changes ownership is the NFT itself, but I have never seen it in practice.
Also, does anyone actually use fraction? They seem to be just selling a platform.
Are any of those smart contracts for physical items recognized by, you know, actual laws, courts, governments, etc.?
> Sometimes the traditional digital item (say an NFT) has an associated real-world contract attached to it that
That is the only thing required for an actual contract for an actual physical object, and NFT is just some scam attached to it.
Web2 isn't going anywhere. It's not about some ephemeral future of web3, but more about stuff most people care about works in web2. Which is mainly, stream a flick, buy a pair of pants, watch football, order food. Web3 really doesn't influence any of those basic needs. And social networks? web3+Facebook would be EVEN WORSE. Hard pass.
Tokenizing humanity is _not_ the way to go.
You could do all those things in the 80's, too. Cable, mail-order catalogs, pizza delivery. It's just gotten a lot better. Web3 will have to make things a lot better, and the only big openings I'm seeing are around management of personal data, but I don't think blockchains really help with that compared to even public cloud providers.
So the likelihood of an item living on in another game could be quite tenuous. Not least because you have to hope the game developer supports your items and there isn't a strong incentive to do that.
The other side of it is whether these will have any meaning beyond being a nice reminder. In that sense you don't really need a token but to own your own data about the game. In this sense we can already see people holding onto the meaning of their previous gaming adventures, through maintaining friendships, keeping screenshots, diaries and other media about them and so on.
It feels like a lot of you guys have no idea what is going on here and just want to be mad at something.
Except in 99% of cases there is no technical reason for those tokens to exist. Everything they claim to do can be done with Bitcoin by itself.
Look, there's nothing wrong with harvesting money from digital rubes. But let's not fool ourselves into believing what's going on has anything to do with turning the world into a digital Chuck E Cheese.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script
As for NFTs they are little more than OP_RETURN, which has been part of Bitcoin since 2014.
There's this persistent and incredibly ignorant view out there that Ethereum's contracts are "smart" and Bitcoin, well, it doesn't do smart contracts. Even a cursory glance at the link shows this is not true.
>incredibly ignorant
I don't think it's ignorant at all. Over-emphasizing BTC smart contracts in my opinion is pedantic. Where is BTC Defi? That is a multi hundred billion-$ industry in terms of value locked in contracts. If BTC doesn't have the equivalent, then its "smart contract" capabilities are not equivalent. Simple as that.
Yes there is. I won't go so far as to say it's stealing, but for smart people who could be using their talents to build something actually valuable it's at least a misallocation of resources.
I'd suggest the end goal is to create value, not simply make as much money as possible.
Can you hold stable coins on BTC? How about lending them for yield? Depositing into pools/vaults that aggregate yield, harvest farmed coins, and other strategies?
How about taking the LP tokens from above, and borrowing against them to increase capital efficiency, even in some cases achieving self-paying loans from the yield derived from the LP tokens [0]?
[0] https://abracadabra.money/
To say BTC can "do all of this" is absurd. Where is it? Who cares if the "can do" is theoretical at best. In practice, the amount of things you can do with ETH and similar dwarf what is available with BTC. BTC is a great finite store of value. But why pretend it does things it doesn't actually do? Why over-state it's capabilities in comparison to other cryptocurrencies?
Crypto definitely does have a "playing with our food" feel a lot of the time, but I also think there's a privileged American perspective in turning your nose up at DeFi. In America we can generally count on a well regulated financial system, a stable currency, and a good climate to transact and do business. Many, MANY other places do not have this. If inflation is 10-20% like Turkey or Brazil, or your bank might bail in your assets to socialize losses like in Greece or Cyprus, or the only way to invest is through shady brokerages who might rip you off, DeFi is a fantastic alternative.
Not to mention some coins helping with the right to transact anonymously. The writing is on the wall for cash, and how many of you are thrilled about a world in which your every purchase and transaction is easily available to governments and corporations? It gets lost in all the hubbub, but Monero is one of the best privacy enhancing tools to come along in years. While it can be used for horrible things, it can also be invaluable to dissidents and other benign actors, just like cryptography in general can.
Fred Wilson's post on "the opening" re: the potential of NFTs I think is also worth a read -- https://avc.com/2021/08/the-opening/ It's hard to understand the memetic disease NFT participants catch until you're actually in the middle of it. Whether everyone will catch it or it will peter out is still up for debate.
You don't think governments want to reduce and ultimately eliminate the use of physical cash with moves like this >$10K reporting threshold proposal, or India banning bills of large denominations, trying to implement a world corporate tax code, etc.?
