dgv devlog

web3 is here

what remains after all hype.

8 minutes to read

tl;dr

I’m aware of current criticism, I’m follower of web3 is going just great from Molly White but also a techno-optimist à la Thoreau (not Andressen’s definition), so even working close to blockchains and using bitcoin since 2014 I always been skeptical until last years events. The idea here is not to convince or promote anything, just summarize some definitions and references about how things are going at this point.

btw, what is web3?

The term “web3” was coined in 2014 by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, is an idea for a new iteration of the World Wide Web which incorporates concepts such as decentralization, blockchain technologies, and token-based economics.

references

hype

Some last decade events:

So, it’s over right? I don’t think so… With all attention going to A.I stuff things start to get interesting for me.

web3-hype

web3 is here to stay

We can’t ignore some things, the bitcoin seminal paper above is from 2009, now the reality is:

So, ponzi scheme or not, meme-shit-coin or not, institutionalization ahead, it’s real and just a part of… Here in Brazil crypto was regulated in 2022 and many financial institutions started to offer exchange services and crypto wallets supporting Bitcoin and Etherium on their apps, more than 4 million people started to use it.

web3>DeFI

DeFI or decentralized finance is the most famous or common use case on web3 followed by NFTs, despite usage of blockchains for supply chains we have bunch of other applications. Forget about ICOs scams, NFTs and expensive ens.domains let’s see some useful dApps examples:

  • Daimo: payments like Paypal
  • Fileverse: file sharing like Dropbox
  • Huddle01: RTC platform like Zoom
  • Warpcast: communitties like Reddit/X
  • Soundxyz: audio streaming like Spotify
  • Status: communication/wallet app like Wechat

We also have another things like Ethereum Attestation Service or the usage of zero-knowledge protocols to prove identity or machine learning models. We also have govs using blockchains…

civil rights

I follow Molly and changed my mind after some events, one of most interesting stories is about Privacy, human rights, and Tornado Cash, great oportunity to understand her points, another interesting episode occurred years earlier in Canada during prostests against COVID-19 vaccination and related restrictions in 2022, btw I personally took my astrazeneca/pfizer shots, the point here is not about vaccination but disproportional acts from state, we saw how censorship and unapropriate debanking works on democracies, or when the Canadian prime minister imposed martial law on the protestors. I’m tired to see here in Brazil justice blocking apps like Telegram, WhatsApp, X, and debanking people. Never forget, privacy is a basic human right, the necessity of crypto in western democracies is clear.

But crypto are helping mafias and banned states, well, drug money saved banks in global crisis in 2008, now even states and their central banks are using blockchain technology, ready for the perfect state distopy of surveillance and censorship. Money is a tool, and a cryptocurrency is just one part or application of web3 ecosystem.

Your revolution was only allowed to happen because it was bought and paid for by people like them…

mrrobot_ecoin

how decentralized and efficient it is?

Moxie (creator of Signal messenger) posted his first web3 impressions in 2022 during NFT hype and criticizes the centralization, but as Vitalik pointed out he was right in many things but missed where the blockchain ecosystem is going…

crypto_pwr

Etherium is using proof-of-stake since 2022 dropping power consumption in 99,84% and improving his decentralization, now all crypto power consumption became a joke with Microsoft reopening a nuclear powerplant for AI (AI vs Bitcoin mining: Which consumes more energy?).

I know, the things still dirty for Bitcoin/Proof-of-work mining, but the point isn’t only about of efficiency or how fast a transaction could be done, but also the values of decentralized systems brings, like resilience over censorship attacks or single points of failure, as pointed on the link above, it will never beat the efficience of centralized solutions (Etherium PoS vs Mastercard), but despite AI thing were most of LLMs models are closed and hungry for the latest available GPUs, on web3 the barriers are lower, the technology is open and we can see even african countries using it to mitigate inflation and trading.

conclusion

I dont like cryptobros, messianic egocentric AI-leaders or quantum-therapists, we all are tired of these bullshit… But in life we basically manage tradeoffs, I cited Moxie earlier, I respect him and love the simplicity and values of Signal, but there is so many contradictions and even running it as 501c3 nonprofit organization they tried to bring MobileCoin…

I know, none of dApps or even federated alternatives (using ActivityPub for example) have the adoption of closed ones (until now), the most interesting thing for me are the enabler technologies of web3, was very interesting the introduction of lightning network on Bitcoin and the transition of Etherium to proof-of-stake and its evolving ecosystem, or explore foundational parts like libp2p also used on IPFS.

In the end of day even if you are not using crypto is important to have compeling alternatives not only for state fiat money, but also for apps we are obliged to use everyday (self-hosted or/and web3 options), ultimaly we are advancing on distributed systems technology, cryptography, censorship resistency, and most of things are open and free.

The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.
– William Gibson