Web3 is just a snappy buzzword for blockchain-based computation: smart contracts, Ethereum VMs, all that jazz. But the broader world just knows it all as "crypto", a term that's now thoroughly associated with FTX-style fraud and snake oil, and the fact that nobody's ever managed to do anything useful with "web3" certainly isn't helping.

The part in the article about calling into question “the most basic tenets of the web3 philosophy” made me laugh. Every statement ever made about web3 has been questionable.

The idea, as far as I can tell, was for web3 to be truly distributed.

That is, there is no single point of failure for any website and no single entity totally controls any site.

Over time as the decentralization bend of crypto faded, so did the meaning of web3.

Eventually it devolved to meaning a site using a crypto wallet for purchases and identity.

At least that’s been my understanding as someone following fairly closely

I think the on-chain products like games are also considered part of web3. Some game developers attempted to store game and user state on chain. As far as I know, these are mostly gambling-type games where the actual gameplay is almost non-existent, and the only attraction (beyond the obvious gambling/crypto) is "the community", "future potential", etc.

Web3/crypto is populated by two types: charlatans and marks.

The marks are upset because SBF’s conviction casts doubt on their convictions. Nobody wants to believe they’re a fool.

The charlatans are upset because SBF broke rule one of a con: don’t get caught and ruin it for the rest.

I’m personally not a fan of the term, but here’s what I believe is the steel-man explanation of it:

Web3 refers to how the Ethereum community decided that the user interface to blockchains should be web-like, instead of say via commandline terminal or via Qt desktop apps (like Bitcoin).

You can see this with Metamask, which is essentially Ethereum’s App Store for smart contracts. https://metamask.io/

From that concept, the notion extended into using crypto to augment Web2 apps, like with micropayments or NFTs or the like.

Now it is a catch-all term for the Internet of Value, or the global Web augmented with a native currency that is not controlled by any country or company.

I’m not sure it was a good idea to co-opt a familiar term (Web2.0) and then define blockchain and cryptocurrency in terms of that. It’s unsurprisingly getting pushback, and Ethereum is being accused of “marchitecture” (like with the Pentium4, tech designed for marketing which compromises true performance, or security, or something else). Blockchains are expensive fully replicated distributed databases. They inherently want to host very light weight but high-value data, like accounting ledgers or internet names, and websites and apps are not that.

>Internet of Value

I’m disgusted how a bunch of VC types thought they were so incredibly clever with that piece of dystopian commodification double speak.

To be fair, VC types are not in the business of ethical philosophy. Crypto was not the first tech hype, won't be the last one. VC types will continue to thoughtlessly promote whatever can make them money.

With my theory of everything that is wrong…

MBA-ification is actually very very high on the list.

I don't have much insight into MBA programs. But suspect that they give substance to a pre-existing world view, effectively provide tools for justifying (and even reinforcing) bad practices. This is a generalization, of course, but if someone is already a crook, an MBA would only amplify that.

It is that. But also efficiency above all else.

Let’s run lean, let’s do it without human interaction, let’s push our solution first, we can force people in to this, etc.

I used to think Ayn Rand’s comments about creators and consumers were smarts people vs dumb, but that isn’t it at all. I think we’re in a complexity crisis and MBA driven business and large government is in a race for unsustainability.

This is not my primary understanding of where the term "Web 3" came from or refers to (though I'm not really disagreeing with you - the term is sufficiently nebulous that people use it to mean different things in different contexts).

I always understood the primary differences in the Web "versions" to be:

1. Web 1.0: dedicated servers on the Internet producing a lot of content/services by your average user who accesses that content with a web browser.

2. Web 2.0: really focused on the rise of user-generated content, e.g. social media, blogging platforms, image sharing sites, etc. But the architecture is still primarily client-server with end users interacting with server-provided apps.

3. Web 3.0: The main differentiator in Web 3.0 is trustless peer-to-peer architecture. That is, it's no longer about end users needing to connect to Google or Facebook-owned servers to receive and share content. Instead, the content lives on a distributed blockchain that no single entity owns. All of the applications that people talk about in "Web 3.0" like smart contracts, NFTs, etc. arise as a consequence of the underlying architecture being this distributed blockchain.

You’re right, that’s the core part of it. I think I just assume that goes without saying, but it should probably be mentioned explicitly when defining Web3.

web1 = read

web2 = read/write

web3 = read/write/own

Seems a little more like:

- It takes some knowledge to post

- It takes too little knowledge to post

- It takes money to do anything

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. Sure it's not completely accurate but it does embody the "spirit" I think.

I know, you could do writes with Web 1, so it's imperfect, but since that imperfection carries on to Web 3, I kinda like it. In its "wrongness" it kinda suggests it's not that simple.

Web 3 might be "own" - but the -value- of what you own is questionable. There might be things of value in there, but if there is it's well hidden by the crap. "Web with blockchain" doesn't seem like a useful improvement over "Web without block chain" [1].

So I like your summary. It begs the question "own what?" Which in turn kinda answers the Web 3 question in a nutshell.

[1] apart from criminal activity, clearly the killer-app for crypto, the block-chain is useful for time-stamping things. It can be used to prove that say a piece of music existed at a specific point in time. Which could be useful in copyright questions. Granted, this is an astonishingly niche case though.

The time-stamping use case you describe is basically non-existent. Even light media like images are not stored on-chain 99.99% of the time. Time-stamping a URL to an audio track that is hosted on a server you own is not in itself a prove of the existence of this copyrighted material.

I have seen interesting on-chain visual experiments (generative animation fully stored on-chain) but that trend seems to have faded under the pressure of the NFT monetization spike+burst.

You don't have to store the data on-chain. Simply storing a cryptographically-secure hash of the data is sufficient to attest its existence.

Interesting how that was exactly my thought process. I asked the original question, read that response, and then moved almost immediately to ask "own what?". I really wanted to know, as those details are important.

Decided against it, read your response, and saw "begs the question". Yes, it does.

I hope that "NFT"s are not something used as an example in an answer.

The "own" part is a fantasy. Fractional tokens of the world's grain resources, on-chain video hosting, a global decentralized currency exchange, etc... none of that really scaled. Having a secret key to a wallet is not more "ownership" in practical terms than having a bank account with an ID and a password.

The way I understand web3, is that its key promise was to create a trustless global digital environment. Technologically speaking, it works to a large degree. Pragmatically—I don't think it's top of mind for the vast majority of people, including most (ex)web3 advocates.

> FTX apparently having affted its philosophy

What does affted mean?

It is a buzzword now. Originally it meant a decentralized p2p app stack. For instance IPFS for file delivery, EVM for computation, and Greenfield for database operations. In this view bittorent would be an early example of a web3 application. The idea is open and permisionless p2p apps can provide better user service than centralized web2 apps.

Now it’s mostly lost it’s origin meaning.

> I have questions too ... like, is this even a thing at all, has it ever been? I must be missing something, I'm just not sure what.

Define "a thing". As in a thing that VCs threw money at? Absolutely. As in a thing that any normal human ever used or would ever want to use? No, but arguably that wasn't the point.

To add to the confusion, there was previously a thing called Web 3.0, or the Semantic Web. This was a big collection of W3C standards aimed around making internet data machine readable. Its main practical legacy is ActivityPub (and arguably RSS depending on how hard you squint at it). This was completely unrelated.