3 ms·

> People keep saying it's the future but I can't really figure out how regular banking, accounting, or general software applications can't do the same basic tas

> People keep saying it's the future but I can't really figure out how regular banking, accounting, or general software applications can't do the same basic task as one on the blockchain - but quicker and at a lower cost. There isn't. I think a lot of people falsely think that Web3 is going to consume Web2 and everything will go on the blockchain and be decentralized. It just won't... we will still have centralized products, much like we still have "read-only websites" but, we are going to see a large increase in decentralization. I feel that we are the "early 1990's internet" stage of decentralization. There were (apparently) article after article, denouncing the internet as a fad, that it will be dead any day, just for <x>, just for <y>, "The internet is tearing apart the fabric of society"... Decentralization, in my opinion, is an inevitability. If the human race becomes multi-planetary and space-faring, we will need to be able to run independent nodes of services while keeping individual nodes honest and accurate. Do I believe BTC or ETH will be the winner? Probably not. But the huge explosion in decentralized tech and allowing technical individuals to sharpen their sticks for it will definitely lead the way for a better, healthier world. I believe the same for Hyperloop; it might fail but ultimately we will win because we have excited a huge number of people about high-speed travel along with having knowledge about what worked. And the multi-planetary argument is just one argument. We are on the cusp of a huge upheaval in government and society imo. We are at all-time peak of distrust among individuals, corporations and the gov't. The only way forward is going to be trust-less systems where everyone can inspect why and how things are working. I don't think that 2031 will look anything like 2021, just like 2011 didn't look like 2001.

