this post has literally NOTHING to do with crypto, blockchain and crypto are not the same things. blockchain is a way to archive maximum transparency whilst maintaining some sort of anonymity, also blockchain makes transactional backups a thing of the past, Crypto is just one single product of this technology. it's a bit like "i don't like cars" because you disagree with a single manufacturer ;)
Blockchain is a distributed append-only database, nothing more, nothing less. I'm sure it has its uses but all of the blockchain proponents (and I use "crypto" to refer to both cryptocurrencies and other blockchain uses because *crypto*graphy is the core of how blockchains work) have yet to pitch me one that isn't just a worse solution to a problem that's already solved, or a solution waiting for a problem. Web technologies are certainly *not* a place where blockchains would help, and certainly have the potential to make many things much much worse.
Aside from DNS, the internet is *already* decentralized. People flock to Amazon Web Services and Facebook out of convenience, but self-hosting (or hosting on a smaller web host) is easier now than it's ever been. No centralization needed. And I'd like to hope "an append-only internet is a bad thing" would be an obvious statement, but just to clarify, "right to be forgotten" laws, the fact that doxxing exists, and the fact that other illegal things can be slapped onto the internet are all good reasons for a web host to be able to *delete* things - an impossible concept on a blockchain (unless you fork them, which defeats the purpose of being a single decentralized authority).
Blockchains ensure that data on the chain remains verifiable and unchanged, but that just means if bad data goes in, bad data goes out, and will stay there forever. I am firmly of the belief that this is a bad thing.
And I think a more apt metaphor would be like saying "I don't like cars" in a society where most drivers are drunk drivers, car insurance doesn't exist, they somehow produce even more carbon emissions than they do already, and they explode if Elon Musk tweets the wrong thing. In that case I think it'd be entirely justified to not be a big fan of cars, actually.
I understand where you are coming from, Bee. If we look past the noise and "scamminess" involved, there is technical merit in the ideas behind Web3. The killer apps here may be something very practical like "An app to browse through land records stored in the blockchain", "simplified contract management", etc.
I think there is some philosophical merit to the ideas behind web3 - having the majority of the internet controlled by a few companies (a few social media companies handling most discourse and Amazon Web Services hosting the rest) is absolutely a bad thing and decentralization is necessary for the future of the internet.
But we already have a technical solution to that: the internet. People can host their own websites (or use smaller hosting providers, for the less tech savvy) free from the big corps. It's how Web 1.0 was before sites like Geocities streamlined things a bit too much, and it's how Web 3 will need to be. Throwing in blockchains that have far higher carbon footprints than standard servers at best (proof of work) or are significantly more vulnerable to centralization at worst (proof of stake) is not the solution, in my opinion. Even ignoring all the countless scams, the tech doesn't solve any problems that weren't already solved in much less complicated ways.
Totally agree with everything you've said. You are spot on about the price/performance/environmental angle being off base with blockchain - esp. on the popular networks like Bitcoin or Ethereum. This would make mass consumer blockchain apps difficult unless this gets solved.
Now, where I do see potential is in custom blockchains (and coins) that companies may create for their own needs. Internal Web3 apps for asset tracking of hardware, access control, etc. where it is a hybrid decentralized solution inside a centralized organization.
It is also very likely that none of this takes off and all of Web3 was a failed experiment. We've probably seen countless examples of "the next big thing" ending up not going anywhere. What gives me some hope is that even when something big like this fails, some technical ideas within it have merit and end up becoming something useful that gains mass adoption.
For three months at my last job me and a team of 2 other research engineers tried our best to make blockchain applicable to a company use-case (the managers wanted the buzzword in our tech). The company we worked for had a wide variety of products and one in particular concerned asset tracking and guaranteed delivery. Ultimately every solution we came up with was much more easily, cheaply and more effectively achieved with "traditional" technology or just regular old edge computing.
I look forward to the day that the web is a giant inter-connectedly natural body of computation working in concert to shuttle information from one place to another, but I really really struggle to see blockchain being a part of that.
Ugh! There are definitely rough edges that need to be worked out. What remains to be seen is if making the developer experience better is enough OR whether the fundamental technology itself needs to be better.
Great article. Can you give an example on how authentication will be different in web3:
You said:
Authentication will rely on anonymous verification as opposed to the Oauth (Twitter/Google/Facebook/etc.) or password-based approaches that we have used historically
Hi Rajiv - reposting my answer from your same question on LinkedIn!
There are two things at play here:
1. At a foundational level, the biggest difference will be in who/what can validate that you are who you claim you are.
2. This change results in a downstream impact on what tools/services you need to use to perform this validation
In today's Web 2.0 world, you authenticate via e-mail/password, which is tied to the service you are trying to sign-in to. You may decide to sign-in using verification from Google, Facebook, Twitter, Github, etc. where the details about who you are are tied to one of these services. These services provide API-level access to make it easy for you to integrate with these auth services from your app. Services like Firebase make that even simpler by giving you a single API that orchestrates authentication with all services behind-the-scenes.
With Web3, details of who you are are stored in the blockchain. This blockchain could be Ethereum, Bitcoin, Solana, etc. Given the decentralized and read/write nature of blockchains, there is no single organization that your credentials are tied to. They are tied to whichever blockchain you are currently using. The way you (and apps) ensure you are who you are on the blockchain is via Wallets 😀
Great write-up! As has been the case from each web transition -- the basics / fundamentals are the most important.
I don't understand the hate you got from other comments. If you don't want to evolve and be a part of the future -- just ignore or unsubscribe.
