One aspect that I strongly dislike about "web3" is that it poisons the discourse with its incentives.

I don't believe that every person on Twitter with $BTC in their profile understands or can knowledgeably argue the benefits of Web3, but their crypto holdings make them a hard-lined crypto zealot in the hopes of multiplying few hundred dollars they've put in.

It's fairly widely known how laughable it is to look for unbiased opinion in the interviews of pundits talking finance. This is since it's become expected that none of their advice is going to be untethered to their investments, but given the opportunity they're talk their book all they long. I don't see that much wrong with talking your book, but desperately trying to cover it up under the guise of "knowing the tech is superior" while only having superficial understanding of what's going on - makes intelligent people reading your stuff distrust you immediately.

I know people on both sides of the fence. I know of only one person that's skeptical of Web3 but still hedges on its success. I'm surprised that there is no middle ground - there are either fervent advocates or fervent opposition, and with very few exceptions (!), the opposition seems to think more clearly and is better informed.

Reading through the linked article on "real world uses for Web3", most of them seem to consist of things that public key cryptography has been able to solve for decades (persistent identity, multiple persistent identities) or things you could do anyway ("right now, people can only go to facebook or Google. With Web3, everyone can have their own space!!") because the writer has apparently never heard of a web server.

Another HNer made a good point recently: Compute power is nearing post scarcity. Web3 is people trying to make it scarce again.

I have the impression that most comments here are either biased against cryptocurrencies or trying to push for them blindly. That's a bit sad considering we should at least be discussing the technology here.

web3 is a marketing brand that defines a future version of web apps where the frontend is a compiled SPA possibly hosted on decentralised platforms (IPFS) and where the backend is a decentralised blockchain (and in its purest form only that).

This goes a step beyond web 2.0 where you would build a SPA with a cloud backend, e.g. Firebase / Google. With web 2.0, you have to trust the backend (so again in most cases Google or Amazon) and that is a limiting factor for sensitive apps, or simply if you care for decentralisation.

Another addition of web3 is the payments, which could have been standardised in the web platform (I am a former W3C member and there were lots of discussions on that), but instead of the browser implementing payments, we ended up with a few centralised processors like Stripe. Same goes for identity.

Quite interestingly, web3 solves both Identity + Payments with a technically elegant solution. Many people got rich by holding AMZN stock, which is in great part due to AWS -- the cash cow of the company. Why would you have a problem with a cryptocurrency token being used to pay for the backend infrastructure i.e. paying for accessing a database-as-a-service?

Crypto fans are always hurling accusations of FOMO on those of us who just "don't get it".

But web3 strikes me as those very same people experiencing FOMO because they missed out printing a bunch of money for themselves in the early days of the web by actually providing novel value - which in hindsight now all looks like really obvious low-hanging fruit, hence the FOMO - so they're hoping to "get in on the ground floor" by rebooting the web and inserting themselves into and extracting a payment from every single transaction and interaction on this new web, hoping we use their magical tokens - which oh by the way are also speculative investments that they currently own a bunch of and you don't - as the currency.

Of course, I'm just a hater who doesn't get it.

It saddens me that they chose "web3" for the latest crypto pyramid scheme.

Call it what you want, but please don't sully the web with your plat du jour crypto antics.

Also for what it is worth, the web has been decentralised from the very start, I don't see what the fuss is about apart from just everyone getting rich selling the next hot coin/token/whatever.

If you've read Anathem by Neal Stephenson; he has an amusing made up word "bullshytt" (https://anathem.fandom.com/wiki/Bulshytt) that is being used in the book by the avout to denote exactly the kind of stuff web3 seems to be about.

In the book, the Avout are basically science & philosphy nerds that the rest of society has locked up in monasteries where they are not allowed to use any form of modern technology after a few incidents in the past where they went off and invented things like gene manipulation, nuclear weapons, etc. The outside world still has technology and interacting with them every few decades is hard for the avout because they seem to adopt all sorts of technical jargon every few years (i.e. bullshytt). So, they need to figure out what these people are talking about every time they are allowed out (every 1, 10, 100, or a 1000 years).