As disclosure, I don't own more than 500usd in crypto (which I mined at a much lower price), don't have a trading account anywhere and have never speculated on it.
However, the reason web3 excites me is this. Imagine the web, but there's a value exchange mechanism built in (a payment system if that helps your imagination).
I see a lot of frontier tech wild west stuff going on and that's fine. Let's not look at the trees here. There have a been a lot of web 1 and 2 approaches that are no longer. But things like braves attention token to relpace the advertisement model and micro transactions for supporting pages directly.
On chain tools which do away with backends, payment processors, account management etc
NFTs as true assets. Currently the closest thing to a digital asset that we have is an email account that we don't want to have blocked or lose.
Now you have people with 5000$ NFTs that they have a level of attachment to and can use as collateral.
They seem silly now, but it meets the definition of a digital asset. And that will help grow a network of tools that use them.
One example, you put your NFT up as collateral for a DeFi loan, you don't pay it back by the time given, a smart contract repos your NFT.
Obviously this is a lot of speculation and opinion, how it all plays out is not going to be and already hasn't been a smooth ride. However, it's bringing a lot of innovation very rapidly.
And one last thing for the sceptics, try to remember that crypto doesn't solve technical problems, it solves problems at a societal level.
Let's test that with ransomware - how does it solve that societal problem?
Right now there is little cost to doing bad things on the internet.
But the point is a little different.
Crypto solves among others the problem of technology moving faster than legislation in ways that can't be tampered with.
That's the big innovation of bitcoin. Someone created a store of value system and threw away the keys to the engine room which means it can't be tampered with by rough actors.
In the same way web3 doesn't solve every problem there is on web2 and web2 doesn't create every problem web3 tries to solve.
It seems to me like it does the opposite. It takes the problems rampant in society thanks to capitalism and moves them into the digital space, with no real benefit.
Data has the advantage of almost free replication, a lack of scarcity that might finally allow us to move forward as a society, allowing culture to be shared freely between free people. Instead crypto folks, blinded by their ideology, try their best to remove that advantage so they can make it just another capitalist asset to be traded.
And that's not all - the price we pay for their attempts to keep shackling culture to capitalism is the destruction of our climate and acceleration towards the apocalypse.
A big part of the problem here is that the high cost of crypto transactions and NFT minting means many Web3 things literally can't afford to let people get started for free.
And there are also other blockchains for which transactions indeed cost pennies, and which are faster than Ethereum. I love Ethereum for what it's provided to the ecosystem, but at the same time, I've never used it.
web3 isn't all tokens and NFTs. There's a huge distributed computing piece.
The increased investment is being used to build important infra.
I want to like IPFS but it has a lot of serious problems. It's got the same inherent problem as BitTorrent in that availability of content follows a power law distribution of popularity. Popular content is readily available but best of luck accessing anything that's not popular. It's link rot taken to the extreme.
It also has the very real limitation of the wildly asymmetric nature of consumer Internet connections. Not only do most connections have a fraction of their downstream bandwidth as upstream bandwidth but ISPs also regularly block ports and event packet types. On mobile the situation is even worse as CGNAT largely prevents devices from hosting content without reflecting off some third party.
These issues just makes the availability problems of distributed storage worse. They're also on top of other practical things like actual host availability (being powered on), how much storage is reliably available on the network, and actually recouping real costs for running nodes.
It most certainly does. But there are other options if you want decentralized storage, like SkyNet: https://siasky.net
Unfortunately the foul smell seems to be coming from the direction of ethereum.. like the devs have an incentive to keep e.g. discoverability crippled so that ethereum is less useless. shrug
So did physical computers, in the beginning.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211111052337/https://society.r...
The mindshare goes this direction because the project lifecycle is faster.
That’s it.
Overhead costs are lower, institutional validation requirements are nonexistent, the infrastructure requirements are minimal (frontend only, and even thats a maybe) - sure you could have used a database but now you dont even need one and your users pay to write to the database (blockchain) you do use! - the monetization paths are more lucrative, more liquid and instant, and your pedigree, geographic location or network doesnt matter to do any of this.
thats why this is going to keep happening.
tech sector is fast, this tech sector is faster. there’s no competition as far as fields go right now.
just continuing working for your exploitative ad conglomerate while imagining you are doing something more important and dont worry about everyone else. thats where we are at right now.
there are many projects out there earning large revenues without issuing a token. ironically many people don’t know about them because there isn’t a token doing all of the advertising from speculators. the one thing that a broader audience would respect, overlooked because there isnt a token they can criticize.
