You can choose your social network - if you don't like it, create one.
You can choose where to store your data - if you don't like it, move it.
You can choose where to host your website - if you don't like it, you have options...
etc.
Web 3 is also based on an economy of popularity and/or financial backing to either increase value or disparage an asset, which makes manipulation rampant, and it also makes the "Web 3 economy" inherently corrupt. Frankly, it's not a movement, it's really to me just a mutation of MLM and pyramid-scheme marketing online.
Sorry to be so harsh, but the way it's being spammed at all of us every day, and infecting real online commerce is abhorrent, and growing to the point where not much can be trusted when Web 3 is mentioned for me.
If you look how people interact with the web, it’s highly centralized to a handful of apps by a handful of companies.
You can use a federated social network RIGHT NOW. Or you can just make your own website TODAY. No permission needed, you get complete ownership. It’s the amazing decentralised dream that was (and is) the internet. Only thing it won’t do is potentially make you rich (at the expense of others) just for getting in (and out!) at the right time.
- You need to remain out of the shitlist of a handful of “spam and anti-evil” authorities (getting on a list means your site gets blocked by all the big browsers and can be permanent or take a long time to resolve)
- You need permission to host your content from the: hardware / cloud provider, the datacentre if you self-host, and / or intermediary ISPs for peering (if no-one will peer, your site may as well not exists)
There are some other parties you need permission or blessing from that don’t come immediately to mind.
>You need to remain out of the shitlist of a handful of “spam and anti-evil” authorities
And the exact same will happen in the world of 'web3'. Except you won't sign your terms and conditions in English but in from of a smart contract. The internet is a distributed computer, blockchains are distributed computers. Whatever people built on top of it will be as permissioned and have as many authorities as anything else.
You think you can't do encrypted, peer-to-peer communication without authorities on the good old internet? Of course you can, there's nothing technically in the way of it at all. It's just that nobody runs a business that way and they won't do it in the world of 'web3' either.
Web3 as it currently stands (as I said before it’s a slippery weasel word so no don’t you’ll change it to suite) also needs all that stuff. Most “web3” apps are served via Cloudflare ffs!
Do you think either site managed to purchase and control a domain name without the approval of a domain registrar?
Do you think either site is accessible without the approval of the ISP providing a connection to their server?
Etc. down the list I provided.
Both those domains at various times have had disagreements with their registrars, with their ISPs and with bodies on the internet more powerful than that. Hasn't made any difference to whether I can connect to them or not, because there are always alternative paths and vendors. Which is more or less what it means to be decentralised. In practice, being able to replace any party and keep on going is the capability that matters.
Most of the points mentioned are security features to shield people from bad actors, something that crypto does not seem very good at thus far, which is why I’m curious how web3 solves similar things.
Just like any paradigm change though, it's going to rely on the "killer implementation" to take off to kickstart the paradigm reaching mass appeal.
Not exactly sure why you think TCP, the protocol, is relevant here? Creating or interacting with a web contract in a blockchain is a different ballgame to hosting a web site, and are treated as such by ISPs. One is indistuishable with normal web browsing, and the other is often treated as a business. The threat of having your ISP cut you off because they don't like what you are browsing remains a threat though, and hence a weakness by requiring their permission.
And that you think the alternative you’re arguing away from is investing in gold and silver is kind of hilarious. Precarious metal “investors” are just a different generation of poor fools.
I can understand web4 could be self financing unstoppable web resources with no central authority able to close them but I dont see yet a proper use case beyond criminal endeavour. Plus, we're far from it, we'd need an organic transmission network that goes out of the traditional ISP system, like a global bluetooth peer to peer mobile network every phone contributes to in exchange for payment... that would be fast enough...
Web 3.0 I have a soft spot for. It was a stupid name and the ideas didn’t really work but the semantic web people had their hearts in the right place.
Nobody said "web2", indeed, but that doesn't invalidate that Web 2.0 described a very distinct and substantial evolution of what is possible in the browser.
Unclear if the value prop is large enough to overcome the activation energy of such an endeavor.
