Note: I might just be uneducated on the subject.
When I read about web3 with blockchains, smart contracts and dapps, all sounds very promising. But once you look for any real world applications it is just some obscure things that kind of only exist to support the decentralized system. I guess that makes sense, but are there any actual real world uses for that? Like day-to-day things that make a persons life easier, not harder?
No, web3 is pure crypto bro marketing. And is very anti solarpunk. It uses a lot of energy to keep blockchains running, and a lot of the underlying logic about trust and contracts are capitalist ideology.
While I do agree that web3 id 99% crypto bro marketing, the fact that it requires a lot of energy is due to the kind of validation algorithm used, and this is not true for all cryptos.
Bitcoin for example use Proof Of Work, which by design requires a lot of energy, but some blockchains use Proof Of Stake validation, which requires a minimal amount of power to work
Doesn’t that just formalise “rich people get paid to be rich” leading to inequality
Proof of stake means the more you put into the stake the more likely you are to take the transaction fees, which is a positive feedback loop that concentrates the wealth towards whoever started with the most.
Please put the difference between Proof Of Work and Proof of Stake in your uninformed comment.
Or if you are informed, then take the heavy one eyed take out of your comment. Thanks!
are there any actual real world uses for that? Like day-to-day things that make a persons life easier, not harder?
No. Web3 is a marketing scam designed to sell crypto tokens. The tokens are also scams.
Being uneducated on web3 is like being uneducated on the benefits of Amway. Some information isn’t worth the neurons it takes to store.
Being uneducated on web3 is like being uneducated on the benefits of Amway. Some information isn’t worth the neurons it takes to store.
I’m afraid being uneducated on web3 makes a lot of non-tech people vulnerable to scams. And as the arseholes keep inventing new terminology for their scams it can be difficult to keep track of things. It’s good to confirm from time to time that there are still no benefits to Amway, or crypto stuff.
Web3 is just crypto scams in a trenchcoat. Blockchains had some cool applications for being a good database engine for high data integrity and transparency. Unfortunately what I imagine happened was some business school duche walked in on the development and went like “I can make the stockmarket with no regulations or safety with this” and that is what it became.
Lets be real with ourselves: web3 was created to be a scam. It never had any legitimacy other than what fascist corporations and media gave it.
I feel the same way, but I think there must be some cool application, right? RIGHT?
There is, as I said: Database engine focused on data integrity and transparency. My favourite real world example is a database for vehicles to show previous owners while being incredibly simple to look up. Currently if you wanna buy a used car and want to look up previous ownership you need to make an application and wait for at least a week while people stich the data together. That would be a built in feature in a blockchain, zero additional work required. Also plenty of open source front ends to modify and show the data.
But that is only useful if a centralized authority enforces the use of it?
You can do this in about 20min with an actual database.
Blockchains aren’t capable of storing any significant amount of data, so at best you’d still have a normal database and an overengineered verification layer. Even then, you still haven’t solved the actual problem: availability of the data.
The reason it takes a long time to retrieve the information you want is that it’s not already in a searchable database, so someone has to be paid to look it up by hand and create a report for you. If the people with the data were to simply publish a CSV, you’d get everything you need without having to waste time, money, and energy on a blockchain.
I absolutely would not recommend “investing” this this stuff. The domain is ripe with scammers and
I loved the idea of bitcoin as a decentralized currency. However, to this day it has proven it is not a currency because it is used for investing and speculating. People in some countries use USD rather than their local currency because of the unstable nature of their curency. Bitcoin is not stable so the only way it works as a currency is if you buy bitcoin and immediate use as it won’t hold its value.
But the idea seems so wonderful for a solarpunk world. Is there anyway a cryptocurrency could be made that wasn’t investing/scamming/etc?
The biggest issue with crypto as a currency is that there is no real way to revert transactions. That pretty much guarantees it will never be adopted as a currency. And forking the whole thing is not a solution.
There are a ton of other issues as well but those are more solvable.
