Hey everyone, welcome back to My Weird Prompts. It is February twenty-fifth, twenty twenty-six, and I am your host, Corn. I am sitting here in the studio across from my brother, the man who has more browser tabs open than most people have files on their hard drives. We are ready to dive into some serious digital architecture today.
Herman Poppleberry, at your service. And Corn, you are not wrong about the tabs. Half of them are block explorers and the other half are documentation for protocols that probably won't exist in six months. But that is the joy of the plumbing of the internet. It is one of my favorite places to be because it is where the future is actually being built, brick by digital brick.
It really is. Today's prompt comes from Daniel, and it is a doozy. Daniel has been looking at the landscape of the modern web and feeling a bit of a disconnect. He writes: I would like to discuss Web three point zero and what it actually means in practice. While there are distributed systems like I P F S and Pinata, and companies like Cloudflare are offering Web three functionality, the majority of the internet still relies on standard frameworks like Google Cloud, A W S, and Azure. This makes Web three point zero feel like an idea that has not quite been realized yet. What does Web three point zero actually mean today, and how is it being implemented in practice in twenty twenty-six?
That is the ultimate "reality check" question. It is a great prompt because the term Web three point zero has been through the ultimate hype cycle. We had the massive explosion of interest around twenty twenty-one and twenty twenty-two, which was mostly fueled by speculative mania and monkey pictures. Then we had a bit of a cooling off, a "crypto winter" as they called it, and now, here in early twenty twenty-six, we are seeing what actually stuck. Daniel is right to point out that Cloudflare is a great bellwether here. They are essentially the front door for a huge chunk of the internet, so when they start offering gateways to distributed systems, you know something is shifting, even if the shift is slower and more subtle than the evangelists promised.
Right, and I think we should start by defining the baseline for Daniel and for everyone listening. When we talk about Web three point zero in a technical sense, moving past the cryptocurrency noise and the financial speculation, what are the actual structural differences compared to the web we have used for the last twenty years? What is the "weird" part of this architecture?
The fundamental shift, the one that changes everything else, is moving from location-based addressing to content-based addressing. This sounds like a minor technical detail, but it is the difference between a centralized library and a global knowledge commons. In the traditional web, which we often call Web two point zero, you use a Uniform Resource Locator, or U R L. That address tells your browser exactly where to go find a file. It is like saying, "Go to the building at one two three Main Street, go to the third floor, look in the blue cabinet, and get the folder labeled document." If that building burns down, or the owner decides to lock the door, or the city changes the street names, you can no longer get that document. It does not matter if a thousand other people have a perfect copy of it in their own homes; your link is broken because the location is gone.
That is the first analogy, and it is a good one. It highlights the fragility of the current system. We have all experienced "link rot." You click a bookmark from three years ago and it is just a four zero four error because the company changed their C M S or went out of business.
Web three point zero, specifically through protocols like the InterPlanetary File System, or I P F S, uses content-addressing. Instead of asking for a location, you ask for the content itself using a unique cryptographic hash. Think of this hash as a digital fingerprint. Every single file has a unique fingerprint based on its data. It is like saying, "I want the document that has this specific fingerprint." It does not matter who gives it to you. If your neighbor has a copy on their laptop, you can get it from them. If a server in Japan has it, you can get it from there. The network finds the nearest node that has that specific content and delivers it to you. This creates a distributed, peer-to-peer network where the data is not tied to a single physical location or a single corporate owner.
So, that sounds amazing in theory. It is redundant, it is censorship-resistant, and it is potentially more efficient because you can pull data from the closest source rather than a server halfway across the world. But Daniel’s point is the "A W S" factor. If I am a developer today, why would I choose to deal with the complexity of I P F S and cryptographic hashes when I can just spin up an S three bucket on Amazon in five minutes and have it work perfectly?
