Tim Berners-Lee Wants Us To 'Ignore' Web3, It's 'Not the Web at All' (cnbc.com) 90
Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web in 1989, said Friday that he doesn't view blockchain as a viable solution for building the next iteration of the internet. From a report: He has his own web decentralization project called Solid. "It's important to clarify in order to discuss the impacts of new technology," said Berners-Lee, speaking onstage at the Web Summit event in Lisbon.
"You have to understand what the terms mean that we're discussing actually mean, beyond the buzzwords. It's a real shame in fact that the actual Web3 name was taken by Ethereum folks for the stuff that they're doing with blockchain. In fact, Web3 is not the web at all," he said.
"You have to understand what the terms mean that we're discussing actually mean, beyond the buzzwords. It's a real shame in fact that the actual Web3 name was taken by Ethereum folks for the stuff that they're doing with blockchain. In fact, Web3 is not the web at all," he said.
He's right (Score:5, Insightful)
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Tim isn't a scammer, they are. I'll listen to Tim.
Hmmm, who should I listen to, the teach of the year award winner can can afford a used Honda civic or the mafia guys in Ferraris?
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The blockchain folks' employees
FTFY. Yes, there are some actual startups run by the smart guys, but the vast majority are vaporware with an incredibly complex and resource intensive smokescreen hiding the fact that there isn't a viable business plan.
Re:He's right (Score:5, Interesting)
I've worked at a blockchain company. We wrote software (web3) for our clients.
I was the closest thing to a computer scientist anywhere near either side of those zoom calls.
If you think there's a bunch of security/finance/compsci geniuses running around the web3 world... well... it just isn't the case.
There are a tiny number of people who write the core blockchain code all these shitty companies live on but they have no idea how any of this shit works, how networks work, how computers work, how operating systems work, etc. I've never been surrounded by more technologically ignorant people in my career in big tech, startups, or government.
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I know exactly who I am, what I know and what I don't. Is English not your first language? Did I not make it clear by implication I am not a computer science genius?
I graduated decades ago from a top notch school, took a ton of comp sci but do not and never have claimed a comp sci degree.
And I am still way smarter than you. I still know more about comp sci, algorithms, networks, operating systems, compilers, languages, math, hardware and several other things than you ever will.
Please learn English and try
Re:He's right (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a friend who started working for some Web3 bullshit company. He mentioned basically the same thing. There's 2 software engineers in the entire outfit, the rest of the company is made up of marketing fools barely passable accountants and some economics / finance majors who think they are changing the world.
Everyone in the company is also getting paid in whatever currency they are peddling.
I still remember him telling me he got a job at a crypto firm. I said "Oh No" and he said "Oh don't worry, I don't believe in this bullshit and I insisted I get paid fortnightly in actual dollars, I'm not stupid."
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I still remember him telling me he got a job at a crypto firm. I said "Oh No" and he said "Oh don't worry, I don't believe in this bullshit and I insisted I get paid fortnightly in actual dollars, I'm not stupid."
The big crypto companies pay pretty well. Or at least they did a few months ago before they laid off most of their staffs. I know a couple of people who went to work for them, and they were offering me close to seven figures (real USD, not crapcoins or equity) to get me to join. At the time I seriously considered parting the fools from their money, but decided I couldn't stomach working for them. Then BTC crashed, 3/4 of their staff got laid off including all of the recently-hired expensive talent, and I wa
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Good call. You would've made 2 pay checks then they would've missed payroll and canned you and you'd be out looking during a down time for tech. My company hired and then immediately canned several people a week or two before I left.
I was in when crypto was on the rise and what they don't talk about is how many of the tiny crypto places go under because these people know even less about business than the dot bomb era startup types. If that's even possible. If they fail during good times how are they goi
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Indeed, same with my friend. He left the door open to return to his previous job, left on good terms knowing it's unlikely to last in the crypto world, but they did offer him more than double what he was making. Initially in some coin, but he turned that down then they reverted to USD.
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I'd always bet on the currency of the world's strongest military before a bunch of silly crypto bros. I can't imagine under what circumstances I'd go with the crypto bros that might actually happen in the real world.
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I was in when crypto was on the rise and what they don't talk about is how many of the tiny crypto places go under because these people know even less about business than the dot bomb era startup types.
