Some benefits that I think web3 can bring to the user:
- Universal login: An alternative to "Sign in with Google/Apple/XYZ" that can't be denied by a corporation. There are countless examples of these companies deactivating accounts for questionable reasons.
- Permissionless composability: I'm not sure how to word this one better. If a developer wants to build on top of blockchain data, they can. No need to apply for API access, rate limits, etc. Not all data should be open/on a blockchain, but in the cases where it's appropriate this is a fantastic benefit.
- Ownership in communities: tokens (fungible or non-fungible) can represent ownership for communities. The next Reddit will reward its community and contributors. This isn't an unusual concept. YouTube and TikTok already reward their creator communities. The difference is that existing platforms don't let you build on those communities outside of their walled garden.
For balance, here are two concepts/terms I see co-mentioned with web3 that I believe are bullshit:
- Metaverse: I don't think this will come to anything. We're already living in the metaverse. We have online identities (yours is mouzogu!). I refuse to spend a significant portion of my life in VR or another 3D game.
- Micropayments: Consumers don't want the mental overhead of figuring out value for money every time they consume content.
You can have universal login with MetaMask, sure, but that functionality isn't reliant on a blockchain. It's decades-old public key cryptography.
> Ownership in communities.... The difference is that existing platforms don't let you build on those communities outside of their walled garden
But successful internet communities do everything in their power to remain walled gardens. What could they possibly have to gain by doing this? Like what would Reddit gain by moving Reddit Gold to the blockchain?
> You can have universal login with MetaMask, sure, but that functionality isn't reliant on a blockchain. It's decades-old public key cryptography.
For sure, you can do PGP, but if it's decades old, you have to ask yourself: Why hasn't public key cryptography taken off as a sign in solution in the same way that email or Google or Facebook have been?
Mainly because it's always been a chicken and egg problem for consumers and application developers. If you implement PGP as your sign-in method, it's unlikely that any consumers will adopt it unless they're developers. And you increase the barrier to entry for anyone who does not understand it.
In the case of MetaMask, this has already got significant traction at 21 million monthly active users (more if you count other EVM wallet solutions), because there's no other way to interact with a blockchain. It's also relatively user friendly. And there's an ecosystem now of applications that require it for interaction, so you're starting to see network effects grow for "Sign in With Ethereum/EVM".
> But successful internet communities do everything in their power to remain walled gardens
This will be proven to be false in the long run. This was the same argument against Linux back in the day vs. Windows. The bazaar will win against the cathedral in the end.
> For sure, you can do PGP, but if it's decades old, you have to ask yourself: Why hasn't public key cryptography taken off as a sign in solution in the same way that email or Google or Facebook have been?
For the same reason a Metamask extension to do so won't take off outside of specialized applications.
Since users have not yet authenticated, this is part of a conversation process of potential users to registered, authenticated users. Only options which will increase that will be supported.
People to some very high double-digit percentage understand what a "Sign in with Google" button does, what will happen if they hit it. Because of that, there is high likelyhood if someone hits that button that they will return successfully authenticated.
PGP never had a website-based authentication option. Mutual TLS did, but other than a few certificate authorities I've never seen it out of the enterprise space - the compatibility and user experience were never even close to sufficient to offer as a broader option.
As optimized as the sign in with Google experience is, there are still sites which will not support it because they want to make sure the user does not get 'lost' on another site if there are failures. They simply will not outsource their funnel.
> Why hasn't public key cryptography taken off as a sign in solution in the same way that email or Google or Facebook have been?
Because people haven't been financially motivated to evangelize it.
I believe that's the core of blockchain/web3 innovations. It's a worse way to do it, but the social hype (driven almost entirely by get rich FOMO) is enough to push it over the edge.
The most efficient way to do it would be to bootstrap the ecosystem with blockchain buzziness and then just deprecate the blockchain part eventually. MetaMask already relies on "Web2" apis to query blockchains, who says they have to actually hit a blockchain all the time?
A user’s transaction on Coinbase rarely represents an actual transaction on the blockchain. A transaction actually represents a row in a Coinbase SQL database, which Coinbase will eventually batch and then convert into a blockchain operation.
Coinbase is a centralized exchange. Of course it runs in a SQL db or whatever. They only need to touch the chain when settling inflows/outflows.
But something like Uniswap: https://app.uniswap.org/#/swap is fully on-chain. Every trade happens on chain, because the application is an immutable smart contract liquidity protocol, called an AMM, or automated market maker.
> MetaMask already relies on "Web2" apis to query blockchains
False. MetaMask uses Infura as a default, but you can edit your RPC URL to whatever you want. You can even run your own node and sync the chain if you've got a couple hundred gigabytes to spare (no stake required to run a non-validating node).
They don't have to hit the blockchain all the time. Only when it makes sense. For everything else, there's off-chain signatures. That's the beauty of it. Hey, you don't want to use the chain, just use the sign-in with Ethereum feature, and that's totally cool!
> This will be proven to be false in the long run. This was the same argument against Linux back in the day vs. Windows. The bazaar will win against the cathedral in the end.
Linux is still sitting at ~2% desktop market share compared to 90% for macOS+Windows. I'd hardly call that a win for the bazaar.
Okay, but the login bit for MetaMask is "just" using public key cryptography though, right? You could strip out the blockchain stuff from MetaMask and that part would still work.
You could also do Web Authentication, which is based on Public Key cryptography and ships with every major browser and is integrated into many operating systems.
Exactly! AFAIK client certificates have been in browsers for decades and almost no one uses them. Whereas, like you said, millions of people now the ability and basic know-how to generate and sign with public-private key pairs, adopted via incentives that keep the wallet ecosystem thriving.