That is the multi-billion dollar question, Corn. The reality is that for most standard applications—your cat photo sharing apps, your corporate dashboards, your basic e-commerce sites—the centralized cloud is still the path of least resistance. It is fast, it has incredible developer tools, and it is what everyone knows. But we are seeing Web three point zero find its footing in specific areas where the centralized model fails or becomes too risky. For example, think about data permanence. If you are building a repository of historical records, scientific data, or even legal documents, you want to make sure those files exist long after your specific startup or university department runs out of funding. In the A W S model, the moment you stop paying the monthly bill, your data is deleted. In the Web three model, the data can live on as long as anyone in the world thinks it is worth keeping.
That brings us to Pinata, which Daniel mentioned in his prompt. Can you explain the role of a service like Pinata in this ecosystem? Because if the whole point is decentralization, having a company like Pinata involved feels a bit like we are just moving back toward a centralized model with extra steps.
You have hit on the central tension of the current era. I P F S is a protocol, but it is not a magic storage cloud that exists for free in the ether. If you put a file on I P F S and then you turn off your computer, and no one else has "pinned" that file to their own node, that file disappears from the network. It is not automatically replicated everywhere forever just because it is on I P F S. This is where "pinning services" like Pinata come in. They are essentially companies that run massive, high-availability I P F S nodes and promise to keep your files online for a fee. They "pin" the data so it stays accessible to the rest of the network twenty-four seven.
So, they are the bridge. They give you the benefits of the I P F S addressing system—the cryptographic verifiability—but with the reliability of a paid service.
Precisely. And this is why it feels like an idea that has not been fully realized, as Daniel said. We are in this hybrid phase. Many people call it Web two point five. You are using Web three protocols, but you are still relying on centralized infrastructure providers to keep the lights on. It is a pragmatic compromise. You get the cryptographic verifiability of the content, which is huge for things like digital identity or verifiable credentials, but you do not have to worry about your files vanishing because your home internet went out or your local hard drive failed.
I want to go back to Cloudflare for a second. Daniel mentioned they have Web three functionality. From what I have seen, they offer things like Ethereum gateways and I P F S gateways. Why would a massive centralized company like Cloudflare, which basically runs the "old" internet, want to help people use decentralized protocols?
It is about being the indispensable middleman, Corn. Cloudflare’s business model is making the internet faster and more secure. If a significant portion of the web's content starts moving to I P F S, Cloudflare wants to be the way people access it. Most people are not going to run a local I P F S node on their phone or in their browser. It is too heavy, it drains the battery, and it is complicated. They are going to type a regular U R L into Chrome or Safari. Cloudflare provides a gateway where they take that regular web request and "translate" it into an I P F S request on the backend. They are essentially providing a high-performance window into the decentralized web. It is a very smart move because it lowers the barrier to entry for users while keeping Cloudflare at the center of the traffic flow.
It feels like a paradox, though. We are using a massive centralized gatekeeper to access a decentralized network. Does that not defeat the purpose of censorship resistance? If Cloudflare decides to block an I P F S hash at their gateway, then for the average user, that content is effectively gone.
You are absolutely right. It is a major point of contention in the community. If we rely on centralized gateways, we have just rebuilt the old system with a different set of protocols. However, the difference is that the content still exists on the underlying network. If Cloudflare blocks it, you can still go to another gateway, or run your own node, or use a browser like Brave that has native I P F S support. In the old web, if Amazon deletes your S three bucket, that data is gone for everyone unless you have a separate backup. In the Web three model, the data lives on the network, and the gateways are just different ways to see it. It is the difference between a locked door and a foggy window. You can still get to the data; you just might need a different tool.
Okay, so we have the architecture. But let's look at the "standard frameworks" Daniel mentioned. Amazon Web Services, Azure, Google Cloud. These companies are not just sitting still while this happens. They are integrating these concepts too, right? We have talked about the "hidden hierarchy" of the cloud before.