Yep. It's kind of obvious, really. Either they are True Believers who don't understand money, economics or business (because if they did understand those things they wouldn't be True Believers), or else they're cynical scammers looking to ride the Ponzi crest until it starts to crash. Either way, they're not going to be in business for long.
Re:He's right (Score:5, Informative)
"Tim isn't a computer scientist or really even a professional programmer either."
TBL is an English computer scientist. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Oh, and for giggles All of this is publicly-available information which you apparently couldn't be bothered to spend 15 seconds looking at before opening your mouth. [wikipedia.org]
"The blockchain folks on the other hand are actual computer scientists who are experts in cryptography. Now for security and cryptography I will listen to them (but not about finance)."
Good thing we have plenty of documentation about their poor security and cryptography for all to see. [web3isgoinggreat.com]
Wanna shill harder about something you're very obviously wrong about, on all fronts, or do you wish to retract your bullshit statements?
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Because, as everybody knows, all you have to do is put all the files in a world-readable folder and a fully-compiled webserver [w3.org] will spontaneously manifest itself in your /sbin directory and start handing out amusing animations of cats, right?
Re: He's right (Score:1)
Wow that's the most provably wrong post on Slashdot today. There should be an award for that or something.
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An effective web is not about who drives what cars, but the infrastructure it provides and for the diversity of solutions it allows for. The problem with deciding how well the solution is based on the car someone drives, is that you end making an elitist solution that only the scammers care to understand.
Re: He's right (Score:1)
The web was deterimmed to be what ever people wanted it to be, whatever that meant. So standards lag behind policy which lag behind a small private interest that is sure it knows what is best for you. Now what is best for you is the metaverse with a $1500 sandbox to bury your head in.
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The Web3 guys drive Lambos
Are you sure? Have you seen them?
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They have NFTs of Lambos!
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It's dot.com 2.0. It's just not "something something internet, something something profit", this time it's "something something blockchain, something something profit". Otherwise, same shit.
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Blockchain is a write-only database. This database is used to track transactions made by users going back to the beginning of the "currency". (ie: Alice paid Bob $2. Bob paid Charlie $1)
"Mining" is just doing the work needed to write to the write-only database. As a reward for writing to the database, you are rewarded with a piece of the pie. Currently that reward is newly-minted currency. In the nearish future, it will be a transaction fee taken from transactions conducted.
Re: He's right (Score:2)
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Iirc that's not even technically true as you need 51% of the total computing power to write lies. That's a lot but not impossible for financially motivated scam artists or large state sponsors.
Re:He's right (Score:5, Informative)
> Nobody can even explain exactly what blockchain is and how it is useful -- in a way that actually makes sense.
It's a database. Except this database doesn't overwrite rows, it just adds rows so you have all historical data to the beginning of time. It is also distributed/multi-user and tamperproof in that the changing an old value requires significant work and the further back you wish to tamper the more exponentially difficult it is.
Databases are already useful. Databases that are distributed/multi-user are even more useful. Databases that are tamperproof and have historical data are already in used in banking, health and security audit logs. This just happens to be applied to tracking a ledger of virtual coins. But the underlying technology is quite impressive and is applicable to many industries.
Further to this Ethereum is a Turing complete computer. It is basically the worlds largest (albeit slowest) massively distributed virtual machine. The blockchain is effectively RAM and you can execute code that is distributed and validated all the nodes in tandem.
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I find when everyone on here sticks to technology and the specifics as NFN just demostrated, it makes everyone seem normal. I've seen several people on here that are really left and really right make some awesome technical comments and it's fun to see nerds still exist under all the politics we like to talk about.
We really do have more in common then we realize.
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Mod parent up, a genuinely insightful comment, he should get some kind of prize :)
Re:He's right (Score:5, Insightful)
All of these things are things you can do with a normal computer, except thousands of times less efficient.
Blockchain, NFT, and web3 are all about creating artificial scarcity in a digital world, where scarcity does not naturally exist. Scarcity is not a social good, it is a device to attempt to create value when none existed before. It will eventually fail. This doesn't mean that you can't make money off it in the short term, but eventually somebody will be left holding the bag. When that happens, you better hope that person isn't you.
