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I don't like how the extreme hatred toward Web3 has spiraled into "I see no practical application for decentralization". Crypto and blockchain aside, how can yo

by Kiro 5y ago

I don't like how the extreme hatred toward Web3 has spiraled into "I see no practical application for decentralization". Crypto and blockchain aside, how can you not see the utility in an open firehose database/API without gate keepers? Don't conflate decentralization with blockchain.

moritonal 5y ago
Because the only reason I can imagine someone wanting a open database without gate keepers is for something the society I've aligned with has decided is illegal. At the end of the day, I guess I trust the goverment I vote for and the banks I decide on more than a distributed group of strangers. Do you have an example of a DB that was unfairly limited by a gate keeper?
- Kiro 5y ago
  Facebook, Twitter or any walled garden. I can't build any app I want on top of those without risking it being limited, restricted or shut down... If they even provide an API at all.
  - cam0 5y ago
    So don't build on FB and Twitter? You do realize you can build an application and very easily host it for the world to access on AWS/GCP/Azure - unless you're doing something illegal or highly unethical the cloud services aren't going to kick you off. It sounds like you're saying you want to build a social media app but you don't like the fact that social media is dominated by a handful of companies (because the majority of users want to use their product already).
    - mattwilsonn888 5y ago
      > Get censored off Twitter without breaking the law. "Just build your own Twitter!" > Conservative Twitter gets kicked off hosting services. "Just build your own hosting services!" > People talk about the importance of Web3 for openness and censorship resistance. "Web3 is a grift, and if its not its for illegal things then you're only getting marginal value as compared to using FB or Twitter! So just build your own Twitter!" I'm getting dizzy.
- mattwilsonn888 5y ago
  > At the end of the day, I guess I trust the goverment I vote for and the banks I decide on more than a distributed group of strangers. This is a pretty ignorant take on how blockchains work. Feel free to have your opinions, but if you really think that billions of dollars is secured in Bitcoin simply because "a distributed group of strangers" are trustworthy, you've missed the entire point and you don't actually understand how it works. "Trustless" is a 'buzz word' you might want to put a lot more respect on - and maybe first learn what it actually means.
  - moritonal 5y ago
    Come on, I read the original bitcoin paper upon its release xD I shortened my original post, but had explained that in the UK the Land-registry has started using a blockchain for record keeping. It worked well and is a good solution, but only whilst they stay as the sole writer. A distributed registry of home-ownership would have many risks, the largest being a sybil attack. Which Bitcoin is also liable to, where your coins are essentially protected in the trust of strangers all acting in their own interest. I can't really respect "trustless" given its an oxymoron really meaning "trust a mass of unknown people to act in their own interest". Putting that aside, let's deal with the original quoted issue. I am privileged enough to be in a place where I trust my government, and by extension agree with their rules. The "trustless" setup of Bitcoin has meant that CP can be hosted comfortably within it (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47130268 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47130268). A system with a liable entity would be able to solve this, Bitcoin cannot. I don't feel ignorant to think this is an issue?
    - mattwilsonn888 5y ago
      You can have plenty of knowledge about Bitcoin, but your original comment about 'trust' reflects none of it. As you know, you don't 'trust' the group of strangers who run Bitcoin software to ensure the security of the protocol - that is in fact that opposite of the intention and for the most part the result. So yes, you failed to demonstrate any knowledge of how blockchains work and now you are introducing a red herring to the original argument. By the way, Bitcoin does not have that problem because the story you linked is about a wild fork of Bitcoin which is unsustainable anyways - not even counting the fact that BSV is not intended as a file hosting service. Perhaps see what IPFS or other file hosting coins and protocols do to stop that problem. And as hard as it is to swallow, there are plenty of other ways to obscure the uploading of illegal data across all sorts of centralized services - but we don't just get rid of the internet.
tootie 5y ago
The issue is that decentralization is orthogonal to the supposed problems to be solved.
mendyberger 5y ago
It blows my mind how many people keep dismissing decentralization because of problems in the NFT space.
- Jetrel 5y ago
  We're not. We don't need blockchain for decentralization. That's what we're dismissing. Blockchain is a set of cancer cells that have metastasized into the existing zeitgeist surrounding decentralization efforts. It offers nothing, and just poisons our existing work.
  - mendyberger 5y ago
    If you're not than I haven't referred to you :)
- mendyberger 5y ago
  To all the people that downvoted my comment, do you think that decentralization is inherently connected to the Blockchain/NFT? If true, mind explaining?
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    Just shouting "BUT DECENTRALIZATION!" bears as much sense as "BUT BITCOIN". Decentralization doesn't have inherent value, and has a whole host of problems that cryptopeddlers don't want to either acknowledge or pretend to solve.
    - mendyberger 5y ago
      > Decentralization doesn't have inherent value I think that when building the internet and the web, decentralization was assumed to have a lot of value, do you disagree with that?
      - dmitriid 5y ago
        > decentralization was assumed to have a lot of value It wasn't inherent. The value was "in the case of global nuclear war it would be nice to have independent centers that could still continue to operate in the aftermath". It was a solution to a very specific (though thankfully theoretical) problem. "web3" offers no such problem, but loves to scream "but decentralization!".
epistasis 5y ago
There's an easy counter to "I see no practical application for decentralization," which is to provide an example of that application. I'm not convinced that Bitcoin or currencies are a practical application that results in net gain (economic or otherwise) to humanity. The internet was obvious from day 1, even if the actual end applications ended up quite a bit different. > how can you not see the utility in an open firehose database/API without gate keepers? This is what I don't see. The "gate keepers" are often a positive, not a negative. And it's hard for me to imagine what sort of database is being held back because of gatekeepers.
