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The Internet Bitcoin

What Is Web3 and Why Should You Care? (gizmodo.com) 113

Gizmodo's David Nield explains what Web3 is, what it will mean for the future, and how exactly the third-generation internet differs from the first two. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from his report: Let's cut to the chase: For Web3 evangelists, it's a revolution; for skeptics, it's an overhyped house of cards that doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. [...] As you might remember if you're of a certain age, Web 1.0 was the era of static webpages. Sites displayed news and information, and maybe you had your own little corner of the World Wide Web to show off your personal interests and hobbies. Images were discouraged -- they took up too much bandwidth -- and video was out of the question. With the dawn of the 21st century, Web 1.0 gave way to Web 2.0 -- a more dynamic, editable, user-driven internet. Static was out and webpages became more interactive and app-like (see Gmail, for example). Many of us signed up for social media accounts and blogs that we used to put our own content on the web in vast amounts. Images and video no longer reduced sites to a crawl, and we started sharing them in huge numbers. And now the dawn of Web3 is upon us. People define it in a few different ways, but at its core is the idea of decentralization, which we've seen with cryptocurrencies (key drivers of Web3). Rather than Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook (sorry, Meta) hoarding everything, the internet will supposedly become more democratized.

Key to this decentralization is blockchain technology, which creates publicly visible and verifiable ledgers of record that can be accessed by anyone, anywhere. The blockchain already underpins Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, as well as a number of fledging technologies, and it's tightly interwoven into the future vision of everything that Web3 promises. The idea is that everything you do, from shopping to social media, is handled through the sane secure processes, with both more privacy and more transparency baked in. In some ways, Web3 is a mix of the two eras that came before it: The advanced, dynamic, app-like tech of the modern web, combined with the decentralized, user-driven philosophy that was around at the start of the internet, before billion- and trillion-dollar corporations owned everything. Web3 shifts the power dynamic from the giant tech entities back to the users -- or at least that's the theory.

In its current form, Web3 rewards users with tokens, which will eventually be used in a variety of ways, including currency or as votes to influence the future of technology. In this brave new world, the value generated by the web will be shared out between many more users and more companies and more services, with much-improved interoperability. NFTs are closely linked to the Web3 vision. [...] For our purposes here, the link between cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and Web3 is the foundation: the blockchain. Throw in some artificial intelligence and some machine learning to do everything from filter out unnecessary data to spot security threats, and you've got just about every emerging digital technology covered with Web3. Right now Ethereum is the blockchain attracting the most Web3 interest (it supports both a cryptocurrency and an NFT system, and you can do everything from make a payment through it to build an app on it).

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What Is Web3 and Why Should You Care?

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @06:09PM (#62080675)

    Do mind that "web" and "internet" are different things. Related, but different.

    And yet another hype for "blockchain"? Please. Make it happen first.

    "web 2.0" wasn't even about editing, but about ajaxifying everything, and thereby destroying the link.

    So nothing but wishful thinking here. Addled wishful thinking.

    • by sg_oneill ( 159032 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @11:46PM (#62081595)

      Right. And while "web 2.0" , as obnoxious as it was, had at least a use case (Making web pages into "Apps"), The blockchain really doesnt have many usecases that aren't done significantly better, and with vastly more efficiency by other technologies (ie Public Key cryptography is a vastly superior technology for "contracts" and ledgers. National Fiat Currencies do everything crypto fiat ones do, but are backed by the state and thus have automatically a higher guarantee of value stability. Cash blows bitcoin out the water for anonymity (In fact a feature of Bitcoin is its lack of anonymity. Anyone can read your books) And so on.

      At this stage its really just finance people, marketing peopleand a handful of confused libertarians still spruiking this nonsense.

      Web 3 might well be coming, but it wont have anything to do with cryptocurrencies.

    • by Kisai ( 213879 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2021 @12:32AM (#62081687)

      There is no Web3. Just like there was no Web 1.0

      There was HTML 2.0, 3.2, 4.01 and 5. All but 5/XHTML were "1.0"

      HTML5, forced a change in how websites were designed, which is why "web 2.0" simply means HTML5+EMCAScript3 (Aka Javascript.)