I think you nailed it. It’s a victory for USERS - owning your own assets in a way that does not require you to trust the platform. It’s not so great for centralized platforms.
But it's not like you can use assets/data from one website in another, unless it's something like a jpg... in which case it's not like you can't just upload that jpg
You'd need everyone to agree to the same standard for stuff. Definitely more likely than game assets, but still incredibly unlikely
Of course you could. Just carrying your identity (even an anon one) between applications alone can be useful. How can I follow the same people on Twitter and Reddit and Discord and Playstation Network? Currently all this is difficult, awkward, etc with the current fragmentation in the market. Meanwhile, any digital content or rights can be represented by an NFT. Is it useful to own the commercial rights to use a pop song on a promotional video and then redistribute it among dozens of independent platforms? How about an open royalty standard for selling in-game music as part of an indie racing game (and by purchasing the in-game music, I get a portable copy that can be integrated in any application)? Just a couple of off-hand ideas, but the composability that blockchains offer for ownership enables some powerful use cases. NFTs are data structures.
>How can I follow the same people on Twitter and Reddit and Discord and Playstation Network? Currently all this is difficult, awkward, etc with the current fragmentation in the market. Meanwhile, any digital content or rights can be represented by an NFT.
I fee like a lot of these "cross platform NFTs" don't take the platform into consideration. A platform like Twitter or Reddit will have to opt-in to this blockchain and have to deal with reproducing whatever asset or relationship into their own systems. This will likely involve an API call to some datastore to retrieve that information.
1. For these platforms this is no different than integrating with any other 3rd party system. It's unclear how this is any different from Gravatar?
2. It's unclear why these platforms are motivated to supply such a feature. Why would I spent time integrating a blockchain for ownership rights over some in-game music, when CD Baby already exists?
A lot of these use cases are still solutions searching for a problem; they don't represent an actual material improvement for the platform (or worse, require economic investment that the platform cannot capture).
> Of course you could. Just carrying your identity (even an anon one) between applications alone can be useful. How can I follow the same people on Twitter and Reddit and Discord and Playstation Network? Currently all this is difficult, awkward, etc with the current fragmentation in the market.
An email address? Why do we need to complicate this with blockchain tomfoolery?
> An email address? Why do we need to complicate this with blockchain tomfoolery?
Because I can send a message to a public key, encrypted such that only the owner of the private key that pairs with that public key, can decrypt. Since the user actually owns the keys, they can't get rugged by Google or Microsoft because they find themselves on the wrong side of big brother. Public on-chain wallets as identity are also much more spam-resistant. Verifying a cryptographic signature is completely decentralized and does not require even internet access (could be done fully offline) whereas email is tied to a server by definition. Numerous possibilities open up with public-private keys.
Oh, interesting! Wonder why? Maybe people exist who don't want the same people from Twitter to follow them on Reddit, Youtube, Steam, Spotify, etc. too, eh? Maybe independent isolated logins aren't such a bad thing? Maybe hand-waving about "BLOCKCHAIN" doesn't actually have any solutions to any of these problems that arise from the fact that: different people have different desires. There is no tech solution for reconciling the irreconcilable.
> Oh, interesting! Wonder why? Maybe people exist who don't want the same people from Twitter to follow them on Reddit, Youtube, Steam, Spotify, etc. too, eh? Maybe independent isolated logins aren't such a bad thing? Maybe hand-waving about "BLOCKCHAIN" doesn't actually have any solutions to any of these problems that arise from the fact that: different people have different desires. There is no tech solution for reconciling the irreconcilable.
I have dozens of wallet addresses. In fact, while typing this message, I just created 3 more, just for fun. It's really as simple as running an ECDSA function in the browser if you want to create separate identities for separate platforms. The beauty of owning your online identities is that you are in control. It's really that simple. But if you want to compose that identity, there is really no better way.
We've already seen deplatforming, censorship, financial exclusion for protesting in a democratic nation, shadow banning, and worse from the big tech cos. That's not the internet or the values I was raised on, and I'm working to push back on it, vis-a-vis tools like SIWE (https://docs.login.xyz/general-information/siwe-overview/eip...). Take ownership.
> You already have that without requiring any buzzword-driven marketingspeak.
> And if your goal is to stay anonymous, in the very least you'd be using independent dedicated identities in separate services.
It is free to create a new identity on EVM. You just create a new public-private key pair. You can do it right now, in the browser, on the fly. If you want to have different accounts for different platforms (or multiple accounts for the same platform), you would have that ability (that is the case today, in Web3). But, if you want to integrate across platforms, it is far easier if those applications adopt an open, user-owned identity standard (rather than rely on Google or Gmail or Facebook or hotmail).
> How about an open royalty standard for selling in-game music as part of an indie racing game (and by purchasing the in-game music, I get a portable copy that can be integrated in any application)?
That’s a cool idea but I’ve no idea why you would need a blockchain to achieve it.
The music owner would surely be a gatekeeper in either a blockchain-based or blockchainless solution because they would want to vet that the service providers were properly respecting the rights token. And whether or not the standard is open or proprietary seems orthogonal to whether a blockchain is involved.
Yes, absolutely. This ("how can you transfer assets between platforms/context without interoperable protocols?", and the corollary "if the content is simple enough to have interoperable protocols, it's probably something uninteresting like an image rather than something valuable like a game asset") is one of the key counter-arguments that deflate a lot of web3 hype (along with "you don't need a blockchain for what you described" and "you are hyping decentralization, but the situation you've described still relies on (or is actively better with) a central authority"). A lot more detail on it here: https://docseuss.medium.com/look-what-you-made-me-do-a-lot-o...
