You may have heard of web3. It made quite the buzz this year; it seems like people either love it or hate it. Honestly, I didn't know what web3 was...
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Ever heard of Diaspora, Friendica, Hubzilla, Mastodon, ActivityPub...?
I think they do the whole decentralisation thing very well without the crypto part which just needs more calculations and thus is a (unneeded?) overhead. Sure it's still the owners of the servers that make the rules, but no one is stopping you from starting your own server and play by your own rules.
We have been using P2P to exchange data for decades. We know how to synchronise data with P2P, but the problem was that we couldn't mutate data in a decentralised manner - we always needed a (write) master and everybody had to trust him. That was until blockchains had been developed. Blockchains use P2P, a runtime layer, a defence mechanism, and some clever data structures on top of databases in order to get rid of the (write) master in a global scenario. Now we have a network of equal nodes, in which everybody can verify data mutation and as long as > 50% of the nodes play fair (=come to the same result) the blockchain works. It's indeed a very expensive composition of technologies just to get rid of that single trusted master server, but it might be worth it depending on the use-case. Today we know for sure of one use-case that's worth all the fuzz* and that's Bitcoin. Web3 is the term that's used to explore blockchain use-cases other than just payment.
* = I don't think that PoW is worth it.What I was referring to was narrowed down to social networks and I think it does not bring much advantahes as there you already have the possibility to have cooperating nodes/servers with things like Diaspora, ActivityPub or the Zot protocol.
I am not so certain if Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are to be seen positively, but there seems to be a market for it.
Thing is: How do you prevent one single entity from running 50% of nodes? Given enough money this can become possible. And then?
I think you always need to trust someone. With currencies you trust the Central Bank, with real estate you trust contracts and courts etc.
It's exactly the "given the money" thing. The solution is economical/statistical, not technical/deterministic.
The same you have with the networks I mentioned. Every node controls their own data, not one single instance.
Ah, scratch that, think I understand your point now: data independent of host.
Yes, this problem is solved. But I'm still not convinced. Maybe I don't see a proper use case, given that I consider Bitcoin rather a bad thing.
Interesting run down of where we were and what we are building right now.
A question I have is why do you feel web3 has become a term and movement we are seeing now? Reason I'm asking is because IPFS, Storj (sub 2018 era projects) and general peer to peer incarnations like music sharing, torrenting and p2p have been around a while now but the web3 "trend" is more recent.
Yes, they have been around for sometime. The way I see it is web3 is the rebranding of decentralized tech. I think that the cryptocurrency part really accelerated the development and usage because of the economic incentives and with that the tech stack is growing.
One thing that can safe all web devs from madness is "communication". If properly communicated, then properly standardized, more over we need "conscious standardization" which I would call "not efficient" for todays web2. Term of "conscious" includes term of "security" tho . Security (immune system) can be achieved only if the body moves properly . Standardization is our legs & arms . We need www community based standardization (a centralized package of good practice you would not required to be payed for a chapter tho) & of course more contributions in one place rather than complicated arch. with thousands of question over stack overflow not mentioning others . This can be achieved but requires ones own income (I am not talking about money, rather tho – efforts) .
Not sure if I understand you right. It's probably too early for w3c standardisation of web 3.0, it's still in its early stages. However some communities have proper standards processes, e.g. Ethereum's EIP -> ERC process. The development of DAOs is also all about government.
But keep in mind: web 1.0 was the "crazy" development with late standardisation. The early, properly standardised web was Gopher. It failed.
Thanks for the post. It sounds like web3 is an interesting idea but until it will have clear standards I will keep tracking it from the distance.
This is by far the most interesting article I read in dev.to!!
Thanks for the rich content.
Heavily misguided. All of it exists today without a need to kill the planet one GPU cycle at a time.