7 ms·

Why Decentralization Matters (2018)

73 points by enigmatic02 5y ago

have_faith 5y ago
>Wikipedia improved at a much faster rate, because it had an active community of volunteer contributors who were attracted to its decentralized, community-governed ethos. Does being open contribution warrant the use of the word "decentralised"? as far as I can tell it's still a huge success story from a centralisation perspective.
- TuringTest 5y ago
  The biggest selling point of Wikipedia at its growth phase was that the content wasn't tied to a single central service, anyone could take it and use it for any other purpose - creating competing services, bundling it with commercial products, etc. The website where the efforts were finally consolidated was a central place, but it could very well have been developed as a network of nodes dedicated to different aspects of the explanation of areas of knowledge; the license allowed that. And the growth was initially not coordinated from a central place, an anarchic community began working on different areas and only later began coordinating by building top level behavior policies (as intended).
  - spiralx 5y ago
    > The website where the efforts were finally consolidated was a central place, but it could very well have been developed as a network of nodes dedicated to different aspects of the explanation of areas of knowledge; the license allowed that. And the growth was initially not coordinated from a central place, an anarchic community began working on different areas and only later began coordinating by building top level behavior policies (as intended). This is a remarkable framing that skirts around the fact that Wikipedia started as a single project and website and remains a single project and website today. Neither crowdsourcing content nor having a permissive license require or even imply decentralisation of any kind.
    - TuringTest 5y ago
      > Neither crowdsourcing content nor having a permissive license require or even imply decentralisation of any kind. That's only true if you don't consider "crowdsourcing" and "open sourcing" as forms of decentralization on themselves. A project based on those foundations will necessarily have a less centralised and controlling leadership than one based on the concept of ownership and copy rights, because it cannot prevent decisions being made by multiple actors and not just the governing board.
      - spiralx 5y ago
        The Wikimedia Foundation is literally run by a governing board lol, and if I start a project on Kickstarter I still have complete control and ownership of my project. Saying that "having multiple contributors" or "permissive licensing" is decentralisation is just silly.
fsflover 5y ago
(2018) Meanwhile, PeerTube v4 release candidate is out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29390312 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29390312.
m_eiman 5y ago
Decentralization is good, but there's no need to bring cryptojunk into the discussion since that's far from decentralized. IMHO. Bring back the use of open protocols, add IPv6 support throughout and add a sprinkling of peer-to-peer.
- Geee 5y ago
  Exactly. If payments / incentives are required, then Bitcoin can be used. For example, there's decentralized Sphinx Chat which runs on the Bitcoin lightning network: https://sphinx.chat https://sphinx.chat I haven't seen any of the 'cryptojunk' tokens implement an actual service like the Sphinx chat, which is quite telling in my opinion.
  - summm 5y ago
    No. It cannot. Bitcoin cannot be used, because the rate of transactions is much to low for such an application. Currently its only use is gambling and burning the planet.
    - aaa_aaa 5y ago
      Last time I checked, in El Salvador you could buy beer from a machine with a cell phone using Bitcoin.
      - nextaccountic 5y ago
        People aren't actually making transactions within the Bitcoin chain there. It wouldn't work out, the on-chain fees are outrageous.
      - uniqueuid 5y ago
        Burning the planet is the primary effect. The beer is a side effect :)
        babelchips 5y ago
shaolinspirit 5y ago
nah, I don't buy this. Education matters. Let the folks educate on how to spin up their own website on a VPS. Let folks educate how to subscribe via rss or websub and get notifications. Let folks educate how to add "donate me" button on their website. Instead, people are educated on how to use useless NFT's and how to burn their time trading air on binance. Web3.0 is the definition of vanity. All of the tools required for freedom are there. You just need to have the honesty and willingness to use them. Instead everybody waits for some web3.0 magic, which will make everybody rich. Edit: typos
- gitfan86 5y ago
  You cannot fight human nature. If you offered everyone the choice between a $1 lottery ticket or helping them go through a tutorial for building their own self hosting websites, 90%+ would choose the lottery ticket.
Olreich 5y ago
The points about centralized power make sense, but why http, smtp, and social media became centralized in the first place wasn’t grappled with at all. Running your own servers is attractive for some, but they aren’t the majority and never will be unless it requires something as simple as buying a $35 box and plugging it in at home with no additional setup. Social media is hard to accomplish without a centralized discovery server. See Torrents before they figured out a mechanism or Matrix. The author didn’t address these forces driving web content to centralized platforms, and web3 isn’t likely to avoid the same incentive structure from what I can tell. Bitcoin and Ethereum both have significant centralization problems for how people use them. More wallets are in Coinbase and other central providers than are run privately. Mining power is centralized among a small population as well. Even current crypto is driving toward centralization to get new people onto the technology, so how do you prevent it in web3?
