Note: I might just be uneducated on the subject.
When I read about web3 with blockchains, smart contracts and dapps, all sounds very promising. But once you look for any real world applications it is just some obscure things that kind of only exist to support the decentralized system. I guess that makes sense, but are there any actual real world uses for that? Like day-to-day things that make a persons life easier, not harder?
I think web3 could be solar punk compared to the current “web2”. It allows for the possibility of smaller internets separate from “the internet” which could be just small webpages on raspberry pis. This would be “solar punk” since even me posting this pointless comment on an obscure forum is involving dozens of computers now and many more in the future as it’s data mined (modern day problem, ideally it’s resolved soon)
Yeah this could be built (and has been many times) using non-block chain tech, but if you wanted to ensure authenticity of any data you’d most likely need a blockchain - which might be nice if the “solar punk” thought experiment ever had to deal with any adversary
Isn’t the internet per definition many independent nets?
Sure there is some concentration of power, like cloudflare is controlling more and more. But that could also happen with web3 (very likely is).
Yeah, the internet is, but what I’d envision would be separate intranets who could communicate to each other if they want. So Brazil could talk to India, but they wouldn’t have to. The block chains could be transparent to trusted systems and opaque to other intranets. Block chain also could be more similar to Elastic Search DB or Mongo DB, where it takes a majority of servers to confirm the validity of a tramsaction before solidifying a change
Just tossing the idea out there
Most people who shit on “blockchain” don’t grasp the nuances. For instance, a hashsums can verify a piece of code is valid, but who’s providing the hashsum? If it’s on the same server, how do we trust it? If it’s on a validator’s server, who is validating that validator? This is a fundamental problem in computer science and blockchain is one of the solutions
I shit on blockchain because there’s high probability of a backdoor in 90% of all computers and most software is vulnerable, so even if the blockchain isn’t vulnerable directly, it most likely is on a different level
if you wanted to ensure authenticity of any data you’d most likely need a blockchain
Lol no.
You either need a central authority or a blockchain
Oh no.
Who designs and modifies the chains? Any democracy there? No, not even NGOs, just for-profit tech bros. You can only use their chains by their rules.
Blockchain looks “decentralised” only at user level. Differently from international DNS, which is much more decentralised in control structure, and provides your own freedom in any technology. Blockchains operate under DNS, so they do not remove their constraints, but only add a layer of control of their own.
Well if you and 2 of your friends did it, then voilà you’d have a blockchain with no tech bros and no DNS. It’s an idea, just because it has been executed poorly doesn’t make it bad in every situation
are there any actual real world uses for that? Like day-to-day things that make a persons life easier, not harder?
No. Web3 is a marketing scam designed to sell crypto tokens. The tokens are also scams.
Being uneducated on web3 is like being uneducated on the benefits of Amway. Some information isn’t worth the neurons it takes to store.
Web3 is just crypto scams in a trenchcoat. Blockchains had some cool applications for being a good database engine for high data integrity and transparency. Unfortunately what I imagine happened was some business school duche walked in on the development and went like “I can make the stockmarket with no regulations or safety with this” and that is what it became.
No, web3 is pure crypto bro marketing. And is very anti solarpunk. It uses a lot of energy to keep blockchains running, and a lot of the underlying logic about trust and contracts are capitalist ideology.
While I do agree that web3 id 99% crypto bro marketing, the fact that it requires a lot of energy is due to the kind of validation algorithm used, and this is not true for all cryptos.
Bitcoin for example use Proof Of Work, which by design requires a lot of energy, but some blockchains use Proof Of Stake validation, which requires a minimal amount of power to work
Please put the difference between Proof Of Work and Proof of Stake in your uninformed comment.
Or if you are informed, then take the heavy one eyed take out of your comment. Thanks!
The whole deal of crypto is the high computational cost due to lack of trust.
Solarpunk aims to enrich everyone in such a way that financial trust is not needed for society, especially if its’ implementation is so wasteful!