They are, but in a very corporate, "enterprise-ready" way. We talked about this a bit in episode seven hundred ninety-seven when we looked at the hidden hierarchy of the cloud. These big providers are starting to offer managed blockchain services and distributed ledger technologies. But their focus is usually on private or "permissioned" networks. Think supply chain tracking for a global retailer or inter-bank settlements. They are not really interested in the "open web" version of decentralization where anyone can join the network. They want to sell you a decentralized database that they still control the billing for. It is "Decentralization as a Service," which is almost an oxymoron.
Which makes sense for their business model. But it does leave this gap between the vision of a truly peer-to-peer web and the reality of where most of our data actually sits. I am curious about the performance aspect. If I am building an app today, is an I P F S-backed site going to be as fast as a site hosted on a traditional Content Delivery Network like A W S CloudFront?
Generally, no. Not yet. Fetching content from a decentralized network involves a lot of "find the peer who has this" overhead. There is a lookup process in what is called a Distributed Hash Table, or D H T, that can add latency. If you use a pinning service and a gateway, you can get close to traditional speeds because the gateway is essentially acting as a cache. But if you are doing a pure peer-to-peer fetch, it is often slower. This is why you do not see many high-performance web applications running entirely on Web three infrastructure. Usually, it is a hybrid. The static assets—the images, the videos, the permanent documents—might live on I P F S, while the dynamic application logic still runs on a standard server.
That sounds like a reasonable middle ground. But what about the cost? We have seen how expensive it can be to store large amounts of data on-chain in something like Ethereum. Does that apply to I P F S as well?
I P F S itself is just a protocol, so there is no "on-chain" cost for the data. But as we said, you have to pay someone to keep the data available. This is where things like Filecoin come in. Filecoin is a decentralized storage market built on top of I P F S. It allows people with spare hard drive space to rent it out. Instead of paying Amazon a fixed monthly fee, you enter into a "storage deal" on an open market. In theory, this should lead to lower prices because it is a competitive market, but in practice, the complexity of managing these deals still makes it more expensive for most small-scale users than just using a cheap S three-compatible provider. However, for massive datasets—petabytes of data—Filecoin can actually be significantly cheaper than the big three cloud providers.
I remember we touched on this in episode six hundred thirty-six when we were talking about the quest for ultimate redundancy. The idea was that if you really want your data to survive a global catastrophe, you need it in more than just one cloud provider's data centers.
And that is where the real value proposition is today. It is not about replacing A W S for your cat photo sharing app. It is about "sovereign data." We discussed this in episode seven hundred ninety-six regarding digital borders and data sovereignty. If you are a journalist in a country with heavy censorship, or a developer building a tool that might be de-platformed by a major tech giant, Web three point zero is not just a cool idea—it is a necessity. It gives you a way to publish and share information that does not have a "delete" button controlled by a single corporation.
But let's be real, Herman. Most people are not journalists in high-risk areas. Most people are just scrolling through social media or shopping online. Does Web three point zero have anything to offer the average person in twenty twenty-six? Or is it still just a niche tool for the "paranoid and the pioneers"?
It is starting to show up in the form of "identity." This is actually where I think the most successful implementation of Web three point zero tech is happening right now: decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials. Right now, your online identity is owned by Google, Facebook, or Apple. When you "Sign in with Google," you are asking permission from a giant corporation to prove who you are. Web three point zero offers a way to have a "portable" identity that you own. You have a digital wallet that contains cryptographically signed proofs of your identity—like your age, your university degree, or your membership in a club. You can present these proofs to websites without needing a central middleman to vouch for you.
That sounds like a huge win for privacy. But it also sounds like a lot of responsibility for the user. If I lose the private key to my identity wallet, I am in big trouble. I can't just click "forgot password" and get an email from Mark Zuckerberg.
That is the second analogy for the day. It is like being your own bank. In a community garden, you are responsible for your own plot. If you forget to water it, your plants die. In a supermarket, you just show up and buy what you need, but you have no control over what they stock or how they treat the farmers. Web three point zero is the community garden of the internet. It gives you incredible power and independence, but it requires a level of technical literacy and personal responsibility that many people find daunting. This is why we are seeing the rise of "account abstraction" and "social recovery" wallets, which try to make this easier for normal people.