Ignore it. It will go away in the end.
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All of these things are things you can do with a normal computer, except thousands of times less efficient.
All but the ledger thing, sure. So that's what's left, is it useful? Yes, it can do a bunch of jobs, though all of them are specifically related to tracking distributed resources.
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> All of these things are things you can do with a normal computer,
Sure you can do all those things with a normal computer, but you can't prove ANY of those things with a normal computer.
My bank can't prove to me that they have my money. I have to trust that they do. Sounds like a pretty shitty system if you ask me.
> Ignore it. It will go away in the end.
What will happen is that the technology will become so core to what we do with software we'll be using them without even knowing it. And then 'tards
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It's a database. Except this database doesn't overwrite rows, it just adds rows so you have all historical data to the beginning of time.
So, it doesn't scale?
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It's a database. Except this database doesn't overwrite rows, it just adds rows so you have all historical data to the beginning of time.
So, it doesn't scale?
It is "web3 scale"!
Re: He's right (Score:1)
It doesn't scale, just like the internet. After all we can only connect 2^32 devices to it.
Luckily it's possible to build additional layers, like routing and subnets on top of ipv4, maybe even switch to ipv6.. why do you think Blockchain is limited to that 5 second introduction sentence... It's like dismissing the internet after hearing that every device needs a fixed, unique, addressable identifier and hence can never be scale able ...
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Except this database doesn't overwrite rows, it just adds rows so you have all historical data to the beginning of time.
Sounds like a typical porn collection. Hopefully HDD prices come down sometime soon.
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further back you wish to tamper the more exponentially difficult it is.
Is that true? The difficulty goes up exponentially with the distance back? I would think the work increases linearly. You really mean exponentially?
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Useful for inventory control.
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FedEx says hello.
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This is silly. How it works is not complicated.
Finding a use for it has proven much harder.
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PKI is a great method as it allows an entity to establish a meaningful chain of trust.
NFT could also potentially have value if and only if it were disconnected from any financially oriented blockchain.
I don't see great value in digital currency. No nation will issue a digital currency without anti-laundering protections, therefore blockchain completely loses its value in terms of being decentralized.
I tried using block chain while
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Using blockchain to track stuff you have isn't useful, because you can do that in some other way much more easily, as you discovered. It's only useful for tracking stuff which is distributed in many hands, and you're worried that one or more of the other parties will try to tamper with the records. Blockchain doesn't solve any problems if you have the only copy of the log.
Re: He's right (Score:2)
Explaining it in a way that makes sense is rather easy, technically its not that hard to grasp. Explaining it in a way that makes it practical from business or consumer standpoint is pretty hard.
Say you used it as access control to a service as for identifying who has right to access a chatroom - you'd still have to keep a mechanism to ban spammers and people who share a single account.
For 'in game assets' and such, the idea that you'd pay once and use it in every game falls apart when companies have an exp
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I'm just surprised they manage to convince venture capitalists to part with their cash.
There's a very specific reason a few VC firms have jumped into this.
It's because in the crypto ICO model, they can cash out before they even have a MVP or a business plan. This industry is so full of irrational idiots who think they're going to get-rich-quick, that they'll buy any new token that comes out. And these VC firms can give a crypto startup a bunch of money in return for tokens, then sell those tokens up front and get a return on their investment before anybody notices there's not even a rug to
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I view it as partially a combination of IPFS, and partially a combination of a PGP/GPG web of trust.
I can't really take Web3 seriously until there are RFCs out there that describe the protocols on the OSI model, reference code for each piece of the entire Web3 gestalt in GitHub, Gitee, and others, and has been through the process of being looked at by guys who don't have a "dog in the hunt", and are not pushing something to make direct cash from it.
NFTs are great... but that is at best a circus sideshow. E
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Web of trust is good, and you can do that with a tree of certs, but that's not the same as blockchain which is just a dumb buzzword for people who like buzzwords. Just keep cryptocurrencies a thousand miles from this though, maybe lob them into space, then nuke them to be sure.
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Totally agree there. One can slap "blockchain" on a lot of things. For example, the -S option with git:
git commit -a -S -m "another commit."
technically makes one's code checked into Git blockchain based, so one can write down "blockchain developer" on their resume.