- fsflover 5y ago
  > The author didn’t address these forces driving web content to centralized platforms, and web3 isn’t likely to avoid the same incentive structure from what I can tell. A decentralized system driving to centralization is much better than centralized overlords having a full control over users in a walled garden reinforced by network effects. As TFA says, "Decentralized networks aren’t a silver bullet that will fix all the problems on the internet. But they offer a much better approach than centralized systems." > Running your own servers is attractive for some, but they aren’t the majority and never will be And it's not necessary as the existing servers federate between each other and allow the users to register normally.
  - Olreich 5y ago
    But that's how we got to the current situation with something like email: A bunch of people ran their own servers because they were tech saavy early adopters. Then, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, etc. started offering poor email service which most people adopted. Then Google came along and had an offer that was very impressive to consumers and everyone switched to gmail over the years. Sure, a competitor CAN exist, but it doesn't because Google's product was good enough and captured a large enough market share to become the default. We even have people trying to come up with them (see Hey!) Why wouldn't this happen with web3 servers? Why doesn't HTTP count as decentralized? Anyone can put a server on the network by buying an IP and domain name. And how does crypto help at all with these basic network effect problems that are the reason previous decentralized systems centralized?
senko 5y ago
What I find curious in that web3 scenario is this: 1. Today's internet is decentralized because people can't run their own web, smtp, nntp, xmpp, servers, WP blogs. Which is true, we can't expect people to run this the same way we can't expect every car owner to have a mechanic shop. 2. The proposals for "web3", to the best of my understanding, require people to run their own blockchain nodes, manage wallets, etc. Based on our collective experience in (1), how does anyone believe that (2) is a reasonable proposal? Handling these over to someone else will just result in another new set of platforms that web3 proponents so desperately want to run away from. Not to mention someone still needs to actually run the servers, reintroducing the same complexity from (1).
- donmcronald 5y ago
  Exactly! And, in addition to that complexity, there are scalability issues that are easier to solve with some amount of centralization. Would you rather build on a platform where you're paying a well known company or a platform comprised of a bunch of anonymous nodes trying to minimize operating costs? That Filecoin thing is a great example. Yeah, I want to store my mission critical data on a bunch of EoL, consumer grade hard disks that someone is using to participate in the blockchain. /s And no regulation isn't the utopia the crypto enthusiasts are selling. Don't completely unregulated systems typically end up dominated by the richest, most ruthless, least ethical participants?
  - synctext 5y ago
    It is not some amount of centralization. Our experimental university work sees all startups cheat with servers. They still sell it as Web3. If you run the servers, you need to police the service! You simply become Web2 again. It should be self-organising and pure, like Bitcoin. Scientifically Web3 consists of: peer-to-peer technology (e.g. Bittorrent) with a distributed ledger (e.g. Bitcoin) and the social practice of sharing (e.g. Github). This will take 10-15 years more to develop further. The startups are very noisy and are now discovering that doing real "distributed systems" is very hard. They consistently cheat by using central servers. Adversarial Byzantine attacks are unsolved (or require wasteful proof-of-work to yield no performance).
keyle 5y ago
I don't understand why the message ends up "let's go crypto" and not "make protocols, not startups". He started by talking about the good old days. He clearly identifies the issues of crypto and that there was nothing wrong with open protocols besides speed to market (which is easier to fix than the snafu of crypto) He identified Wikipedia vs Encarta and Wikipedia is a success but has nothing to do with crypto. There are so many issues with blockchains compared to publishing RFCs and pushing an opensource client as a scout... it boggles my mind.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  existing protocols were not built around identity, but the new ones do, and in order to avoid the centralization that is inherent to identity, they have rely on blockchains or something equivalent (which doesnt exist), hence the crypto connection. It doesnt have to involve money, but the solutions are equivalent. E.g. metamask can be a wallet or an authentication mechanism.
  - largely_sitting 5y ago
    Identity can always be botted and forged.
the_gastropod 5y ago
It never ceases to amaze me just how incredibly naive even the tippy-top biggest thought-leaders in crypto are. He clearly doesn’t understand why centralization happened on the web and why “web3” is wholly insufficient to solve that. He’s got major blinders on, I suspect in part because he’s deeply financially invested in this supposed solution.
drclau 5y ago
And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And people forgot how the internet works, and reinvented the _decentralized internet_. Behold, the engineers of now give you… Web3!
mad44 5y ago
Three years ago, I had written this as a response. https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/03/change-my-mind-about-why.html https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/03/change-my-mind-abo... I don't see any better arguments, development put forth since then