Asking the question if it is bullshit is kind of answering it, I would say. But it's definitely bullshytt.

Web3 is a web of lies. It promises proof or original for digital content which is a) nonsense and b) impossible. It promises easy transfer of digital rights while not doing that at all and it is actually impossible with current crypto tech. It promises decentralized money while making extremely centralized system. It promises severig ties with money printing and then blatantly money prints with zero oversight. It promises investments, but that that is completely manipulated by major player as they wish. It promises security but ”lol, not your keys not your money”. It promises getting rich, but conveniently forgets that crypto is negative sum casino. It promises going green, but is fully conscious that it will never happen because fundamentally there need to be punishment for bad actors and energy is it in crypto.

Basically every tech where inventor looks you in the face and says that ”black is white” can be called web3.

For awhile I insisted that all cryptocurrencies were bullshit and also Ponzi schemes, but given how many people take pleasure in buying them, selling them, and talking about them, I've come round to viewing them as a kind of in-game currency, with the game being a bit like those role-playing games that you play in your neighborhood while interacting with the real world. Anyone who grew up playing some variation of Assassin, especially the multi-day assassin games where you and your friends were still playing even when you went to school, and occasionally you had to tell teachers "I don't want to run this message to the main office because I think my friend Jim has a plan to get me if I go there." Much laughter.

Cryptocurrencies are starting to feel like that, a massive game that people take pleasure in. Nothing wrong with that. I've enjoyed real-world role-playing games, so I don't want to judge anyone else who is into such things.

Is it crazy to make a game currency your main form of investment? Maybe, but not automatically. You should, of course, invest in a diversified portfolio, but if you want to go long on this particular kind of game, it might pay off huge in the end.

I recall when I was a child me and my friends played Dungeons and Dragons -- long running campaigns that went on for years. One of the parents of my friends was upset by this and said it wasn't really a game because it didn't end and nobody could be declared a winner. I'm afraid my initial reaction to cryptocurrencies was similar, not seeing it as a game and rejecting it as not being real.

Of course, a big difference is that we insisted Dungeons and Dragons was a game, whereas the proponents of cryptocurrencies continue to insist that this is not a game. Some make some variation of the argument "there is so much money in this, it's too big to be a game" but that's an incorrect understanding of a game. There is a lot of money in esports, but we are still talking about games.

I've come round to accepting that cryptocurrencies are here to stay. I no longer consider them Ponzi schemes, I do regard them as a kind of play activity, one that deliberately tries to blue the line between play and non-play. To the extent that they enable certain kinds of criminal activity, they become real and can be used in non-play contexts. But mostly, this is a kind of play that some people find pleasure in, and there is no point in berating them for it.

Whenever I read about Web3 I always get the idea the feeling it's an entirely self-interested idea or movement, and there is nothing idealistic about it. Instead of control being with a single corporation, control will be with an exclusive limited group of founders who got in cheap, and to which access is sold at a significant premium.

It pretends to democratize things, but rather moves from a monopoly to an oligarchy, which works great for the 'in' group but not necessarily for those outside it.

I would like to see more discussion around P2P solutions like https://dat-ecosystem.org/ and the fundamental principles around distributed networks/economies.

I really like the idea of being able to "git clone" your data/website into your own local browser and just make it's own webserver. For most of content we generate, that would probably be enough.

I don't see the point of trying to place everything in a blockchain. I understand the power (and need) to decentralization though.

And I'm not sure just one tech/coin/protocol/chain will be enough, but maybe if we pack:

- a P2P browser, with a wallet for authentication+payment (abstracting money away together with authentication is a near idea)

- a versioned content manager that make it easy to pull/push from/to peers

- ways to P2P nodes to sign their own content and give permission or not to peers to read/write, so we can trace ownership through version logs

- a way to run serverless functions to share computational power, but only for complex tasks like ML training, rendering, etc

- a way to automatically (and collectively) parse in-browser data to add annotations (bringing semantics to random data, or labels to ML datasets)

- automate renderers of such data to create (and host) 2D websites, data visualizations, or 3D content (you can call it your own miniverse)

Or what I just described is the Web we're already building, we just need more hands on deck to actually build it instead of wasting our time with bs.