> But successful internet communities do everything in their power to remain walled gardens. What could they possibly have to gain by doing this? Like what would Reddit gain by moving Reddit Gold to the blockchain?
We have to reimagine everything, I don't think a successful web3 platform will emerge from simply tacking on tokens to existing platforms. Successful internet communities become walled gardens to protect against competition, but they're limiting the growth of their community members and I believe the platforms themselves could capture more value. A creator on TikTok today can't easily give their most loyal followers discounts on their Shopify store, perks for moderating a Discord, early access to YouTube content, etc.
>We have to reimagine everything, I don't think a successful web3 platform will emerge from simply tacking on tokens to existing platforms.
Greenfield projects are easy because they wave away the real complexities of integrating with existing systems. But those existing platforms already provide a lot of tangible value. If you want users, you can't just ignore that.
>A creator on TikTok today can't easily give their most loyal followers discounts on their Shopify store, perks for moderating a Discord, early access to YouTube content, etc.
That could easily be done with plain old public key cryptography.
Blockchains are really just a shared public key cryptography system. It solves the key distribution problem and makes using keys easy for developers and users.
Universal login: the third party services still need to accept your login and can still reject it. Service providers won’t vanish or decentralize, look how we got google on the open web
Composability: sounds really bad for privacy. The entire concept of a permanent public record of transactions scares me for this reason
rewarding creator communities: we already have Patreon and advertising deals. Aren’t crypto transactions relatively slow and expensive, or has that changed?
I'm not sure I understand your question, genuinely. There are of course costs for the benefits that come with web3: protocols are slow to evolve, and infrastructure is less efficient when we require a distributed consensus. Anyone that thinks "Web 2" or centralized systems will disappear is silly, there will always be situations where the costs of web3 are greater than the benefits. On the other hand, it's equally silly to think that there are zero use cases where the benefits of web3 outweigh the costs. Both can and will coexist.
I agree - misguided attempts to make everything "web3" shouldn't take away from the huge amount of value that future web3 services can bring, even if they are vastly outnumbered by web2 services forever.
Not sure if you’ve heard but, over the last two years, some of the most polished and well-produced voices on NPR were literally coming from someone under a blanket in a closet. I’m not sure how much web3 is happening in closets but I wouldn’t bet on zero.
have you considered how (not "why?") was google able to give away one gigabyte of email storage to anybody before 2010s?
that was not free either... what I'm trying to get at (and not very eloquently) is that a lot of that work is done by the computers. also, something about how the code is written once and then used by everybody at the same time. sure, writting the code may be expensive at first.
dunno, I doubt better written words will get you to agree with (or see) whatever it is I'm trying to get at.
I get stuck at the point where I’m supposed to store the key material for my highly secure, persistent, web3-wide identity in … a browser extension? To which I then allow every web3 site I visit to access? I understand that it helps adoption, but there’s an enormous impedance mismatch there. Why isn’t there offline identify verification front and center?
The way you've described it, sounds like a cross domain cookie. That isn't technically a thing unless you consider one domain/company selling the tracking of their cookie for you to another domain/company or a data broker/aggregator.
So it sounds like it could make tracking of activity much easier and that doesn't sound right.
Universal Login: while some corporate login controls are anti-competitive, most blocks are due to spam and phishing. Web3 / crypto has yet to provide an effective sell against fakes and whitewashing. Sure blockchain is cool, but the actual product is the design of the collision to stop spam.
Permissionless composability: Copyright ensures there will always be the need for permission if you wish to compose in a country that has copyright.
There are some good ideas here but there are also some very critical flaws. The problem is not so much web3 itself but that web3’s most vocal proponents—- particularly investors—- have refused to grapple with things like spam and copyright. It’s probably because they want to be middlemen who collect all the profits and are left without liability when the pyramid collapses.
All of those usecase are going to suck for handling fraud and abuse though, same as everything else crypto related.
Permissionless composability means you have no control over which apps use your data, the universal login makes sure that spam is present and unbannable, and Reddit communities benefit heavily from being able to have top mods removed when they turn abusive
I like the distributed ID stuff and think its good or at least has potential.
permissionless computing is also fine, but I think payments need to be somehow decoupled from this. endless ocean of tokens is stupid. we need some kind of distributed payment gateway built into the internet where you can use any currency on a list of supported currencies, and none should be supported that are "bad" ie planet killing POW.
Every service that might use blockchain based authentication will implement allow lists. As everyone in the history of the Internet has learned trolls and spammers will ruin services. So some sort of unblockable universal login is an impractical fantasy.
p2p is great and has some excellent use cases. We used it on a previous project to download 100+GB patches onto dozens of PCs in a trusted environment using a 100(?)mbps external connection in a couple of minutes.
Torrents are also an incredible piece of technology, allowing tamper resistant distribution of files from untrusted parties - imagine how much value Linux distros glean from being hosted by third parties who voluntarily do so without needing to "partner up"?
I don't disagree that the _primary_ use case is piracy though (and I've yet to see any genuine use cases for web3 suggested either)
> How about poniz schemes ran by governments ? You are ok with that kind of exploitation ?
I don't understand what kind of argument you were aiming at. Even if your "government ponzi scheme" non-sequitur is taken at face value, what's your point exactly? Do you expect that a type of fraud becomes acceptable if you manage to point out other types of fraud?
simple, if there are no more participants in a govt systems like social security or people dont want to use govt backed money, then it's value will collapse in a one way or another.
It means that people who are left in the system are screwed like in any ponzi like systems.