- Kiro 5y ago
  The gate keepers are preventing me from building the kind of apps I want. Just the other day people here reminisced about the days when Twitter used to have an open API and how bad it is that they shut it down. I want to build apps without having to worry about ever being restricted, limited or shut down.
  - jcun4128 5y ago
    I was thinking about this, not sure if entirely the same. For example the YT dislikes going away. What if you got people to install a chrome extension where it tracked urls with upvotes/downvotes (game system). The database is shared between installed apps no central db... would it work? I could be far off with the intent of the application but another example is mesh networking where it is nice to not have a central pipe but is it going to be as good, particularly the case of cross continent.
    - mattwilsonn888 5y ago
      This is the kind of thing that inspires true Web3 people (not the grifters selling their OpenSea NFTs). If you dig into the problems that arise when implementing those systems you talk about and what happens when data of value can be contributed, you start naturally running into the solutions that Blockchain developers have been working on for years.
  - 5y ago
Traubenfuchs 5y ago
Because they keep talking and talking and all we get is get rich quick schemes involving blockchains and crypto. Where are the applications?
jandrese 5y ago
Anything "web scale" without gatekeepers is immediately colonized by criminals, neo-Nazis, redpill edgelords, pedophiles, and all other such manner of people who are always looking for a new place to exist after being kicked out of every other one. Unmoderated discussion doesn't scale. The noise floor rises faster than the population of the service until it collapses under the weight of the trolls.
- Kiro 5y ago
  Moderation and filtering can happen on the user application layer with the underlying data still being open and accessible. Right now the gate keepers are Big Tech deciding who and when someone or something can access the data.
  - jandrese 5y ago
    Personal spam control has its own issues. Managing the filter can end up consuming all of your time on the platform and that effort has to be replicated for every user. Worse, public perception will be that your platform is unusable because the horrendous first impression it makes. So maybe you decided to make public filter lists, but then the people making the filters end up being the defacto operators of the platform and you're back to square 1.
    - Kiro 5y ago
      I mostly meant the app you're using to access the data doing the moderation for you. I don't think we would be back to square 1. We would still have the possibility to create new clients and build whatever applications we want without being under the mercy of Big Tech holding the data hostage. Sure, maybe one such app talking to the open platform would become dominant and the de facto operator but at least it wouldn't have the power to restrict, limit or shut down other apps.
      - shagie 5y ago
        > We would still have the possibility to create new clients and build whatever applications we want without being under the mercy of Big Tech holding the data hostage. How does this improve on a self hosted blog with RSS feeds and associated aggregators?
stathibus 5y ago
Web3 is like a solution in search of a problem, except worse, because the solution does not actually solve the problem.
- FridgeSeal 5y ago
  If the proponents could catalyse their solution into anything more concrete than “Something something crypto currency” we might even be able to figure out what their proposed solution actually is lol.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
FridgeSeal 5y ago
> Don't conflate decentralization with blockchain. Well it’d be easier if crypto wasn’t every second word out of someone’s mouth when they talk about “web3”. The technology to do pretty much everything “web3” promises already exists, and works better than it’s crypto-equivalent. The Local-First software movement is a good example of this. If the proponents of “web3”actually cared about decentralisation/federation/user controlled data/etc they’d be pushing *actual solutions” instead of recruiting for yet another crypto Ponzi scheme. Worth noting, however, that I’m not saying there aren’t improvements to be made, but I have yet to see any demonstration that the crypto space can contribute anything actually meaningful to this space.
- mattwilsonn888 5y ago
  So what is the solution to posting sensitive information on an open platform where people can easily lie or cheat? Your version of Web3, despite its head start, is no better off than the so called 'grifter version' (grifters dog piling innovation doesn't tell you anything about the legitimacy of that innovation; see "Dot-Com Bubble"[1]). Let's start you off with the very basics; a low stakes example. What is a solution to email spam? You incur a small cost to honest senders and a large cost to mass senders. We'll call it Hashcash[2], and as a user you will only accept emails from senders with a header including your email and the date, which hashes to a sufficiently small value of your choosing, the smaller, the harder it was to send. Every sender gets a linear increase in amount of work to send, but for normal email users sending one email at a time its a small constant, while mass senders increase this value for each recipient. Because of the economics of spam email, where the profit is made off a few gullible recipients while the majority ignore it, Hashcash makes spam emails a losing strategy, at least in this simple example. This is an economic solution, and it is also exactly what the primary cryptocurrency does. Bitcoin is primitive, and its data throughput reflects that. I won't be shilling or giving you tips, but imagine a blockchain system which ensures openess (no Infura Problem[3] as is common in Ethereum sized blockchains) and a scalable model for pricing and putting data on chain. It may be more expensive or slower than a federated system, but a system with the proper economic incentives and deterrents is now capable of doing something a centralized or federated system cannot: hosting data for which there is massive economic incentive to distort without a profitable way to actually do so, or more specifically, a predictable cost of attack that rises with subsequent block confirmations (just like Bitcoin's security model). Now you can price your data, and wait the amount of time that correlates to the cost of attack that would not be worth the money it takes to cheat. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash [3] https://cryptobriefing.com/infura-outage-sparks-debate-over-ethereums-decentralization/ https://cryptobriefing.com/infura-outage-sparks-debate-over-...