That's it. That's all that needs to happen to keep me on side. The more our online lives and worlds fulfil the above statement, the better.
However, the internet is infrastructure and right now both governments and service providers like Facebook, Twitter, Google effectively force moderation on communities becasue they increasingly control the infrastructure and methods of access that communitites need to use that infrastructure. The goal of "web3" or decentralisation in general should be to remove those layers and give communities complete freedom and control over how and if they moderate content.
However I don't want a Web3 built around "pay-to-play" which rejects the idea that anyone can read, write, and publish without paying for the privilege. The web I want is closer to Gemini (a simple transfer protocol and a hypertext format built around user-chosen presentation), instead of HTML's complex element hierarchies often unreadable without CSS's author-dictated formatting, JS's drive-by code execution by design, or Ethereum's rejection of permissionless access.
In other words, the prerequisite is that you already believe web3 is a real technology and not just bs.
Really, why are developers wasting their time? Plenty of real “decentralised web” technologies and opportunities are begging for your acquaintance!
Web3 is going to be the most greed and profit-driven tech the internet has ever seen.
Yes it should. Hence the reasons why there are alternative blockchains that not only aim to supersede Ethereum but they are specifically designed to scale and handle more applications and use-cases with cheaper transaction fees and are also EVM compatible.
The only reason that they have decided on something unscalable and expensive as Ethereum is because they missed out on Bitcoin. So the Web3 crowd decides to hype it everywhere.
I still cannot use Ethereum to buy my groceries. Therefore it is completely useless for that case.
"If we could do it, we could build a completely decentralized version of our current internet," Hendricks says. "With no firewalls, no tolls, no government regulation, no spying. Information would be totally free in every sense of the word."
Web 2.0, while nebulous, is reasonably defined as "the web as an application platform". Web 1.0 is for documents; static. Web 2.0 couldn't exist without 1.0; it took HTML, CSS, added JavaScript (well, argue the term "added", its nebulous, we're speaking in broad terms), and "evolved" it (or "devolved" depending on who you ask) to support much deeper user interaction and productivity.
Moreover; Web 1.0 is still right here. It didn't go anywhere. Its as easy as its always been to publish a static site with just HTML.
Anyone on the Web3 side who argues "P2P or Nothing" is, frankly, just as pointless as someone on the other side who says "haha, all your marketing is on Web2 Twitter, you people can't even build a social network!". Its not a zero sum game, despite what the semver naming scheme asserts (and let's be fair: Web2 started it! Web3 just adopted their inaccuracy).
Really love a lot of the other points made here, though. Lots of things to ponder over.
> The money thing confounds evaluation; it’s like trying to look at a star next to the sun [...] would you still be curious about Web3 if those currencies were worthless, in dollar terms? [...] The Ethereum Virtual Machine, humming heart of Web3, is a computer that charges you many dollars to execute a very small program very slowly. [...] They were about other things — science and coffee pots, links and camera lenses — while Web3 is, to a first approximation, about Web3.
I think a lot about sort-of the thrust of all these points. Web3/ETH/etc are super interesting from a technical angle, but what "real" work are they accomplishing? First thing people point to: DeFi. But that's self-referential, as he says, and moreover, finance sucks; its important, but its fake. Where's the real productivity in Web3? Well, the Second thing; ETH VM, which is a joke.
NFTs feel like a "third" large use-case of Web3, and could be the first interesting one, as a way to create digital scarcity. I'm not sure if its good or bad, but it is, at least, Natural, and Interesting. But its still self-referential and rooted in finance.
Point being, I think I would be far, far more interested in Web3 if it actually wasn't so mired in finance. I love his wording: its like trying to look at a [planet] next to the sun. But I'm also convinced that it wouldn't exist without its roots in finance; that's how you get people interested.
That's a really, really good point. Web1 has become commoditized and thus invisible. Web2 might follow a similar path.
- web 2.0 are platforms
- web 3.0 will maybe be protocols agains
The next iteration of web doesn't make away with the previous, it includes it, so thee is no fear of losing deletion but as anyone that can code can imagine: there is a real benefit to immutability, it gives you a foundation you can build on and in this case a decentralized foundation. Stop being fixated on kids swaping cards and try to see the good this tech can do, becuse if not only its bad side will be explored and we will just get platforms with more insidious dark patterns.
It's here to stay, NFT opened the floodgates and in 10 after the usual crashes and bull market runs, everyone will be integrated onto the blockchain one way or another.