P.S. Thanks for downvotes HN on my orginal comment
yeah, if you cut out and overlook all the key defining aspects of a Ponzi scheme like the fraud, sure.
Once the government privatizes social security (and similar mandatory retirement programs in other countries), converts it to a for-profit system, encourages speculative “investing”, makes deceptive claims on returns— you’ll be exactly right, they would be the same.
What about it? Everybody knows it's a Ponzi and at some point people agreed to it. It's not lying to you saying it will magically create money for you if you invest. You take the money from younger contributors, to give it to older contributors by design. And that kinda makes sense because the people at the top eventually die and it's everybodys turn at some point.
Story time. About 20 years ago, when dialup was introduced where I grew up, my uncle called me to show him what this new internet thing is.
As soon as I opened "yahoo.com", he asked "how am I paying to view Yahoo?". I said you're not paying anybody, you're just paying for the Internet connection. He nodded.
I then showed him Hotmail. He kept asking "ok so now, how did they charge me to view this page?". I kept telling him, "that's the beauty of the internet, you don't pay for each site you visit, you just have access to this enormous body of knowledge".
He was thinking of sites in terms of making long distance calls, since he knew the Internet used the phone line, so to him it was normal to pay for each "site call" (if that makes sense), because that's how phone calls worked.
This interaction stayed with me for a long time, because it was natural for him to think about paying for each website visit, but to me it was all 'free'. As social media and user data became more monetizable in the years after, we found out pretty fast that there was no such thing as free.
At times I wonder what would the web feel like if it worked like my uncle expected it to work back then. Websites could support their existence without ads, since each customer would be a paying customer. Ads would still be around, but perhaps people would have demanded a nicer experience once they know they are paying for the visit.
In many ways, that's the lense through which I look at web3. It might be too late to switch to a pay as you go system. It might be too late to educate people about the importance of staying anonymous and preserving their user data. Nothing about this payment system requires a blockchain, but internet-money is a good enough excuse to introduce an alternative pay-per-click approach to the Internet, because, to be honest, I think the Internet ended up being a cesspool of abnoxious ads, paid content, ads disguised as content, dark patterns, etc, like the world's dirtiest third world country bazaar.
Maybe if we paid for each click, the experience of using the Internet could be more like a supermarket.
> In many ways, that's the lense through which I look at web3. It might be too late to switch to a pay as you go system.
In that regard, web3 is a solution looking for a problem.
Companies like Medium, Udemy, Spotify, Netflix, LinkedIn, etc already offer users pay-as-you-go services for higher-value content, and none of them required so many buzzword-driven technologies to pull it off.
Heck, even Amazon offers pay-as-you-go access to books.
Exactly what does web3 bring to the table?
> It might be too late to educate people about the importance of staying anonymous and preserving their user data.
Again, exactly what does web3 bring to the table with regards to privacy and "preserving user data"? Those examples seem too vague to have any meaning beyond scaremongering.
> At times I wonder what would the web feel like if it worked like my uncle expected it to work back then. Websites could support their existence without ads, since each customer would be a paying customer.
No one would bother with the web if they had to pay for every visit to every website, especially if they had to pay before any content got delivered. It's a certainty that as soon as the client is paying per byte or per transaction that pages will do everything they can to nickel and dime clients by bloating even more than they do today. For clients that's fees on top of what their ISP is charging for the privilege to be charged more money.
Pre-web services like Compuserve were pay-per-hour IIRC. Nowadays there is a very distant chance that Brave fixes this. I've always felt that micropayments are the best application for cryptocurrency, but because they aren't lucrative they're mostly ignored in the space. It seems Stellar is humming along, and I remain a (somewhat bitter) Nano holder, but otherwise everything is about "trustless protocols" and "decentralized platforms" and other hogwash that ignores the scaling issues inherent to digital ledgers.
Yeah, I think everything being ad driven and free to use will be incredibly hard to move away from because it's damn hard to compete with free but it causes incentives to be profoundly misaligned.
> What is the value proposition of web3 to the user? ... You will up pay for every click.
But people who come after you will pay even more to you to do the same thing that you did for cheap! You are an early adopter who can just do nothing but click early all the way to becoming a millionaire! Basically a shameless ponzi is implicit in the promise.
I think in a perverse way, the pay per click dystopia is a feature and not a bug.
The theory is that people are incentivized to contribute to the p2p ecosystem. Unfortunately, the visionaries behind it probably didn’t predict that the user base (and therefore the next generations of developers) would be dominated by scammers and charlatans. Most of those projects didn’t even become decentralized, having a heavy UI on top of a thin blockchain.
I think the original vision might be possible to pull off if redesigned to ward against that sort of thing. Successfully rebranding it would be one of the harder problems I would imagine.
That's not web3. Web3 should feel no different to the end user than web2, except for the fact they "sign in" via their wallet (Metamask) instead of legacy login mechanisms (Username+password or Google/FB sign ins).
Users shouldn't even pay for gas. Look at orbis.club for an early example of proper web3.
What we saw up until now is not "true" web3, but simply web2 masquerading as such and using web3 as a marketing buzzword.
This sentence is emblematic of the major problem with discussions of "web3" right now. There are dozens of different definitions of web3 that all conflict with each other in one way or another; the only thing people seem to agree on is that web3 involves blockchain somehow. With so many different versions, it's hard to have a conversation because any criticism invariably ends up with people jumping in with "well, that's not really web3!"
When I see a product that is web3 but I don’t even know it’s web3, I’ll take it seriously. It’s like everyone talking about how MeteorJS is better than vanilla js, you just have to rewrite your app. It’s all hype.
React was “just better” than everything else, and flexible. There was hype, for sure. But you’d only discover React by investigating a company’s stack.
