Solarpunk and web3

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.

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.

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.

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:

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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.

The whole deal of crypto is the high computational cost due to lack of trust.

Solarpunk aims to enrich everyone in such a way that financial trust is not needed for society, especially if its' implementation is so wasteful!

web3isgoinggreat.com/

Yeah this idea of decentralization is kind of a buzzword at the level the bros push it at

Every user having to check your work doesn't offer more security it offers a waste of power so inneficient it'd be like using a Matrioshka Brain as a simple calculator

Kind of a shower thought, and far less important than the pragmatic takedowns others have laid here, but another thing that bugs me.

One of the tells that one is talking to a crypto bro is use of the term fiat currency, almost exclusively, when talking about non-crypto currencies. One rarely (I've never) heard/read them talk about representative currency (backed by actual physical commodities). There are in fact, some important ways in which they all differ, but the one that drives me nuts is their relationship to, well, entropy.

Commodities, by their nature, are low-entropy. Think gold bullion, or even wood. Or salt. Whatever. Being low entropy, they represent potential—or there's something innate about them that make them desirable. So, representative currency represents potential, and also "authenticates" it... makes it real. And representative currencies in turn grant liquidity to commodities.

Fiat currency—e.g. the dollar, the euro—don't have any intrinsic value, so they instead are "made real," and liquid, by the credit of the government backing them and controlling both their supply and how much it costs to borrow them.

And the physical instruments of exchange of both kinds of currency (cash, coins) are fungible and anonymous. Of course transfers that transit the banking system are traceable, but physical exchanges far less so.

Cryptocurrencies, by contrast, are not only intrinsically and indelibly traceable (yes, there are various tumblers and mixers, but mathematically that's just obfuscation). But the real kicker is that it's neither their low entropy / high potential, nor the guarantee of an authority that lends them their authenticity or value. Their value represents effort that has already expended for literally nothing useful other than making a token unforgeable —they're valuable because of their scarcity measured in past entropy increase. They're the representative currency of burning tires.

Like I said, inchoate shower rambling, but there's something about the dependency of crypto upon energy having been converted to waste heat evokes the image of crypt bros selling the opportunity to wrap one's lips around a tailpipe rolling coal, and I find that a useful visualization to keep in mind.

Yes, I know things are a little different in a proof-of-stake system like post-fork ethereum, but it's kind of a technicality.

The data sovereignty argument of crypto is also BS; as other posters have said, one literally loses all control of data added to a chain; there are some cases where this property is desired, but it's not one's chat messages (Matrix), and god no it's not one's medical records. It's not one's consent to have sex.

Indelible, immutable public records aren't sovereignty. They're the forfeiture of optionality, and most value boils down to optionality in the end.

Back in 2021 I wrote a whole article What Web3 is Not that discusses exactly what you're talking about. I'll post the content of the article below for those who dont use Medium.com.

I'm particularly proud of this quote from the article:

If NFTs were equivalent to high-performance F1 engine oil, then most people would be using engine oil for home cooked meals.

Article

Update: 1/18/2022

This is an update of defeat, as I believe the common definition of Web3 no longer refers to The “decentralized internet”. Through incessant social media posts, and nearly constant edits to the Wikipedia page, crypto bros and the ntf hype squad seem to have successfully distorted Web3 to mean an internet of purely financial transactions.

However, replace “web3" with “decentralized internet” below and the article should still be accurate/useful.

Original Article

Over-hype, misunderstanding, scams, and betrayals associated with “Web3” are bad enough to ruin it’s reputation for a generation.

So let's get a few things straight before that happens.

1. The NFT Market is not Web3

If NFTs were equivalent to high-performance F1 engine oil, then most people would be using engine oil for home cooked meals. I'm not saying engine oil is useless, I'm saying your NFT purchase for "art" or whatever relates to Web 3 about as much as cooking with engine oil makes you a participant in F1 racing.

If you want to cook with engine oil (and you fully understand the consequences!) be my guest.

And to show that I’m not just dismissing this topic: imagine having a physical key, but the key doesn’t unlock any locks. It is a key to ✨nothing✨. Now imagine the key is made out of pape — actually paper is too valuable — imagine the key is made of compacted garbage. Ta.Da. you’ve successfully imagined almost* every NTF. Software devs can design locks to fit keys, and we can find these keys quite useful. But you, Mr./Mrs. End-User, should be about as excited for NFT’s as an Amish person.

2. Web3 is not Magical, it’s Foundational

In internet-land we (practically) cannot make roads. Instead, to see our neighbor we catch a train to Facebook/Discord/Microsoft HQ, we give them a blood sample, receive a tracker from them, and then they drive us to our neighbor.

With that hellscape in mind, imagine me at your front door, excitedly showing off a 10 ton asphalt paving machine (with WEB3 on the side).

Voila! Now you can ... just ... pave your own road to your friends house! 😃 \s

Some people (me) are legitimately excited as this tool foundationally changes the balance of power in internet-land.

For obvious reasons, people probably wouldn’t be too excited about receiving a 10 ton paver, since it takes effort, skilled labor, and years of work before anyone benefits.

3. Build it and they-- Wait who is building it?

Did I mention there’s basically no financial incentive for creating community-built roads?

Actually its even worse; self-built roads aggressively threaten mega-corp’s profit margins; corporations that both have all the power in internet-land and every reason to try to destroy, taint, vandalize, and slander community-built roads.

Oh, and I should also clarify; it can be very profitable for scam artists. Which reminds me, did I mention that cons would be totally welcome to build their own roads / labyrinths, and there’s no user-friendly way to distinguish them from legitimate roads?