Ekaros 5y ago
I really wonder about this decentralization. If you really think of it all of the big players are already decentralized. The whole cloud is about decentralization. Hot swapping to new location when some datacenter goes down... Routing your traffic to nearest one to save fractions of cents on data transfer. I see no reason why this wouldn't work with multi-planetary system too? The whole blockchain just seems so inefficient way of doing it. And with NFTs we aren't even putting data itself on the chain. Shouldn't whole point is that the data is there and will live forever on the chain, just latest node telling who owns it is updated as needed?
- nightski 5y ago
  I feel what you are describing is redundancy, not decentralization. Decentralization is inherently inefficient imho.
jimkleiber 5y ago
> We are at all-time peak of distrust among individuals, corporations and the gov't. The only way forward is going to be trust-less systems where everyone can inspect why and how things are working. I agree there's a lot of distrust in society but maybe not all-time peak because to interact with so many moving parts in our complex environment today, I think we may be trusting of more things. But perhaps that's for another conversation. The main thing I'm curious about is your statement that the only way forward is thru trust-less systems. I personally believe we could also try to increase trust in other people and institutions. Why do you think the only way forward is thru trust-less systems?
- madamelic 5y ago
  > Why do you think the only way forward is thru trust-less systems? <hand-wave-y weirdo ranting about social trust> I don't think we _can_ restore trust as you suggested. I think that social media and the "modern internet" has broken humans. Humans, in my opinion, are incompatible with trust outside of a very small circle of people. So, we need to move to a system where no one trusts anyone or anything, data is either strictly controlled by an individual person (the biological person, not a corporation or any other legal funny business) or is freely open for everyone to see. I think that Fake News is largely only able to propagate because there has been a failure in trust. It's not (entirely) an educational problem, it's a problem that the system is opaque, the participants are opaque and the distributed trust the world was built on no longer works because we are no longer dealing with a disconnected population that only build strong forms of trust within themselves across generations. We are still working on the assumption of trust or using biological signals to determine trustworthiness of a person or fact. That's _really_ bad when people don't know what or who to trust because society assumed implicit trust would work. We have to move past a web of webs trust-wise where each web has only a few edges to other webs ("I trust this individual to speak for me") and move to a single web of each node (person) having to reach consensus with other nodes using transparent, consensus-reached facts. I think we _could_ do make our gov't and officials completely transparent but that still relies on trust & honesty to report what's happening without bias (which, imo, isn't possible for humans). </hand-wave-y weirdo ranting about social trust> > Why do you think the only way forward is thru trust-less systems? Trust is easily broken or exploited. We are better off if each node, either biological or not, determines from provable and transparent facts ("this was agreed upon by 51%+ of trusted nodes") rather than being expected to implicitly trust opaque facts ("trust us... the money is definitely there. ;)")
bryans 5y ago
> Decentralization, in my opinion, is an inevitability. If the human race becomes multi-planetary and space-faring, we will need to be able to run independent nodes of services while keeping individual nodes honest and accurate. I think this is the most overlooked aspect of decentralization efforts. The conversation we've been having since the dawn of BTC quickly devolved into applying the legitimate criticisms of BTC specifically, to the concept of decentralization as a whole, instead of accepting that it was an experiment which proved "good enough" to scale without too much friction or technical failure. The concept has already evolved substantially in the past decade, and these experiments will continue to inform how we handle decentralization when it finally becomes critical to societal function, which is inevitable for the reasons you mentioned and more.
acdha 5y ago
> I feel that we are the "early 1990's internet" stage of decentralization. There were (apparently) article after article, denouncing the internet as a fad, that it will be dead any day, just for <x>, just for <y>, "The internet is tearing apart the fabric of society"... It's true that those articles existed but I think there were two key differences: they were written by [generally] old people who weren't at all conversant with the technology and were recognized as such by many people at the time. It was widely recognized that the dotcom stocks were overheated and some of the companies had no chance but at the same time most people were buying PCs and internet connectivity because there were tons of things they _did_ want to do. That situation is generally reversed today: the people who understand technology are highly skeptical and the people most bullish about cryptocurrency do not show much sign of understanding either the technology or the markets where they're looking for buyers. The strongest parallel I see now are the cryptocurrency bulls sound exactly like this sales guy I knew 1999-2000 who was convinced that the primary reason to buy a stock was how much the share price was increasing. Sadly, he neglected to cash out before the crash and ended up substantially in the red. Regarding decentralization, I think it's important to consider how the internet has become less decentralized over time. The situation in the 90s was far more distributed but the centralized solutions have won out in many spaces, and it's not just well-funded rent-seekers but also factors like cost, reliability, support, and often even performance. I'm philosophically inclined towards open standards and distributed protocols but I have to say the experience has generally not lived up to the dream.
- gonehome 5y ago
  The incentive structures enabled by web3 (in addition to distributed state) can solve the issues that led to the failure of the decentralized web. At least I see a path for this to be true.
  - acdha 5y ago
    Can you explain in more detail? It won’t help with the technical issues I mentioned, spam is still a big challenge, and blockchains add new failure modes related to the inherent performance and reliability limits. There is an interesting argument about micro-transactions. The practical challenge there is getting the price to be enough below the cost of credit card transactions to spur adoption, especially since the processors have plenty of margin to cut since their overhead is so much lower. The bigger problem is one of market: beyond the questions about restricting sites to people affluent enough to pay for those micro transactions, it’s unclear how many people will actually pay as much as advertisers for most sites. This has been tried a number of times over the years but there have been relatively few successes.

Ekaros 5y ago

I really wonder about this decentralization. If you really think of it all of the big players are already decentralized. The whole cloud is about decentralization. Hot swapping to new location when some datacenter goes down... Routing your traffic to nearest one to save fractions of cents on data transfer. I see no reason why this wouldn't work with multi-planetary system too? The whole blockchain just seems so inefficient way of doing it. And with NFTs we aren't even putting data itself on the chain. Shouldn't whole point is that the data is there and will live forever on the chain, just latest node telling who owns it is updated as needed?

nightski 5y ago
I feel what you are describing is redundancy, not decentralization. Decentralization is inherently inefficient imho.

jimkleiber 5y ago

> We are at all-time peak of distrust among individuals, corporations and the gov't. The only way forward is going to be trust-less systems where everyone can inspect why and how things are working. I agree there's a lot of distrust in society but maybe not all-time peak because to interact with so many moving parts in our complex environment today, I think we may be trusting of more things. But perhaps that's for another conversation. The main thing I'm curious about is your statement that the only way forward is thru trust-less systems. I personally believe we could also try to increase trust in other people and institutions. Why do you think the only way forward is thru trust-less systems?