Storing content on the blockchain is prohibitively expensive. So "web3" is either using centralized non-blockchain solutions, or users will pay for it.
Running "smart" "contracts" which underpin "web3" is not free.
So yeah. If users only consume content, then web3 can be free for those users I guess.
Honest question: Is there something specific about TikTok technology/usage pattern paving the way for distopy acceptance or it's just the same concept of facebook/instagram/Twitter but with a younger audience?
I have noticed a cultural difference between different generations of social networks. With Facebook, people usually sought out people and groups that they wanted to connect with and complained about being algorithmically profiled for ads but accepted it as part of the business model.
With TikTok, people usually express how much they love the algorithm that finds things that they like.
> With Facebook, people usually sought out people and groups that they wanted to connect with and complained about being algorithmically profiled for ads but accepted it as part of the business model.
Google's success with ads is that they were able to trigger them as part of user action. Paid search results are hypothetically helpful to some people. Contextual ads on a site may actually provide value if they are on-topic.
Facebook ads mostly target people. They don't really provide any in-context value, they are pure commercials - spooky commercials that know what is going on in your life, although the ability to utilize this information is often laughably bad.
Twitter often has the same problems. Ads interspersed within conversations just aren't helpful or desired.
You will hear testimonials of most TikTok users addicted to and sniffing the digital crack / cocaine on the platform praising the super dystopian algorithm that operates on their viewing activity and collects minute data-points to keep them glued and addicted to the platform and screen time.
Then you will get something like this [0], and folks [1] on the kool-aid with nonsensical claims like 'TikTok is the best thing to have happened to the Internet' at the height of the euphoria.
In reality, it is both the same concepts of the other social networks but much worse and [0] has shown that its algorithm was more dystopian than previously thought.
It's strange that people lump these four together. There's a marked difference between Facebook/Instagram (friends first, sharing encouraged by all users) vs. Twitter/TikTok (mainly acting as a broadcast medium with a long tail).
you could make social media where the ad revenue is shared with the users. you can already sell art where the platform can vanish (like hicetnunc did) but the artists and users can take their assets to just another platform (like objkt).
Tiktok is the opposite of web3. It's a centralized service, run by a Chinese company, that collects loads of data about users and which controls the network. If they decide they want to ban your account they can. If you want to take your username and data to another network, it's very hard to do.
Networks should function more like domains and email. If you own "mouzugo.com", you can use Gmail for email. If you decide you'd rather switch to Fastmail, you can migrate without a problem. It's all enabled by open standards and interoperability.
No, it's trying to extract money out of clients for every transaction they perform. Moreover it requires all users buy into the cryptocurrency Ponzi to participate in that rent extraction. So you trade real money for Geoffrey dollars in order to pay money to read a fucking tweet.
If you're talking about visitors to a web3 website, ideally they shouldn't be able to tell if it's web3 or not.
But I believe the value proposition is for people who have spare bandwidth/compute/storage and want to make money. Currently internet infrastructure (like AWS) is largely owned by a few corps. Web3 has the potential to let anybody join, distributing the infrastructure across individual providers like what Uber did to taxis.
Another big one is web3 social platforms like Odysee and Peertube. These are more censorship resistant because they are decentralized.
A sharing economy can (and does!) exist in Web2 though - I've yet to get an answer as to what Web3 gives me over web2 when it comes to these sorts of problems.
So, being FULLY tracked by every website ever, on every device at the same time, since all your data is whatever wallet you use across devices anyway, is now a good thing?
You're not wrong. Privacy mechanisms still need to be designed and implemented. There is much research, particularly in the landscape of zero-knowledge proofs.
How does data portability actually work? I hear it talked about a lot, but I've never seen anything more than vague hand-waving as to the actual mechanics of it.
I suspect Web3 will be a spectacular marketing fail and then eventually nerds will figure out a real Web 3.1 that is not nearly as easily hyped but actually brings us some nice advances
The value proposition is the ability to share content without restriction or censorship, and own your data rather than being locked in a walled garden.
Sure, but if you have an individually managed social trust graph built into the distribution network that's pretty easy to combat. Have a friend that's spreading trust to scammers? Reduce their trust value (or just stop trusting them), problem solved.
Most tech calling itself web3 has less privacy - rather than 'just' Google knowing who I am across the internet, I'm spreading correlating information and pointers to publicly accessible records everywhere.
Privacy isn't some technology you can add to the stack. Rather than adding ZKP sprinkles on top, every technical choice will ultimately need to be reevaluated if privacy is a goal. Basically, you're talking about web4/5.
web3 is not "pay for every click." value prop is disintermediation and decentralization. like purchasing a game asset, and not having it tied only to your iOS or Steam account.
It's just as easy for a game developer to say "eh we're no longer using that blockchain for game assets" or otherwise make your "purchase" (which isn't really a purchase) unusable with a blockchain based solution as it is with current Steam/iOS-based systems. (Probably easier, really.)
You're missing the point, the game developer obviously has to buy into the ecosystem, but the difference is with the current status quo in-app purchases are not really owned by the customers, so even if another game developer wanted to honour their purchases there is no way to interop.
Web3 is a pretty good use case for this, and the transaction costs barely add anything if you compare to the cut the platform takes (Apple takes 30%) so the game publisher could easily swallow this extra cost too (which could be tiny)
They'll never be owned by the customers. They're owned by the companies that design them. Other developers do not have the right to include your purchase in their games due to law, not technical problems.
Further, you're now talking about having a way to bring your level 28 sword of whacking into a completely different game world. And somehow you think this is just a matter of an in-app purchase.