None of those resources operate peer to peer, none of them operate in anything resembling a mesh network. DDG is absolutely stoppable and centralized.
Not that I don't love all those projects and all of those qualities.
DuckDuckGo is even more centralized since it uses the index of one of the largest search engines (bing), is not at all self-financing, is not at all unstoppable (if the central authority was shut down any replacement would need to access bing's result) and is not at all peer-to-peer.
Either you don't actually know what those terms mean or you don't know how those websites function.
> Wikipedia, OpenStreetMaps, [WebSearch] would all be great examples of [potentially operating as] self-financing unstoppable web resources with no central authority distributed across a peer-peer mesh network.
> Unclear if the value prop is large enough to overcome the activation energy of such an endeavor [to convert these currently centralized services into an entity like what the grandparent describes].
As you can imagine, the latter activity is criminal in Russia and Belarus.
Source: I'm from Russia.
This seems like incredibly irresponsible advice: if you're worried about consequences for a political donation, leaving a signed public confession is the police's dream come true. Compromise someone's computer and you now have proof of a crime as well as something you can use to pressure everyone they transacted with, even if you had no idea to investigate them at the time it happened.
Best of all, nobody knows if that's happened unless you tell them so you can continue to quietly map out the opposition network and pressure each person you link to a Bitcoin transaction to identify their partners but otherwise stay quiet.
People like pointing out echo chambers all around while they are also in one.
Remember all the feathers ruffled with cloud computing? It just servers in a data center! Serverless? There are still servers! web2.0 s just ajax requests!
If people dump money into it, then something is likely to come out whether is better or not than what it was before. Maybe is worse, or maybe something will be built on top of it that will be better or some othere political event might make it relevant. Who knows
Now “crypto” is a little different because the the promise (not always followed though on, it’s still negative sum) of money to anyone who can bring themselves to believe. Like many bubbles and ponzi-like schemes before it’s primary functionally is to promote itself, and damn that’s one of the few things it’s really good at.
They really didn't. In my 20+ year tech career I have never seen any new technology prove anywhere near as divisive as web3/crypto.
That level of confident ignorance is the prevailing tone of the cryptocurrency world: everyone talks about changing the world but it's extremely hard to find someone who actually understands the details of the business they're trying to get into or why it works the way it currently does, but they don't let that stop them because they've already bought in they stand to lose potentially quite large sums of money if they can't find buyers.
Unlike the crypto ecosystem, those offered a tradeoff of higher cost and less control for greater convenience and ease of management. Which was hugely successful.
They're also not ... hegemonizing? in the way that cryptocurrency seems to be advocated.
I'm not saying the same will neccessarily repeat with so called web3, but we might be at a similar stage - in this case the sensation(?) of ownership of one's content is a desired attribute at the expense of efficiency in computing/processing terms for some use cases
it's pretty much the wild west now and not fully understood, but if it attracts investment with time something might come out of it.
Think of having a Facebook-like social graph, not controlled by Facebook. Or a merchant aggregation system like Amazon's without Amazon. A system not driven by maximizing exposure monetization (via ads, paid placement, etc.) but by something like a Nash equilibrium that maximizes value creation for participants.
This is what I work on, and I think it can be done.
The entire argument rests upon this premise and the author doesn’t explain it one bit.
If I tell you that web4 is all about complete freedom and an end to world hunger and it’s based on cow farts is it up to you to prove that it’s BS? (It’s early days for cow farts, you can’t judge them o what they can do right now)
The dot-com bubble was similar.
The onus is on the cryptobros to prove its usefulness, not the other way around.
What will your opinion be of web3 should the number start to continually go down?
But the thing that really seems weird is that all you need to do make it interesting is 1) define what you mean by web3 (it’s a slippery weasel word that changes meaning whenever the people using it needs it to) 2) define a few uses that are obviously better than the alternatives and justify them without hand waving (including explaining why what would appear to be fundamental show stopping flaws are not in fact that)
If you can’t do that (and no one seems to be able to) the maybe, just maybe, it is bullshit?