
Why We Need Web 3.0 - bpierre
https://breakermag.com/why-we-need-web-3-0/
======
blunte
He begins by claiming to have coined the term "Web 3.0". Reminds me of when
some other guy recently claimed to have coined the phrase, "priming the pump".

When I see a statement like this, one which seems clearly absurd, I have a
hard time taking whatever follows seriously.

~~~
droidist2
I just coined the term Web 4.0, you heard it here first.

~~~
Midnightas
36 minutes too late, better quickly coin Web 5.0:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17918120](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17918120)

~~~
droidist2
Oh damn! I'm coining Web 6.0 just to be safe.

------
pjc50
Ah, Ethereum.

Web 1.0's idealism was focused on liberal, unilateral sharing of information.
People just put things up without any real commercialisation, until the dotcom
era of the very late 90s. Not all the internet was the web: there was a
decentralised censorship-resistant messageboard system known as USENET, and
people tended to access email with local clients.

Web 2.0 was the commercialisation and polishing of the above; everything
became a web app. The downside of this was everything being infested by
advertising.

Web 3.0 likes to claim it's a return to 1.0 ideals of information-sharing, but
if it's built on cryptocurrency it will inherit its flaws: appalling waste of
energy, fundamental capacity limitations, and a tendency to collapse in fraud.

~~~
platz
> a return to 1.0 ideals of information-sharing

Jaron Lanier often makes the point that the goals of free information didn't
turn out quite the way they intended

> The internet was built on a socialist model that everything should be free
> and accessible to all. But it also celebrated visionary tech entrepreneurs
> who made it big with their world-changing ideas. “How do you celebrate
> entrepreneurship when everything is free?” he mused. Tech companies looked
> to advertising to fund their operations, and that’s where all the corruption
> began.

Ads powered by algorithms that perform behavior-modification on it's subjects
is the only model left when all that "information" is free.

> A monetized information economy will create a strong middle class out of
> information sharing—and a strong middle class must be able to outspend the
> elite tip of an economy for democracy to endure,”

[https://qz.com/1249955/jaron-lanier-at-ted-2018-to-fix-
the-i...](https://qz.com/1249955/jaron-lanier-at-ted-2018-to-fix-the-internet-
we-have-to-start-paying-for-google-and-facebook/)

[https://qz.com/87795/free-information-as-great-as-it-
sounds-...](https://qz.com/87795/free-information-as-great-as-it-sounds-will-
enslave-us-all/)

~~~
pjc50
Certainly, but we know what the likely alternatives were at the time: telco
walled gardens (Minitel) or dialup services (AOL).

I maintain that building the internet _without_ an integrated billing system
was its most impressively radical choice. If a telco had been involved they'd
have built the billing first then worked out what limited range of services
they felt like selling, on which they would try to keep as much of the margin
as possible rather than letting third parties profit.

The economy of monetized information would be much smaller, since you would
need to "buy in"; no Wikipedia, no Stackexchange, no free courses, no free
software, no free maps.

> A monetized information economy will create a strong middle class

This very much depends on whether information is a form of labour or a form of
capital. What's the information equivalent of "r > g"?

~~~
platz
> The economy of monetized information would be much smaller

There is plenty of evidence that that is not a guaranteed outcome:

> HBO and Netflix’s paid subscription models have resulted in “peak TV.”

Micropayments might be a way to allow everyone to participate.

> Lanier suggested exploring other business models as well, including a
> scenario where individuals would be compensated for uploading quality
> content.

~~~
Pokepokalypse
> Micropayments might be a way to allow everyone to participate.

. . . only if the scale of that "micro" is truly "micro" in relation to our
"micro" incomes, as consumers.

------
overcast
Here's hoping Web 3.0 goes back to minimalism. Unless you're building a fully
interactive web application, let's get back to server side rendering,
optimized images, and minimal web requests. Now that everyone is getting
faster and faster internet speeds, the web has turned into the old sloppy
coding practices, where CPU speeds were doubling year after year. Just give me
the information we need without all of the magical fluff around it.

