Any thoughts on web 3?

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dharmafootsteps
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Re: Any thoughts on web 3?

Post by dharmafootsteps »

narhwal90 wrote: Wed Oct 13, 2021 8:28 pm One thing for sure people are not going to host web3 apps themselves, but on the various clouds. Guess which companies are going to get a % of every micropayment that goes anywhere, and gets the surveillance of every transaction with every user. To me this looks like market consolidation with a fancy mobile interface.
Web servers and centralised databases aren’t needed for decentralized apps, that’s part of the point of the architecture.

The interface is the part that doesn’t change. Frontends of decentralized apps are identical to the way they’re done now, HTML, CSS and JavaScript, or something that compiles to WASM, or native mobile. It’s the backend web server and db that’s being swapped out here.
narhwal90
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Re: Any thoughts on web 3?

Post by narhwal90 »

I work with stuff on both sides of that every day, I dont see any decentralization happening.. all the magic is being handled by the cloud api's... Sure you can rent cpus and storage and bandwidth to run your upside down decentralized conpany- it used to be capital equipment, beancounters love this I'm sure.

But now your datacenter can be vanished with the click of a button. I think if you want to be Somebody in web3 you better be good at making deals with the cloud companies.
dharmafootsteps
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Re: Any thoughts on web 3?

Post by dharmafootsteps »

Come on, you’ve got to be trolling me at this point.
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Queequeg
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Re: Any thoughts on web 3?

Post by Queequeg »

dharmafootsteps wrote: Wed Oct 13, 2021 8:12 am
Web 2: Users are the data, corporations own the platform, and the code is closed.

Web 3: Users own their data, contributors own the platform, and the code is open.
You started by quoting this tweet.

The purported difference between Web 2 and Web 3 is who owns the value.

I watched the video you linked and it doesn't help me understand much except that through the use of these collectively created protocols, people can have secure interactions; further, a feature of these protocols is that it allows currency like functions.

It sounds like the wet dream of technologists back in the early days of the internet, and clearly, that cult lives on - technology is going finally free humanity! The guy definitely spoke with religious-like inflections in his speech. "We are the high priests who have so much responsibility for the future!"

The biggest problem with that dream is that human beings are involved and human nature is not going to miraculously change because we have some new technology.

From what the guy in the video was saying, I think his dark vision of the future is much more likely where the internet is a series of closed ecosystems. Actually, it sounds like Apple will finally be able to cage all of their customers as they always envisioned. That's how the money gets made.

The promise of collective ownership, I see a few problems, the least of which will be the proliferation of unique protocols that make their currencies negligible. Its still about user critical mass and I trust FB will figure out how to corral the herd before John Barlowe's spiritual disciples can turn the world on to the liberation and wonders of Web 3.

I also see governments cracking down on this, as China is currently doing for the simple reason it has the potential of destabilizing economies. There is a reason the world relies on the dollar as the reserve currency - sure there is the fact that its backed up by the US economy and implicitly, its guns, but practically speaking, its a common baseline for people from various countries with different currencies. The US is not going to give up its place as the reserve currency. Once it becomes a threat, the US will regulate this aggressively. We go to war over oil. The US government, once it catches on to what kind of threat this is will try to control it or burn it to the ground to stop it.

Sure, this will lead to some amazing innovations, but it will be the same old people owning and making money off of it after a while. I don't know how that will happen, but betting against the house always loses in the end.
Last edited by Queequeg on Thu Oct 14, 2021 12:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
There is no suffering to be severed. Ignorance and klesas are indivisible from bodhi. There is no cause of suffering to be abandoned. Since extremes and the false are the Middle and genuine, there is no path to be practiced. Samsara is nirvana. No severance achieved. No suffering nor its cause. No path, no end. There is no transcendent realm; there is only the one true aspect. There is nothing separate from the true aspect.
-Guanding, Perfect and Sudden Contemplation,
narhwal90
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Re: Any thoughts on web 3?

Post by narhwal90 »

dharmafootsteps wrote: Thu Oct 14, 2021 8:49 am Come on, you’ve got to be trolling me at this point.
I dont think so. You web 3'ing with a mobile in your hands, you are interacting with a monolithic closed system you cant control. Yes, you get to web browse, download many apps that you cant audit or control- and have 0 visibility about how and with whom your data is shared. If you want to decentralize, you, personally, have to own and control the equipment. As soon as you outsource your equipment and software, your data is no longer yours- you are renting it.

Have not yet seen how web3 includes users owning and controlling their data, but I do see a lot of fancier web2 stuff in the cloud because integration and maintenance and scaling is outsourced. Are you suggesting that AWS, Azure, Google will give up their ownership of user's data?

What seems more likely to me is AWS etc offer the fancy nxt gen web3 services, in their clouds, attractively priced and open for business. Your data is still not yours.
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