I think the idea is that there are entities like facebook/ meta who believe that the metaverse is going to be a big thing, so if a "metaverse" is going to exist and see adoption, most people would much rather have it not be under the sole control of a corporation like facebook like most of the services on the web right now. Similarly, digital currencies are going to eventually become mainstream, and there are similar concerns about how central banks will implement them. In cases like these, having an second option that isn't controlled by some powerful institution could help democratize how they get implemented and used. If you dismiss it, then you are just leaving it to these large institutions to make the rules like they previously have, they have the power and resources to out compete, buy or snuff out any traditional competition.

Yeah, but remember when Facebook decided to inflate engagement stats for video, and sent everyone on a wild goose chase trying to create videos for everything? That made journalism much more expensive to do, made the web worse (auto playing videos now everywhere) and was a complete and utter waste of everyone’s time, effort and money. That’s almost certainly happening again with the metaverse. You don’t have to play the game. You’re arguing that we should follow the advice of large institutions to invest in their crap, simply because if we don’t, they’ll have the crap all to themselves. I say let them keep it.

No that isn't what I am saying, I am simply saying that there appears to be trends in the way technology is going to be developed and used. Facebook wasn't the first to think of a metaverse, but they are a big player in how it will develop based entirely on how big they are. Money has already increasingly become digitized and will continue to trend that way long before any central bank digital currency gets developed.

The point is that nobody knows what the future tools of the internet will be, they can only see trends and act on those. Most are probably stupid and most will probably be useless, but innovation will inevitably happen. Its fine if you think places like facebook can have the metaverse to themselves, just like it is fine for people to think they shouldn't.

If Facebook were the only player in the metaverse, it would have no value whatsoever. They need other people to invest, because it is too big to build themselves, and it is therefore necessary for others to participate for there to be a market at all. Simply doing it because it’s a trend is incredibly vapid. If you don’t think it’s a good idea, don’t give them your investment. Your choices matter; your thoughts on whether a trend is worthwhile matter, because your participation determines its success. Take some responsibility.

I think there is a misunderstanding here, I'm not involved in any web3 stuff I am just discussing it. I think whether or not you or I think it is a good idea or not is irrelevant because the reality is that there are people that are working on things because they think they are good ideas, and there are people investing in those things similarly, even things you would consider ethically questionable. It happens and will continue to happen.

Facebook doesn't need to build it all themselves, they just have to make the platform that everyone else will want to build on, just like what all of the current tech giants have done for the past 20 years. The idea isn't about chasing trends (or even something specific like a "metaverse"), it is seeing where innovation in happening and hopefully avoiding further concentration of power in the future of the internet.

> could help democratize how they get implemented

Was there any democratic process when "Solidity" was designed? Unfortunately, it does not appear to me that the right experts have been involved and that there was peer review. It looks like it was thrown over a wall, much like JavaScript was.

cue xkcd “14 competing standards” comic.

one reason there are so many blockchains is because they are all taking different development approaches and tradeoffs.

> In cases like these, having an second option that isn't controlled by some powerful institution could help democratize how they get implemented and used. If you dismiss it, then you are just leaving it to these large institutions to make the rules like they previously have, they have the power and resources to out compete, buy or snuff out any traditional competition.

I thought the whole idea was it is "distributed" and non centralized. If big evil company takes over, can't you just fork? If it really was decentralized, why would i care about the direction the central commitee takes?

The big company isn't taking over, the big company is making the thing so they own it. The point was that having a similar distributed solution takes power away from the big company because it provides an option for users to choose if the big companies implementation becomes too onerous.

The points made are relevant. However, they are much more political/social points rather than technological. Technology could help to facilitate such social or political change but it is the smaller part.

Somehow the web3/crypto etc discussions tend to vastly overestimate the role of technology vs the role of societal choices.

Technological changes are often precursor to societal change. But its not necessarily easy to predict what that societal change will be. Very often it isn't what the techno-enthuiasts think it will be.

A few web3 projects I think provide value.

1. Handshake

This is decentralized root naming system. This is one of the most practical use of a blockchain where all records need to be public and verifiable. No need to depend on icann and registry owners for having a tld which you own.

2. Unlock

This is membership protocol powered by nft. People can buy a nft and then for authorization, service provider can check whether the wallet has the nft and is valid. This way, nobody controls your membership and you can move them around the web as you like.

They are all connected to a wallet you control.

3. Arweave

Permanent storage using incentives and built on the idea of storage getting cheaper. Of course, this may not scale but I like the potential.

> 1. Handshake

This is what Namecoin[1] tried to do using the Bitcoin blockchain ten years ago without success. This gets reinvented about every year on top of every new blockchain, and none of these implementations have proven useful yet.

The main problem is that speculators become domain squatters, and buy all the popular domain names with the hope that they go up in price.