So, no, with the current tech, I don’t think it’s happening and even if someone comes up with better tech it may be too tainted by scammers and finance bros.
I just answered a similar question to this in another thread, so I’ll copy/paste it here with some more info about “web3” specifically:
TL;DR: It’s just a complicated (and energy intensive!) way of keeping track of things.
Web3, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and any “coin” you hear about on the web uses something called the “blockchain”, which is just a MASSIVE file living on hundreds (thousands?) of computers around the world. This file is like a bank ledger: a record of things that happened. Think of it like a text file:
Bob gave Sarah €1.50
Sarah gave Alex €2.00
...
Now imagine that it’s hundreds of millions of lines long, and every time anyone in the world gives anyone money, that list gets a little bit longer.
“But how do you make sure that people don’t start tinkering with the ledger?” you might say? "I could say “Alex gives me €1000000”. Well the files are kept in sync by this protocol where all participating computers do complex math to prove that they haven’t edited anything. Everyone else does the same math, and so everyone’s results should be the same. If your math is different, you’re ignored. This is why transactions can take as much as a few hours or even days to go through and gobble a shittone of electricity. Awesome.
This is basically where Bitcoin came from.
After that was a thing, a bunch of other nerds got together and built Ethereum (same tech, different computers doing the work, so it’s a different ledger), which uses the same technology. Ethereum however introduced this thing called “smart contracts” though, which are tiny programs that are baked into the chain (ie. they codified into this Great Big File That Everyone Has so they can’t be changed). Smart contracts are simple instructions:
If Bob gives Sarah €1.50, Sarah then owns this: 1234567890
That 1234567890 relates to something in the real world, most famously a URL, which is where you get those NFTs that everyone was crazy about for a few months. Bob can give Sarah $1,000,000 and this would enshrine that Sarah owns https://somwhere.ca/picture-of-cat.jpg and then she can go around and say “I ‘own’ this picture”. Then one day that website takes the picture down and Sarah realises that she paid a million dollars for a record in a text file.
Each transaction on a blockchain (Ethereum, Bitcoin, whatever) costs money, which you pay in that chain’s currency, and that’s where this all starts to make sense. If I can get you to buy my “magic internet money”, then I’m selling you that currency for actual money.
Web3 is another abstraction on top of this, but most of it is nonsense. If you can use a contract to allocate ownership of something to someone, why not bake that into your website? The claim is that you can “take back the web” from centralised giants like Google & Facebook by “putting your data on the blockchain” and then you can choose to change who owns that data rather than these big companies.
It’s a noble idea but tooooootal bullshit. First of all, the web is already open. I host my own website on a Raspberry Pi from my house. The idea that it’s technology centralising the web and not capitalism is laughable.
Secondly, by design, everything on the blockchain is open. You get around this with encryption, but if I grant Facebook the rights to my data, they have it. If I change my mind tomorrow, then they still have it. They won’t get any new data I append to my records, but I’m not “in control”. It’s actually much worse. The web3 nerds want us to store everything on the blockchain: browsing habits, mortgages, medical records, and all it takes is one unpatched update, your laptop gets hacked and now I own your house. Fuck That.
You probably haven’t seen the definitive take-down of blockchain technology yet. It’s long but solidly the best piece of criticism of the tech I’ve seen. Do watch it. It’s far more authoritative than I can ever be.
Full disclosure: I bought into Bitcoin way back when it was cheap 'cause I was fascinated by the techology. Then I learnt how it actually worked, and how it absolutely cannot scale to be anything useful, so I just held onto the coins I had. I cashed out to the tune of about €40k. I absolutely would not recommend “investing” this this stuff. The domain is ripe with scammers and the project has no legs. It’s long past the point of experimentation and is now at the stage of trying to drag more suckers in. Don’t be that sucker.
Everything related to crypto is ultimately a scheme to get you metaphorically invested in crypto, so the line goes up for people who already literally invested in crypto. All the theoretical benefits and non-scam use cases remain purely theoretical. Where it sounds kinda dumb and overcomplicated - that’s because it is.