by Kiro 5y ago

moritonal 5y ago

Because the only reason I can imagine someone wanting a open database without gate keepers is for something the society I've aligned with has decided is illegal. At the end of the day, I guess I trust the goverment I vote for and the banks I decide on more than a distributed group of strangers. Do you have an example of a DB that was unfairly limited by a gate keeper?

Kiro 5y ago
Facebook, Twitter or any walled garden. I can't build any app I want on top of those without risking it being limited, restricted or shut down... If they even provide an API at all.
- cam0 5y ago
  So don't build on FB and Twitter? You do realize you can build an application and very easily host it for the world to access on AWS/GCP/Azure - unless you're doing something illegal or highly unethical the cloud services aren't going to kick you off. It sounds like you're saying you want to build a social media app but you don't like the fact that social media is dominated by a handful of companies (because the majority of users want to use their product already).
  - mattwilsonn888 5y ago
    > Get censored off Twitter without breaking the law. "Just build your own Twitter!" > Conservative Twitter gets kicked off hosting services. "Just build your own hosting services!" > People talk about the importance of Web3 for openness and censorship resistance. "Web3 is a grift, and if its not its for illegal things then you're only getting marginal value as compared to using FB or Twitter! So just build your own Twitter!" I'm getting dizzy.
mattwilsonn888 5y ago
> At the end of the day, I guess I trust the goverment I vote for and the banks I decide on more than a distributed group of strangers. This is a pretty ignorant take on how blockchains work. Feel free to have your opinions, but if you really think that billions of dollars is secured in Bitcoin simply because "a distributed group of strangers" are trustworthy, you've missed the entire point and you don't actually understand how it works. "Trustless" is a 'buzz word' you might want to put a lot more respect on - and maybe first learn what it actually means.
- moritonal 5y ago
  Come on, I read the original bitcoin paper upon its release xD I shortened my original post, but had explained that in the UK the Land-registry has started using a blockchain for record keeping. It worked well and is a good solution, but only whilst they stay as the sole writer. A distributed registry of home-ownership would have many risks, the largest being a sybil attack. Which Bitcoin is also liable to, where your coins are essentially protected in the trust of strangers all acting in their own interest. I can't really respect "trustless" given its an oxymoron really meaning "trust a mass of unknown people to act in their own interest". Putting that aside, let's deal with the original quoted issue. I am privileged enough to be in a place where I trust my government, and by extension agree with their rules. The "trustless" setup of Bitcoin has meant that CP can be hosted comfortably within it (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47130268 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47130268). A system with a liable entity would be able to solve this, Bitcoin cannot. I don't feel ignorant to think this is an issue?
  - mattwilsonn888 5y ago
    You can have plenty of knowledge about Bitcoin, but your original comment about 'trust' reflects none of it. As you know, you don't 'trust' the group of strangers who run Bitcoin software to ensure the security of the protocol - that is in fact that opposite of the intention and for the most part the result. So yes, you failed to demonstrate any knowledge of how blockchains work and now you are introducing a red herring to the original argument. By the way, Bitcoin does not have that problem because the story you linked is about a wild fork of Bitcoin which is unsustainable anyways - not even counting the fact that BSV is not intended as a file hosting service. Perhaps see what IPFS or other file hosting coins and protocols do to stop that problem. And as hard as it is to swallow, there are plenty of other ways to obscure the uploading of illegal data across all sorts of centralized services - but we don't just get rid of the internet.