[1] https://www.namecoin.org/dot-bit/

If only they also reinvented ICANN UDRP too...

almost as if the existing structures, as flawed as they are, were created for a reason.

> The main problem is that speculators become domain squatters, and buy all the popular domain names with the hope that they go up in price.

This is the worst part about any web3 project.

Though, there are some differences between namecoin, ens, and handshake.

Handshake lets you register the TLD while ens, namecoin, etc are limited to domain on a single TLD. The potential number of combination of domain + tld is enormous comparatively.

Secondly, handshake doesn't release all TLD at once. They are released slowly to stop speculators from gobbling up the initial supply.

I do agree speculation is a huge problem which happens in normal ICANN world as well. So nothing to miss except I can own the TLD for which I don't need to pay over 200k USD with chance of getting rejected from ICANN and ongoing cost.

> main problem is that speculators become domain squatters, and buy all the popular domain name

I like the geo-libertarian approach to this. Said squatters should need to keep paying the market value of the resource in rent to remain in control of it. Thus removing the benefit of just squatting and require you to provide additional value on top of being the current owner to not lose money.

How do you determine the market value of a domain? Just let the highest bidder win?

Should we let a bunch of black hats purchase google.com if they can extract more value from it than Google can (and are therefore willing to pay more for it than Google)?

I want to have a few different line if thoughts to that concern.

a) On black hats, and presumably the risk of being tricked. Perhaps this is an orthogonal problem to who controls the name. Then again it might not.

b) On who the name is valuable for. You hint at there being a public interest in who controls the name. The free market response would be that in theory if the black hats can extract more value its because the invisible hand provides that value to the public in unforeseen ways. Or it may be that we just exchange one rent extractor for another, in which case perhaps the public should be more directly involved in the value assignment. A democratically governed central authority is one approach, another might be a more direct decentralised trust/value assessment towards a particular assignment

c) On bidding. I can see different approaches but to avoid a takeover situation a bid would probably have to binding over some significant time making it implausible for a takeover to be profitable unless the calculated return can be sustained.

What keeps the name squatters from becoming landlords? Rent the name to those who want to use it at an inflated price to subsidize their other squats.

Im imagining that the renters could simply bid on controlling the name directly instead of going through the squatter

> This is membership protocol powered by nft. People can buy a nft and then for authorization, service provider can check whether the wallet has the nft and is valid. This way, nobody controls your membership and you can move them around the web as you like.

Who is the boogey-man trying to control your site memberships? The site operator? I highly doubt this system is robust against site operators trying to "moderate" you, but supppse it was, why would they sign up for it?

For an ecosystem originally built on keen insights on how to mix tech with incentive structures, web3 seems to have thrown that all out the window and replaced it with wishful thinking.

> Who is the boogey-man trying to control your site memberships? The site operator? I highly doubt this system is robust against site operators trying to "moderate" you, but supppse it was, why would they sign up for it.

People use centralized platforms like patreon for memberships. They can kick you off and you will lose all your subscribers. Your patrons will lose access as well. That is what unlock tries to solve.

The membership data is stored on the blockchain publicly which everyone has equal access to. You can prove you own a particular nft stored on the blockchain by signing using your private key. So even if all data is public, authorization is secure and reliable.

So its a really fancy way to make an immutable public back up?

I mean i guess, but you could also just back up your subscribers list.

Here's the thing though.

Let's say, I want to provide special benefit to people who own membership on hackernews.

In the model where this data is public, I can query the wallet of people to check for HN nft and provide special discount or perks.

If this membership data was privately backed up, I cannot do that.

It fits nicely into the blockchain model, imo.

Subscriber owns the membership and can prove to the service provider.

Service provider has access to the membership and can check the validity.

> "In the model where this data is public, I can query the wallet of people to check for HN nft and provide special discount or perks."

How will you provide your "perks" if either you or your members have been kicked off the platform where those perks made sense in the first place?

With this use-case you're describing - all you have is a list of wallets that were at some point relevant to you in some way. This is the equivalent of maintaining a mailing list. Why does any of this require a distributed ledger? What problem does this solve exactly?

> "Subscriber owns the membership and can prove to the service provider. Service provider has access to the membership and can check the validity."

How is this any different than signing up with an email-address as a username?

I think you are misunderstanding something above.

I'm not the one providing HN membership. That would be YC but I as a third party can verify whether someone has a valid HN membership and provide them perks based on their membership. That is the problem a distributed ledger solves. The data is public and usable by any service provider.

To verify you have a HN account (membership) today, a service provider need to build something like keybase. That is complicated and will be different for each service.

That is the problem unlock-protocol "solves". It defines the protocol for managing these memberships. To create, verify, deploy, etc.

You need some way to pay for membership without a middleman. This is solved by cryptocurrency part of the blockchain these nfts are stored on.

