What Is Web3? Should You Care?
spiegelmock.comyou 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)
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.
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.
How is it different than WebAuthn+FIDO2?
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
Can you describe some of these possible changes?
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".
What problem does this solve? What's wrong with the way I currently do "identity management"?
It solves a few problems as mentioned below.
Every single form of your identity right now is mediated by a third party.
Your email. Your Instagram. Your Twitter. Your phone number. Your bank account.
Not only that, but each one is independent of the other. That's 5 different accounts with 5 different providers. Each of them has a vast infrastructure and duplicate copy of everything about you and everything about everything else. Each one of them has an off switch to your identity that they can freely flip on a whim with no recourse available to you.
If you invert that and say that your identity is no longer mediated by any specific entity, or array of entities, it is mediated by a provably neutral public infrastructure that is completely opt in and costs only the amount that is proportional to your usage.
Now the identity resides with the user, not any third party, which means they have full control over it, without having to rely on any one entity that can fail or turn against you.
> Your email. Your Instagram. Your Twitter. Your phone number. Your bank account.
These are identifiers, backed by accounts with credentials.
> If you invert that and say that your identity is no longer mediated by any specific entity, or array of entities, it is mediated by a provably neutral public infrastructure that is completely opt in and costs only the amount that is proportional to your usage.
What value does this have for your email provider? Instagram or Twitter? The phone company? The bank?
All of these companies provide value _through_ the identifier. Checking accounts and Credit cards issued by the bank. The phone number. Your handle on Instagram or Twitter.
Many of these need to have an idea of a real-world identity for regulatory reasons. For account recovery actions. For effective enforcement of abuse bans.
What about this off switch? Even if I show up with my own identifier - twitter can still refuse to post my messages. My bank could block access to my funds.
This vision seems to be able replacing these businesses with new businesses and new infrastructure.
So in this brave new world, if someone manages to steal a single piece of my data (my private key) then they can have unfettered access to my phone, bank, email and social media accounts? And none of those services have a customer support team who can restore my access and reverse the fraudulent transactions that were made in my name?
Your first sentence greatly exaggerates the content that follows. I don't see any actual problems with the latter.
I do see more problems with the "solutions" actually.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It solves the problem of needing to make and remember a username/password on every site you use, it solves the problem of password hashes being leaked when a site gets compromised, it solves the problem of not being able to know that hihihihi1234 on hackernews is the same person as hihihihi1234 on lobste.rs, and it solves the problem of trying to make an account on a website only for your typical username to be taken already
How does me making an offline private key with the username Spivak fix the problem of someone else making their own key with the name Spivak? There is still a shared namespace of user ids. And if it’s fine that two keys have the same display name then you could just do what Discord does and do Spivak#42069.
There can still only be one twitch.tv/spivak.
This doesn't require web3 though. We have Web Authentication already integrated into every browser.
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...
I think this is the exact opposite direction I would like to see things go. We need to remove profit incentives to encourage more free thought.
If we have profit incentives in everything, we will see optimization for profits at the expense of everything else, including quality of information.
Completely agree, but you see this is like a 5 billion people driving a non stopping train, and it will go somewhere weather we like it or not, we can only help make it better
I don't like SPA, Electron, JavaScript in general, but the internet doesn't care
More on your comment, I can see what you say, someone not making a political controversial comment because it would mean losing money. But if we look at YouTube again, actually not every video is worth money, there is a lot of creativity and controversy still, more than before it
Every system is not perfect, and at the moment, by being, free a lot of people are not creating, or commenting or dev blog-posting, because they are not get paid for it, and they need to survive, so they have to invest their time on the 9to5, and after are to tired to investigate how can I profit by telling everyone "how did I do X interesting thing project"
Open source will probably see a bigger influx of money, there will be less friction to value people time
Like the time I just spent writing these comments for free!
did you get involved in bitclout? it approaches decentralized social media from this “monetize everything” angle, with one click to mint NFTs from any post. I actually like the micro-tipping and fundraising potential, but honestly the drama just gets cranked up to 11 once people’s financial solvency is tied to randos’ reputations.
i’m of the opinion that everything monetization touches dies, tho i’m sure META will be full of content creators getting their royalties as people have no choice but to buy an NFT of any MP3 they want to play in their zuck-sanctioned surveillance-spaces, I still believe in the old cyberspace declarations [0] where government regulations and copyright law are considered quaint anachronisms.
No
I agree with that, when there is money involved things can get poisoned very quickly, but we can develop better reputation systems. And people have jobs, this would be making it easier to earn while enjoying free time. People have been fight the internet advertising economic model for awhile. So there is some monetization dependency already. And we will have to decide where it will pivot next
We can't forget forget creativity, intrinsic value and allow dissent. But like I say above not everything will have to be valued, there is separation, you can put content into IPFS without emitting NFTs
I think blockchain technology promotes less lock-in, not more. Probably several METAs will appear competing with each other, we just have to choose the one that promotes more freedom and interoperability
What's in it for YouTube in this? It operates quite profitably without using blockchain to track ownership of videos and copyrights and who to send ad money to
I was just making an example that like an YT video, an NFT has value for content creators and can be the future of internet
Couldn't care less what happens to YouTube, hope something better comes along
The trend with this blockchain technologies is that single companies will have less power and control so they probably won't like it much, or will look for workarounds
But whatever happens for web3 probably most will have to adopt or stay behind
But that is the key question. Why would something else come along? You need backend resources for transcoding and serving. You need a search system. You need an ad system. And if you get big you need a copyright management system.