madamelic 5y ago
> Why do you think the only way forward is thru trust-less systems? <hand-wave-y weirdo ranting about social trust> I don't think we _can_ restore trust as you suggested. I think that social media and the "modern internet" has broken humans. Humans, in my opinion, are incompatible with trust outside of a very small circle of people. So, we need to move to a system where no one trusts anyone or anything, data is either strictly controlled by an individual person (the biological person, not a corporation or any other legal funny business) or is freely open for everyone to see. I think that Fake News is largely only able to propagate because there has been a failure in trust. It's not (entirely) an educational problem, it's a problem that the system is opaque, the participants are opaque and the distributed trust the world was built on no longer works because we are no longer dealing with a disconnected population that only build strong forms of trust within themselves across generations. We are still working on the assumption of trust or using biological signals to determine trustworthiness of a person or fact. That's _really_ bad when people don't know what or who to trust because society assumed implicit trust would work. We have to move past a web of webs trust-wise where each web has only a few edges to other webs ("I trust this individual to speak for me") and move to a single web of each node (person) having to reach consensus with other nodes using transparent, consensus-reached facts. I think we _could_ do make our gov't and officials completely transparent but that still relies on trust & honesty to report what's happening without bias (which, imo, isn't possible for humans). </hand-wave-y weirdo ranting about social trust> > Why do you think the only way forward is thru trust-less systems? Trust is easily broken or exploited. We are better off if each node, either biological or not, determines from provable and transparent facts ("this was agreed upon by 51%+ of trusted nodes") rather than being expected to implicitly trust opaque facts ("trust us... the money is definitely there. ;)")

bryans 5y ago

> Decentralization, in my opinion, is an inevitability. If the human race becomes multi-planetary and space-faring, we will need to be able to run independent nodes of services while keeping individual nodes honest and accurate. I think this is the most overlooked aspect of decentralization efforts. The conversation we've been having since the dawn of BTC quickly devolved into applying the legitimate criticisms of BTC specifically, to the concept of decentralization as a whole, instead of accepting that it was an experiment which proved "good enough" to scale without too much friction or technical failure. The concept has already evolved substantially in the past decade, and these experiments will continue to inform how we handle decentralization when it finally becomes critical to societal function, which is inevitable for the reasons you mentioned and more.

acdha 5y ago

> I feel that we are the "early 1990's internet" stage of decentralization. There were (apparently) article after article, denouncing the internet as a fad, that it will be dead any day, just for <x>, just for <y>, "The internet is tearing apart the fabric of society"... It's true that those articles existed but I think there were two key differences: they were written by [generally] old people who weren't at all conversant with the technology and were recognized as such by many people at the time. It was widely recognized that the dotcom stocks were overheated and some of the companies had no chance but at the same time most people were buying PCs and internet connectivity because there were tons of things they _did_ want to do. That situation is generally reversed today: the people who understand technology are highly skeptical and the people most bullish about cryptocurrency do not show much sign of understanding either the technology or the markets where they're looking for buyers. The strongest parallel I see now are the cryptocurrency bulls sound exactly like this sales guy I knew 1999-2000 who was convinced that the primary reason to buy a stock was how much the share price was increasing. Sadly, he neglected to cash out before the crash and ended up substantially in the red. Regarding decentralization, I think it's important to consider how the internet has become less decentralized over time. The situation in the 90s was far more distributed but the centralized solutions have won out in many spaces, and it's not just well-funded rent-seekers but also factors like cost, reliability, support, and often even performance. I'm philosophically inclined towards open standards and distributed protocols but I have to say the experience has generally not lived up to the dream.

gonehome 5y ago
The incentive structures enabled by web3 (in addition to distributed state) can solve the issues that led to the failure of the decentralized web. At least I see a path for this to be true.
- acdha 5y ago
  Can you explain in more detail? It won’t help with the technical issues I mentioned, spam is still a big challenge, and blockchains add new failure modes related to the inherent performance and reliability limits. There is an interesting argument about micro-transactions. The practical challenge there is getting the price to be enough below the cost of credit card transactions to spur adoption, especially since the processors have plenty of margin to cut since their overhead is so much lower. The bigger problem is one of market: beyond the questions about restricting sites to people affluent enough to pay for those micro transactions, it’s unclear how many people will actually pay as much as advertisers for most sites. This has been tried a number of times over the years but there have been relatively few successes.