Are Web3 and DApps the Future?

Distrubuted virtual machines are the slowest, most expensive compute possible to devise - they wear "trustless" as a virtue but you save gobs of time and money with just an ounce of trust.

I do believe distributed hash tables as used in IPFS and webtorrent are enabling some futuristic anti-censorship tech, and using metamask for identity is pretty cool, but smart contracts are very stupid - just post the source code and let anyone run it, why does the source need to be stores forever on everyone's computer?

There are some really bad incentives with ETH contracts apecifically - the number of instructions your code compiles to determines the gas fees to run the code every time - want to add a type check, range check, write code a little more verbose so its easier to understand ? all of that adds multiple-dollars-per-api-call. That's one reason multi-million dollar hacks are so common. Check out https://rekt.news , they do a good balance between technical and laymen-accessible about how these hacks happen.

No.

Investing in crypto is very similar to learning to win at poker. It's totally possible to make a lot of money in crypto, but there is no positive impact on the world.

Because of this, nobody invests in a certain crypto because they think it will have a positive impact on the world. They only invest to make money. "Successful" Web3 startups will be the ones that focus on making their coin go up instead of focusing on making the world a better place.

Personally, I don't see a reason to invest time/money in something that doesn't help people.

If you want to earn a quick dev buck go for it

Personally I think the entire web3 thing is going to fizzle out before it goes anywhere useful. It’s already fallen off my radar for the most part

I don’t think a mainstream audience will pay for internet content in this way. Nobody is going to pay to post to Twitter, as an example, and if it doesn’t mean you need to pay to create content in this way then you might as well ditch the web3 part entirely

Intrigued if I’m wrong, but heavily doubtful

On HN, the bias is mostly negative towards anything Blockchain related. So it's not a great place for objective advise. There is a remarkable amount of emotions related the the field, here on this website, recognizable by the strong wording and lengthy discussions.

The problem with this field is also that people are pretty much incentivized to be dishonest. You never know if somebody is giving advice based on wanting some part (usually a coin) to increase in value or if they're just tired of all the spam from those same people, or just disappointed in missing out.

My advice to you: try to dig down deep into what has been created and see if that's something you see going somewhere and you see yourself contributing.

I think web3 and blockchain are thinly disguised ponzi schemes with zero potential for solving problems I care about.

If I'm wrong about this, I'll catch up later. I have enough experience in tech now that I'm confident I can become productive in some bizarre future blockchain-infested hell-scape with a few months of dedicated effort if I need to.

I'll have missed out on the chance to become a crypto billionaire the easy way. I'm OK with taking that risk.

In 2018 I had the same question so I started messing around with ETH myself. I concluded after spending a few months with it and while the whole space is interesting and cool, there wasn’t a lot for me to contribute or get excited about personally. That is key. It just has to excite you! If you aren’t excited leave it alone. You will find something else. In 2010 I was a hardware engineer and played around with Android and iOS sdks every night. I was so excited and believed mobile was the future I quit my job and dove head first. I gave myself the chance to do that again with crypto but it never catalyzed. Maybe bc I am 10+ years older. But I feel wisdom gives me an even keener judgement on these sorts of things. I don’t have a family in fact I am now divorced so have even more time to plow into tech. Your job is not to predict the future but find what excites you

Nobody knew what a website was....until they found one that replaced their old way of doing things. Yahoo replaced the phone book. Amazon replaced the mail order catalog. The value in these developments were immediately obvious to most.

Have you found something on Web 3 that supplants how you do things today?

Blockchain has built so much hype driven by investors chasing the next big thing that any move in that direction is highly speculative. It's not that crypto lacks utility, clearly there is some meat there, but the amount of money invested there is based on expectations of the future that are far from a sure thing. Think about the impact of the web from 1995 to 2010. Think about the impact of the smart phone from 2007 to 2022. The revenues and profit margins of Apple, Google, Amazon over the last couple decades have been jaw dropping. Do you think crypto will be on that order of magnitude? Because VCs are willing to throw around huge investments if they think there's a 5% chance that it could be.

Personally I would not do a hard pivot into crypto. If you are interested in it, by all means learn about it and maybe dip your toes on some side projects. But in terms of your career, focus on moving up the value chain rather than chasing fads. A foundation of solid web dev skills will always serve you well, but specific tech know-how has a half-life (which gets shorter the higher you go in the stack), and you don't want to find yourself competing on pure coding prowess once you have >10 years experience. Think about your strengths that can't be replicated just by grinding code, and what you've learned over many years of experience across different environments.

Try to answer a simple question: do we have benefit from append-only files? Are them sustainable means of storage? IMVHO the answer is "very limited to specif domains, like for short-term logs" and "no".

Blockchain is an append-only big file with no real means to drop past content after a certain amount of time. Distributed (really) software have simply too much overload to work properly.

The REAL hi-tech future is from the '70s: desktops, connected via open protocols no one really own, like emails, usenet etc. Local software, local storage. The short-term future will be a continuous push to the classic mainframe model, the cloud is the actual version, is nearly not sustainable anymore so new model to offload costs and jobs appears (take a look at edge/fog computing for instance). That's just a totalitarian surveillance dream dressed as a Trojan horse to be accepted as a good thing but will not last for long.

It's hard to predict the future, but you should not use your developer's intuition to predict the outcome because it is the public sphere making that decision. The public sphere can will something into existence, despite good, bad or seemingly impossible logic to make it so. The US political situation is an example of how dysfunctional the situation can be.

