I think people don't care enough about "I am the true origin" internet. Web3 is, IMHO, a waste of time.
At the end of the day, an internet server will (and should) be managed by a single entity (person or corporation). Why? Well, why not? Why should _I_ host _your_ website (IPFS)? Just so that some granny with a laptop can cryptographically prove it's yours as originally intended?
For example, I personally don't care what FB (now Meta) does with my data - my likes aid in teaching an algorithm to understand humanity better than humans themselves? That's fucking awesome!
How would Web3 change this even?
There'll always be a need in understanding people in ways no one can imagine yet, and to do so, someone has to leverage your data in ways you might not like (mostly because you don't understand the need, or you're just a sheep in a herd screaming "that's mine!"). This is inevitable.
P.S. I am still struggling to understand Web3, please bear with me and my rant.
This is a common misconception. Web3 mostly exists off chain. Storing everything on the blockchain would not only take a lot of space (and thus be extremely expensive) but also be horribly slow. Web3 apps generally use the blockchain more as an audit log. There's a reason most of the web3 apps crypto believers give as examples for web3 apps that actually work are trading apps.
FWIW I think most people base this of a misunderstanding of how NFTs work based on the claims around it: NFTs prove ownership of a hash. That hash is associated with a URL. That URL points to a JSON document. That JSON document points to the NFT art piece (i.e. the "JPEG"). If the service hosting the JSON document (or the service hosting the art piece) goes away, the hash becomes a simulacrum, an identifier with no identifiee. It still indicates ownership but only to those who already know that this is what it does. There can be JPEGs on the blockchain (and allegedly there is already CSAM on at least one of them) but due to the size constraints this isn't how things usually work.
This isn't even getting into multi-layer approaches which came about because while web3 is built on ETH, actually doing anything with the ETH chain is extremely rate limited and has extremely high transaction costs, so other chains have been built on top of it that as I understand it just bulk commit hashes of snapshots or something to it.
FWIW the "first you download the Internet" solution already exists and is called IPFS. There is also a solution called Freenet that focuses on anonymity and avoiding censorship. Predictably the biggest problem with downloading the Internet is that you unknowingly (or knowingly) start collecting illegal content like CSAM, which may be a serious crime depending on where you live.
So, is blockchain therefore even needed? Why should you even "first you download the internet" (or even a subset of it)? I just want to watch some cat videos.
Confirming data integrity and origin is already solved - thanks digital signatures and checksums.
The only thing blockchains add is a strict ordering.
So someone can now sign a message A saying "I give this picture to X" and everyone will know that any future message B from that person saying "I give this picture to Y" is "invalid" because everyone agrees that message A happened before B. Anyone who downloads the whole blockchain can see this.
Well, as long as everyone agrees to believe that blockchain.
In case my bias wasn't clear enough: no, they're a solution looking for a problem and right now the biggest problems they're targeting seem to be a lack of grey market money laundering and pyramid schemes.
That vision of Web3, "Just put everything on the blockchain" is doomed to fail and I don't know anyone who ever seriously proposed it.
Blockchains are best suited for data subject to manipulation, i.e. data in which there is profit to alter. If we were to naivly build "Web3" in theory with this in mind, then the majority of activity would be peer-to-peer, federated, or partially centralized, while the exchange of security credentials would take place on an efficient broadcast layer.
The trick is to do as much off chain as possible - and if trust becomes an issue, develop a minimally on chain scheme. Its still early days, if you ask me how exactly this looks in 20 years I couldn't tell you.
How do you develop a minimal chain scheme for increasing trust? As in, do you first get people to your website and then ask them to contribute in decentralization by downloading the chain?
Bitcoin cannot work without people noticing and liking Bitcoin. If it didn't get traction, it'd still be centralized haha - only one entity would have the whole chain.
Not sure why you’re downvoted because this is a legit question. Even if web3 is build on a large number of blockchains, you still need whole blockchains downloaded in order to be trustless. Currently probably only a tiny percentage of crypto users have downloaded whole blockchains, and instead defer to third parties.
Exactly, the chain would increase indefinitely begging 2 questions:
- Who would even want to keep it?
- Is using blockchains even worth it? Like, if you defer the download to third parties - isn't it again being centralized?
Web3 will handle IP address and DNS storage, sale, and search using basically NFTs on the blockchain. Meanwhile, HTTP content hosting will still be kept separate (maybe IPFS, maybe something centralized depending on the need).
Current example: NFTs typically store metadata on the blockchain and the content in IPFS.