tootie 5y ago

The issue is that decentralization is orthogonal to the supposed problems to be solved.

mendyberger 5y ago

It blows my mind how many people keep dismissing decentralization because of problems in the NFT space.

Jetrel 5y ago
We're not. We don't need blockchain for decentralization. That's what we're dismissing. Blockchain is a set of cancer cells that have metastasized into the existing zeitgeist surrounding decentralization efforts. It offers nothing, and just poisons our existing work.
- mendyberger 5y ago
  If you're not than I haven't referred to you :)
mendyberger 5y ago
To all the people that downvoted my comment, do you think that decentralization is inherently connected to the Blockchain/NFT? If true, mind explaining?
- dmitriid 5y ago
  Just shouting "BUT DECENTRALIZATION!" bears as much sense as "BUT BITCOIN". Decentralization doesn't have inherent value, and has a whole host of problems that cryptopeddlers don't want to either acknowledge or pretend to solve.
  - mendyberger 5y ago
    > Decentralization doesn't have inherent value I think that when building the internet and the web, decentralization was assumed to have a lot of value, do you disagree with that?
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      > decentralization was assumed to have a lot of value It wasn't inherent. The value was "in the case of global nuclear war it would be nice to have independent centers that could still continue to operate in the aftermath". It was a solution to a very specific (though thankfully theoretical) problem. "web3" offers no such problem, but loves to scream "but decentralization!".

epistasis 5y ago

There's an easy counter to "I see no practical application for decentralization," which is to provide an example of that application. I'm not convinced that Bitcoin or currencies are a practical application that results in net gain (economic or otherwise) to humanity. The internet was obvious from day 1, even if the actual end applications ended up quite a bit different. > how can you not see the utility in an open firehose database/API without gate keepers? This is what I don't see. The "gate keepers" are often a positive, not a negative. And it's hard for me to imagine what sort of database is being held back because of gatekeepers.

Kiro 5y ago
The gate keepers are preventing me from building the kind of apps I want. Just the other day people here reminisced about the days when Twitter used to have an open API and how bad it is that they shut it down. I want to build apps without having to worry about ever being restricted, limited or shut down.
- jcun4128 5y ago
  I was thinking about this, not sure if entirely the same. For example the YT dislikes going away. What if you got people to install a chrome extension where it tracked urls with upvotes/downvotes (game system). The database is shared between installed apps no central db... would it work? I could be far off with the intent of the application but another example is mesh networking where it is nice to not have a central pipe but is it going to be as good, particularly the case of cross continent.
  - mattwilsonn888 5y ago
    This is the kind of thing that inspires true Web3 people (not the grifters selling their OpenSea NFTs). If you dig into the problems that arise when implementing those systems you talk about and what happens when data of value can be contributed, you start naturally running into the solutions that Blockchain developers have been working on for years.
- 5y ago

Traubenfuchs 5y ago

Because they keep talking and talking and all we get is get rich quick schemes involving blockchains and crypto. Where are the applications?

jandrese 5y ago

Anything "web scale" without gatekeepers is immediately colonized by criminals, neo-Nazis, redpill edgelords, pedophiles, and all other such manner of people who are always looking for a new place to exist after being kicked out of every other one. Unmoderated discussion doesn't scale. The noise floor rises faster than the population of the service until it collapses under the weight of the trolls.

