Moxie Marlinspike tries ETH and figures out ETH isn't the foundation of a viable Web 3.0

I published an essay a couple of weeks ago along with @apshamilton about what Web 3.0. The story of the dairy cows.

Last weekend I was on Community Token Talk with @starkerz and @theycallmedan and one of the biggest stories of the week was Moxie Marlinspike's detailed blog post about his experiments with what he thought of as Web 3.0.

Before I get into the detail.... have you supported my new @v4vapp proposal yet?

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My first impressions of web3

Moxie's post, entitled "My first impressions of web3" kicks off with his definition of web3:

web3 is a somewhat ambiguous term, which makes it difficult to rigorously evaluate what the ambitions for web3 should be, but the general thesis seems to be that web1 was decentralized, web2 centralized everything into platforms, and that web3 will decentralize everything again. web3 should give us the richness of web2, but decentralized.

Which is a good place to start. If you read the cows essay, you'll see that I think of Web 3.0 both in architectural terms (decentralised) but also in terms of the economics of the Web. It's not surprising that Moxie comes at it first from the architectural standpoint.

And he's right in as far as it goes. His next statement nails the fundamental reason Web 2.0 came to be. Very few people want to run servers. They want ease and features.

People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will. The premise for web1 was that everyone on the internet would be both a publisher and consumer of content as well as a publisher and consumer of infrastructure.

We’d all have our own web server with our own web site, our own mail server for our own email, our own finger server for our own status messages, our own chargen server for our own character generation. However – and I don’t think this can be emphasized enough – that is not what people want. People do not want to run their own servers.

This is why Facebook, Twitter and Google and all the other centralised services exist. When I think back to my own slide into the dark side, I believe Google Mail was my first cigarette. I had already had and moved on from a University academic email address, moved to one tied to my ISP in the UK. Google offered a "free" and seemingly unlimited storage system that was "mine" and not tied to my ISP. I did at least add my own domain but that was an unusual step.

It wasn't until some years later and fairly recently that I came to realise what I had done and reversed this and moved my email to a server under my own control. This is expensive and entails work to maintain. It is way beyond the skills and desire of most people.

But this is key to Web 3.0 as well. I see it now with some who dream anything more than a tiny minority of people who use the internet will ever run a Bitcoin or Lightning node and be properly self sovereign. Most won't ever even take possession and securely hold their own keys if they dabble in crypto currencies. This is reality. Web 3.0 has to adabt to reality, not the other way around.

Moxie's next point is absolutely on point too.

A protocol moves much more slowly than a platform. After 30+ years, email is still unencrypted; meanwhile WhatsApp went from unencrypted to full e2ee in a year. People are still trying to standardize sharing a video reliably over IRC; meanwhile, Slack lets you create custom reaction emoji based on your face.

This isn’t a funding issue. If something is truly decentralized, it becomes very difficult to change, and often remains stuck in time. That is a problem for technology, because the rest of the ecosystem is moving very quickly, and if you don’t keep up you will fail. There are entire parallel industries focused on defining and improving methodologies like Agile to try to figure out how to organize enormous groups of people so that they can move as quickly as possible because it is so critical.

When the technology itself is more conducive to stasis than movement, that’s a problem. A sure recipe for success has been to take a 90’s protocol that was stuck in time, centralize it, and iterate quickly.

Hive isn't a blogging platform, it is a new Internet Protocol

WordPress is blogging software, standing behind it and propping up its maintenance is a well funded and successful company Wordpress.com. WordPress is not the blogging protocol of the internet. Substack and Medium also provide blogging services but are closed and centralised.

The internet has a kind of open blogging protocol, which WordPress does include to some extent, it is the RSS feed. Podcasting is built on this and, for a variety of reasons, wasn't captured by Web 2.0. But exactly as Moxie points out "If something is truly decentralized, it becomes very difficult to change, and often remains stuck in time". This happened to RSS and Podcasting and it wasn't until Adam Curry and Dave Jones started up @podcastindexorg just over a year ago that almost anything moved in this area for over a decade!

And it wasn't all about the money (diddy dum dum diddy dum dum). In the last few years huge money flowed into podcasting but it went on marketing, content and closed, centralised Web 2.0 developments at the likes of Spotify and Apple. Nobody spent a dime on open source tools.

Compared to a core internet technology like RSS, Hive has huge active development and agility and this flows from tokenomics and governance.

Tokenomics and Governance

Hive has an internal and self sustaining economy. It also has fully self contained ways to make decisions relatively quickly. These two things are priceless when combined. We aren't as well funded as a Billionaire's pet project or a VC tech play, but we have funds. We can't be as decisive or authoritarian as Zuckerberg, but we do agree to change things that need change. And under alien attack we can move swiftly and decisively.

We are protected against most attacks, and motivated to remain independent.
This is also priceless and with the broad distribution of our governance token, hard to subvert.

Hive the Protocol

If you just read blog posts, or like and comment on Hive it largely resembles Facebook or a WordPress site. You don't need to know or care why it's so different behind the scenes. The sign up and key handling is a little more involved but many manage this.

But when you understand that @splintelands or @threespeak or any of the numerous blogging engines use the same account data, you start to understand that a Hive account is more than it appears to be. And it has real value.

Hive is an:

• Immutable Database;
• Distributed API database access;
• Account management and ownership system;
• Communications protocol;
• Value transfer protocol;
• Value storage system;
• Reward mechanism;
• Proposal funding system;
• NFT minting and ownership;
• Gaming platform.

And more uses I can't imagine or people haven't built yet! The point is not that Hive is the best at all of these, but it is competitive and unique because of its distributed and diffuse ownership.

Hive has strengths and weaknesses and, when designing a new system, building it around Hive involves a major shift in how you think. Hive is not useful for everything and not every aspect of Hive is needed by any given use case.

But when you hit upon some aspect of Hive, like 3 second blocks and global permissionless transactions with no cost per transaction, you find Hive doing something like @podping which no other system in the world can do as well.

Dapp Building

Moxie's main post discusses Defi and NFT related dapps on Ethereum. Perhaps this is because these are pretty much the main areas of work that anyone does on Ethereum because doing anything on that chain requires so much in gas fees, there has to be a large financial component to it! This is itself is a failure in what permissionless distributed systems can be used for caused by the inefficiencies of proof of work for anything except securing the chain.

That's not to say we have solved the chain security problem on Hive, but we've gone further than any other system.

Moxie might not have looked at Hive yet. But one day I believe this little corner of the free web will receive a lot more attention.

And if you've made it this far, please click on one of the links below and fund my proposal to continue integrating Hive with the Lightning network and Value 4 Value in Podcasting.

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Support Proposal 201 on PeakD
Support Proposal 201 with Hivesigner
Support Proposal 201 on Ecency

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