And that is probably why the "Pied Piper" reality we talked about in episode six hundred eighty-three hasn't quite arrived. Building a truly distributed web is hard. It is not just a technical challenge; it is a user experience challenge.
It really is. And to Daniel's point about the standard frameworks, the big cloud providers are very good at user experience. They make it easy. A W S has a million different services that all talk to each other seamlessly. If you want to build a Web three app, you are often stitching together five different protocols and three different pinning services, and then you have to figure out how to handle the latency. It is a much higher mountain to climb. But we are seeing new frameworks emerge. Have you heard of Farcaster or Lens Protocol?
I have heard the names, but I haven't really spent much time in those ecosystems. Are they the "Web three social media" everyone was talking about?
And they are actually working. Farcaster, in particular, has seen a lot of growth in the last year. The interesting thing is that it feels like Twitter or X, but the underlying data is decentralized. If the main app you use to access Farcaster decides to ban you, you can just take your entire history, your followers, and your identity to a different app. You own the relationship with your audience. That is a fundamental shift from Web two point zero, where the platform owns the relationship and you are just a guest.
That is a powerful concept. It moves the power from the platform to the protocol. But let's talk about the physical side of this. Daniel mentioned I P F S and Pinata, but there is also this whole world of "De P I N" or Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks. We touched on this briefly, but I think it is worth expanding on because it is a huge part of the twenty twenty-six landscape.
Oh, De P I N is fascinating. This is where Web three point zero moves out of the browser and into the physical world. Think about the Helium network. Instead of a big telecom company building cell towers everywhere, individual people buy small hotspots and put them in their windows. They provide wireless coverage for the Internet of Things, and in return, they earn tokens. It is a crowdsourced infrastructure. We are seeing the same thing with Hivemapper, where people put dashcams in their cars to create a decentralized map that competes with Google Maps.
So, instead of one company owning the data and the infrastructure, it is owned by the people who provide the service. That feels like the most "realized" version of the Web three dream.
It is, because it has a clear economic incentive. People aren't doing it just because they like decentralization; they are doing it because they can earn a return on their hardware. And for the users of the data, it can be much cheaper. If you are a developer who needs map data, buying it from a decentralized network like Hivemapper can be a fraction of the cost of the Google Maps A P I. This is where the "standard frameworks" like A W S start to face real competition—not in hosting websites, but in providing the underlying data and compute resources.
I also want to touch on the "automation" aspect of this. Daniel works in A I and automation, and I can see how these two worlds might collide. If we have A I agents running autonomously on the web, they are going to need a way to store data and prove their identity without necessarily having a bank account or a Google login.
That is a brilliant point, Corn. Decentralized infrastructure is actually much better suited for autonomous agents than centralized infrastructure. An A I agent can have its own wallet, it can pay for its own storage on Filecoin or Arweave, and it can sign its own transactions. It doesn't need to "agree to the terms of service" of a major corporation. We are seeing the rise of decentralized compute networks like Render or Akash, where A I models can be trained and run on a distributed network of G P Us. This prevents a "compute monopoly" where only the biggest companies can afford to run the most powerful A I.
So, in a way, the "dream" of Web three point zero is actually being realized, just not in the way people expected. It isn't a new version of Facebook for your grandma; it's a new way for machines and sovereign individuals to interact with the digital world.
It's the infrastructure for the "machine economy." If you look at it through the lens of a consumer wanting a better version of Instagram, you're going to be disappointed. But if you look at it as a developer wanting to build a system that is truly independent of any single point of failure, it's the most exciting time to be in tech. The tools are finally getting to a point where they are usable, even if they still have a learning curve.
This really connects back to what we discussed in episode seven hundred seventy about Rclone. For those who don't know, Rclone is a command-line tool that lets you sync files between different cloud providers. One of the things it supports is mounting these distributed systems like I P F S or Arweave as if they were just regular folders on your computer.