Kiro 5y ago
Moderation and filtering can happen on the user application layer with the underlying data still being open and accessible. Right now the gate keepers are Big Tech deciding who and when someone or something can access the data.
- jandrese 5y ago
  Personal spam control has its own issues. Managing the filter can end up consuming all of your time on the platform and that effort has to be replicated for every user. Worse, public perception will be that your platform is unusable because the horrendous first impression it makes. So maybe you decided to make public filter lists, but then the people making the filters end up being the defacto operators of the platform and you're back to square 1.
  - Kiro 5y ago
    I mostly meant the app you're using to access the data doing the moderation for you. I don't think we would be back to square 1. We would still have the possibility to create new clients and build whatever applications we want without being under the mercy of Big Tech holding the data hostage. Sure, maybe one such app talking to the open platform would become dominant and the de facto operator but at least it wouldn't have the power to restrict, limit or shut down other apps.
    - shagie 5y ago
      > We would still have the possibility to create new clients and build whatever applications we want without being under the mercy of Big Tech holding the data hostage. How does this improve on a self hosted blog with RSS feeds and associated aggregators?

stathibus 5y ago

Web3 is like a solution in search of a problem, except worse, because the solution does not actually solve the problem.

FridgeSeal 5y ago
If the proponents could catalyse their solution into anything more concrete than “Something something crypto currency” we might even be able to figure out what their proposed solution actually is lol.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

FridgeSeal 5y ago

> Don't conflate decentralization with blockchain. Well it’d be easier if crypto wasn’t every second word out of someone’s mouth when they talk about “web3”. The technology to do pretty much everything “web3” promises already exists, and works better than it’s crypto-equivalent. The Local-First software movement is a good example of this. If the proponents of “web3”actually cared about decentralisation/federation/user controlled data/etc they’d be pushing *actual solutions” instead of recruiting for yet another crypto Ponzi scheme. Worth noting, however, that I’m not saying there aren’t improvements to be made, but I have yet to see any demonstration that the crypto space can contribute anything actually meaningful to this space.

mattwilsonn888 5y ago
So what is the solution to posting sensitive information on an open platform where people can easily lie or cheat? Your version of Web3, despite its head start, is no better off than the so called 'grifter version' (grifters dog piling innovation doesn't tell you anything about the legitimacy of that innovation; see "Dot-Com Bubble"[1]). Let's start you off with the very basics; a low stakes example. What is a solution to email spam? You incur a small cost to honest senders and a large cost to mass senders. We'll call it Hashcash[2], and as a user you will only accept emails from senders with a header including your email and the date, which hashes to a sufficiently small value of your choosing, the smaller, the harder it was to send. Every sender gets a linear increase in amount of work to send, but for normal email users sending one email at a time its a small constant, while mass senders increase this value for each recipient. Because of the economics of spam email, where the profit is made off a few gullible recipients while the majority ignore it, Hashcash makes spam emails a losing strategy, at least in this simple example. This is an economic solution, and it is also exactly what the primary cryptocurrency does. Bitcoin is primitive, and its data throughput reflects that. I won't be shilling or giving you tips, but imagine a blockchain system which ensures openess (no Infura Problem[3] as is common in Ethereum sized blockchains) and a scalable model for pricing and putting data on chain. It may be more expensive or slower than a federated system, but a system with the proper economic incentives and deterrents is now capable of doing something a centralized or federated system cannot: hosting data for which there is massive economic incentive to distort without a profitable way to actually do so, or more specifically, a predictable cost of attack that rises with subsequent block confirmations (just like Bitcoin's security model). Now you can price your data, and wait the amount of time that correlates to the cost of attack that would not be worth the money it takes to cheat. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash [3] https://cryptobriefing.com/infura-outage-sparks-debate-over-ethereums-decentralization/ https://cryptobriefing.com/infura-outage-sparks-debate-over-...