Ironically the people pushing for Web3 are mostly those that do not understand why decentralisation is key^1. The projects pushed by these individuals and corporations are largely very centralised.

Look at the Solana fiasco a while back where the network went down and required a coordinated restart.

Another centralising power in these "smart" blockchains are the stable coin issuers. In the event of a hard fork^2 Tether and USDC essentially have the power to decide single-handedly decide which chain ends up being the correct one. Why? Because they can't support two chains, the value of the tokens would be split in half. So, for example. Let's say Tether decides that Eth 2.0 is not something they would like to support, they would simply say "We will not redeem any coins on Eth 2.0" and that would be it. The value of the DeFi on that chain would evaporate instantly and no one would use it. The fact that almost no-one talks about this is pretty scary.

^1 Only Bitcoin is actually sufficiently decentralised to withstand large take-over attempts and politics, IMO.

^2 Ethereum hard forks every 6 months by design, by the way

Web3 seems like a response to every facet of Facebook. Facebook offers valuable services for free in exchange for data about its users. Web3 pays users for data they own and control with money grown on trees. There are limitless forests where money grows on trees if you just close your eyes and dream hard enough. Advertisers will pay users for their data, cutting out the middleman who creates any sort of meaning about them. Who needs valuable services, after all? Just send the money directly from advertiser to user.

The crypto ecosystem does have a killer app. Just not one people are eager to talk about. The vast majority who know about it are making money off it. It is a subsidized casino. Casinos are wildly popular even though they take 5% of the betting flow. How popular would a casino that on average pays out 5% be? Where is the 5% coming from? Three sources: money launderers, scammers (tether etc), and longer term speculators, in order of size. Money laundering traditionally takes something like a 30% haircut. Taking only a 5% haircut in crypto is a massive improvement and thus we should expect to see a substantial fraction of all the world's money laundering to move on chain. The other two are self explanatory.

I think many comments are either missing the point or just use it the article as an excuse to talk about something else.

The key point is that today everything is seen as a kind of speculation, and in order to have a decent life (provide for a family, and have a secure place to live, including in the old age) one has to be good at it.

It is one of the central problems of our society, and whatever is called web3.0 seems to only make it worse. As someone who is extremely unenthusiastic about being bearish, bullish and anything around stock markets I can understand author's sentiment very well

The absolute best argument I’ve seen so far against “web3” is this very pro-web3 and very clear article.

https://www.preethikasireddy.com/post/the-architecture-of-a-...

Read that, and make sure you understand the basics of what Ethereum, IPFS and maybe a few more technologies from the article etc actually are, then think about if that sounds like sensible thing to do.

If you can still take it seriously afterwards then I’m impressed!

"Web 2.0" was the modern web around 2008, and concurrent with or associated with things like AJAX and Ruby-on-Rails - here is an old article expanding on the term:

https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1310178

"Web 2.0 is a term (or rather buzzword) that you often hear when describing most “modern” web sites; however, it shouldn’t be a new concept to web developers. Web 2.0 is actually a consolidation of many existing technologies that allows you to provide a rich interactive user experience over the web. Examples of Web 2.0 technologies include, but aren’t limited to, the following areas:

  - Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), which include AJAX, Adobe Flash, Silverlight, and Moonlight
  - Web services
  - Blogs
  - Wikis
  - Social networking
  - Social bookmarking
  - RSS/Atom"

Just a reminder on how easy it is not seeing the forest because of the trees, and instead focusing on things that are shiny and noisy yet will not last.

What lasted was to move from server-side computing where all the UI was rendered server side as HTML pages, to a world where a lot of the computing and all of the UI rendering was done client-side.