This feels like a tiny tiny edge case. How many developers simultaneously have the rights to an IP and have the game asset data and code, but also lack the ability to retrieve purchase data on that other game?
> the difference is with the current status quo in-app purchases are not really owned by the customers, so even if another game developer wanted to honour their purchases there is no way to interop.
Roblox already does this. Your in-game purchases are yours and you can carry them from one game to another.
Platforms outcompete protocols - this is why web2 became centralized.
> Your in-game purchases are yours and you can carry them from one game to another.
this is close to what web3 is trying to achieve but with all digital assets like domain names as well.
not familiar with roblox but it sounds close to this, except built on a private centralized ledger instead of public and decentralized. so the assets are attached to roblox as a company.
It's not about "game assets". It's a about having disintermediated access to the state of the "world".
Think of all the stories of startups that offer a product that locks their users and then go to be acquired/shut down by some other bigger company. If the services and the data live on the blockchain, it's guaranteed by design that the users are in control of their own data (no lock in) and that if the company just drops out of the market, others can continue using the services however they want.
This doesn't make any sense to me. The blockchain just says you own a thing, it might even have some data about the thing. But what are you going to do with it? If the game company decides to shut down their game, what do you actually do with a digital hat you bought on the blockchain?
Oh, yeah, maybe someone else will make another game and do the work to support a digital hat you bought from someone else. Maybe it'll happen in a bid to try to scoop up users of a dead game. Or maybe, they'll just make their own digital hats and sell you a new one.
Substitute "digital hats" for "exclusive contract with the star player on FIFA Football Manager", or "a mine that produces unobtanium on a blockchain version of minecraft"
And yes, I am not much of a gamer so these examples might sound super silly today. But 25 years ago the idea of people making a living by collecting and selling items on WoW would also be met with general skepticism, so we never know what the future holds.
You named two examples that only make sense in a centralized platform world.
FIFA licensing will always be a thing and collecting and selling WoW gear / accounts only worked because other people wanted to play WoW that badly. Both work because they're tied to a platform, not in spite of being tied to a platform.
It's amazing how unimaginative people are when they are biased against the innovation. The examples I gave were only to bring an analogy. Of course the next version of FIFA FM won't be licensed by FIFA. We are talking about a world without intermediaries. Star players would themselves be creating blockchain avatars that could be tied to their real-world performance. Fantasy Sports already exist, web3 just removes middlemen and make existing mechanics possible.
...What? Why wouldn't the next version of FIFA be licensed by FIFA?
I guess I don't really know what you're suggesting. As it is, people gotta get a new Madden game every year just to update stats. This isn't because of some kind of technical limitation afaik. EA just wants to sell a new game every year. In fact, I think they might have to buy the data and the right to use it from the league.
FIFA has a primary institutional function: to coordinate the activities of all professional sport clubs in a way that is in the best interest of every one participating.
So, all types of decision making power were given to FIFA because the clubs thought it would be better to negotiate as a group for broadcast rights or game licensing fees.
The thing is, this type of coordination does not require an all-encompassing central entity anymore. You can see that in Europe already with the top teams from different countries trying to create the "Superleague", completely aside from the FIFA/UEFA-backed leagues.
In Brazil, there has been some years already that the most popular clubs decided to break away from the national association and went on to negotiate broadcasting rights individually. Lo and behold, they are making more money than if they went the "unionized" route.
When people want to play a football game, they don't care about it being FIFA. They care about seeing their favorite clubs and their favorite players. If we have the technology that allows clubs and players to negotiate their image rights directly with game publishers, who needs FIFA?
All of these games run on centralized servers, though. You can "own" whatever assets you want on the blockchain, when that server goes down, they stop having any use at all.
Games run in many different contexts. The difference is that instead of your game state/achievements/assets being controlled by a balkanized industry of competitors seeking to lock you into their platforms, it could be stored publicly on a blockchain and available to you regardless of platform.
But in the real world, companies have to build and test assets. Blockchains are ledgers, and NFTs are receipts: they're far too expensive to hold a lot of data. They're never going to hold game assets.
If you want to say that Activision or Square-Enix come up with a tokenized platform for their own assets, which you can then use in other future games, that's marginally interesting. But Activision isn't going to care one bit about creating tokenized assets that players from Square bought on Square's platform. There's no money there.
Furthermore, players play for assets all the time in order to show off. When you start flooding the market with items so that players have cool stuff from day 1, you create a disincentive for them to push through and acquire these other items.
Who cares about Activision or Square-Enix? It's not going to be Activision that is going to build the blockchain-powered generation of gaming platforms. It's going to be one of the many small dev teams that wants to find a way to disrupt the market.
Well, for one, they're the prime use-case for this sort of thing because they have the resources. None of these podunk little developers is going to "disrupt" the market with blockchain assets, because of ALL the developers and studios, they're the LEAST capable of designing and testing assets that did not come from their studio.
"Hey Jim, we have a hotfix we need you to work on."
"No time for that, Bob, XYZ Gamecorp just created a pair of shoes on the blockchain, and even though it's only going to net us a nickel, we're going to spend the next week working on getting it into the game."
Might as well just light their studios on fire and try to recoup the insurance money, because it'd ultimately be more profitable.
They will not disrupt with the assets. They will disrupt it with the new game engines, and they are already backed by billions from VCs and the money from NFT speculators.
There is a reason that Valve is not too fond of crypto, and it is not "climate change".
Right, the fact that they would lose control over the distribution channel has nothing to do with it. It is only because they are oh-so concerned with "money laundering".
Why would somebody be spending billions of dollars in VC money when you could just use whatever game engine you want and license a small third party library to do asset validation? VCs can't possibly be THAT eager to blow all their money unless it's as a PAAS ala Roblox.