Memberships are also more complicated than a list of email addresses. They can be transferred, expired, and change depending on the action of the user. For example, some provider want their memberships to be reduced to half when transferred.

This is the part smart contracts solve.

> To verify you have a HN account (membership) today, a service provider need to build something like keybase. That is complicated and will be different for each service.

What's wrong with plain old digital signatures in this contrived scenario. If for some reason this was desired, hn signs an assertion that so and so is a member. Person presents this assertion as neccesary. No blockchain required.

Memorizing hn's public key is no more hard than memorizing what their nft is.

I suppose you'll say transfering memberships. If hn is onboard with the transfer they could just issue a new signed assertion. So the only use case is if you want to transfer ownership against the service provider's will. But how does blockchain solve that? Unless i missed some great advance in zkp, all transfers are public on the blockchain, and service providers can trace the transfers and not recognize transfers they don't like.

> They can be transferred, expired, and change depending on the action of the user. For example, some provider want their memberships to be reduced to half when transferred.

What's a real world example of someone wanting something like this? I can't think of any.

> What's wrong with plain old digital signatures in this contrived scenario. If for some reason this was desired, hn signs an assertion that so and so is a member. Person presents this assertion as neccesary. No blockchain required.

Blockchain isn't required for this part and I answered why not certificates in this thread elsewhere. The simple reason is, wallet based authentication & authorization is more mainstream than pgp today. You also need to pay for memberships and that can be done through the same wallet. Arguably better UX.

> If hn is onboard with the transfer they could just issue a new signed assertion. So the only use case is if you want to transfer ownership against the service provider's will. But how does blockchain solve that?

Indeed. That's the point of storing membership data on blockchain. The user and community can go against the service provider. Think of freenode transfer a while ago, if the identity, moderation, ownership of channels, etc data was stored on the blockchain and controlled by the user. The community could migrate to another IRC service which fetched data from the blockchain and each user could get the same account they had on freenode by verifying they owned that data.

Check out other commenter on the same thread too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29862347

> more mainstream than pgp

This is the one of the most "damning with faint praise" comments I have seen this year.

> The simple reason is, wallet based authentication & authorization is more mainstream than pgp today.

So what, the killer feature is its UI isn't as shit as the program world famous for having a shit UI

Besides if that is your metric, JWTs are definitely more mainstream than blockchain stuff.

>Think of freenode transfer a while ago, if the identity, moderation, ownership of channels, etc data was stored on the blockchain and controlled by the user. The community could migrate to another IRC service which fetched data from the blockchain and each user could get the same account they had on freenode by verifying they owned that data.

Kind of hard to have a secret cabal channel if membership is public. Does this mean to ban someone from a channel you need to pay a transaction fee? That sounds fun from a channel op perspective.

> "To verify you have a HN account (membership) today, a service provider need to build something like keybase. That is complicated and will be different for each service."

No, they need at-best a small subset of what OAuth offers. OAuth is already distributed in that sense. It's a standard protocol which accounts for this exact scenario. This is a solved problem today.

It's not different than "login with Google"/"login with Apple".

> "You need some way to pay for membership without a middleman. This is solved by cryptocurrency part of the blockchain these nfts are stored on."

What does this sentence even mean? Your membership costs are on a per-service basis, and they are tied to each service you want to pay for. Different services have different costs.

This could make some sense if services wanted to get paid with Bitcoin, but ironically enough - the Bitcoin must be converted to USD at some point down the chain?

> "Memberships are also more complicated than a list of email addresses. They can be transferred, expired, and change depending on the action of the user."

Sure, but wtf does the blockchain have anything to do with this? You're free to have an account with any service and manage it as you wish on an individual per-service basis.

> I as a third party can verify whether someone has a valid HN membership and provide them perks based on their membership. That is the problem a distributed ledger solves.

It's the problem delegated auth (OAuth, etc.) already solved.

> You need some way to pay for membership without a middleman. This is solved by cryptocurrency part of the blockchain these nfts are stored on.

But... it's not, because a system that relies on a distributed network of middlemen isn't “without a middleman”.

> Memberships are also more complicated than a list of email addresses. They can be transferred, expired, and change depending on the action of the user. For example, some provider want their memberships to be reduced to half when transferred.

Smart contracts just add complication; this is trivially solved internally in centralized membership systems.

Well, you don't need to sign up for yet another service for one. People don't want to have yet another email and password to remember. That's what OAuth and all that machinery was invented to solve.

AuthN is one of the few use cases where having a public shared database/blockchain and users authenticate using their private keys works out better in some respects because the alternative is to depend on a centralized user database owned by a private company (eg Facebook). What happens on all of the sites you used Facebook login on, if your Facebook account gets suspended?

So we sacrifice member privacy for the sake of spam? Who would want this other than the spammer?