Yes! That is a great practical takeaway for Daniel. If you want to experiment with this without becoming a "Web three developer," you can just use Rclone to back up some of your important files to an I P F S gateway or an Arweave node. It makes the technology feel much more tangible. It's not this abstract thing in a "crypto wallet"—it's just another place to put your data that has different properties than Google Drive. It is about adding layers of resilience to your own digital life.
I think that is the key. Demystifying it. It is not magic; it is just a different way of organizing information. Instead of a giant central library, it's a neighborhood book swap. Both have their place. The library is great for finding things quickly and having a standard experience, but the book swap is what survives when the library closes its doors.
And I think we should address the "misconception" that Web three point zero is just about money. Because of the cryptocurrency association, people think if they aren't trading tokens, they aren't "doing Web three." But the most interesting parts of this are the protocols. The tokens are just the incentive mechanism to keep the network running without a central owner. You can use the protocols without ever caring about the price of a specific coin. For example, the Ethereum Name Service, or E N S, is basically a decentralized version of D N S. It lets you have a human-readable name like "herman dot eth" that points to your wallet or your website. It is a utility, not a speculative asset.
That is an important distinction. The "financialization" of the web was just the first use case because it was the easiest to implement. But the "architectural" changes are what will actually last. I am curious, Herman, where do you see the "big three" cloud providers in five years? Will they have fully absorbed these protocols, or will they be sidelined?
I think they will continue to dominate the "high-performance" layer. If you need to run a massive, real-time database for a global bank, you're going to stay on Azure or A W S. But I think they will be forced to become more interoperable. We are already seeing "cross-cloud" and "multi-cloud" strategies becoming the norm. The decentralized web provides a sort of "neutral ground" where data can live independently of any one provider. I think the cloud giants will eventually just become the most efficient "gateways" to this decentralized layer. They will sell you the convenience, but you will have the option to move your data elsewhere if you need to.
It is interesting to see how companies like Cloudflare are positioning themselves as that "translation layer." It suggests that the future isn't one or the other, but a permanent state of "Web two point five."
I think that is exactly right. Even the most hardcore Web three projects often use A W S for their front-end hosting or their indexing services because they need the performance. There is no shame in that. The goal is to move the "source of truth" to the decentralized network, even if the "delivery mechanism" is still centralized for speed. If the underlying data is a cryptographic hash on I P F S, it doesn't matter if you downloaded it from an Amazon server—you can still verify that it hasn't been tampered with. That is a massive upgrade over the current web where you just have to trust that the server is giving you the right file.
Let's talk about the practical side for a developer or a small business. If someone is listening to this and thinking, "I want to start using some of this tech," where should they actually look? Daniel mentioned I P F S and Pinata. Are those still the gold standard?
They are definitely the most accessible. If you want to host a static website in a way that is highly redundant and hard to take down, putting it on I P F S via Pinata and then pointing a decentralized domain name like an E N S name at it is a great project. It teaches you a lot about how the underlying protocols work. Another area to look at is Arweave. While I P F S is about content-addressing, Arweave is focused specifically on "permanent" storage. They have a unique economic model where you pay a one-time fee to store data for "two hundred years." It is a different approach to the same problem of data longevity.
Two hundred years? That is a bold claim for a technology that is only a few years old. How can they possibly guarantee that?
It is based on an endowment model. A portion of your fee goes into a pool that earns interest, which is then used to pay miners to keep the data alive. The math is fascinating, though obviously, it relies on the network staying active and the price of storage continuing to drop over time. But again, it is a tool in the toolbox. If you have a legal contract, a piece of art, or a historical record that you want to ensure exists long-term, Arweave is a very interesting option. It is the "digital archive" to I P F S's "digital file system."
I also want to mention the "Zero-Knowledge" aspect, or Z K proofs. We haven't talked about that much, but it feels like a big part of the "privacy" promise of Web three point zero.