So it meaningful to ask: Are we going into a world where the centralised server gets even less of a role because of things like data storage, payments, authentication are done in a distributed manner or purely client-side?

Web2 adoption was organic, driven by programmers and it definitely made the end user experience much better. With web3 we are jumping ahead of what it will be before even there has been consensus on it. For now it's an idea with possibilities. What is worse is VC's, hustlers, influencers (Gary Vee etc),Elite crypto tribes(polka) are selling the 'product' that doesn't exist yet. I say let it organically evolve and not prematurely bring in the marketers to sell it.

It feels marketing driven. Like trying to make a thing. I haven't seen an actual change in consumer interaction with the web, which was a defining aspect of web1 -> web2.

Ignoring its association with Ethereum and crypto.

I think standards for the following:

  - Authentication
  - Payments
  - Storage

That could be used without a server-side component would be useful and bring web client-side programming forward.

I reject the term 'web3'. Let start with the simple fact that blockchain is not web-based. Actually, lets end with that fact, too. This tech, whether or not you believe it is going anywhere, is quite simply not the web.

The question the title asks can be answered with a single word: yes.

If I had a fraction of a bitcoin for every recruiter who has contacted me in the last two months with a breathless crypto startup job posting with boatloads of seed capital, I'd be "rich."

If the tech industry bubble pops in the near future, it will be because of crypto.

(EDIT: As a sidenote, it is interesting that when I filed my taxes for 2020 revenue Canada had added a question about cryptocurrency assets.)

As with a lot of cryptocurrency stuff, web3 is very overhyped yet also genuinely promising and useful. The ecosystem is not yet at a point where it's streamlined enough for mainstream adoption, but it's possible to build working MVPs for very interesting services with privacy and decentralization guarantees that just weren't feasible pre-web3.

Of course that does come at some cost and from a pure surface user experience level a lot of these services do still feel like "existing things but worse". It takes a while for these kinds of structural changes to catch up in some ways, though there's already plenty of web3 services that are genuinely useful in their own right, too.

Disclaimer: I get paid to develop web3 applications and I like my job

I think this is a pretty astute analysis/taxonomy of analysis.

I'm interested in read/study more about: "the broad political-economic or cultural questions: who is participating in, sponsoring, and getting rich off of web3 technologies? What is the particular political or economic dynamic that makes the blockchain attractive? Given this, what will it be used for?", or "the culture, values, and especially the backers of the web3 world."

These are all things to be investigated that don't have a "yes" or "no" answer, but are instead "what's going on and what might it mean.".

The only thing I found myself taking issues with is the author's confidence that the technical issues ("Can the blockchain do anything that other currently existing technology cannot do and/or do anything better or more efficiently than other currently existing technology?") are "difficult to definitively resolve to everyone's satisfaction" but the second category "Will the blockchain form the architecture of the internet of the future" has a simple yes or no answer that will somehow be definitively resolvable.

My own thinking-as-an-engineer reaches the opposite conclusion -- the first category are relatively simple technical answers which can be be evaluated on technical merit, while the second category is future-prediction, political dispute, and narrative choice, and that's what's difficult to "resolve to anyone's satisfaction" with a consensus determination somehow.

Probably both categories are actually a mixture of both.

But what's going on right now is more knowable than predictions of future paradigm shifts, either way. That's actually the main thing I take from OP, let's lessen my interest in arguing about predicting the future, and increase it into looking into "what the hell is going on right now anyway". (Like what are the social and cultural and political factors in the current rise of blockchain interest, and who does it benefit?)

Let's agree on a definition first: web 3.0 is using blockchain tech to replace current server-side computing (static file hosting, functions/processing, databases, etc) and online centralized services (payments, identity, etc).

So, is it bs? No, it is not. If you are a developer, you can go now and build a dapp (a web3 application or distributed app).

So far so good, but:

A simple dapp will cost cents to host/run (even better: will cost only once!) but, can it scale? How easy/cheap would be to run a big, very big, social net? An online store such as Amazon? Uber?

