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622 points ColinWright | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.208s | source
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pavlov ◴[] No.30079513[source]
> 'Some people use the term "Web 3.0" to refer only to decentralized blockchain-based networks without considering that all personal websites have essentially the same goals, be they on the regular Internet or on the new blockchain networks. Those who use the term "web 3.0" seem to have forgotten that self-hosted personal websites that run on home servers and are accessible over the regular Internet are inherently decentralized. Unfortunately, despite common goals, some on today's old Internet are hostile to blockchain technology. I am not sure why.'

What goals does today's crypto-token-powered "web 3" vision share with the old Internet? It's not enough to say "well it's decentralized" and do a handwave.

Consider the NFT exploration Moxie Marlinspike did recently:

https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

This is essentially a system that lets you buy DRM'd metadata that points to servers owned by a corporation funded by billions of VC dollars, and transactions are recorded on a ledger that spends more power than the entire country of Finland. The only purpose of these activities is to speculate on prices of these make-believe digital assets.

None of these things have anything to with the old Internet: cargo cult DRM, billion-dollar VC funding, enormous energy waste, artificial scarcity where none is needed.

That website on dial-up was slow because of real physical constraints, not artificial constraints erected to make VCs richer at the expense of the planet's ecosystem.

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steelstraw ◴[] No.30079780[source]
Vitalik's response to Moxie is worth a read:

https://np.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/ryk3it/my_first_im...

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1. Animats ◴[] No.30080291[source]
Buterin: "Moxie's critiques in the second half of the post strike me as having a correct criticism of the current state of the ecosystem (where (1), (2), (7) and (8) are the only things that we have working code for), but they are missing where the blockchain ecosystem is going."

Right. In other words, what we have now sucks, but you shouldn't criticize it because we have this proposed scheme which might be better.