(/s of course... partially.)
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It's also highly centralized (Score:5, Insightful)
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Anything unregulated eventually does. Same reason why anarchy doesn't work for long, or at least not on a large scale. At some point some asshole comes in, corners the market and becomes the de facto regulatory body, with himself as the main benefactor.
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And yet half the world lives under crippling corruption, where too-powerful governments are populated with thieves demanding kickbacks from president down to the person at the DMV who needs an extra $500 or you can wait years for your driver's license.
What was your minor complaint again?
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That, believe it or not, it could very well be even worse. For reference, see any country where the government broke down.
Yeah, I'm not exactly a big fan of government corruption myself, who would be, but since the alternative isn't some fairy-world where everyone is nice and honest and doing his job perfectly without any egoistic tendencies but rather a world where the biggest asshole and psychopath runs it, without any checks and balances, yeah, I prefer what I have.
We, as a civilization, don't exactly ha
Fuck it. (Score:5, Funny)
We're going to 5 webs.
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One for each eye.
Re:Fuck it. (Score:4, Funny)
I believe this rig only goes to 11 :p
Re: Fuck it. (Score:1)
Re: Fuck it. (Score:2)
Only time I've seen web 3 mentioned is (Score:4, Insightful)
when crypto of NFT's are pimped out, nothing else.
Swore I would never... (Score:5, Funny)
do this again, but I lied:
Dissociated Press (DP) — FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Physicists identify new fundamental particle
May herald a new particle family and restructuring of the Standard Model
Geneva, Switzerland — December 3, 2018
Keywords: hypino, shinyon, blockchain
High energy particle physicists at the CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nullité) facility have confirmed the existence of the long-conjectured hypino (hy-PEE-no). It is thought to be the first member of a new class of particles known as shinyons (SHY-nee-ons), distinct from bosons and fermions.
Unlike other subatomic particles, hypinos carry no charge, and have neither rest nor relativistic mass. Their only defining quantum property is spin. Hypinos are thought to be the fundamental unit of marketing hyperbole. To date, hypinos are the only known members of the proposed class of shinyons, which are of especial interest to tech investors and holders of the MBA degree. Dr. Martin Waugh, of the Institute for Advanced Squander, further posits that the hypino may be the carrier of the so-called “weak-minded force”, a mutual repulsion between fools and their money. It is theorized that, upon sufficiently accelerated spin, hypinos transform into super-excited hyperinos, detectable only by Chief Information Officers.
The discovery of the hypino is recounted by Drs. Robert Crawford and Robert Jensen as follows:
“It was a Friday afternoon, and we and our colleagues were returning from a long lunch. Maintenance on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was scheduled to start Saturday morning, and the apparatus would be unavailable for two months. We were in a ‘what the hell’ kind of mood, so we thought we'd take a fantasy shot, just for grins and giggles.
“We had a few leftover Higgs Bosons from 2012 on the shelf, so our lowly lab technician, Garth Dennis, breech-loaded them into the beast , set up a blockchain for the target, positioned the extremely sensitive Swindleometer at the intended point of collision, energized the superconducting electromagnets, and let it rip. Upon collision, the blockchain shattered into a shower of the elusive hypinos. Examination of the debris field revealed that the blockchain and all of our cash were gone! Apparently the hypinos were entangled with our funding.”
There may be natural sources of hypinos. The strongest natural emitters appear to be located in Redmond, Washington, and Armonk, New York.
Thank you, Captain Obvious (Score:1)
I mean, thank you Tim. It shouldn't need to be said, but unfortunately some people will only listen if a "celebrity" says it.
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What I find ironic is that I consider Tim a celebrity. I wouldn't see any private company making the grounds for the Web, just because there is no ROI to do so. At best, it might have been an intranet protocol, sort of like sticking a HyperCard interface onto a client, or maybe something for a closed client like AOL... but definitely not something as an interoperable case.
I'm sure people will gripe that "Tim doesn't drive a supercar like the Web3 people, so why should I bother?" Money doesn't automatical
Already doing that (Score:2, Insightful)
There is nothing in "Web 3" except some more money-grab attempts by people trying to get rich quick.