- spiralx 5y ago
  There have been precious few new arguments put forth since the crypto space pivoted from "currency of the future" to "immutable store of value" as its origin story, and even then it was - as you pointed out - a bunch of assertions taken as fact and edge cases treated as critical problems in dire need of solutions. Web3 and NFTs are interesting only in that they're so nonsensical even a large chunk of crypto believers can't bring themselves to buy into them.
brightstep 5y ago
The author says "democracy isn't perfect but it's better than the alternative," then overlooks the obvious corollary with regard to "GAFA" and other powerful corporations: we should have democratic control over our economy. Crypto and web3 are an attempt to solve a political problem with a technological tool; a cop-out to avoid a political fight. We're not going to make a better, more just or more democratic world by putting everything on a blockchain.
- 87329868723 5y ago
  What does "democratic control over our economy" mean? Does it mean surrendering control to ostensibly democratic state monopolies that respond with violence to any attempt at competing with them? I prefer 'consensual' to 'democratic'. Most blockchain-based systems are consensual in that they operate based on rules that enjoy the unanimous consent of everyone they apply to. If I and everyone I want to interact with via a blockchain agrees to change the rules, we can freely do so, but if someone doesn't agree, we either have to stop interacting or come to an agreement. I strongly believe political fights should be avoided whenever possible because they are (at best) win-lose. Political fights are about who should get to control everyone or what everyone should be forced to do. Technological solutions can sometimes allow everyone to get what they want without imposing their vision and preferences on others.
  - brightstep 5y ago
    It means worker-owned and -run companies and actually democratic government to regulate them. You're absolutely right about political fights, and it's clear that centralized authorities (e.g. FB, Google, the US Gov't, others) have won/are winning the political fight against you and me. A technological solution realized under their authority will not be allowed to succeed unless it can be bent to their own purposes. I don't wholly disagree with the goals of crypto/web3, but I fear that pursued alone, i.e. without a political movement to back it, those ideals will be corrupted by our existing power structures.
- treestumpquiet 5y ago
  Software is trying to virtualize a left-government. But without addressing the underlying problems of ownership in the real world, every virtualization is ultimately a zero-sum game.
dusted 5y ago
"During the first era of the internet — from the 1980s through the early 2000s — internet services were built on open protocols that were controlled by the internet community." <-- is this no longer the case? Did something happen to HTTP and HTTPS or the underlying IP protocol suite ? Isn't everyone still free to purchase a domain name and plug a computer to their network and serve a website?
- skeeter2020 5y ago
  The premise that the first era of the Internet was the 80's through 00's is flawed. The modern web? Maybe, but web !== internet. The protocols he touts where firmly established by the early 70's
skeeter2020 5y ago
This seems like a really long-winded, single perspective (and perhaps even revisionist) way of justifying one possible use-case, in which the author has an oblivious conflict of interest. Maybe he's got some ideas of what a possible future could look like, but it's hard to square this with it conveniently running through the technologies where he's invested, and there's no explanation of how the NFT exchange he was earlier trumpeting is critical to this future. I've read his posts for years and they've evolved into Andreessen Horowitz-style PR masquerading as deep & critical thought pieces.
- astoor 5y ago
  For venture capitalists like the article author, the primary objective isn't fixing problems or making things better, it is about making money. He even makes this explicit in the article: "cryptonetworks align network participants to work together toward a common goal — the growth of the network and the appreciation of the token", i.e. the common goal is to not to provide useful new functionality or to improve upon things in some way, it is quite simply to get new members to join their cryptocurrency schemes and in doing so make existing members of the schemes more money. BTW, original discussion on this article from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16410478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16410478
SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
"Decentralized" is woo https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/decentralized-woo.html https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/decentralized-woo.html Web3 is not Decentralisation https://medium.com/@rossstalker_5939/web3-is-not-decentralisation-its-a-ploy-to-put-crypto-bros-in-charge-c791752e2bb6 https://medium.com/@rossstalker_5939/web3-is-not-decentralis...
dwpdwpdwpdwpdwp 5y ago
>> But the hardware-based networks of the past are fundamentally different than the internet, a software-based network. This struck a nerve. The internet is most certainly hardware based. While distributed databases are great, there is an extraordinary system of hardware that will always need to be produced, maintained, and powered to keep such databases operational.
jacknews 5y ago
He conflates the benefits of decentralization, with crypto/blockchain. You don't need blockchain for decentralized services, just look at peertube, mastadon, etc. NFT identity etc might be a useful addition, but decentralized services don't need to be 'built on' so-called 'web 3.0'.

