Web3 investor Packy McCormick can't explain a use case for Web3 [video]
twitter.comFor me, this video pretty much sums up the problem Web3 has: At every interface to the real world, you need a trusted third party.
Another example: A smart contract that transfers ownership of your online accounts to someone else in case of - say - death. Sounds reasonable, but who tells the smart contract that the person died? The coroner? If so, you are back to square one trying to solve the trusted third party problem.
Ironically for Web3/etc. the "(no) trusted third party" is both the selling point and it's largest problem.
> Ironically for Web3/etc. the "(no) trusted third party" is both the selling point and it's largest problem.
Here’s ethereum.org’s comparison of web 2 vs. web 3: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/web2-vs-web3/
I don’t see any mention of trustlessness. Rather, the selling points seem to be around different network designs.
Looking at the same page I come to a different conclusion. The pros it lists are permissionlessness, censorship resistance, and avoidance of a single point of failure. Cons are scalability and cost.
While they don't mention the word "trustless", those 3 pros are all things that you lose when you rely on a trusted third party. And since you pretty much always have to add a trusted third party to make the dApp useful, you effectively lose the pros and keep the cons.
They don't mention smart contracts in that page either. However, if you look at https://ethereum.org/en/web3/ you will see this: "At its core, Web3 uses blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and NFTs to give power back to the users in the form of ownership". And this: "Web3 is trustless: it operates using incentives and economic mechanisms instead of relying on trusted third-parties."
So I guess, when they compare web2 with web3, they implicitly mean the things I quoted.
Funny that you use that example. That's a classic example of something that's achievable in a trustless manner. If the address has no outbound activity for x time, transfer assets to beneficiary. Something like who wins the sportsball event would have to rely on a 3rd party oracle, of which there are many, but for the right price any of them can be tampered with.
I wouldn't want to rely on a dead man's switch pretty much my whole live. But you are right: There are many more examples. The one you mentioned suits better.
Can you have a trusted third party in a decentralized world?
Two years deep in the web3 hole and after using practically every single protocol, I can't think of any "need to have" use cases either.
Everything is either completely unnecessary or a "nice to have". Like, say, trading video game assets. Or digital art. All nice to haves, but nothing that would even remotely warrant the kind of valuations the segment commands.
Yo was more deserving of a million dollars of investment money than web3 is.
Yo?
I'm guessing this [0], which is the base from the 'bro' app from Silicon Valley.
>Yo was more deserving of a million dollars of investment money than web3 is.
Here is the thing, I despise Web3 it's a total Boomerism trying to shoehorn themselves into relevance and trying to ride the coat tails from the Bitcoin and to a greater extend the alt coin mania which so many profited from since the ICO craze; but for real-time crowd-funding it's pretty useful, Nadya of Pussy Riot and anti-Putin activist raised $40 million selling her NFTs and sent the first traunch of funds to help the frontline soldiers in less than 24 hours on the day of the invasion. And this was at a time that the Ukrainian Central Bank imposed Capital Controls and made it incredibly hard to get money in or out of the country.
This is a very narrow usecase, and I mean incredibly narrow, but it has utility: you can in theory be able to prove providence of an item in real time with this tech, but the issue as in most cases, will rely on an arbiter: and Courts/Judicial system are simply not caught up to the 21st century to make any of this enforceable.
You could program certain parameters into the NFT/Token to avoid scamming, or scalping in secondary Markets if you're holding an event etc... but as I said, these are so narrow that I fail to see if being embraced by anyone who doesn't have a financial incentive because it is still so early.
Eventually you can have things like Oracle's that point to certain events and self-execute a transaction, but honestly you'd be a fool to build this on ETH or any other Alt for anything that matters since it's so prone to hacks/reversals/forks etc... Personally I think this will be Layer 3 in the Bitcoin network due to security.
0: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-yo-could-be-the-next-twit...
You know you’re in the wrong path when investors are tech evangelists instead of techies.
is web3 a way of transferring storage and transfer costs to the user?
i guess web3 apps will exist on some blockchain with its own token and fee mechanisms.
companies already dump their giant js apps on the client side, wouldnt it be great if further requests could be paid by end user also.
3:08 is a pure gold summary
> it doesn't work [...] you've just recreated [...]
rebuttal:
> ...on the blockchain