      Nobody wants blockchain in the digital space. Cryptobro's want it to happen, it's not happening because there is pushback from the smart people who know this is a grift to make digital assets have have rarity. We see this with the "NFT" already, where it's being used to steal and claim digital assets that they don't own and then sell them to other cryptobro weirdos.

      Blockchain is never going to solve anything in the digital space except maybe DRM, and digital assets that might be used in multiple games from different developers. That's about it. Trying to make digital scarcity with it is never going to happen, and as we've learned from 40 years of computer piracy, nobody cares enough to respect DRM based on serial numbers, when you can just share the serial number. The only effective DRM is always-on centralized cloud-services, and blockchain is not solving that.

  • nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)

    by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @06:13PM (#62080685)

    What is Web3? VR and Crypto nonsense. Damn I really must be getting old, I just don't get it. I don't want a bulky thing on my head so I can see cartoon you in meetings. I don't want everything I do recorded in a blockchain somewhere (or in any database private or public). I really don't get the value of these additions general use everyday.

    • What is Web3? VR and Crypto nonsense. Damn I really must be getting old, I just don't get it. I don't want a bulky thing on my head so I can see cartoon you in meetings. I don't want everything I do recorded in a blockchain somewhere (or in any database private or public). I really don't get the value of these additions general use everyday.

      You forgot Non-fungible tokens! Damn - that's the future right there, I'll tell you what!

    • Where's that "I hate the modern internet" dude when you really need him?

      • Look, I like the internet. I can see some interesting uses for AR. VR on the other hand does not seem that useful outside of entertainment. Why do I need everything I do recorded in the blockchain and how does that add privacy? That is an honest question. To quote the article "with both more privacy and more transparency baked in". I really don't understand how getting tokens for letting someone record everything in a blockchain has anything to do with privacy. Do we get privacy baked in because of cr

        • VR on the other hand does not seem that useful outside of entertainment

          AR lets you have a guide to things which exist in the real world. VR lets you visualize things which do not exist in the real world, possibly things which are going to be instantiated as real objects in the future. AR lets you have enhanced interactions in real space, VR lets you have interactions in imaginary spaces. Both have actual functional uses. Entertainment is as valid as any other use, though.

          • My point is that the web should not be using VR everywhere by default. I shouldn't need VR for Zoom for example. I don't use FB now, and I won't be using Meta in the future so maybe I don't care that much. CAD is great for visualizing not yet real things, no stupid headset required.

    • You ain't the only one - I was thinking pretty much the same thing.

      It's not as though I'm averse to change and there are lots of new tech developments I like. But this stuff seems like the ravings of hard-core glue sniffers.

  • Just gimmick (Score:5, Insightful)

    by etash ( 1907284 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @06:14PM (#62080691)
    Web3 is just a stupid marketing effort (as is this article an ad for it) that tries to push the decentralization and crypto narrative. No one really cares about decentralization because it's more expensive and inefficient. Societies are built in trust. Not on not trusting. That's just the lobertarian digital preppers idiotic wet dream.
    • Re:Just gimmick (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Junta ( 36770 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @06:23PM (#62080727)

      While utterly decentralized is indeed impractical at the scales we would hope to operate on, it *would* be nice to see a return to more federated services rather than the status quo where whatever messaging or discussion service you are using allows you only to reach users of the same platform.

      Email is there, Matrix provides for chat for those who find IRC lacking, and so forth. This particular article hits too many of the buzz words square on to inspire much confidence, but the over-centralization of the internet is a concern we should have. Basically we watched the online experience move from fragmented walled gardens like AOL and Prodigy to a federated experience and pulled largely back to the essence of the walled gardens.

      • by splutty ( 43475 )

        The EU actually seems to be trying to write some laws about forced interoperability.

        I doubt it'll be much use, but I guess the thought is there.

      • I agree with you completely, that decentralization (or federated services) are 100% the best way to go.

        I can't see from a technical perspective how it will be built on crypto, though.

      • by Luthair ( 847766 )
        Its not like federated services like Jabber didn't exist in the Web 2.0 days.
        • Skype was designed to be decentralized and nearly was pre-Microsoft.

        • by Junta ( 36770 )

          True, but that was quickly sunset with the major implementation people might use (google) shutting down jabber interaction. Also Jabber sort of predated the big 'web 2.0' hype, but like email and irc, it simply endured a bit into the web2.0.