73 points by enigmatic02 5y ago

>Wikipedia improved at a much faster rate, because it had an active community of volunteer contributors who were attracted to its decentralized, community-governed ethos. Does being open contribution warrant the use of the word "decentralised"? as far as I can tell it's still a huge success story from a centralisation perspective.

TuringTest 5y ago
The biggest selling point of Wikipedia at its growth phase was that the content wasn't tied to a single central service, anyone could take it and use it for any other purpose - creating competing services, bundling it with commercial products, etc. The website where the efforts were finally consolidated was a central place, but it could very well have been developed as a network of nodes dedicated to different aspects of the explanation of areas of knowledge; the license allowed that. And the growth was initially not coordinated from a central place, an anarchic community began working on different areas and only later began coordinating by building top level behavior policies (as intended).
- spiralx 5y ago
  > The website where the efforts were finally consolidated was a central place, but it could very well have been developed as a network of nodes dedicated to different aspects of the explanation of areas of knowledge; the license allowed that. And the growth was initially not coordinated from a central place, an anarchic community began working on different areas and only later began coordinating by building top level behavior policies (as intended). This is a remarkable framing that skirts around the fact that Wikipedia started as a single project and website and remains a single project and website today. Neither crowdsourcing content nor having a permissive license require or even imply decentralisation of any kind.
  - TuringTest 5y ago
    > Neither crowdsourcing content nor having a permissive license require or even imply decentralisation of any kind. That's only true if you don't consider "crowdsourcing" and "open sourcing" as forms of decentralization on themselves. A project based on those foundations will necessarily have a less centralised and controlling leadership than one based on the concept of ownership and copy rights, because it cannot prevent decisions being made by multiple actors and not just the governing board.
    - spiralx 5y ago
      The Wikimedia Foundation is literally run by a governing board lol, and if I start a project on Kickstarter I still have complete control and ownership of my project. Saying that "having multiple contributors" or "permissive licensing" is decentralisation is just silly.

fsflover 5y ago

(2018) Meanwhile, PeerTube v4 release candidate is out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29390312 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29390312.

m_eiman 5y ago

Decentralization is good, but there's no need to bring cryptojunk into the discussion since that's far from decentralized. IMHO. Bring back the use of open protocols, add IPv6 support throughout and add a sprinkling of peer-to-peer.