Yeah this idea of decentralization is kind of a buzzword at the level the bros push it at
Every user having to check your work doesn’t offer more security it offers a waste of power so inneficient it’d be like using a Matrioshka Brain as a simple calculator
I just answered a similar question to this in another thread, so I’ll copy/paste it here with some more info about “web3” specifically:
TL;DR: It’s just a complicated (and energy intensive!) way of keeping track of things.
Web3, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and any “coin” you hear about on the web uses something called the “blockchain”, which is just a MASSIVE file living on hundreds (thousands?) of computers around the world. This file is like a bank ledger: a record of things that happened. Think of it like a text file:
Bob gave Sarah €1.50 Sarah gave Alex €2.00 ...Now imagine that it’s hundreds of millions of lines long, and every time anyone in the world gives anyone money, that list gets a little bit longer.
“But how do you make sure that people don’t start tinkering with the ledger?” you might say? "I could say “Alex gives me €1000000”. Well the files are kept in sync by this protocol where all participating computers do complex math to prove that they haven’t edited anything. Everyone else does the same math, and so everyone’s results should be the same. If your math is different, you’re ignored. This is why transactions can take as much as a few hours or even days to go through and gobble a shittone of electricity. Awesome.
This is basically where Bitcoin came from.
After that was a thing, a bunch of other nerds got together and built Ethereum (same tech, different computers doing the work, so it’s a different ledger), which uses the same technology. Ethereum however introduced this thing called “smart contracts” though, which are tiny programs that are baked into the chain (ie. they codified into this Great Big File That Everyone Has so they can’t be changed). Smart contracts are simple instructions:
If Bob gives Sarah €1.50, Sarah then owns this: 1234567890That
1234567890relates to something in the real world, most famously a URL, which is where you get those NFTs that everyone was crazy about for a few months. Bob can give Sarah $1,000,000 and this would enshrine that Sarah ownshttps://somwhere.ca/picture-of-cat.jpgand then she can go around and say “I ‘own’ this picture”. Then one day that website takes the picture down and Sarah realises that she paid a million dollars for a record in a text file.Each transaction on a blockchain (Ethereum, Bitcoin, whatever) costs money, which you pay in that chain’s currency, and that’s where this all starts to make sense. If I can get you to buy my “magic internet money”, then I’m selling you that currency for actual money.
Web3 is another abstraction on top of this, but most of it is nonsense. If you can use a contract to allocate ownership of something to someone, why not bake that into your website? The claim is that you can “take back the web” from centralised giants like Google & Facebook by “putting your data on the blockchain” and then you can choose to change who owns that data rather than these big companies.
It’s a noble idea but tooooootal bullshit. First of all, the web is already open. I host my own website on a Raspberry Pi from my house. The idea that it’s technology centralising the web and not capitalism is laughable.
Secondly, by design, everything on the blockchain is open. You get around this with encryption, but if I grant Facebook the rights to my data, they have it. If I change my mind tomorrow, then they still have it. They won’t get any new data I append to my records, but I’m not “in control”. It’s actually much worse. The web3 nerds want us to store everything on the blockchain: browsing habits, mortgages, medical records, and all it takes is one unpatched update, your laptop gets hacked and now I own your house. Fuck That.
You probably haven’t seen the definitive take-down of blockchain technology yet. It’s long but solidly the best piece of criticism of the tech I’ve seen. Do watch it. It’s far more authoritative than I can ever be.
Full disclosure: I bought into Bitcoin way back when it was cheap 'cause I was fascinated by the techology. Then I learnt how it actually worked, and how it absolutely cannot scale to be anything useful, so I just held onto the coins I had. I cashed out to the tune of about €40k. I absolutely would not recommend “investing” this this stuff. The domain is ripe with scammers and the project has no legs. It’s long past the point of experimentation and is now at the stage of trying to drag more suckers in. Don’t be that sucker.