Since the beginning of the conversation, I am saying that is not about the assets. Why do you continue to center your reasoning around that?
It's like worrying about parking lots in a world where self-driving cars are available on-demand. If you don't believe that self-driving cars are ever going to reach that state, fine. But conditional on accepting a premise (web3 games using the blockchain as the basis of the world logic), you can not try to apply the rules of the old system into the new one.
Maybe it's because the technology isn't meant for being used as a storage medium for 'world logic" and the games that try to utilize it in this manner will be both expensive and terrible... so I give game dev studios and VCs enough credit that they have the common sense not to do stupid things that will fail miserably.
At least you are not talking about assets anymore. Yet:
> technology isn't meant for being used as a storage medium for 'world logic"
Au contraire. Perhaps a better terminology would be "world state", which is exactly the function of blockchains. It's not about the game data. It's just the "save file" for the users. And only about the data that needs to be shared and agreed upon all users.
> the games that try to utilize it in this manner will be both expensive and terrible
Why? There are scaling solutions to handle with this. State channel technology is quite appropriate for this scenario. Or highly specialized roll-ups for the different types of games. The "world state" would be secure in the blockchain, but all the complicated interactions could be done off-chain.
> they have the common sense not to do stupid things that will fail miserably.
Mind you, I am not saying that this game specifically will be a success. I am also never going to claim that all future games are going to be "on the blockchain". What I am saying is blockchain tech brings disintermediation, and that opens up the possibility of having games not controlled by any single entity.
But then... what’s the incentive to build a platform?
This is the part I don’t get. Use web3 to build your game, but you own no users. I get the value prop for users (in theory), but what is the value prop for developers?
Yes, there was. E.g, I remember playing Nascar online with school buddies via dial-up. There was no DLC, no extensions, no pay-to-win. You bought the game once, and you played it forever.
Ah, okay, fair. I don't think anyone is super interested in a return to only direct-connect multiplayer. Third-party server browsers showed up in a hurry, to be quickly superseded by much better in-game server browsers, with official servers being preferred, to cut down on cheating.
And especially if you want any kind of global ranking to ensure reasonably fair skill levels for matches, you're going to need a centralized service.
Imagine a game like Valorant without any central server. It'd be a much different game, a lot less user-friendly. And some people would go for that, because it would appeal to their moral sensibilities, and more power to them. But it would get destroyed, market-wise, against actual, centralized, user-friendly Valorant.
That's not theory, that's history. Players demanded games have good server browsers, good official servers, and good match-making, and games that didn't provide that suffered.
What you are talking about does not require locking users into the platform. It's totally okay to offer a service with your product, as long as it doesn't lock you into it.
Many apps offer you your data if you want it. For example, Facebook. I think people overestimate how useful data is outside of the application that was tailor-made to handle the data in the precise format it's in.
I guess "Web3" (it pains me to even use that term) would allow another developer to reverse-engineer an application to digest the data as it exists on the blockchain, but... that seems like a pretty negligible improvement over the status quo with many very significant drawbacks. For starters, a Raspberry Pi has orders of magnitude better performance than the "Ethereum World Computer". To make that concession, I'd hope for a much better benefit.
but it is still locked into the walled garden. if 5% of Twitter users want to escape the platform when a billionaire buys it and reinstates Trump, their only option is to use an entirely new protocol (Mastodon).
if 5% of OpenSea users want to escape the platform, they can and already are doing so because OpenSea never owned the tokens and media on its platform to begin with. see: LooksRare, Zora, Rarible.
Great! I have 132GB of photos, and would like to store them on the blockchain to ensure I always have access to them. How much will that cost me? Show your work, and round your answer to the nearest million.
Maybe too much snark, but there’s a real tension there. “Store it on the blockchain” means “store a copy on every single node, forever”. It’s understandable that incurs some costs, and that one has to store only the most essential information. Maybe, there are some paths forward, like sharded chains?
No. The blockchain is not a data store. The blockchain is needed only when you need:
- global view of the state that is taken as truth by all participants (consensus)
- where anyone is allowed to make operations to change the state (permissionless)
- and all operations that change the state are agreed by all participants (trustless)
You don't need the blockchain to store your music collection. Any content-addressable filesystem can do that for you. But you do need a blockchain if you want to make a decentralized "top-40" list.
I actually agree with all of that. I don't agree that storing that sort of data on the blockchain supports statements like "the users are in control of their own data". You're make a distinction between assets/content/etc. and 'data' that I don't think most users would recognize as a difference. If I make a playlist on decentralized-Spotify, and then that service goes bust, it's weak comfort that I'm able to move a list of song-hashes unless I (or another service I can move to) have access to the corresponding content. I can only exert as much control over my data as I over the off-chain content store[1].
What categories of data do you see that (a) average users care about and (b) would want to control beyond the life of a service provider but (c) doesn't depend on the availability of assets/contents/etc. cannot be viably stored on-chain?
[1]: Sure, FileCoin and dependent services offer some control and guarantees over off-chain data I guess.
Again, it's not about the data. Data is cheap. It's the meta-data and what you can do with it that is interesting. It's about the new classes of applications that might come up when the underlying data is not stored by any middleman.
To illustrate: the "Pirate Bay catalog" is many times larger than anything offered by any of the streaming services, but the majority of people still prefer to pay for the services. Github is the destination of almost every open source project, and companies are paying a good amount of money not for the storage of data, but for what it can be done with it.
Without the Google, Facebook, and Twitters of the world pouring substantial resources into hosting and powering those platforms a decentralized approach needs to cover costs somehow.