Geee 5y ago
Exactly. If payments / incentives are required, then Bitcoin can be used. For example, there's decentralized Sphinx Chat which runs on the Bitcoin lightning network: https://sphinx.chat https://sphinx.chat I haven't seen any of the 'cryptojunk' tokens implement an actual service like the Sphinx chat, which is quite telling in my opinion.
- summm 5y ago
  No. It cannot. Bitcoin cannot be used, because the rate of transactions is much to low for such an application. Currently its only use is gambling and burning the planet.
  - aaa_aaa 5y ago
    Last time I checked, in El Salvador you could buy beer from a machine with a cell phone using Bitcoin.
    - nextaccountic 5y ago
      People aren't actually making transactions within the Bitcoin chain there. It wouldn't work out, the on-chain fees are outrageous.
    - uniqueuid 5y ago
      Burning the planet is the primary effect. The beer is a side effect :)
      - babelchips 5y ago

shaolinspirit 5y ago

nah, I don't buy this. Education matters. Let the folks educate on how to spin up their own website on a VPS. Let folks educate how to subscribe via rss or websub and get notifications. Let folks educate how to add "donate me" button on their website. Instead, people are educated on how to use useless NFT's and how to burn their time trading air on binance. Web3.0 is the definition of vanity. All of the tools required for freedom are there. You just need to have the honesty and willingness to use them. Instead everybody waits for some web3.0 magic, which will make everybody rich. Edit: typos

gitfan86 5y ago
You cannot fight human nature. If you offered everyone the choice between a $1 lottery ticket or helping them go through a tutorial for building their own self hosting websites, 90%+ would choose the lottery ticket.

Olreich 5y ago

The points about centralized power make sense, but why http, smtp, and social media became centralized in the first place wasn’t grappled with at all. Running your own servers is attractive for some, but they aren’t the majority and never will be unless it requires something as simple as buying a $35 box and plugging it in at home with no additional setup. Social media is hard to accomplish without a centralized discovery server. See Torrents before they figured out a mechanism or Matrix. The author didn’t address these forces driving web content to centralized platforms, and web3 isn’t likely to avoid the same incentive structure from what I can tell. Bitcoin and Ethereum both have significant centralization problems for how people use them. More wallets are in Coinbase and other central providers than are run privately. Mining power is centralized among a small population as well. Even current crypto is driving toward centralization to get new people onto the technology, so how do you prevent it in web3?

fsflover 5y ago
> The author didn’t address these forces driving web content to centralized platforms, and web3 isn’t likely to avoid the same incentive structure from what I can tell. A decentralized system driving to centralization is much better than centralized overlords having a full control over users in a walled garden reinforced by network effects. As TFA says, "Decentralized networks aren’t a silver bullet that will fix all the problems on the internet. But they offer a much better approach than centralized systems." > Running your own servers is attractive for some, but they aren’t the majority and never will be And it's not necessary as the existing servers federate between each other and allow the users to register normally.
- Olreich 5y ago
  But that's how we got to the current situation with something like email: A bunch of people ran their own servers because they were tech saavy early adopters. Then, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, etc. started offering poor email service which most people adopted. Then Google came along and had an offer that was very impressive to consumers and everyone switched to gmail over the years. Sure, a competitor CAN exist, but it doesn't because Google's product was good enough and captured a large enough market share to become the default. We even have people trying to come up with them (see Hey!) Why wouldn't this happen with web3 servers? Why doesn't HTTP count as decentralized? Anyone can put a server on the network by buying an IP and domain name. And how does crypto help at all with these basic network effect problems that are the reason previous decentralized systems centralized?