No "password-reset" mechanism. That just sucks.

Keeping the current web safe for your uncle is a pain, yes, that uncle that clicks on every link sent from the rich African prince. Imagine keeping it safe once you help him install a chrome-ext crypto wallet so he can login and consume content from a dapp social net?

It is not really decentralized: you public facing dapp cannot be directly served from the nodes of a blockchain, you need a gateway, that is a centralized web server (good luck making SSL work for your registered domain!).

It would take many years for businesses to migrate/adopt web 3.0 standards. We are barely finishing moving tech to "online versions" from traditional client-server apps.

Miners are businesses, running nodes costs money, they ought to make more of what they spend otherwise they will just disconnect the node. Your data/code may be distributed but its persistence/availability depends on the economic success of whatever project you choose to trust. Early adopters of web 2.0 server-less apps experienced this first hand when they had to port their projects from Parse to something else when FB bought it and shut it down.

Professional miners are needed. You are not going to build your banking dapp on the spare capacities of our laptop's hard drives and CPUs, or are you? Might as well trust the engineers at Google or AWS who have it already figured out and are charging reasonably for it, no?

In sum: web 3.0 tech is here, it is interesting, but it is not a hammer for every nail.

As I recall the original conception of the web was such that it was inherently browsable _and_ editable (the first web browser was also a WYSIWYG editor). After people forgot about this and subsequently rediscovered an easier form of publishing user-generated content via web apps (PHP) "Web 2.0" took off. Ever since then I've used "Web 3.0" as a casual tongue-in-cheek reference to emerging web technologies and concepts; I never thought I'd see it seriously applied to technologies like blockchain and asymmetric key cryptography.

Web3 is not bullshit, nobody actually defined it properly, just like nobody defined properly what is Web0, Web1 and Web2. Web versioning methodology is bs, not the general concept of pinpointing what makes a big leap.

Does anybody here have a link to proper methodology for versioning the Web?

ps. Web is simply referring to a web of connected “pages” through links. Pretty much anybody who claims to work on Web3 says nothing about links.

Web3 or what is meant by it is just a database in the form of a blockchain. Nothing else. And to interact with this database, you still need a centralized server. This is the main problem, having solved which, I believe, we could reach a new level. If browsers could communicate directly with the blockchain, bypassing centralized servers, this would take the technology to a new level.

"web3" certainly looks like BS to me. Or, at least, it's just a buzzword lacking any real meaning.

But perhaps I simply don't understand it sufficiently. No matter how many explanations or advocacy pieces I've read about bringing the blockchain to the web, I don't see what the actual value of doing that is. The cost/benefit ratio of it seems incredibly unfavorable.

I don't know what Web3 will be represented by, but Web4 will be operated with sticks and stones...

I don’t like how web3 supporters divide sentiment towards web3 into “you’re either a cool crypto-aware person or just a normie loser”. It comes off as a pressure tactic, like they’re trying desperately to sell something. This is a tactic used by charlatans, not by engineers.

> Something that has frustrated me so far about the debate over web3 is the extent to which it's articulated in the latter terms — those of a prediction market

> ... all discourse is subconsciously understood to be people taking speculative positions on various topics

> ... can I at least just get slowly tanked on free booze and annoy people with a reminder that the house always wins?

So clearly the author thinks that "Web3" is just a rebranding of crypto. I didn't see anywhere in the article an explanation of Web3 or any examples.

Let me premise my take by saying that I am not a crypto zealot. If I hear a financial/investing podcast talk about crypto, I will fast forward. I think the vast majority of investors should steer clear. What about Web3?

Let me tell you my story of independently "discovering" the concept now being called Web3 - as I'm sure thousands of others have done in the last few years. In July I was out on my walk and an idea popped into my head. It was interesting enough that I took out my phone and recorded as I thought it though out loud.

Here it is in a nutshell: Distributed smart contracts can empower information consumers.