Of course they monetize the users and their content and make a pretty penny while doing so (except for Twitter).
The centralization of these big tech companies also brings efficiency, optimization, and economies of scale to this infrastructure that decentralized blockchains inherently don’t have. There’s also the issue of much of the Web3 infrastructure being hosted on $BIGCLOUD because lots of data and usage at scale is really hard. Piñata just uses S3 and charges a hefty markup on top of it (as one example). S3 is $0.03/GB at the lowest usage. Piñata is always $0.15.
I’m not saying the decentralized promise of Web3 is impossible. It’s just a bigger question of the vast majority of users who have already demonstrated they’re fine with being monetized by the big tech companies as long as their use is free/extremely low cost paying at least 5X of the fundamental underlying costs. That’s not even getting to content creators that have utilizes these free platforms to already generate significant income for themselves.
The HN crowd has a much better understanding and resistance to big tech and what they do to offer free products that monetize the user. The vast majority of the billions of users on these platforms have demonstrated that they do not care.
agree that media storage is not going to be easily decentralized, and most web3 products will depend on big cloud tech companies for storage and services.
almost all NFT platforms will extract some % commission from trades as a form of monetization. they could take 0% but then will have to cover their costs some other way; maybe monthly subscription or regular advertising.
but in the end it doesn't matter how the platform decides to offset its costs, if the data and assets are removed from centralized control. good example of this is NFT art marketplaces - one can go offline, and users can just move to another, or build a new one on the public data (blockchain tokens + IPFS media).
Game devs could offer transferable content without stores if they stopped using the stores (ok, admittedly, iOS makes this harder). Web3 has nothing to do with this.
1. you purchase digital items with centralized payment processors like VISA
2. the asset is transferred to your centralized iOS/Steam account. you do not "own" it, the company owns it. if you are banned from Steam, you lose all your games and game purchases.
web3 is asking how these two things can be changed to remove the intermediary.
the best frame for this is not "web3 ideals are not worth pursuing" but "how can we make web3 ideals feasibly work"
doubtful . these will come from creators and indie game devs first whenever they get over their hatred of crypto and blockchain. eventually major game houses and consoles will follow suit.
similar thing happens in rest of digital art and media worlds. photographers, musicians, and artists all doing NFTs, then later Instagram, Spotify, Adobe, major art auction houses all begin to explore NFTs as they can then capture some of that market.
> doubtful . these will come from creators and indie game devs first whenever they get over their hatred of crypto and blockchain. eventually major game houses and consoles will follow suit.
The indies could do this without crypto. They'd need a standard, Drop-box, and to collaborate on a little messaging system so their payment DBs can update one another. Pow! Same functionality, equivalent level collaboration, no crypto-bro middlemen, 1000th the environmental burden.
Is it? I've heard a lot of people claim this, but I've never seen any indication of platforms or standards that are attempting to do it, instead I'm seeing dozens of "centralised platform but on a blockchain".
Now we don’t have to pay for any costs (maaaaybe a smart contract deployment once) and the users can’t help themselves from interacting
Compared to web 2 marketing funnels, this is a one click funnel where every click is a payment. (Every click doesnt have to be a payment, users dont currently care)
Thats a great value proposition
Cheaper to operate, faster to accept payment, better path to getting payment. Pick all three.
Faster to accept payment? How is it easier for me to accept payment in eth and use it to pay my energy bill than it is to set up stripe?
Also, you claim a better path to getting payment? What is better about it? As far as I can see either I trust a third party to act as an intermediate to save in gas tax, or I charge multiple dollars to verify payment "immediately" - i.e. anytime in the next few hours if imlucky, depending on the currency. Of course there are coins out there that don't have these problems (yet) but then I need to go find an exchange that supports the coin I have and the coin I want, transfer them (see above) and _then_ pay? I don't see how this as a consumer is easier than having my browser autofill my credit card, or as a developer is easier than implementing a handful of functions to accept currency my users already use.
OP might be living in the future a bit, because yeah, fees are still too high right now, and there's too much friction. For now.
But in principle I agree. If you have a wallet set up and are used to using it, it's pretty quick and easy, and the money settles faster than ACH in the US which take at least a day if not 3-5? Although in Canada settlement with Interac is almost instant, maybe 3 minutes to an hour.
Setting up Stripe is something you can only do with approval from the authorities, though, so e.g. sex workers can't use it.
> But in principle I agree. If you have a wallet set up and are used to using it, it's pretty quick and easy,
Once you've overcome all the hurdles it's quick and easy isn't exactly encouraging. I'm not going to claim that it's easy to open a bank account/get a debit card, but they're pretty close to required in the western world these days so people have already overcome that hrudle.
> and the money settles faster than ACH in the US which take at least a day if not 3-5
This is a US problem that can be solved by regulation, not a technical problem. SEPA transfers clear in seconds in the EU. If you're using a payment network like Visa or Mastercard, you don't need to wait for processing (which can be 5-10 days), you only need authorization which is normally in the order of seconds. There is an element of trust here for sure, but you're trusting your Merchant Provider, and if you don't trust them to pay you you need another Merchant Provider _anyway_.
> Setting up Stripe is something you can only do with approval from the authorities, though, so e.g. sex workers can't use it.
Coinbase requires you to go through a KYC too, meaning it's unlikely that a person who is currently unable to use an existing Merchant provider will be able to use any of the larger exchanges.
JS web apps offloaded the compute and memory onto the browser/client, web3 to offload storage costs onto the user.
You will up pay for every click. web3 and metaverse feels so dystopian. but the young generations that were raised by tiktok will probably accept it.