senko 5y ago

What I find curious in that web3 scenario is this: 1. Today's internet is decentralized because people can't run their own web, smtp, nntp, xmpp, servers, WP blogs. Which is true, we can't expect people to run this the same way we can't expect every car owner to have a mechanic shop. 2. The proposals for "web3", to the best of my understanding, require people to run their own blockchain nodes, manage wallets, etc. Based on our collective experience in (1), how does anyone believe that (2) is a reasonable proposal? Handling these over to someone else will just result in another new set of platforms that web3 proponents so desperately want to run away from. Not to mention someone still needs to actually run the servers, reintroducing the same complexity from (1).

donmcronald 5y ago
Exactly! And, in addition to that complexity, there are scalability issues that are easier to solve with some amount of centralization. Would you rather build on a platform where you're paying a well known company or a platform comprised of a bunch of anonymous nodes trying to minimize operating costs? That Filecoin thing is a great example. Yeah, I want to store my mission critical data on a bunch of EoL, consumer grade hard disks that someone is using to participate in the blockchain. /s And no regulation isn't the utopia the crypto enthusiasts are selling. Don't completely unregulated systems typically end up dominated by the richest, most ruthless, least ethical participants?
- synctext 5y ago
  It is not some amount of centralization. Our experimental university work sees all startups cheat with servers. They still sell it as Web3. If you run the servers, you need to police the service! You simply become Web2 again. It should be self-organising and pure, like Bitcoin. Scientifically Web3 consists of: peer-to-peer technology (e.g. Bittorrent) with a distributed ledger (e.g. Bitcoin) and the social practice of sharing (e.g. Github). This will take 10-15 years more to develop further. The startups are very noisy and are now discovering that doing real "distributed systems" is very hard. They consistently cheat by using central servers. Adversarial Byzantine attacks are unsolved (or require wasteful proof-of-work to yield no performance).

keyle 5y ago

I don't understand why the message ends up "let's go crypto" and not "make protocols, not startups". He started by talking about the good old days. He clearly identifies the issues of crypto and that there was nothing wrong with open protocols besides speed to market (which is easier to fix than the snafu of crypto) He identified Wikipedia vs Encarta and Wikipedia is a success but has nothing to do with crypto. There are so many issues with blockchains compared to publishing RFCs and pushing an opensource client as a scout... it boggles my mind.

cblconfederate 5y ago
existing protocols were not built around identity, but the new ones do, and in order to avoid the centralization that is inherent to identity, they have rely on blockchains or something equivalent (which doesnt exist), hence the crypto connection. It doesnt have to involve money, but the solutions are equivalent. E.g. metamask can be a wallet or an authentication mechanism.
- largely_sitting 5y ago
  Identity can always be botted and forged.

the_gastropod 5y ago

It never ceases to amaze me just how incredibly naive even the tippy-top biggest thought-leaders in crypto are. He clearly doesn’t understand why centralization happened on the web and why “web3” is wholly insufficient to solve that. He’s got major blinders on, I suspect in part because he’s deeply financially invested in this supposed solution.

drclau 5y ago

And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And people forgot how the internet works, and reinvented the _decentralized internet_. Behold, the engineers of now give you… Web3!

mad44 5y ago

Three years ago, I had written this as a response. https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/03/change-my-mind-about-why.html https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/03/change-my-mind-abo... I don't see any better arguments, development put forth since then

spiralx 5y ago
There have been precious few new arguments put forth since the crypto space pivoted from "currency of the future" to "immutable store of value" as its origin story, and even then it was - as you pointed out - a bunch of assertions taken as fact and edge cases treated as critical problems in dire need of solutions. Web3 and NFTs are interesting only in that they're so nonsensical even a large chunk of crypto believers can't bring themselves to buy into them.

brightstep 5y ago

The author says "democracy isn't perfect but it's better than the alternative," then overlooks the obvious corollary with regard to "GAFA" and other powerful corporations: we should have democratic control over our economy. Crypto and web3 are an attempt to solve a political problem with a technological tool; a cop-out to avoid a political fight. We're not going to make a better, more just or more democratic world by putting everything on a blockchain.