And here's the specific form that my idea took, and why, when I got home from my walk, I bought some ETH, having never owned any cryptocurrency before. My screens are going to be "Web3 clients". This client will have a new feature that my current TV does not. It will have available an overlay like Amazon X-ray. It will display info about what is on my screen, and most importantly a "truth meter". While I couldn't work out the details of how this would work, I did decide that a) it's a feature that I think will arrive, and b) Ethereum is likely to play a role.

Here's another idea: Discuss Web3 without even mentioning cryptocurrencies. Instead, just give your idea as I did, and explain how blockchain smart contracts will play a role in the implementation, and perhaps at the very end of presenting your idea, mention that it may be considered a form of Web3.

I remember people saying WEB 2.0 / AJAX was bullshit too. It's easy to lampoon the buzzwords / early failures of a new paradigm. People will be tinkering to learn new ways to working. Personally I believe Web3 has a huge future.

I think, web3 has potential.

Is it full with grifters?

Sure, but I wouldn't call the stuff that happened in the last 20 years on the internet as sound, even if it was often law abiding.

Web3 is full of ponzi schemes and, at least to me, the rich people web2 "created" tell there is something wrong too.

Decentralization is an opportunity, and I know this doesn't require blockchains, but I had the impression that OSS, and software in general, lacked in terms of "payment on the protocol level".

So, I think, this could lead to a new, better, era, for the internet. If we take the right steps.

I dedicated the last 3 years of my life to build "web3". In my case it means building a new democratic Internet (whatever that means) on top of ENS+IPFS. I a few projects in this direction, the current one is Esteroids.

Is this a good idea? dunno yet. Is this BS? I hope not, my intentions are surely good, no BS in them. Are there plenty of BS web3 projects? Yes, of course, same as in any other area of IT. But I really don't think the web3 idea is inherently BS, there's really plenty of value to be found in it.

Maybe web3 is not only about crypto bs. It's probably more about accountability and repudiation. To remove the control to central corporations like the FANG. To stop spreading hate speech and encourage to destroy the planet.

I really hate the web 2.0 personally and I stay far away from it. I'm not trying to convince anyone to follow my path, but I'm hoping that the true meaning of Internet will shine soon. Maybe the 3.0 is the way to go and in my opinion it cannot be worst than 2.0.

I'm surprised there's so many comments here. My usual reaction to anything "Web 3.0" is usually "nothing to see here, move along".

Not quite sure what web3 stands for, but seems like decentralization is suppose to be a big part of it.

But I think all the proponents of stronger algorithmic decentralization ignore the fact that the web doesn't quite live in a vacuum, and "real world" power will mostly like be translated into virtual/web power as well, and the decentralization will just make it less transparent, and with even less accountability.

I think a lot of web3 products thus far are bullshit, but I can't deny the sort of eventual absolution of re-federating the internet. Things can't continue to FAANG forever.

The ever-marching disappearance of offline-only humans also points towards a higher standard of understanding for the average internet user. Someday everybody might run their cloud or at least be involved in a direct way somehow

> Is Web3 Bullshit?

Yes.

I don't know whether it is or (more importantly) will be bullshit but one aspect of web3 I think has been a victory to webstandards: an actual decentralized SSO standard.

I know it must be easy to use Google's or Facebook SSO. But why rely on a Third party for this? And why - as user - must i open new accounts on all these webservice?

Yes it is bullshit. Any of you positive activists have any financial literacy? I've not met a single person who is positive about cryptocurrencies that also has a finance degree, that is not also a conman selling crap securities. Every respectable financially knowledgeable person I know calls them a fraud.

I don't think we need to make this longer than it should:

Yes. It's bullshit.

A lot of what seems jargon and bullshit is because of the initial applications sprouting on top. Do creators need to have better ways to retain ownership, monetize their work? Does open source creation need a better monetization model? I guess we would all be in sync with this.

Do we see the initial applications of web3 about creating these decentralizing apps to decommission centralized infra & taxation ? I guess not. The web does need to fundamentally evolve from already now being turned into walled gardens.