What is forcing Patreon or any other company to allow you to export your subscriber list? And do you have a right to export even if your account has (wrongly?) been banned. Unless there's some kind of regulation involved, this is the kind of thing that easily could cease to work as expected once a company has enough market share.

> 2. Unlock

> This is membership protocol powered by nft. […]

How is this preferable to just having the client generate a local private key and authenticating using public key cryptography?

You still need to store that data on somewhere to verify if someone owns a membership and whether it is valid though (memberships can expire).

That data is stored on blockchain vs having a centralized database. Refer to an earlier comment for why having it public is useful.

As for why people didn't use certificates till now, I don't know. I know they use wallet connect more which operates on the same principle but with existing adoption.

...why do you have to have a peer-to-peer network managing a blockchain just to verify membership data? It would be simpler to just have whoever controls memberships sign a user's public key to indicate membership (and then you add some metadata for expirations/membership levels/etc.). A user seeking to assert membership presents that certificate and proves knowledge of the private key.

Really though, I am not sure what problem is being solved here. Why do we need this in the first place? What is the attack scenario we are trying to address?

> 3. Arweave

> Permanent storage using incentives and built on the idea of storage getting cheaper. […]

How does this compare to existing implementations of the same idea such as STORJ?

> This is membership protocol powered by nft. People can buy a nft and then for authorization, service provider can check whether the wallet has the nft and is valid. This way, nobody controls your membership and you can move them around the web as you like.

The service provider sure does. They can just decide to not let you use the service.

Thx for highlighting this. If Handshake becomes a viable system it will def. serve as an important milestone for making web3 viable. Problem is this is not the type of project that is getting significant attention or funding.

ENS is an example of a project that is extant, working, and has a decent amount of funding (controlled democratically through a delegated token voting system). Here's my ENS record:

https://app.ens.domains/name/suzuha.eth/details

also, my post is on arweave, one of the cryptoeconomic data availability layers mentioned on the post:

https://3m44zon3blpnpjs3neglffbhqaibvuaeofkln2rd645dvky7cblq...

What I like about handshake is that you can own the TLD. I own searchableguy/ top level domain. This is gated by ICANN right now and they charge huge fees for nothing.

> The claim site is now open: claim.ens.domains.

> The ENS token contract is token.ensdao.eth: 0xC18360217D8F7Ab5e7c516566761Ea12Ce7F9D72

> Double check the website URL and contract address to avoid scams.

> Users have until May 4th, 2022 to claim their tokens, after which any remaining tokens will be sent to the DAO treasury.

Yeah of course.

> https://3m44zon3blpnpjs3neglffbhqaibvuaeofkln2rd645dvky7cblq...

Is it me or this links to some JSON?

yeah, it links to a standard JSON format for my article. mirror's data is portable. the json also contains my signature which authenticates the post to my self-sovereign identity (the keypair associated with my ENS name).

I just to a quick look it seams pretty centralized in practice no? https://docs.ens.domains/permanent-registrar-faq

all of that functionality is mediated by on-chain evm bytecode

And if there is a logical error, what's the correction mechanism?

The ENS DAO is responsible for changes to the protocol. There's a constitution, delegates, and proposals as tools for corrections.

More info on the ENS Governance page: https://docs.ens.domains/v/governance/process

If a web3 project can't get funded now in the current craze, im pretty sure it never will.

I think the tone of the author is that distributed ledger/blockchain/crypto/web3/monke ponzi- however any individual chooses to interpret this “cultural and monetary shift”- is in reality the future. And those who respond with indifference and denial of that reality, much like a person in your position, will have no say or power within the new system. That’s the voice of the author I believe. Not mine. As to the value, well I’d say you can only change when you’re ready to change. This applies to vision of value as well.

>And those who respond with indifference and denial of that reality, much like a person in your position, will have no say or power within the new system.

that wasn't my point. my point is that this technology shows no sign of slowing down, so by just angrily and reflexively dismissing it critics are throwing away an opportunity to make real, constructive criticism like Moxie did here at a time when it could make the most impact.

Save your words for people who want to hear it!

The people like me who really need your communications are starving for it. People who are already bought in and want quality content aren't getting much. This is a risk to the long term adoption of crypto.

My sources are few. I get a few crumbs on /ethfinance, and some nice nuggets from this thread, but there's just so much crap and snark to wade through it's almost not worth it.

> Show me the value, where's the ??? value!

What are the killer apps that are built on top of the web3 stack? Most I saw are not very killer... Or decentralized. I would expect, if this all is great as they say, that people tell me 'oh, you are using platform X?? Did you know that's fully web3?'. I tried things and they all are... not good... expensive or obvious money grabs. And when I ask around, even though 'entire twitter' seems to be building web3 apps, people only send the same ones; how can that be? Maybe it's my echo chamber; I don't follow many blockchain things.