Oh, Z K proofs are the "magic" of twenty twenty-six. They allow you to prove that something is true without revealing the underlying data. For example, you could prove you are over twenty-one years old without showing your birth date or your name. Or you could prove you have enough money in your bank account for a loan without showing your entire transaction history. This is the "privacy layer" that Web two point zero never had. In the old web, to prove something, you had to give away all your data. In Web three, you just give away the proof.
That feels like the missing piece of the puzzle. If we can have decentralized storage, decentralized identity, and decentralized privacy, then we really do have a new version of the internet. It just looks a lot more like a complex ecosystem of protocols than a single "website" you go to.
It's a shift from "platforms" to "protocols." And that is why it feels so messy right now. We are used to platforms like Facebook or Google where everything is integrated and "just works." Protocols are like Lego bricks. You have to build the thing yourself, or wait for someone else to build a good interface for you. We are in the "building the interfaces" phase.
So, to answer Daniel's question: Web three point zero is not a failure because it hasn't replaced A W S. It is a success because it has created a parallel infrastructure that provides things A W S never could—permanence, sovereignty, and cryptographic truth.
I couldn't have said it better myself. It is maturing. We are moving past the "this will replace everything" phase and into the "this is a specialized tool for specific problems" phase. I see it as a new layer of the internet stack, not a replacement for the whole thing. We will still have centralized clouds for high-speed computing and massive databases. But we will have a decentralized layer for permanent storage, verifiable identity, and censorship-resistant communication. It is about adding resilience to the system.
It is a more robust, if slightly more complicated, world. And honestly, I think that is a good thing. The more options we have for how we store and share our data, the better off we are.
I agree. And we are seeing that in the way regulations are evolving too. We talked about data sovereignty in episode seven hundred ninety-six. Governments are starting to realize that having all their citizens' data stored in a handful of data centers in Northern Virginia is a massive national security risk. They are starting to look at decentralized storage as a way to comply with local data laws while still benefiting from the global nature of the cloud. It is a very weird intersection of high-level policy and low-level networking.
It feels like we are in the "early broadband" era of Web three point zero. We have the technology, we have some early adopters, but we are still waiting for that one thing that makes it indispensable for the average person. Or maybe, as you said, it just slowly seeps into everything until we don't even notice it's there.
I think the latter is more likely. In ten years, we won't even call it Web three. We will just have a web that is more resilient, where our identities are portable, and where our links don't break as often. It will just be the way the internet works. The "weirdness" will have become the standard.
I like that vision. It is less about a revolution and more about an evolution toward a more robust system. Well, Herman, this has been a fascinating deep dive. I think we have covered a lot of ground, from the philosophy of content-addressing to the practical realities of pinning services and the ongoing dominance of the major cloud providers.
It is a complex topic, but I hope we have made it a bit clearer for Daniel and everyone else. The "weirdness" of these prompts is always a great excuse to look at the world from a different angle. And honestly, looking at the plumbing of the internet is the only way to understand where we are actually going.
And if you are listening to this and you have your own thoughts on Web three point zero—maybe you are building something on I P F S or you have a different perspective on the cloud giants—we would love to hear from you. You can reach us at show at myweirdprompts dot com.
And if you are finding these deep dives useful, or if you just like listening to two brothers nerd out about technology, please consider leaving us a review on your podcast app. Whether it is Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you are listening, those reviews really do help new people find the show. It is the best way to support what we do here.
They really do. And remember, you can find our entire archive of over eight hundred episodes, including the ones we referenced today like episode six hundred thirty-six on redundancy and episode seven hundred ninety-seven on the cloud hierarchy, over at myweirdprompts dot com. There is a search bar there, so you can find exactly what you are looking for.
Our music for the show is generated with Suno, which is another great example of how A I is changing the creative landscape, something we explore quite a bit here. It is all part of this new, weird digital world we are living in.
It sure is. Well, Herman, I think that is a wrap for today. Thanks for the expertise as always, Herman Poppleberry.
My pleasure, Corn. Until next time, everyone. Keep exploring the weird corners of the web.
Thanks for listening to My Weird Prompts. We will see you in the next one. Goodbye!
Goodbye!