Web3 with decentralized protocols around not only comms but value will hopefully be a spur and movement towards this. Time will tell

"First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you." Recently it feels like the general sentiment toward Web3 has been moving from the ridicule phase to the attack phase. Then finally comes the acceptance. In my view, the entire Web3 movement (not just the speculative virtual currencies and NFTs) is so big and covers so many new areas that it's here to stay forever. It's going to fundamentally change the way that people work together all around the world. In the coming decades there will be huge inventions around Web3 that we have no way to predict yet.

Jury is out. I agree the speculative part of web3 is pointless.

What I love? Young entrepreneurs diving head first into an opaque technology stack looking to build something good.

Yes.

In case anyone missed this point too, blockchain technology enables the notion of robotic singularity. Not saying that's what it is, but when your robot (or car) is connected to an immutable ledger, it has access to everything every other robot (or car) senses, so for instance robots connected to a blockchain can synchronize their orchestration (so, for instance, making it more possible to produce self driving cars).

Web3 makes great sense when energy is abundant [1] and we're more concerned with the "ownership problem" and who should become wealthy and who not and its socio-economic (and political) justifcation, which was largely what we had occupied ourselves in the past 100 years, but in a different lingo: eg communism/socialism vs capitalism.

[1]: when we reach Type 1 as a civilization with eg large-scale application of fusion power. (According to mass–energy equivalence, Type I implies the conversion of about 2 kg of matter to energy per second https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#Type_I_civiliz... )

It'll never be a perfect system. But overall we shouldn't under-estimate the impacts of the wealth transfer [2] created by BTC, ETH, etc, to the hands of young and tech-believed optimists. And what this means from an evolutionary consumer-market perspective and how cultures are being shaped very differently (in US, EU, China, etc). (I’m in Hangzhou now and it's quite surreal to hear random people chatting about NFT in a cafe here despite CCP's ban of cryptos.)

[2] There were ponzi schemes for sure. But there are (a larger number of) honest people that became wealthy simply because they bought some BTC at $10 and are holding to this day too.

Yes. Metaverse also.

The phrase "social media" has become passé and even toxic.

The language around BTC & Crypto have political & other baggage.

Web3 is an attempt to re-package the past 10-15 years of web trends in a hip new label that leaves behind the baggage and allows for the appearance of "new stuff happening". But nothing much new is happening.

web3 is a complete marketing marvel. the only goal is money and more money and more..

web1: information

web2: information, people

web3: information, people, value

(value as in money and other valuable assets)

Yes

Elon Musk might think web3 bs because even he's rich, but Web3(or blockchain) operating out of his control.

Is an article that starts with an Elon Musk tweet quote bullshit?

well the article is certainly bullshit. but someone there wrote a useful and accurate comment:

> people who claim to be working on web3 and crypto desperately try to fit their technology to user problems. none of them seems to be working on the fundamental issues or the foundation needed to solve the existing problems.

> Most of them are half baked product/ marketing guys

> pretty much they create glittering websites and post tweets threads like "here is why web3 is a big thing" and nothing else they do

web3 can be proven bullshit the moment you realize all the implementations require web browsers instead of coming up with a solid foundation. this has caused major issues in ethereum (such as realizing their shit is completely broken and replacing it with metamask which is still bullshit). this on top of the fact that it's all MVP half working crap. almost all cryptocoin applications (and basically 100% of things titled "web3") require a web browser, which means you are trusting google/mozilla with all your money, on the web which is the most insecure, error-prone possible way to develop an application.

even from a layman perspective it's crap. you get something competing to be a standard web app, with all the same bugs and slowness, instead of a properly developed "native" GUI. example:

last time i tried to do something with metamask (a browser plugin), it didn't work on firefox. oh yeah, this was a top 10 (i.e, multi billion dollar market cap) cryptocoin's main use case which requires you to run code from a webpage on the internet that interfaces with metamask and you have to trust both of course as well as CA infra which is the opposite of decentralized. so i went with chrome. it tries to be a popup menu you're meant to just open and click one button in and close. if you open another window (like a text editor), it closes and you have to reopen it. so when i tried to open it to do some stuff and cross reference some number, i had to repeatedly: reopen metamask and press a bunch of buttons to bring me back to the same screen within metamask.