The future is the fediverse (Score:2)
What we need is Web0
Winamp (Score:3)
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Reminds me of when Winamp 3 was released. Everyone hated it, so they backpedaled rereleased it as Winamp 5. Still using it to this day!
When Winamp 3 was released everyone hated it, none more-so than one of the developers of the previous Winamp who then left Nullsoft and started working on his own media player, Foobar2000.
There's no reason to keep clinging on to a company which has lost its way in the face of so many great alternatives and for 2 decades Foobar2000 has been an amazing mediaplayer and still gets regular updates without screwing up anything.
Tim who? (Score:2, Funny)
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Damn straight, not a tech billionaire with harebrained ideas that make you wonder how he made that money in the first place and whether wealth is only a function of insane luck rather than actually having working ideas, he's also not a talentless pair of boobs on some body or an antisemitic wannabe rapper, so who'd listen to anything he says?
Web 3 is not a concern (Score:1)
Web 3 is bullshit pushed by bullshitters on bullshitable VCs. I've found myself dealing with some of these just in the last few days. Millions in funding pouring in and all they've come up with in since 2019 is a Gmail extension no one uses. Do not worry about Web 3. As the VC money dries up it will fade into an amusing memory, dropped as a joke by old timers 10 years from now.
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Web 3 is bullshit pushed by bullshitters on bullshitable VCs. [...] As the VC money dries up it will fade into an amusing memory, dropped as a joke by old timers 10 years from now.
Like I said, dot.com 2.0.
$30 million in a funding round, what? (Score:1)
The technology, protocols and APIs are already available and in use to make this decentralization to happen. It's just the users chose to log-in to Tik-Tok, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, etc.
The problem is not the technology. The problem is the people using it.
Maybe Tim is raising his pension fund.
3.0? (Score:2)
News media without a brain (Score:2)
"web3" presumes a forklift upgrade (Score:1)
Of course he's right. People have confused their pet obsessions with ownership and crypto with the broader web.
"web3" suggests a forklift upgrade like it's Windows XP, when in reality it's more like online investing added to the mix.
No wonder why most humanoids need convincing today that web3 even is worth their time. This wasn't a requirement with web2.
Upcoming documentary (Score:2)
There's a really good upcoming documentary about blockchain by a software engineer that's making the rounds now at film festivals, but will soon be released online. You can see some clips here on their channel [youtube.com].
At this point 14 years into the creation of blockchain, nobody can cite even a single definitive use case that doesn't involve criminal activity. Yet the mainstream media keeps harping this point that "blockchain is the future" but whenever someone is asked, "What is it uniquely good at?" the respo
Web3 REAL definition (Score:3)
Web 1: The original Internet - a combination of centralization (DNS,IANA) and de-centralization.
Web1 is still around and doing fine.
Web 2: Corporations discover Web1 and want a piece of it, so they give away free services in order to corral users into walled gardens: YouTube, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tiktoc, Instagram, etc.
Web2 runs on top of Web1, which is still there.
Any time anybody gets sick of Web2 they can go back to Web1. They can run their own web sites or Wordpress installations. IRC, Usenet, Etc.
Web 3: Web 2 with ponzi scheme tokens added
Web3 is just a different set of rich people offering inferior copies of web1 and web2 services with crypto tokens added, foolishly thinking that people are going to pay for inferior versions of services they already get for free. It's one of the most absurd things ever.
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Web 2: Corporations discover Web1 and want a piece of it, so they give away free services in order to corral users into walled gardens: YouTube, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tiktoc, Instagram, etc.
This is backwards. Sites with user-generated content came first, and quickly became very popular. To fund the operation and scaling of such sites, the startups that created them turned to advertising. This business model was extremely successful, turning the startups into big corporations, many of which are interested in keeping users in their services via lock-in (walled gardens).
Web 3: Web 2 with ponzi scheme tokens added
Web3 is just a different set of rich people offering inferior copies of web1 and web2 services with crypto tokens added, foolishly thinking that people are going to pay for inferior versions of services they already get for free. It's one of the most absurd things ever.
Kind of. Many of the web3 proposals aim to replace the centralized servers of web2 (and even web1, somewhat) with decentralized
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Whaaaaa (Score:1)
What is The Metaverse then? Web i.0? *
* i as in the imaginary unit