What Is Web3? Should You Care?

https://spiegelmock.com/2021/11/24/what-is-web3-should-you-care/

by bwooster • 5 years ago

42 46 5 years ago

guilhas7• 5 years ago

Yes we should. Very exciting time full of opportunities

If people ignore the buzzword scams, and focus on what is possible to change with these new paradigms... I am already getting FOMO

jwilber• 5 years ago

Can you describe some of these possible changes?

noman-land2• 5 years ago

There's a lot to say but one of the big ones for me is normalizing the use of public key crypto for identity management.

Now anyone can create a keypair offline and suddenly they have a way for people to interact with them and they don't have to run any of the infrastructure themselves.

I like that it inverts the concept of "self hosting" into "everybody hosting".

guilhas7• 5 years ago

Just being completely random imagine the internet is now the multiverse. And everything publish on it is an NFT, posts, videos, images, comments. Like the current internet but everything has a value. Creating a comment on StackOverflow could get you paid instead of just reputation

The NFT concept seems stupid at first, and a 60 million NFT is definitely stupid. But imagine Youtube is the metaverse where videos, or NFTs, are published, and the owners will forever receive royalties from Youtube advert/membership profits. People can upload similar videos, but then there is, for example, music rights violation arbitrated by the site that some or all the profits of the video revert back to the original creator. And generally all free for the consumer. By no means perfect

Mining could be people caching, and serving NFT content, through which they could get paid, and preserve internet. Partially replacing web hosting, and preventing censorship. Using your neighbors pcs to speed up video encoding

For example the Google News problem with Spain and Australia URLs can be NFTs, and have rules. If a site is referencing a URL and is profiting, a part should go to the URL owner, but if the URL is clicked then a part goes to the site that referenced it https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/3/22761041/google-news-rela...

You might say that people don't like these new concepts, or mining is bad for the environment, but right now we can make them what we want them to be. The internet will evolve somewhere and if we don't think about it, someone else will and we won't like the result! Everything is up for grabs, payment systems, identity authentication, personal data management, web3 economic model, social media, news platforms...

clay-dreidels• 5 years ago

evilmaid.crypto

pketh• 5 years ago

web 1 and 2 promised very little and delivered a lot, web3 looks like the opposite

0xcoffee• 5 years ago

I feel like web 1 & 2 was really about sharing things. Newsgroups and forums. Then videos and social media.

However 'web3' seems the opposite. Decentralization is touted as a feature, because we cannot place our trust in other people. NFT hype is all about 'claiming' ownership over something. Where is the sharing and community?

For these reasons I do not think it is something interesting.

enos_feedler• 5 years ago

also the early web had some hype with claiming ownership of web domains.

tomByrer2• 5 years ago

"because we cannot place our trust in corporations"

Fixed your statement to demonstrate why Web3 is a thing. Once we saw how many scientists on FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, YT, etc got muted the past few years, the need for communication outside of the corporations is desperately needed.

butMyside• 5 years ago

Domain squatting, and all the security effort of protecting now worthless code IP, meta data analysis for private use, profit being funneled to fewer and fewer people are all outcomes of web 1 & 2

Take off the rose colored glasses; it’s all been a speculative game. That’s the root node of our economics at this point.

At the end of the day it’s electron state in a box of metal and plastic. It’s been generating “value” for owners distracting people from their lives.

I’ve been online since the 80s; people were complaining about web 1 ruining usenet, irc, and everything else.

Time moves on.

tata71• 5 years ago

This isn't going to age well.

Spivak2• 5 years ago

That’s what people keep saying but I’ll start to believe it when any web3 tech has even a hypothetical consumer or business application outside of web3.

_alex_• 5 years ago

Name a non-speculative usecase

dropnerd• 5 years ago

you can lose half of your logins (oauth) if faang's algorithm don't like you. decentralized identities fix this for free (no-onchain transactions required)

md_3• 5 years ago

Indeed, but I do wonder whether most users need a single global identity anyway. FIDO keys or—gasp—passwords-per-site seem to solve the real problem most users have (which is, you know, maintaining logins).

I do think if there were strong user demand for a unified web identity (beyond email identifiers, which aren’t obviously improved by blockchain), we’d see more adoption of OIDC, including offered by IdPs who only provide that service.

Instead, the common providers are providing federated identity as a sideline—you don’t create an Apple or Facebook account because you want to be able to sign in with Facebook elsewhere on the web; you create it ‘cause you want to use Facebook’s app.

Users don’t care—or don’t understand—federated identity, so they sure as hell aren’t going to be interested in blockchain-decentralised versions.

clippablematt2• 5 years ago

I’ve shown rainbow to a few of my friends. Shown them how to log into a site by scanning the wallet connect code and all their data moves with them and their wallet. From my experience they all really like it and prefer it to passwords and password managers. Add to this everyone getting used to scanning QR codes during COVID and suddenly what was seen as a big point of friction in ux isn’t such a big deal anymore. Give it a couple years for more social-recovery wallets to be developed and we’re good.

I’m really happy that alternatives to passwords/login with facebook/emails are taking off. Good to have options. There was a while there where sites only had a google log in and it was painful.

diveanon• 5 years ago

Can’t wait to see the tone of this forum change when YC starts investing in metaverse projects using web3 for auth.

dang• 5 years ago

HN commenters hardly take their cues from that.

What Is Web3? Should You Care?

Related Stories