let's also look at the standard web3 "onboarding" user experience:

    - they assume you're a giant moron (and are correct)
    - they make you setup a password to encrypt your private key and not tell you this will be used as an encryption key (do they really believe I as a giant moron will come up with a password with sufficient entropy to be used as an encryption key for the 5th application today that asked me to make a password?)
    - next, they display the seed used to generate your password in the form of 20 or so words and ask you to write it down
    - next, they force you to input the words to "prove" you wrote it down, typically with some hack to disable copy/paste
    - at this point you may have lasers and spaceships flying around your screen as well as animated 3D polygons, to emphasize how cool it is to go through this step (and lessen the chance the user understands what is going on)
    - they do not provide an option to skip any of the above (typically, you may need to go read undocumented internal API)

let's look at web3.js

    - it's terribly documented
    - it's js
    - a language that does not support numbers
    - go-ethereum ships with a version that is several years old, i don't remember the numbers, but it's on an order of magnitude like 0.4.0 vs 2.3.4
    - in go-ethereum, there is no real way to find documentation for the web3 JS APIs you can use from its shell. but that's fine since the web3 JS API largely is an incoherent mess anyway
    - it's full of quirky shit (largely for the sake of snakeoil) like: every time you use a function in the "personal" namespace, like personal.listAccounts, it erases that line from your shell history
    - in fact, they dont want you to use the shell, they want you to be a mindless consumer and use premade web applications (hosted behind web pages "secured" by CAs) to do everything
    - i never used it outside go-ethereum, because why would i want to use js. may as well just use the node API at that point
    - all these are a multi billion dollar companies that could easily have allocated resources to these problems

let's look at how web3 wallets work:

    - it's a web app in electron, that takes between 4 seconds (eternity) and several minutes to display the main GUI
    - on most coins, there is no official wallet. not CLI. not GUI. so it is indeed an electron app by a 3rd party
    - the text "undefined" is written everywhere
    - menus mysteriously fail to open on certain occasions
    - it has several hundred thousand lines of code to do animations like lasers flying around the screen, yet the program literally has no features aside from "transfer in" and "transfer out", and "recover from seed"
    - the code is written by a mix of teenaged script kiddies, dot com boomers, and silicon valley startup hipsters (actually this applies everywhere in blockchain stuff, not just GUI wallets)
    - they do not tell you how you are synchronizing to coin #35. is it using an internal server owned by the wallet vendor? is it doing light sync?
    - they do not provide you with an option of *how* to connect to the coin's network, it "just works"

tl;dr web3 is not real software

It’s like that headline about the internet being a glorified fax machine in 1999. [0]

It was wrong to put your name on that piece for posterity to see (and mock you) , but if you listened to that article and shorted the Nasdaq you’d have made 5000% type returns .

And if Krugman himself listened to his own brain , he’d have had enough money not to care about that piece or make people forget about it

The web3 might not be bullshit , but if you want to make money the only trade out there is to bet that it is .

Bulls who say that web3 is in its early days surely mean the technical early days , because financially the web3 is already priced for world domination .

Bulls forget that when you have to learn a programming language to profit off a trend you already missed on life changing money and hockey stick price increase (bitcoin 2010-2020 and Ethereum 2015-2020)

[0] https://twitter.com/kevincadogan/status/1195521960437932033?...

Note to people reading these comments: HN Is notoriously anti-bitcoin and crypto. It was within hacker news discussions that I first heard about bitcoin, back when it was trading for less than one dollar. I did not buy bitcoin because I figured the hacker news crowd was very intelligent and knew a scam when they saw one. Just Keep this in mind when reading these comments make sure you take them with a grain of salt.