Alternatives come along everyday for varied reasons
https://alternativeto.net/software/youtube/
Progress just happens now and then, newer people comes to the ecosystem and change things to their liking. And in this case the blockchain invention is to big and disruptive to be ignored
Someone is working on a blockchain related system for all the things you said
And probably in the future no one will trust a company without some sort of auditable public blockchain ledger
> Alternatives come along everyday for varied reasons
But they don't stick. Simply being an alternative is not sufficient to make a service better and very few people care about the fundamental difference between youtube and some website that serves videos that are IPFS references.
> And probably in the future no one will trust a company without some sort of auditable public blockchain ledger
Why? What undesirable action would youtube take that is prevented by having them reference a blockchain such that you now trust them? The core things that people don't like about youtube are
1. Making videos and channels unavailable on youtube.com
2. The recommendation algorithm
3. Google remembering your browsing history and later serving you ads based on their profile of your interests
All of those still exist even if all of the videos are instead IPFS references.
Don't know why you so focused about YT. I was just exemplifying how the NFT could be the future of internet by comparing to YT video ecosystem. Not specifically on the future of YT. If anything it was a compliment. But if it improves or is replaced, don't care
> But they don't stick. Simply being an alternative is not sufficient
Tiktok clearly overtook a part o YT for younger people. And some big youtubers already double publish in other platforms
> Why? What undesirable action would youtube take that is prevented by having them reference a blockchain such that you now trust them?
Imagine a new video service appears that hosts the video normally, without IPFS etc, but tracks the user views/likes/dislikes in a public blockchain
Now there is someone with 1 million to invest in adverts. Will they do it on a platform where can validate the actual numbers, or trust YT word?
Not even sure if feasible, everything at the moment is hypothetical. But it will come
Just ask: How much money do you expect to get? Who currently has that money? Why would they give it to you?
1) more than I get now
2) ceo of Spotify is worth estimated $5billion maybe start there, shouldn’t that (be it money or ownership in Spotify) be going to the musicians who actually make the content and who get fractions of pennies?
3) they probably don’t want to. But we can just build systems that replace them. It seems to be working so far.
evilmaid.crypto
web 1 and 2 promised very little and delivered a lot, web3 looks like the opposite
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.
"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.
There has never been a web problem with people being published. Run your own website.
What you are talking about is how large companies are not willing to amplify those voices.
Web3 so far has not been about new forms of publishing _or_ amplification nearly as much as it has been about owning generated cat drawings. I don't think it is meant to solve this problem.
There's also the question of whether uncontrolled and anonymous amplification is a societal harm.
I'd rephrase amplification as discovery.
As a consumer of publications, I am limited by the centralization of discovery mechanisms, to only see what big companies want to show me.
It becomes a bigger problem when they choose to show different people disjoint information. Eg. Somebody could plan and attempt a coup without me hearing about it till after the fact, even though they conspired quite openly
Yes 8note, exactly.
Can't really "Run your own website" without filtering out the unsafe hosts. If you don't march to the beat of the drum, then Google, AWS, GoDaddy, MicroSoft, likely CloudFlare, IBM, etc will shut you down with little to no notice. & they're big enough to pressure others to do the same.
Thus, an underground web is needed for actual discourse.
also the early web had some hype with claiming ownership of web domains.
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.
This isn't going to age well.
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.
Name a non-speculative usecase
I mean, I'm far from an NFT buyer or fanboy, but what can smart contracts and distributed trust-less compute do?
Supply chain tracking is a fairly perfect match. An example in production usage today is https://simbachain.com/ and https://www.computerworld.com/article/3439843/how-pharma-wil... and a particularly interesting vaccine distribution database from IBM: https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/industries/vaccine-distributi... - or how about voting: An example in production usage today: https://www.govtech.com/products/utah-county-makes-history-w...
There is the obvious securities trading usages, but that may or may not qualify as speculative. Anyways, you could argue blockchain is a stupid tech for all those reasons and all the startups mentioned in these articles will fail - and fine, maybe you're right. Maybe postgres is better for all those jobs. But these are non-speculative use-cases. If they're the right fit for those problems -- well, I'm not running a crypto startup, so... But in the long expanse of history, I do believe trustless societies will eventually emerge.
Thanks for sharing the examples!
The obvious criticism is indeed that these use cases could be addressed—if not with Postgres—with Merkle trees, no? Like (at a quick glance) MediLedger wants auditability similar to (say) Cert Transparency, and is using a “permissioned” blockchain to do that. How that differs from a centralized or partially centralized model like CT isn’t obvious to me.
Perhaps more importantly, though, none of these examples seem like they demonstrate the supposed appeal of “Web3.0”: permissioned blockchains, by definition, do not have truly distributed ownership; the entire bullshit premise of Web3.0 from people like (ironically) a16z is that you get to own “digital assets.” Yet permissioned, partially centralized blockchains—-irrespective of whether Postgres would be a better solution!—-exhibit none of those characteristics, right?
If all the hype around “Web3.0” is just a way of saying “supply chain tracking will be done, at greater cost and complexity, in a distributed manner”, that doesn’t strike me as deserving of all the hype. What broad cultural or economic impacts will it have?
I'd expect a voting system to be unable to prove that any one voter voted in a certain way. I don't think that requirement is well suited for a blockchain?
There are a couple solutions to this. The simplest one could be for the government to publish a known public-key. Vote-data would be encrypted with the public key which only the election board has the private key to decrypt. This would ensure that no citizen could vote twice, each vote could be tracked to where, when, who, but not _what_, except by the election board.
Can’t wait to see the tone of this forum change when YC starts investing in metaverse projects using web3 for auth.
HN commenters hardly take their cues from that.