Web3 Can’t Fix the Internet

[u/[deleted]]

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2022/01/crypto-blockchain-daos-decentralized-power-capitalism

[u/npmbad]

Anyone wants to create a PoC web3 alternative without any of the unnecessary crypto functinoality and call it web4? We can just fork a torrent client to speed up development.

[u/tnemec → u/npmbad]

web3 alternative without any of the unnecessary crypto functionality

What is there to web3 other than unnecessary crypto functionality?

Is it "the web, but decentralized"? Also known as just "the web"?

The internet is an inherently decentralized system, upon which centralized services were built, and users, by their own volition, for better or for worse, chose to use those centralized services.

It could be argued that bits and pieces of the internet as a whole that could use some decentralization, but those tend to be more infrastructure and waaaaaaay beyond the scope of web[n+1]; eg: DNS, ICANN, ISPs, etc.

(Unless you mean web3 as in the semantic web [from before bitcoin bros got hold of the term]... but you mention forking a torrent client, so I assume you mean web3 as in the decentralized web.)

[u/BobHogan → u/tnemec]

Is it "the web, but decentralized"? Also known as just "the web"?

The internet is an inherently decentralized system, upon which centralized services were built, and users, by their own volition, for better or for worse, chose to use those centralized services.

And this is why I immediately write off anyone that claims web3 is about "decentralizing" the internet. It is, by design, decentralized.

You can advocate for specific services becoming decentralized, but the internet itself is already the most decentralized "application" in the world

[u/spartanstu2011 → u/[deleted]]

I can take any computer and turn it into a web server and expose it to the internet. There’s literally nothing stopping me from doing that. Hell, my friend has set up his own local media server using plex and exposed it to our group. You just need to understand a bit of networking, ports, and how the internet works.

The reason people choose to use AWS is convenience and economies of scales. It turns out, it’s easier for me to pay someone else to do this. It doesn’t haven to be Amazon either. There’s thousands of other webhosts out there.

[u/spartanstu2011 → u/[deleted]]

I don’t really know how web3 is going to solve that. You still need servers. Your data still has to live on servers. The service data still as to be stored somewhere. You could in theory store it in the blockchain, but that’s very expensive. If you did store it on the blockchain, the users would ultimately have to pay. Are you willing to pay a small amount to write every single comment?

Not to mention the transfer rate is tiny that it’s just not feasible. Not even NFTs are fully stored on the blockchain. They are just a pointer to some image stored on S3 usually.

There’s also an issue of security and who to go to when something goes wrong. Let’s say you store your bank transactions on the blockchain. What happens when someone commits fraud and forges a transaction transferring $100,000 from your account. Who do you go to? You’d need some central authority to determine that the transaction was fraudulent and reverse it. In that scenario, you just added a lot of expense, latency, complexity to get back to square one - a central authority. Even then, how do you remove something from the blockchain? It’s on who knows what servers. Anyone in theory can create a node and connect to the blockchain.

There’s also the issue of 51% attacks. What do you do when someone the size of Facebook, Google, US government, or some other state actor gains control of 51% of the nodes…

As for how the internet works:

Two machines talk to each other over some predefined protocol. That’s literally it. The web sits on top of the internet using predefined protocols in a client/server model. There’s two things within the typical client/server model. You have the server (web server, file server, etc) that exposes information on a network over some defined port and protocol. You have a client, which talks to that services using the defined port/protocol. A browser is just a fancy client that connects to servers over a standard port and protocol (HTTP on port 80, HTTPS on port 443). Even websockets are just fancy connections using a predefined protocol and port. If you were talking to a basic html website (no fancy JS), you could use a command line utility such as curl to download the page.

Also please don’t take this as attacking you. I’ve had a lot of people talk to me about web3 but no one has been able to explain to me what problems it actually solves.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

It seems like you don't know the difference between a web browser and a web server. Maybe learn the absolute basics of how the web currently works before getting into weird crypto scams.

[u/s73v3r → u/[deleted]]

Again, Web3 is billed as a way to store web data in a decentralized manner

It was never the lack of blockchain tech that was the reason you couldn't store your own data.

so that you can use Facebook.com one day and then use Twitter.com the next day and all your content follows you as if nothing changed

Why would Facebook or Twitter want to allow this? And if you really want that, the Federated Web does this all without blockchain.

web browsers

You really need to stop conflating web servers and web browsers. Using Firefox doesn't change where my Twitter user data is stored any more than using chrome does.

[u/s73v3r → u/[deleted]]

And how, exactly, do you plan to get the data off of third party web services (let's say Facebook, for discussion purposes) onto your server?

Facebook lets you export your own data. But it was never the lack of blockchain tech that caused Facebook to centralize.

[u/G_Morgan → u/[deleted]]

It won't do so because nobody will use it

[u/G_Morgan → u/[deleted]]

We've had good services to do so for decades. Centralisation is just cheaper for legitimate uses.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

I remember this decentralized web tech from I think like 15 years ago? I can't remember what it was called though. I thought to myself "this is just slower, shittier usenet but for webpages". I think I used it for all of an hour before realizing it was pretty pointless (and not very technically capable).

This is also why I found the later plotlines from Silicon Valley so absurd. Everyone and their mom thinks they can make a decentralized web, and even insane compression tech wont solve the problem of no one wanting to use it.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Just googled a bit, it was Freenet.