- 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?
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 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.
brave already supports "login with ethereum"
adoption matters
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.
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.
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.
It does as much, if not more, volume than Coinbase ($1.98B in last 24H): https://info.uniswap.org/#/
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!
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.
Blockchain doesn’t really solve the whole “who is giving me this key” issue with PGP.
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.
You'd need everyone to agree to the same standard for stuff. Definitely more likely than game assets, but still incredibly unlikely
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).
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.
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.
> 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).
Web3/NFT etc doesn't solve this though.
Where is the list of followers going to be stored ? It isn't on chain.
Anything more data intensive than that can be stored on Ceramic/IPFS. https://ceramic.network/ https://www.arweave.org/ https://nft.storage/
That’s a cool idea but I’ve no idea why you would need a blockchain to achieve it.
Because otherwise you have gatekeepers and incompatible proprietary standards that don't interoperate or compose.
What does "owning your own assets" really mean, with regards to services such as Reddit, and where exactly do you see any problem worth fixing?
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.
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.
Patreon makes it pretty easy to give your subscribers early access to stuff, too. No blockchain involved. A lot of it happens over email.
That could easily be done with plain old public key cryptography.
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?
Instead of the Security team at Google, their ddos service and OnCall experts we have whom now?
Some miners?
Perfectly written Blockchain code?
You sound like those things are just free.
Static HTML pages still exist today.
Google isn't the Internet, no matter how badly they want you to believe that.
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.
Undersee cables for example.
Project Zero.
Secure by default.
2FA.
Google even gives you now the option of configuring your ads.
Realistically speaking some entity with a monetary motivation is solving hard problems for us.
Who will solve this issue in web3 and with what motivation?
If it is monetary (as it will be) do I now should start trusting the etherium company instead of Google?
Or should I start trusting 1000 small companies than Google?
I'm quite happy what Google does and I don't know all of those other potential companies.
LOL
I'm not aware of any opensource community being happy at doing on call.
Or end customer support.
Or even marketing.
And if we look at successful opensource projects, than we have companies behind them.
So it sounds like it could make tracking of activity much easier and that doesn't sound right.
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.
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
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.
tokenization I think is a dead end
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.
The same value as most other P2P software: illegal activity.
Web3 in particular is very useful for running online casinos and ponzi schemes.
Note that there is huge potential there for a ton of profit. Casinos make a ton of money.
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)
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?
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
1. Claim that X is the same as Y.
2. Assert that Y is Bad.
3. Therefore, X is Good. QED.
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.
why not just waltz into Russia, tell Putin and pals to leave and replace them with kind, competent, generous leaders?
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.
It would certainly be different.
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.
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.
But crypto is not the answer for micropayments, if that’s the goal we can do it without all the blockchain nonsense.
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.
If people pay to use that network and that increases, means alot of people are
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.
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!"
Ok but we’ve had this technology for decades and nobody cares. Why is doing this via the blockchain suddenly going to make it work?
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.
Yes, yes it would feel different. Because every action requires the user to pay.
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.
With TikTok, people usually express how much they love the algorithm that finds things that they like.
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.
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.
Therefore, it is the nadir of social media.
[0] https://www.nrk.no/osloogviken/xl/tiktok-doesn_t-show-the-wa...
There is nothing about TikTok that makes my generation mindless Web3 drones.
Doesn't make their thoughts any less valid.
There are clear differences between the Facebook demo and the Tiktok demo. I am not smart enough to be able to articulate them but they are there.
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.
This is what web3 is trying to get back to.
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.
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.
Is it bad to pay to click, if you earn more from the ads on the page? Along with micro-payments, you also micro-earn.
No. No you don't.
1. Below you claim that "Only you (or anyone who has access to your private key) can access your data."
So when you sign in somewhere, that "web3" app still has no access to your data
2. Just the fact that you have your data does not mean it's portable.
A proprietary binary blob created by app1 will not be readable or accessible through app2.
Is it that I don't have to re-enter my personal information on each site? Signing in with Google already gets me that. Is it something else?
Is it some kind of JSON blob that every service will know how to ingest properly?
Potential of paying for services and being able to require privacy in return? It is not a choice one can make with many web2 services (e.g. google).
As for "blockchains are transparent and can't offer no privacy" - just a question of time. Tech is already here (zkps, mpc, etc).
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.
Much less dystopian to me to pay rather than indirectly pay by being a data mining product and selling my mental real estate.
Steam and Apple stores have policies that merchants are legally liable for, including refund and availability policies.
Who enforces it when the creator no longer honors your token?
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)
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.
It's a weird fever dream.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
"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.
There is a reason that Valve is not too fond of crypto, and it is not "climate change".
Because, like with third party Counter-Strike knife skin sites, it always devolves into money laundering and illegal gambling.
Only in an ecosystem like cryptocurrency that exists for those purposes does it make sense.
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.
> 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.
Please, go tell that to the execs at Animoca Brands: https://medium.com/star-atlas/animoca-brands-joins-star-atla...
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.
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?
There used to be a time where people made money by providing actual products and services, not by locking users into a platform and exploiting them.
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.
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.
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?
- 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.
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.
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).
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"
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.
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.
PoS removes the environmental burden.
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.
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.
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.
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.