Considering Web3 and DApps are largely marketing efforts, my guess is the marketing dominated portions of the software industry may end up with some variant of the Web3 DApp promises realized in a terminology stretching, primarily profit driven manner. Video games and social media may end up with something, probably just a series of $40 terms forced over what is essentially trading stamps/cards with complicated rules of use. Nobody knows what is going to happen, really, because this stuff is pure mind games territory.

No.

The future of your career is being good at what you do, having social connections, or ideally both.

Trying to jump into a less crowded field is not a long-term career solution, and the blockchain field already has more devs than it needs anyway. It's a gold rush.

The NFT thing seems to be on the way out.

* Google Trends: NFTs down 70% from peak.[1]

* Axie Infinity Smooth Love Potion token: down 95% from peak.[2]

* Use of NFTs by games that people actually play: cancelled.[3]

* NFT resale now illegal in China, sellers punished.[4]

It's hard to tell because of all the wash sales, but it appears that the NFT resale market on OpenSea does not result in profits for flippers.

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=NFT&geo=US

[2] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion

[3] https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/canceled-gaming-nft-202...

[4] https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3168188/ant-gr...

I'd say it's wise and valuable to not stay as a typical anything. Having a greater variety of experience will serve you well.

I personally don't think web3 and dapps are going to have that much impact, although others may disagree.

One observation I would make is that trying to identify "the next big thing" is innately risky. You could be right, or it might crash and burn. Do keep learning, growing and pursuing things that interest you.

No.

Also, bootcamps don’t turn out experienced senior engineers or talented managers. If you’re really good at that, grow your leadership and management skills—those are rarer and more valuable than your ability to hack JavaScript.

There are pockets where salary inflation is concentrating, and web3 maybe one of them. If you're a senior blah blah and want to get paid, it's hard to beat the high margin monopoly companies in FAANG. Once you're in the club it's a lot easier to switch.

Long term is hard to project let alone correctly forecast considering the world upends itself every 10 years or so.

Now, on the metaverse front, which is what what "web3" was about before the NFT crowd came along, it's not clear what happens. What is clear is this:

* Building a good metaverse is very hard technically. You have most of the problems of making an AAA game title, some of the problems of making a web browser, and a set of new problems associated with making a world full of user content. Roblox is working on it, with 90 dev teams and billions of dollars. They're hiring, by the way. Epic is working on it, with a budget of a billion dollars. Linden Lab (Second Life) mostly has it, but their technology took two decades and is dated and sluggish.

* Even after you've done it, is it more than a niche market? So far, no. Except for Roblox, which seems to be able to suck in a sizable fraction of the middle school population.

Ask yourself if the work makes the world a better place even if the company fails. That's my measurement of good work.

No. "web3" is breathless hype. DApps are DOA, gas fees are absurd and from a speculation and gambling perspective DApps are always a money loser relative to just holding tokens and waiting for a pump.

Web3 is centralized, MetaMask talks to Infura which runs on AWS. Its no small task to decentralize a smart contract platform.

Opportunity lies at the edges of technology, maybe in this vein you could dig into wasm instead.

Kinda hard to imagine a huge need for blockchain developers. I mean, practically speaking, what would such developers actually do?

At current, it seems like a lot of folks who like blockchain are trying to find things to do -- seems like there's a surplus of folks who want to do that sort of work, with a shortage of actual projects to be done. Which makes it seem like a weird space to enter if you're concerned about crowding.

I've been around awhile so take this with a grain of salt:

- web1: Anyone can publish and connect to like minded people. Everyone will want a server

- web2: dynamic web pages like GMail are amazing. Smart phones and native apps will be incredibly popular

- web3: Some smart people describe edge cases where it could be useful, but there doesn't seem to be a compelling case to drive adoption like web1 and 2

It's definitely an interesting new paradigm but not one meant to replace everything web2 even if it succeeds. If you want to develop financial apps then there's probably much more value in pivoting to web3 than if you are a dev in a different domain.

The difficulty in making accurate predictions here is based on the fact that we humans tend to think the status quo linearly into the future, which is why many wrong predictions have been made regarding the adaptation of computers or the Internet or other technologies. However, it has been shown that certain unpredictable ideas may be developed based on these technologies, leading to mass adoption of the respective medium.

Long story short: If you don't know which horse will win and you have enough money (time), bet a certain amount on the most promising ones.

Are you in a position where you could wade in, start learning and maybe start a simple side project? If so, why not try something small and see if it makes you feel creative?

No, and when I read “Now I'm hearing more and more about Web3 and decentralized apps” my instinct is to suggest that whatever channels you are hearing this through could use a good spring clean, to clear out all this obvious hype/influencing/advertizing. You don’t need to subject yourself to this nonsense. Here’s a nickel, kid - get yourself a better network.

Web3 is just cash circling the blockdrain.

Crypto isn't the future, it's right now. I haven't had this much fun online since the 90s.

You missed this trend if bootcamps are pumping out grads. Start digging for the next big thing and invest early.

May I ask, a senior full stack web developer with what skills exactly (tech stack & years of experience)?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g

Almost entirely scams, even the "real" use cases are just desperate attempts to find a novel use case and become the next big thing. Vitalik Buterin and Chris Dixon are driven much more by Libertarian ideology than actual technical advancements.

no, "web3" is reputation laundering, pure and simple.

The technology makes sense for some applications, and less so for others.

It’s also highly a dynamic environment, keep that in mind between different Blockchains and DLTs.

Do what you’re passionate about and strive to be the top 1% at it, nothing else will matter.

Yes.

Yes, if nothing else to get your head around how it's done and there are plenty of amazing opportunities in this space.