Thanks for having a pragmatic view on this, John :-)
I didn't sign up for this, why am I getting emails about it. Web3 is a scam and I'm not remotely interested.
Sorry about that! I'll remove you from future postings.
Same here. I've enjoyed Kirupa stuff in the past but any person or company trying to push crypto on me is an instant No Thanks Forever.
this post has literally NOTHING to do with crypto, blockchain and crypto are not the same things. blockchain is a way to archive maximum transparency whilst maintaining some sort of anonymity, also blockchain makes transactional backups a thing of the past, Crypto is just one single product of this technology. it's a bit like "i don't like cars" because you disagree with a single manufacturer ;)
Blockchain is a distributed append-only database, nothing more, nothing less. I'm sure it has its uses but all of the blockchain proponents (and I use "crypto" to refer to both cryptocurrencies and other blockchain uses because *crypto*graphy is the core of how blockchains work) have yet to pitch me one that isn't just a worse solution to a problem that's already solved, or a solution waiting for a problem. Web technologies are certainly *not* a place where blockchains would help, and certainly have the potential to make many things much much worse.
Aside from DNS, the internet is *already* decentralized. People flock to Amazon Web Services and Facebook out of convenience, but self-hosting (or hosting on a smaller web host) is easier now than it's ever been. No centralization needed. And I'd like to hope "an append-only internet is a bad thing" would be an obvious statement, but just to clarify, "right to be forgotten" laws, the fact that doxxing exists, and the fact that other illegal things can be slapped onto the internet are all good reasons for a web host to be able to *delete* things - an impossible concept on a blockchain (unless you fork them, which defeats the purpose of being a single decentralized authority).
Blockchains ensure that data on the chain remains verifiable and unchanged, but that just means if bad data goes in, bad data goes out, and will stay there forever. I am firmly of the belief that this is a bad thing.
And I think a more apt metaphor would be like saying "I don't like cars" in a society where most drivers are drunk drivers, car insurance doesn't exist, they somehow produce even more carbon emissions than they do already, and they explode if Elon Musk tweets the wrong thing. In that case I think it'd be entirely justified to not be a big fan of cars, actually.
I understand where you are coming from, Bee. If we look past the noise and "scamminess" involved, there is technical merit in the ideas behind Web3. The killer apps here may be something very practical like "An app to browse through land records stored in the blockchain", "simplified contract management", etc.
I think there is some philosophical merit to the ideas behind web3 - having the majority of the internet controlled by a few companies (a few social media companies handling most discourse and Amazon Web Services hosting the rest) is absolutely a bad thing and decentralization is necessary for the future of the internet.
But we already have a technical solution to that: the internet. People can host their own websites (or use smaller hosting providers, for the less tech savvy) free from the big corps. It's how Web 1.0 was before sites like Geocities streamlined things a bit too much, and it's how Web 3 will need to be. Throwing in blockchains that have far higher carbon footprints than standard servers at best (proof of work) or are significantly more vulnerable to centralization at worst (proof of stake) is not the solution, in my opinion. Even ignoring all the countless scams, the tech doesn't solve any problems that weren't already solved in much less complicated ways.
Totally agree with everything you've said. You are spot on about the price/performance/environmental angle being off base with blockchain - esp. on the popular networks like Bitcoin or Ethereum. This would make mass consumer blockchain apps difficult unless this gets solved.
Now, where I do see potential is in custom blockchains (and coins) that companies may create for their own needs. Internal Web3 apps for asset tracking of hardware, access control, etc. where it is a hybrid decentralized solution inside a centralized organization.
It is also very likely that none of this takes off and all of Web3 was a failed experiment. We've probably seen countless examples of "the next big thing" ending up not going anywhere. What gives me some hope is that even when something big like this fails, some technical ideas within it have merit and end up becoming something useful that gains mass adoption.
:-)
For three months at my last job me and a team of 2 other research engineers tried our best to make blockchain applicable to a company use-case (the managers wanted the buzzword in our tech). The company we worked for had a wide variety of products and one in particular concerned asset tracking and guaranteed delivery. Ultimately every solution we came up with was much more easily, cheaply and more effectively achieved with "traditional" technology or just regular old edge computing.
I look forward to the day that the web is a giant inter-connectedly natural body of computation working in concert to shuttle information from one place to another, but I really really struggle to see blockchain being a part of that.
Ugh! There are definitely rough edges that need to be worked out. What remains to be seen is if making the developer experience better is enough OR whether the fundamental technology itself needs to be better.
Great article. Can you give an example on how authentication will be different in web3:
You said:
Authentication will rely on anonymous verification as opposed to the Oauth (Twitter/Google/Facebook/etc.) or password-based approaches that we have used historically
Hi Rajiv - reposting my answer from your same question on LinkedIn!
There are two things at play here:
1. At a foundational level, the biggest difference will be in who/what can validate that you are who you claim you are.
2. This change results in a downstream impact on what tools/services you need to use to perform this validation
In today's Web 2.0 world, you authenticate via e-mail/password, which is tied to the service you are trying to sign-in to. You may decide to sign-in using verification from Google, Facebook, Twitter, Github, etc. where the details about who you are are tied to one of these services. These services provide API-level access to make it easy for you to integrate with these auth services from your app. Services like Firebase make that even simpler by giving you a single API that orchestrates authentication with all services behind-the-scenes.
With Web3, details of who you are are stored in the blockchain. This blockchain could be Ethereum, Bitcoin, Solana, etc. Given the decentralized and read/write nature of blockchains, there is no single organization that your credentials are tied to. They are tied to whichever blockchain you are currently using. The way you (and apps) ensure you are who you are on the blockchain is via Wallets 😀