~~~
highesttide
I honestly don't think I would want to keep working with webdev if I had to go
back to relying on server side rendering for everything, the workflow is just
_so_ much worse (to me).

~~~
rpdillon
I'd like to hear more about your experience. I was in a technical presentation
yesterday in which a web developer working on a Rails codebase that has been
transitioning from backbone to React over the past couple of years talked
about her experience trying to add a single page to the app. In the end, it
required 14 steps, and I couldn't help but wonder whether all the scaffolding,
code generation, and wiring to enable both dynamic and static rendering to
work correctly (static for search engines) really provides a better experience
for anyone. I get why companies like Google and Facebook developed these
frameworks, but for a site of moderate size (say, a million monthly uniques),
is it really a win? I look at sites like
[https://pinboard.in/](https://pinboard.in/) and feel like they really hit the
sweet spot on utility, user experience, performance, and development workflow.
But most of my experience is on the backend. What am I missing?

------
r3bl
Not that I give any of these two any chance of succeeding, but the fediverse
seems to me like it has much higher chances of short term success than Web
3.0.

Small (and a pretty ignorant) comparison:

Fediverse: Fair amount of clients, some users, utilizes existing technologies
and creates decentralized versions of already existing paradigms based on the
W3C recommendations.

Web 3.0: Uses blockchain, can't access it from your browser, has barely any
users but apparently a lot of clients, inherits probably the worst aspect of
.onion services (inability to just type in the URL).

However, looking purely at the financial level, Web 3.0 seems to be winning.
It's where money is funneled through, because there's a small chance that it
will offer something grandiose in return. Meanwhile, fediverse operates on
pennies donated by the users to approachable sysadmins with some spare
resources.

One of them can afford a summit in San Francisco (sponsored by a few
foundations), and the second one will probably never have a summit anywhere.

~~~
phiresky
> (inability to just type in the URL)

You could still put all domains of an alternate domain system behind a
X.web3.org that loads the whole system client side, and then connects to peers
via WebRTC to load the domain X via webtorrents or ipfs or zeronet or
whatever. That way it's (mostly) backwards compatible to normal websites and
you can remove the "root domain" trust point later.

------
realPubkey
_What precisely is wrong with the web today? In short, it’s a big baby. It has
grown old without growing up._

That's exactly what I think about most of the cryptocurrenciy ecosystem today.

~~~
blocked_again
Ethereum is only 3 years old.

~~~
MrEfficiency
It had the lessons of Bitcoin and hundreds of dead alt coins.

Every time ETH gets used for an app, it takes down/log jams the network.

I dont think it will be possible to use blockchain to power the web. Slow,
unreliable, and expensive.

~~~
blocked_again
There were hardly a dozen alt-coins before Ethereum. I mentioned specifically
Ethereum because it was Ethereum that introduced a Turing complete virtual
machine that allowed people to execute code in Blockchain. Before Ethereum
came into the picture people used Blockchain only for storing value. So
Ethereum was a game changer and it is only 3 years old.

Ethereum developers are currently working hard on making Ethereum more
scalable. It cant definitely power the web anytime soon but its getting better
and better. Read about Sharding, Plasma, Raiden etc if you are interested.

~~~
MrEfficiency
There were hundreds of alt coins before ETH, they were bitcoin copypastes and
no one cared.

When you start talking about offchain ETH solutions or using multiple ETH
systems to scale, you are removing the only thing that provides value from
Blockchain - Trust.

When an ETH sidechain can get 51% attacked or the entire system is verified
through a few centralized locations, you remove the only reason you should use
blockchain.

I used to drink the ETH koolaid, I now realize blockchain shouldnt be used for
apps.

------
losvedir
I used to be much more positive about decentralization. I even wrote this
little decentralized side project[0] that did well on HN a few years ago.

But lately, I've become more cynical about it. I fear it just doesn't map that
well to the real world. From an abstract/logical architecture it makes a ton
of sense, and would be beyond amazing to have a decentralized, unstoppable,
computing platform that anyone can hop on, like Ethereum promises.

But there's real computation happening in physical machines somewhere, real
fiber connections between servers, real electricity costs, real national
borders, real laws, etc.

These days I'm much more enthused, I think, by federation, as that seems to
map more cleanly onto the real world, putting the ownership and costs and
responsibilities on those who control the hardware. I was extremely excited,
for example, by sandstorm.io, but it seems like it's winding down lately. I
haven't really seen an equivalent that's caught my eye, but maybe I'm missing
some.