Well, as I fearlessly sit on my 10 ton paver... yeah I should probably mention those things.

And speaking of funding...

4.1 Maintaining Web3 is not Free

Asphalt pavers run on gas. And if you think gasoline prices are bad, wait till you hear about Ethereum gas prices.

Well, there’s one exception; right now, making a un-changing site, that has a long ugly URL is totally free. But to update a web3 site, you must (as of Dec 2021) pay a hefty gas price to announce to the world “Hello everyone! My website has been updated! (And here’s proof that I’m the owner)”. This high transaction price needs to change (and it is!). The full release of Ethereum 2 should be a major step forward, and might address it entirely.

4.2 Being a user on Web3 is mostly* Free

Right now Google/Facebook/Microsoft often happily pay your storage bill. It’s not a huge bill, but if you want to do everything on Web3, just know that you’re going to need some storage space. You might already have enough space on your device, but maybe you’ll want an extra hard-drive connected to a small always-on computer.

Some costs are more than financial though, which brings me to...

5. Web3 is not Controllable

Web2 is already a public stage, but Web3 is a public stage AND most audience members are individually recording your performance. Once you post data publicly, once it’s been distributed, nobody (and I. mean. nobody.) can reliably force it to be taken down.

No company No government ... But also often not even you can

Many times apathy will be on your side; you can ask all the individuals to delete their recording. But you will be relying on good will.

Even for the bravest of us, this can be a uneasy feeling.

However, the most important thing you need to know about Web3 is…

6. Web3 is not a Theory

Its already here! You can publish your own Web3 site today.

Web3 has two forms; I'll call them federated and mesh.

The mesh form could be considered the "true" Web3. The IPFS (Inter-Planetary File System) is the backbone of the Web3 mesh, and crypto (like Ethereum) are the system’s muscles that allow it to update. The Opera browser and Brave browser have supported IPFS and crypto URLs right out of the box for a while now, even on mobile. FireFox can get IPFS support through the IPFS extension, and crypto support through the Metamask extension. To get your own Web3 URL, and have a website you can update, take a look at Unstoppable Domains, or Ether domains. If you want to see an elegant UI and an impressive precursor to Web3, take a look at ZeroNet.

The federated form of Web3 has several major advantages and major disadvantages. It’s also not separate; it can and will work together with the Web3 mesh. The main difference is the federated system can run entirely on web 2.0 browsers. It is a self-hoster server, but it collaborates with other self-hosted servers to look and feel like a singular website. Take a look at the Fediverse, Lemmy, Mastodon, and Element (formerly Riot) to get an idea of how to join some of these systems. Self hosting servers can be hard, but they are wonderfully capable/flexible systems.

And that’s it! I hope you’re still excited because there is so much potential for a faster, safer, less intrusive internet; we’re just going to need to build it.

Like day-to-day things that make a persons life easier, not harder?

Yes, but without them knowing. Stellar is good to exchange currencies, Circles was good as a basic income and stuff like Handshake.org could decentralize domain name systems, Holochain for a decentralized cloud, something like Filecoin to incentivize piracy... Special mention for Monero even tho it’s a dangerous weapon that allows both good actor and bad actors to be invisible.

I’ve been a bit in the bubble and I can say that most of the stuff, even when led by good principles, it just becomes a form of capitalism because cryptonomics is just capitalism with less technical steps. Stuff like DAOs could be good if the government could acknowledge them but the government could just fucking ease a way to share properties and associations skipping entirely the DAO step lol.

I could write more but sorry I don’t feel like it because here the sentiment is clear.

I’d just ask people to not assume that blockchain = proof of work or blockchain = cryptonomics. A blockchain is just one way to share a database, it can be useful. Could be useful also for fediverse actually, as an identity provider to allow people move instances without losing account but without also referring to a central authority without the need of any cryptocapitalism (basically dns, the use case I already listed with handshake.org).

https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/

As far as i understand web3 (not an expert) it is a bit more nuanced than many comments. A short historie irrc web1 was just websites and hyperlinks so early web. Web2 is where we are mostly jet. High centeralisation, few have power over the whole internet landscape (FANG, etc). It is built around closed systems and users as well as content creators are hostages of these services. Web3 means a new decentralized Web. It is supposed to be more democratic, because everyone can contribute and everyone has the same amount of control. A example for that is the fedivers the place you are in right now. Or I think P2P nets like Briar and I2P belong also in this category. But also crypto. Which don't get me wrong can have valid use cases in a world still relying on currencies. But this idea was hijacked by the hyper capitalistic techbro scene. Which also calls them self "libertarian" and has the slogan "don't tread on me" and "become ungovernable" but has few in common with actual Anarchist thought. And therefore is not compatible with the Anticapitalist as well as the post-hierarchical stand of Solarpunk. An example is the abuse of crypto mining to create money out of thin air while reducing the decentralization aspect. And also NFTs.

tl;dr: in my eyes web3 is Solarpunk but it was like many ideas infested with hyper-capitalist ideology.

I think web3 could be solar punk compared to the current "web2". It allows for the possibility of smaller internets separate from "the internet" which could be just small webpages on raspberry pis. This would be "solar punk" since even me posting this pointless comment on an obscure forum is involving dozens of computers now and many more in the future as it's data mined (modern day problem, ideally it's resolved soon)

Yeah this could be built (and has been many times) using non-block chain tech, but if you wanted to ensure authenticity of any data you'd most likely need a blockchain - which might be nice if the "solar punk" thought experiment ever had to deal with any adversary