    • This! Any distinction between static and dynamic web pages was evolutionary and not part of some big "web version" nonsense. Also any call out of these version was after the fact, not forward looking like this article is trying to do. Trying to make a "Web3" is exactly like you say, a marketing gimmick.
    • by znrt ( 2424692 )

      No one really cares about decentralization because it's more expensive and inefficient. Societies are built in trust. Not on not trusting. That's just the lobertarian digital preppers idiotic wet dream.

      the article and the whole web3 thing are indeed bullshit trumpeteering the blockchain hype, but i have trouble following your logic in this one. a decentralized system that is verifiable merits the same trust than a centralized one that is equally verifiable. now, are they, in their current implementations? that's actually a (hugely important) technical detail. the blockchain design is solid except it is (for now) only used for bullshit. guess what, so does good old centralization. bullshit is the coinciden

      • by etash ( 1907284 )
        give me a valid use case where blockchains with POW provide a solution to an actual problem
        • by splutty ( 43475 )

          Automated financial transaction logging.

          • by bucky0 ( 229117 )

            Who is clamoring for that, and are blockchains + POW the optimal way to do that? I'd argue the frameworks of Certificate Transparency could probably get you most of the way there

          • he meant a scalable solution to an actual problem, that doesn't require the energy consumption of Norway
          • Curiously, every bank in the entire world already seems to manage that without blockchain.

    • Sounds like a web that will enrich a few and drive out most casual users. I smell mass greed and balloon schemes.
    • Well I'm not totally sold on ipfs, but web3 auth means no more db leaks or phishing attacks, it's clearly better than anything we're doing now. As far as Metaverse implications? I probably don't want to be a part of it but I'll try to keep an open mind. I have seen some interesting VR demos.
    • by Luthair ( 847766 )
      I would phrase it more as a marketing effort by cryptobros trying to convince people blockchain is the future of the web. The irony is of course that web 2.0 was coined and adopted to refer to websites that already existed and were widely used rather than figments of the imagination.
    • Decentralization offers actual benefits of many kinds. Reliability and a reduction of traffic are two of the big ones. Yes there are costs, but there are also benefits...

  • by Casandro ( 751346 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @06:15PM (#62080699)

    Sometimes I wonder if the Cryptobros aren't just a fabrication of the NSA to make their job easier. After all the main idea behind a blockchain is that everything can be traced much more easily, plus those fanboys easily discredit every idea in cryptography by doing idiotic things with it.

    • Sometimes I wonder if the Cryptobros aren't just a fabrication of the NSA to make their job easier. After all the main idea behind a blockchain is that everything can be traced much more easily, plus those fanboys easily discredit every idea in cryptography by doing idiotic things with it.

      Kind of an extension of the concept that every 13 year old girl in chat rooms is a policeman.

      I suppose as long as people fall for these schemes, it will be useful to the law.

    • After all the main idea behind a blockchain is that everything can be traced much more easily

      I would say the "main idea" of a blockchain is that it's immutable without a SPOF.

      The Bitcoin blockchain does indeed allow public tracing of all transactions between wallets, but that's not true for all blockchains. Privacy coins (Monero and friends) are examples of this.

  • > Right now Ethereum is the blockchain attracting the most Web3 interest (it supports both a cryptocurrency and an NFT system, and you can do everything from make a payment through it to build an app on it).

    Yeah, at 15 transactions/second globally and at ridiculous costs to compete for a slot in that 15/sec.

    • Yeah, at 15 transactions/second globally and at ridiculous costs to compete for a slot in that 15/sec.

      Well, and I'm new to all of this, but as I understand it, the V 2.0 of eth, where they switch over to "proof of stake" (?) will allow many more transactions per second.

      • It's not going to be enough transactions to build a popular "app" like Facebook on top of.

        • Transactions are things that you pay for. Do people pay for things on Facebook? You can sign messages with web3 quickly and for free, and other things too.
      • Proof of Stake, otherwise known as PoS. https://www.urbandictionary.co... [urbandictionary.com]

      • by bucky0 ( 229117 )

        Once proof of stake goes through, doesn't it make the problem worse? Now instead of getting money from both minting coins and doing transactions, people running the blockchain rigs will only get transaction money. I would think that this means either a) transaction costs increase or b) it becomes unprofitable for many miners to run their rigs, leading to more consolidation of giant operations with preposterously cheap electricity.

