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Re:Is Web3 Bullshit? by 3np on Sunday December 05, 2021 @07:36AM (#29448791)
Imagine a world where infrastructure, libraries and developer tooling are all there. Imagine the reduction in costs for infrastructure, security (sure you still have to do it but the body looks completely different) and all that goes with having a "backend". Suddenly you don't even need to run a business to afford supporting an app that loads of people use.

Sure, you will still have backend processes but the exposure to "the app" is greatly reduced.

Re:Is Web3 Bullshit? by jazzyjackson on Sunday December 05, 2021 @08:16AM (#29449029)
That sounds great if it lowered costs, but it takes gas to run services on blockchains - it’s still “someone else’s computer” that has to be incentivized to do work, whether that’s executing a smart contract or paying to pin files on IPFS.

IMO there’s room for small benevolent communities where people choose to share in the cost of infrastructure (e.g. hosting seedboxes in torrenting communities where you are expected to keep your up/down ratio even) but expecting users to run full nodes is a tall order, computation and bandwidth-wise you’re offloading costs to your users. I always thought something like wikipedia could work like this since there’s thousands of committed super-users that could afford to run a background process, and indeed there’s IPFS mirrors of it, but IIRC the edits still happen on jimmy wales’ computer.

Re:Is Web3 Bullshit? by 3np on Sunday December 05, 2021 @08:31AM (#29449124)
I kind of mentioned it already, but apart from payments or other transfer of digital ownership, there shouldn't be much need for on-chain transactions. In some years when, hopefully, L2 technologies have matured and grown to live up to their promise, those won't have to either (there is always the initial on-boarding of course, but credit cards and mobile payments have those too)

As for "who's going to run the nodes", if cryptoeconomics or users don't take care of it, I assume businesses will. The nice thing is that regardless, the payment for this infrastructure is also facilitated through cryptocurrency transactions on L2 networks. For someone who doesn't want or need to take ownership of that, it can just be proxied through to the client and not need to be the concern of the developer of publisher of the app.

Of course businesses can still choose to pony up for it proactively of they have the finances to support it, potentially running it themselves or through a third party. You can always fall back to "the old ways" for certain things when it makes sense.

Re:Is Web3 Bullshit? by ShamelessC on Sunday December 05, 2021 @09:57AM (#29449720)
If by L2 you are referring to proof-of-stake, I don't think that technology can ever be made to work without needing to exist alongside a proof-of-work coin due to the "nothing at stake" issue.
Re:Is Web3 Bullshit? by 3np on Sunday December 05, 2021 @10:53AM (#29450147)
No, I am not talking about PoS. One example of "Layer 2" is Lightning Network for Bitcoin. You "lock up" an amount of BTC in a channel that you can then use over the p2p onion-routed liquidity network. Payments are practically instant and fees are low (and can be made 0 if you open a direct channel with the counter-party).

It's orhogonal to consensus so works equally well on PoW/PoS.

There are a couple of competing and complimentary solutions for L2 on Ethereum. I'm quite sure it will converge at some point.