### Main uses ?
Most people talk about censorship and decentralization but what percentage of consumers care about it negligible.
If you want to fight against censorship then just create a website on dark web ( like NYT has ), you can also use tools like Onion Share ( I haven't tested it yet ) if you have no idea how to do complicated stetting up of a dark web site.
### Decentralization
WEB 3.0 people talk about decentralization and spread their word on Twitter and discord ( Centralized means of communication ) but will never host a node of mastodon or Matrix Chat, which is a real way forward if you want to fight these platforms but no as if they will do then people will know, Oh Shit Decentralized web already exists and this will drop the value of token will drop as people will know there it no future in wasting hardware capabilities for nothing. Even a silly dog shit coin ( DOGE ) can has so much value what the hell is going on, its not even limited.
When people talk about IPFS they can only say it is decentralized and stuff but can it ever compete with the speed and cost efficiency of AWS S3, GCP Storage or Azure's offering, or even a self hosted 3 replica set on MinIO, never. And we have go guarantee of availability on IPFS so that's a big no at least for me. Also it is so slow that Cloudflare is caching content on IPFS they told in their recent blog post, so where is the decentralized bit am I missing something.
Also some decentralized blockchains have invite only miners program, so where is decentralization, am I missing some thing ?
### Is it forever ?
NO. Believe Me.
Who the hell is going to use mining resources used now when all coins are mined out and sold. No one with a right mind, as there will be a very less incentive to do so. And who will stop the spread of misinformation without censorship, well we can't ( theoretically ).
### Environmental Impact
Now let's talk about environmental impact that no one is going to talk about, why "We don't do that here.". It is one of the worst in a news article I read recently it said that it takes energy that would be required by 2 households in a day to process one transaction on Bitcoin. Global Warming WTF is that ask crypto coins.
### How do coin and protocol developers make money ?
While doing research about WEB 3.0, I was wondering how the hell are companies developing products will make their money to remain in business and thus maintaining the projects and you how they will keep around about 15-20% or more of initial coins for them. Or if it is a company like Brave ( makers of brave browser who blocks others ads and show people their ads and makers of token BAT ) pre mint all the coins and wallah here comes the centralization in the coin.
Web 3.0 can never obtain or create new innovative technologies like FANG as they can hire best engineers who really enjoy their work and their salary do not depend on value a silly token so they try to promote it everywhere they go.
Now companies like twitter and discord and facing backlash as they unveil their plans to use tokens, so that's actually good I think.
### Any Solution:
Yes, if you are on the immutability train let me introduce you to ImmuDB https://github.com/codenotary/immudb it is a super fast, so fast that blockchains can never accomplish these speeds "SQL SQL SQL" database which is so much more feature rich then the dumb blockchain.
If you are on public ledger thing then just create a read-only node of database and let it open to public so everyone can use it, there are 1000s if not millions of people who know SQL that only few who the blockchain protocols.
### How can a blockchain be destroyed ?
Simple Method Govt. can just block transaction from banks and exchanges and you are done no one accepts silly coins in real world.
Hard Method ( Permanent / Long Lasting ) As far as my knowledge blockchains are venerable to 51% attack which people say is impossible, but let's say I'm XYZ country and I want to ruin a blockchain I will just force all the cloud providers in my country ( big and small ) to lend their computers for few minutes for free or paid and then just do 51% attack and ruin it and then when other good people will do the 51% attack to reset it to original form we know that it is not immutable and people will lose trust and wallah you just shot yourself in the foot and value of your tokens and all other tokens is below the ground.
### How to can content on IPFS be blocked ?
Govt. can just tell ISP to block url to IPFS on web ( like cloudflare thing ) and check it against banned IPFS content signature and you have successfully blocked IPFS content. As govt. keeps a list of porn sites they can keep one for IPFS over http and update them regularly.
So torrent it let's say 100 times if not 1000 times better that it.
### How censor people on Web 3.0 ?
This is the biggest argument I hear so I decided to tell people a simple way to do it. Enjoy :).
Just do it in frontend as social media today do, that's it. Then the Web 3.0 people say we will just use another frontend and well that's what we do today.
For example: If some content is not available in your country let's say on reddit then you can just use another reddit client or if you are a pro then just read JSON response from the public API, or just use a VPN or TOR.
## Why ?
I was frustrated will all this Web 3.0 coins and speculation everywhere so I wrote it and it is more that what I expected that I would write, also if you find any grammatical, spelling or any other errors just let me know I will fox it.