      • No PoS won't help, but sharding will. That's in the roadmap somewhere after PoS (which could be years honestly). But there's other EVM chains, Binance Smart Chain is what most of Defi is using now and that's much faster / cheaper.
      • by leonbev ( 111395 )

        Funny... I thought that Solana was the new hotness for Web3, because it's already proof of stake and can move transactions faster than Ethereum.

    • Re:eth (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sjames ( 1099 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @07:18PM (#62080935) Homepage Journal

      And there we get the real point of web3, make sure nobody does anything without paying through the nose for it, even for things that were next to free on Web 1.0 or even 2.0

  • The summary didn't seem to say anything about this, it seems like the blockchain parts were all focused on the user, with nothing said about verifying information fed from the website itself (like maybe a published checksum of the current web page you are supposed to be downloading).

  • by C_Kode ( 102755 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @06:19PM (#62080717) Journal

    Crypto and NFTs have zip to do with the Internet or "web" other than you can read about them on it.

    Seems to be nothing more than gibberish and another form of hype for questionable investments that have no intrinsic value.

    • by jythie ( 914043 )
      I think they are trying to draw inspiration from things like namecoin.. so people are rewarded for providing infrastructure with something they can spend for access or trade for cash from people who want access but not contribute... so sharing the load via financial rewards.... so techbros trying to apply fancy technology to solve a non-problem in a technolibertarian way and hoping to get rich by being early.
    • by evanh ( 627108 )

      Pushed bling is the name of the game. Something that doesn't require any thinking from the clueless suckers that are impressed with the bling.

      Importantly, it involves creative ways of clipping the equally careless ad ticket ... and maybe even avoiding taxes.

      Yep, lots of hype for sure. They're reaching for that pot of ad gold.

  • by korgitser ( 1809018 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @06:23PM (#62080731)

    It's like blockchain! But on the internet!

  • It would be absolutely fantastic for all the crypto/NFT/blockchain "people" to have their own "Web3", so people that see the bubble for what it is can stay with their only-somewhat-infected-by-bullshit-bingo Web 2.0!

    But... I doubt that'll happen.

  • So, does this mean everyone will go back to having web servers in their basement like in the web 1.0 days? That's not plausible:
    1. The vast majority of people (or businesses) are trying to minimize the amount of computing hardware they have.
    2. There is too much money invested in centralized hosting. 4 of the 10 largest companies provide centralized internet services. They will do everything in their power to keep it that way.
    3. The only proof of concept I've seen are cryptocurrencies and NFTs. I see
    • by Junta ( 36770 )

      1. The device in my hand can get 500 mbps down/100 mpbs up over cellular network, has more aggregate CPU performance and RAM than a number of major sites had at their disposal back in the 'web 1.0' days. There is horsepower aplenty for actually serving up a household's potential hosting needs in the average new 'phone'.
      2. This I can't argue with. The efforts to provide an alternative do not attract financial investment, as there's no money to be had in empowering the users over the centralized internet comp

  • by jythie ( 914043 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @06:26PM (#62080745)
    I could actually see a future where things are less centralized. Go back a few decades and you saw a lot of 'every node is a client and server', and as we see more IoT and mesh type products, I could honestly see that opening things up in interesting ways. But.. I really do not see how 'blockchain' or NFTs or rewarding people with tokens is really all that necessary. That talk really just seems like someone trying to pump and dump some early adopters or something.
    • by splutty ( 43475 )

      Like every pyramid scheme, you need new people buying into 'your' currency for your currency to have value. So infecting 'the internet' with it would of course be fantastic.

      You just need to keep pushing and flooding things with "WEB3 NOW BETTER!"

    • good point thanks

      There are some really amazing decentralized technologies coming out, or gaining traction, that have NOTHING to do with blockchain or crypto. Blockchain is, at best, only pseudo-decentralized anyway, so it grates that all the really interesting and promising work out there gets them lumped in with the crypto crowd.

      Here are some of the things I'd recommend checking out if anyone is interested in exploring:

      • IPFS [ipfs.io] - decentralized storage
      • m-ld [m-ld.org] - decentralized protocol for information sharing
      • Sc [scuttlebutt.nz]
    • I could actually see a future where things are less centralized. Go back a few decades and you saw a lot of 'every node is a client and server', and as we see more IoT and mesh type products, I could honestly see that opening things up in interesting ways.

