[diego]

As I understand it, the gist of web3 is to do away with the need for having centralized organizations who control a particular resource. For example domain names, identities, speech. In the beginning, the web was supposed to be an egalitarian and democratic space. Of course corporations and governments seized as much control as they could. Today we have companies that dictate arbitrary rules. For example, there is nothing you can do to grow your Twitter account. If Youtube decides they don't like you anymore, your audience is gone. Your domain name is not really yours, etc.

Supposedly web 3.0 would fix this problem by making sure decision power is decentralized. Will it deliver? I personally doubt it, because it's easy to create an anonymous oligarchy under an apparent layer of decentralization. Still, I'm sure some applications will succeed.

[Strom]

I think there are two fundamental issues that need some addressing:

1) Either the decentralized software system can't easily be updated without true consensus - which will make it slow and cumbersome (like bitcoin) or there will be a central authority that can just change the rules at any point - which will make it centralized (like Ethereum Classic vs Ethereum fork). Every web 3.0 related tech that I've peeked at looks to be like the latter - it claims to be decentralized, but is actually controlled by some central authority that is authoring the whole thing.

2) Governments aren't going to stop enforcing laws just because the activity moves onto a blockchain. Governments will most likely be slow to react, sure - but ultimately all these decentralized encrypted bits flow through a cable that the government can just cut. Wireless signals aren't an answer either, because the signal can be located and the antenna owner introduced to a wrench. A lot of web 3.0 promises that I've seen seem to either implicitly or even explicitly promise freedom from government policy, which I think is naive at best.

[capiki]

I think 1) will probably never get "solved," but that's ok. I don't think the vision of DAOs replacing traditional companies will ever materialize, for example. It's just too inefficient.

What I see blockchains enabling (to what degree, tbd) is ownership of digital assets without a central party. Take concert tickets, for example. Imagine a world where transaction fees are nominal and blockchains are scalable. An artist/venue can mint tickets and have people buy them directly from them, no TicketMaster with 20% "convenience" fees needed. Now, of course, there will exist a product (probably a winner takes-all, as usual), that will serve as the UI to mint the tickets. But a significant value add of such products, the validation of tickets via the authority of their name, will be replaced by the blockchain. I don't know exactly what that'll look like, but I don't think that's insignificant.

[jt2190]

> Every web 3.0 related tech… claims to be decentralized, but is actually controlled by some central authority that is authoring the whole thing.

Can you elaborate a bit? Are you saying that ultimately things start looking like competing groups or that they start looking like a single group?

[brightstep]

Things look like competing groups, just as they do now with corporate control over web 2 infrastructure

[armchairhacker]

This used to be my understanding.

But decentralization isn't anything new: decentralized peer-to-peer networks have existed for a long time (Napster, BitTorrent, Tor). Calling decentralized technologies "web3" implies that they are new, not just revived.

Also, you don't have to go fully decentralized to avoid the extreme moderation of YouTube, Twitter, etc. Plenty of centralized forums exist which allow controversial or even full alt-right content, and generally the "centralized" internet of Cloudflare and registrars/ISPs won't take you down unless you're especially toxic or illegal. This could change in the future, so decentralized solutions are very important, but usually only as a sort of backup.

The web will definitely evolve until it deserves a new denotation "Web 3" distinct from "Web 2". But I don't think it will be the web3 everyone is talking about now, I think it will be something else.

[vkkhare]

Exactly if that is the case, it should also include technologies where data ownership lies with the users. After all data itself is a huge resource. One of the biggest reasons corporates could monopolise the platform because as users we only had our own data but no access to others data.

Maybe a consent mechanism to use other's data in privacy safe manner, where anyone can build their analytics models and people can choose which one to follow or choose. Seems like a interesting proposition.

[giantrobot]

> Maybe a consent mechanism to use other's data in privacy safe manner, where anyone can build their analytics models and people can choose which one to follow or choose. Seems like a interesting proposition.

But cryptobros are all about secondary markets. So as soon as you give permission to your data to an entity they'll copy it off-chain (you can't stop them if they can read it) and bundle it up for resale.

All this does it flip the problem. Instead of a singular entity that "owns" the data, everyone owns it. So instead of having no privacy from the singular entity with a wide reach you've got no privacy from anyone.

[vkkhare]

That's why not giving them ability to copy data, allow them to use that data only on your device and send aggregated information back. So they cannot copy the data

[timeon]

So they are going to run code at your home instead of using data directly. Maybe I'm missing something but this sounds bit naive to me. Most of those crypto solutions sounds just like detour with similar result in the end.

Like you can have decentralized web now, you can host your video on your server. Maybe even p2p. Just the reach would be probably minimal. And you can have your own bitcoin wallet. I was downloading chain to my wallet ten years ago and it was slow. Most people will chose some centralized service even for crypto.

[vkkhare]

I was thinking along ML. How analytics and ML happens on user data which is stored on data silos. For example, twitter has data about all our posts and interactions and uses that data to build recommendation models which it monetizes as to who comes on top.

In decentralized world, everyone can build their models, host them and train them on user data. But since, I wouldn't want my data to be used for any other purpose, I don't want them to make a copy of that data. So they send their models (after taking my consent) to my device, train it locally and send the aggregated model back.

[giantrobot]

You're just describing signing tokens which has been around for decades with smart cards. There's no need for a blockchain to be involved in that process. It just makes it slower, expensive, and public.

If you want some personal data to show up somewhere be it a name or avatar it has to leave your device. At that point someone can and will copy that data. If there's value with associating that data with your activity someone will do it.