87329868723 5y ago
What does "democratic control over our economy" mean? Does it mean surrendering control to ostensibly democratic state monopolies that respond with violence to any attempt at competing with them? I prefer 'consensual' to 'democratic'. Most blockchain-based systems are consensual in that they operate based on rules that enjoy the unanimous consent of everyone they apply to. If I and everyone I want to interact with via a blockchain agrees to change the rules, we can freely do so, but if someone doesn't agree, we either have to stop interacting or come to an agreement. I strongly believe political fights should be avoided whenever possible because they are (at best) win-lose. Political fights are about who should get to control everyone or what everyone should be forced to do. Technological solutions can sometimes allow everyone to get what they want without imposing their vision and preferences on others.
- brightstep 5y ago
  It means worker-owned and -run companies and actually democratic government to regulate them. You're absolutely right about political fights, and it's clear that centralized authorities (e.g. FB, Google, the US Gov't, others) have won/are winning the political fight against you and me. A technological solution realized under their authority will not be allowed to succeed unless it can be bent to their own purposes. I don't wholly disagree with the goals of crypto/web3, but I fear that pursued alone, i.e. without a political movement to back it, those ideals will be corrupted by our existing power structures.
treestumpquiet 5y ago
Software is trying to virtualize a left-government. But without addressing the underlying problems of ownership in the real world, every virtualization is ultimately a zero-sum game.

dusted 5y ago

"During the first era of the internet — from the 1980s through the early 2000s — internet services were built on open protocols that were controlled by the internet community." <-- is this no longer the case? Did something happen to HTTP and HTTPS or the underlying IP protocol suite ? Isn't everyone still free to purchase a domain name and plug a computer to their network and serve a website?

skeeter2020 5y ago
The premise that the first era of the Internet was the 80's through 00's is flawed. The modern web? Maybe, but web !== internet. The protocols he touts where firmly established by the early 70's

skeeter2020 5y ago

This seems like a really long-winded, single perspective (and perhaps even revisionist) way of justifying one possible use-case, in which the author has an oblivious conflict of interest. Maybe he's got some ideas of what a possible future could look like, but it's hard to square this with it conveniently running through the technologies where he's invested, and there's no explanation of how the NFT exchange he was earlier trumpeting is critical to this future. I've read his posts for years and they've evolved into Andreessen Horowitz-style PR masquerading as deep & critical thought pieces.

astoor 5y ago
For venture capitalists like the article author, the primary objective isn't fixing problems or making things better, it is about making money. He even makes this explicit in the article: "cryptonetworks align network participants to work together toward a common goal — the growth of the network and the appreciation of the token", i.e. the common goal is to not to provide useful new functionality or to improve upon things in some way, it is quite simply to get new members to join their cryptocurrency schemes and in doing so make existing members of the schemes more money. BTW, original discussion on this article from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16410478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16410478

SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago

"Decentralized" is woo https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/decentralized-woo.html https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/decentralized-woo.html Web3 is not Decentralisation https://medium.com/@rossstalker_5939/web3-is-not-decentralisation-its-a-ploy-to-put-crypto-bros-in-charge-c791752e2bb6 https://medium.com/@rossstalker_5939/web3-is-not-decentralis...

dwpdwpdwpdwpdwp 5y ago

>> But the hardware-based networks of the past are fundamentally different than the internet, a software-based network. This struck a nerve. The internet is most certainly hardware based. While distributed databases are great, there is an extraordinary system of hardware that will always need to be produced, maintained, and powered to keep such databases operational.

jacknews 5y ago

He conflates the benefits of decentralization, with crypto/blockchain. You don't need blockchain for decentralized services, just look at peertube, mastadon, etc. NFT identity etc might be a useful addition, but decentralized services don't need to be 'built on' so-called 'web 3.0'.