      There's too much big money tied up in centralized internet services. 4 out of 10 of the world's largest companies!

  • I am watching the world getting more despicable every day!
  • by drjzzz ( 150299 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @06:35PM (#62080787) Homepage Journal
    Really "sane"?

    "... everything you do, from shopping to social media, is handled through the sane secure processes..."

    Or "same" (i.e., blockchain)? If a typo, most probably, not the most reassuring. But hype leaves no time for proofreading or reflection.

  • by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @07:00PM (#62080865)

    Even greater shit than we have to endure now. Between continually rotating background pictures, dropdown menus which block half the page, to the infinite page full of words but no substance, the current version of the web has become a near nightmare to find information or accomplish anything. Wading through paragraph after paragraph of word salad has become endemic.

    How about we stop this nonsense of thinking everything and anything needs to be shoved into people's faces every second they're on the web and just give the information people want. Stop the maddening merry go round of every more jumbled web page designs brought on by web developers trying to justify their existence.

  • What a friggin' mess
  • Web 3.0 powered by blockchain and NFTs? Kids these days. Absolute marketing amateurs.
    Shitty buzzword games that rely on tech sounding words come and go, but quantum, that's where the real marketing lies as no one was ever certain if it was a real buzzword or not.

  • by AcidFnTonic ( 791034 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @07:17PM (#62080925) Homepage

    I personally feel we did more in the 90s and 2000's. That seemed to be the peak. Random people were asking how to setup Dynamic DNS and calling their isp to demand ports opened.

    People like my uncle who were "wannabe" techies running their own servers on spare 386s,setting up routing, firewall rules, dynamic dns and paying for static ip "business" plan internet.

    Nobody "regular" does that crap today. I lived through random neighbors of mine running FTP servers, running dial-up bbs's, and not considering themselves at all technical.

    This generation sets up some stupid AWS script and thinks they've done something. Mumbling crap about how it can scale better, all the while if I actually send them that load the billl will be six figures, so it's technically a pipe dream.

    • Today random people are asking me how to deploy decentralized apps that reward users for staking tokens. Imagine if you could offer your uncle a way to host websites on a decentralized filesystem and it couldn't be taken down as long as people were using it? The idea that regular people aren't innovating is misguided, it just seems like that because they're innovating in an area that you don't appreciate. And for the record these dapps have to be super-optimized because every op costs gas. So much of this i
      • and it couldn't be taken down as long as people were using it?

        Thats the trick of it. Getting others to waste their storage and bandwidth hosting your "distributed site" has to be built into the protocol itself, and most "distributed sites" will essentially be freeloaders while only a few are a good reason to use the protocol in the first place.

        I dont see it as something self-sustaining, but its possible to gimmick your way into people using such a demanding protocol for awhile.

        • by Jeremi ( 14640 )

          Thats the trick of it. Getting others to waste their storage and bandwidth hosting your "distributed site"

          I think it's worse than that; at least some of the "distributed sites" are inevitably going to be hosting kiddie-porn and similarly repulsive content, and as soon as people realize what they are involuntarily hosting, their co-operation is going to be rescinded real quick.

          • Ah, but if they use blockchain then there will be an indelible record of who uploaded the kiddie porn, making it much easier to track.

  • Web3? More like Web5 (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anubis IV ( 1279820 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @07:20PM (#62080941)

    These terms are meaningless marketing fluff. There was a fairly clear(-ish) delineation between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 (though even that statement isn't exactly true, since to some people Web 2.0 was simply any page with dynamism, whereas to others it didn't start until Google Maps et al. arrived), but the phrase "Web 3.0" is nearly 20 years old at this point in its usage.

    Remember when the "Semantic Web" was a big push by the likes of Berners-Lee and we were told that XML and XHTML were the direction things were going as we worked to make all data meaningful? That was being referred to as Web 3.0 [wikipedia.org] back in the early 2000s, possibly even the late '90s. The idea never completely died, of course, but referring to it as "Web 3.0" more or less fell out of use until some people realized they could co-opt the idea as part of something unrelated they had declared "Web 3.0" (perhaps without realizing "Web 3.0" was already a thing) in order to lend some legitimacy to their version of things.