I really do support the "Web 3.0" vision as defined here, and best of luck to
them. If they can get that "killer app" that makes everyone want to join, and
provide a little defense against detractors trying to use physical means to
shut down the logical decentralization, then it would be a revolution for
sure. But it looks hard to get there from here, to me.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9531265](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9531265)

~~~
lylecubed
> [federation] seems to map more cleanly onto the real world, putting the
> ownership and costs and responsibilities on those who control the hardware.

This is both the biggest strength of federation and its biggest weakness. How
do those who control the hardware profit from federating open and free
services? Federation will be a contender when (if?) somebody figures that out.

------
mdarens
I'm old enough to remember when Web 3.0 was another name for The Semantic
Web[1]. I'm sure Gavin Wood is a clever person but the opening of this article
made him come off as a dotcom boom era huckster.

[1]
[https://archive.fo/jUSh#selection-627.0-627.56](https://archive.fo/jUSh#selection-627.0-627.56)

------
egypturnash
I kept on waiting for the part where he actually tells me what “web 3.0”
involves. I guess it’s “something something blockchain”.

------
octosphere
I experimented with Beaker Browser[1] and explored some dat:// pages. It
reminded me when I first used the Tor Browser. Most of the pages looked like
they were Geocities pages, and the same goes for dat:// pages - they are like
something from the late nineties web. So much for the term 'Web 3.0'

[1] [https://beakerbrowser.com/](https://beakerbrowser.com/)

~~~
tyingq
_" dat:// websites work just like any other webpage. They’re a collection of
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files that come together to form a webpage"_

So there's nothing technical driving that dated look and feel...

~~~
octosphere
Yeah but I think it's the _type_ of users creating the webpages. They sloppily
throw together some HTML & CSS and it leads to this dated Geocities look and
feel. (No jQuery powered single page application which hogs memory and heats
up your CPU)

------
Midnightas
I'd rather keep using non-corporate internet such as IRC, forums, and whatnot,
it's sad to see what's happening with this.

------
jmull
Maybe I'm looking at this blockchain thing all wrong.

Perhaps it's a lesser evil, whereby the foolish money is vacuumed up and held
in a relatively innocuous form before it is dispersed all around where it
would cause greater mischief and misery.

What can I say, I'm an optimist.

------
sonusario
> Ethereum—the platform I helped found—would allow people to interact in
> mutually beneficial ways without anyone needing to trust each other.

Asking from ignorance here. Is everyone who uses ethereum subject to the
ethereum developers when updates are made?

------
platz
I guess web 3.0 is blockchain, eh

> “the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary
> authority of the despot.”

\- brought to you by a humble impartial observer who maintains the blockchain
protocols

------
pjmlp
Web 3.0 will be the browser as universal VM, with everyone directly targeting
WebAssembly, re-inventing the UI stack via WebGL or WebGPU.

------
chooseaname
If "Web 2.0" was already coined, can you really coin something so derivative
as "Web 3.0"?

------
vslira
If we get fully cryptographic computation (I don’t know if I’m using the term
correctly, but basically no one knows what you’re doing with their cycles),
why would we need decentralization? Couldn’t Isis run their irc server on AWS
if it was impossible to know who is doing what?

This is an honest question btw

~~~
icebraining
Computation is just a small part of the system. Payment is a big one - your
account can still be flagged and taken down if they ban your credit card or
equivalent. Another is public services: if you're serving a publicly
accessible site, for example, at some point the data must be encrypted to be
shown to the user. If they can trace that back to the AWS machine, the account
can still be taken down.

------
jancsika
Proof of work doesn't provide a sufficient number of transactions per second
to support ideas of this magnitude.

------
anvandare
>[...] We see wealth, power and influence placed in the hands of the greedy,
the megalomaniacs, or the plain malicious. [...] the same old dynamics.

Insanity is running the same program over and over again and expecting
different results. You can tweak the configs a bit and change the running
environment; but until we start editing the sourcecode (our DNA) you may
expect the crooked wood of humankind to always act like humans always have.

------
blocked_again
I always thought web 3.0 was the decentralised web and not necessarily
blockchain.

------
coldtea
> _It was over four years ago that I coined the term “Web 3.0.” Back then, it
> was clear to me: Ethereum—the platform I helped found—would allow people to
> interact in mutually beneficial ways without anyone needing to trust each
> other._

Well, I'd rather we have a web of people trusting each other...

------
Numberwang
"It was over four years ago that I coined the term “Web 3.0.”"

Pay heed, as today I the great Numberwang coin the term "Web 4.0"

~~~
pupppet
I couldn’t get past that first sentence.