    Remember when Gmail switched away from static pages in 2004 and then Google Maps launched in 2005? Those products popularized the dynamic retrieval of content as the world suddenly woke up to ideas like "AJAX". What once was static could now be loaded with fresh content as map tiles and emails poured in without the need for a page refresh. Pundits at the time declared it the advent of Web 3.0. Here's a book from 2010 that claims to teach you how to use AJAX as part of Web 3.0 [oreilly.com].

    Remember just a few years later when single page application (SPA) frameworks hit the scene in a big (and bad) way? The Back button and browser history suddenly became useless across numerous sites as they adopted new approaches without regard for user conventions, preferences, or usability. The Web wasn't for pages any more, it was for "apps". A dozen frameworks were born and died every week and your knowledge became obsolete nearly as fast, but amongst that carnage some people claimed that SPAs were "Web 3.0" [citation admittedly needed], much to the humor of many of us who had heard it before.

    And now this amalgamation of crypto/blockchain/decentralized/AI/fintech is being declared "Web 3.0" by marketers trying to smash buzzwords together to generate interest in whatever it is that they're selling. Here's the thing though: have any of you noticed anything actually change? Are there any major standards in the pipeline that would herald a sea change? Last I checked, HTTP is still HTTP/2 and the semantics they're talking about for this latest "3.0" are the same ones they were talking about over 20 years ago.

    For my part, I choose to believe that Web 3.0 will only ever refer to this [megius.com], which I discovered when pulling together links for this post.

  • Ya, no. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @07:28PM (#62080975)

    What Is Web3 and Why Should You Care?

    Read TFS; don't care; don't want any "tokens"; don't want to waste electricity maintaining the blockchain; get your NFTs off my lawn.

  • Is the day Google invents human-intelligence androids (pun intended).

  • by superdave80 ( 1226592 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @07:46PM (#62081039)
    I don't mind the dynamic web pages of 2.0, I just hate that even what should be static web pages are all turned into dynamic webpages that constantly shift, reload, disappear, reappear, everything freezes while a video you don't want pops up on the side, etc.. I'm constantly leaving websites because I can't even scroll through and read things anymore.
    • Yeah, web 2.0 always felt like taking one step backwards to take two forwards, except they weren't all in a straight line either.
  • I was wading through the bubbly summary when I came to the word "blockchain" and it all made sense. This is just a way for blockchain enthusiasts to hype their favorite buzzword.

    We all got the difference between Web 1.0 and 2.0. Going from static to interactive was a major change. But what exactly do I get from a blockchain-based web? What practical difference would it make for me? I don't get it.

    • Blockchain can make some cool things happen.

      Consider a project like Filecoin [filecoin.io]. People with storage capacity available can become a storage provider. They are compensated in $FIL. Users pay for storage in $FIL. The value of $FIL increases as users exchange fiat to use the Filecoin system, and it declines as suppliers sell $FIL. By using their own currency, transaction fees are reduced, banks are avoided, and early users fund the tech development (instead of VCs).

      So what you end up with is:
      - fault-tolerant, ge

      • I'm not sure how your example solves a problem for a regular person. For an anarchist who doesn't want to deal with government-backed money, sure. For TOR enthusiasts who want cheap storage, sure. But what does this do for your aunt who barely knows how to use her smartphone?

        Web 2.0 helps all these people in a tangible way. It (ideally) makes their use of the web more interactive and accessible. It gives them access to cute cat pictures and videos. It makes Google Maps and navigation possible. Why would suc

  • lets combine some hypewords and hope some dumb investors throw money at it. Come back with something substantial if you want to make me care.
  • Please disregard this crap. It is just some moron trying to picture himself as a genius.

  • So... anyone already building one?

    Yes, I did read some Tad Williams recently ;) If you get the reference, a lot of themes mentioned in there are getting uncannily close...

  • Right now, anyone can setup a web server and anyone can access it. Introducing the blockchain just makes it harder to setup and access things.

    Looping in NFTs is amazing. The problem with current properties like YouTube is that ANYONE can put up random bits of content, but we don't have a clear mechanism for people to assert ownership of that content, so it is prone to abuse in both directions. An NFT asserts ownership of a spot on the blockchain ... but everyone still has to agree that ownership of that

    • I know artists who have their work stolen off their website and made into NFT's without their knowledge. Cartoonists, and contemporary artists are especially vulnerable to this thing.

      The problem with NFT's is they don't establish ownership of anything. Technically speaking, if you buy an NFT, and the original artist wants to lawyer up, you could be on the hook for copyright infringement for the cost you paid for the NFT. Worse, if you sell the NFT to someone else, (commercial gain involved), you could

  • by Nocturrne ( 912399 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2021 @12:15AM (#62081643)

    IMO, talk of blockchain and cryptocurrency are what hold this concept back. We need decentralization and anonymity, but not a government created honey pot, like TOR. After living in China for a few years, this is something I really hope we figure out soon.

  • Tim O'Reilly was banging on endleslsy about how Web2 was going to democratize everything and overthrow the gatekeepers and wot not. He pushed it relentlessly in conferences. His efforts indirectly led to the rise of the big gatekeepers of social media today. So if someone is claiming Web3 is the democratizer and we know how well that revolution turned out last time, I can only assume that in 10 years we'll be looking back at today's internet as joyous and free because we'll be in a locked down hellscape
  • This is just the same old Utopian Libertarian Fantasy that failed in Web 1.0. Adding Block Chain isn't going to change anything. The problem was never that Silicon Valley was taken over by evil corporations or governments. The problem is that the people on the internet are the same people who live in our society, vote and buy things. Hell is other people, and you can't escape them in Second Life, the Metaverse, or Web3.0 or whatever it will be called next week.

  • Semantic web has been with us for a long time way before 2.0, never took off. We like mess and unstructured data. IPFS is the future of internet or rather the raw unfiltered internet that we hoped for in 1.0.
  • by Fons_de_spons ( 1311177 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2021 @05:40AM (#62082099)
    This really sounds like one of those tv commercials for a new kitchen tool.
  • There are definitions for this web123 stuff.

    Web3 is simply (user generated) content 'hosted/accessed' P2P instead of servers controlled by centralized properties & cartels - like FB, Twitter etc.

    For example IPFS, Wormhole, webtorrent or the federated self hosted social networks, or self sovereign identities etc. Even DeFi smart contracts on the newer side chains, hyperchains (blockchain of blockchains) etc. None of these are mainstream yet but its inevitable that some modified versions will become succ

    • Web3 is simply (user generated) content 'hosted/accessed' P2P instead of servers controlled by centralized properties & cartels - like FB, Twitter etc.

      Ok, but that's also what "Web1" was. Nobody called it that and there were far fewer people using it, but the whole point of HTML and HTTP was to allow any site to point to any other site, so there was no need for centralized companies. The term "home page" often literally meant a single person's hand crafted HTML page that their browser opened by default and which they shared with other people "hey, please add a link to my home page on your home page". Web rings were also a big thing. And the claim that ima

  • Key to this decentralization is blockchain technology, ...
    tightly interwoven into the future vision of everything that Web3 promises. ...
    In its current form, Web3 rewards users with tokens,

    Remember MLMs? When friends, old and new, got in touch about business 'opportunites' in homecare, health, beauty, nutrition, websites... you name it?

    This reminds me of that era -- now it's the folks personally-invested in cryptocoin that see 'blockchain' opportunities everywhere.

    At least they could have called it "Web 3.0" -- "Web3" looks like the marriage of a buzzword with ASCII emoticon.

  • Beau does everything he can to push crypto here. Total BS.

  • Modern websites are worse than frames. Let's make them worse. : P
  • Everything TFA mentions could have been done in 1998 with Java applets. Some people got clever with JavaScript and did some really nifty things, like JavaScript games, calculators, etc...

    The web used to be decentralized. It still is, to some degree, but most of the independent, personal websites have disappeared from the "popular" internet. It's not that they went away, so much as that Google stopped listing them on the front page so frequently. Google is an ad agency, after all, and they don't exist

  • Put a blockchain on it!

    Wasn't that a skit in a episode of Portlandia?
  • So instead of being controlled by publicly traded US companies, Web 3.0 will be controlled from mining farms in China. Got it.

"May your future be limited only by your dreams." -- Christa McAuliffe

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