30 ms·

Web3 is centralized

• po1nt 5y ago
  I don't get the argument. We all follow standards like HTTP, IP, ECMAScript and others that are developed by single entity. That doesn't mean it's centralized. It's like saying open source doesn't exist because most of the open source projects are hosted on github owned by microsoft.
• john_alan 5y ago
  I think the author is confused about the goals of “web 3”.
  • lwansbrough 5y ago
    Please elaborate.
    • monkeypawfan 5y ago
      Web2 = We make money more easily Web3 = We print money more easily
• jsemrau 5y ago
  My main concerns with Web3 are that it is "pay to play" in many aspects and it's less democratic than the existing Internet.
  • ThomPete 5y ago
    Democracy isnt free. Pay to play is exactly what makes it democratic. Free is more like a benevolent dictatorship.
    • onethought 5y ago
      Clarification? I can participate/play in my democracy with little to no cost. Unless you are arguing time (~20 minutes/year) commitments to vote?
      • ThomPete 5y ago
        How is it little to no cost? You pay through taxes, value creation, allegiance and a bunch of other areas.
        • onethought 5y ago
          No, tax is only required on income, not related to whether I can vote or not. Don’t need to create value either. Not sure what “allegiance” means.
  • reilly3000 5y ago
    Agreed. The one dollar-one vote concept is fundamentally flawed, but has become the main model for crypto community governance. There aren’t a lot of viable alternatives, especially as there is no concept of a person, just free, infinite wallets and limited coins. As such, the interests of the wealthiest steer the entire community, and a bad actor could derail a project with malevolent use of voting powers. Democracy is messy at best, but where there are no ‘demos’ its nigh impossible.
    • kibwen 5y ago
      Note that "one dollar, one vote" describes a plutocracy, not a democracy.
    • littlestymaar 5y ago
      > There aren’t a lot of viable alternatives, especially as there is no concept of a person, just free, infinite wallets and limited coins. Sybil attack is the fundamental problem of the internet. (And proof of work was actually designed as a way to mitigate it)
    • mattwilsonn888 5y ago
      That's an interesting point. I would make the refutation that a system where large 'voters' in a DAO are forced to lock up their tokens after votes proportional to their power would prevent them from sabotaging the project, but if they had even more money at stake in a competitor its easy to imagine scenarios where such foul play may happen. The interesting thing about governance is that it existed before the term: In Bitcoin the community governs the direction of the protocol by directing their hash power, perceived value, and simple use of the network towards their desired fork. You can't do this with contract tokens unless you want to fork the entire Ethereum Blockchain for the sake of one DAO. Despite this limitation, if DAO pay to vote schemes could be combined with 'vote with your feet' you could have the clean, efficient governance of a DAO with the fully actionable emergency escape (a fork) in case foul play is sniffed out.
  • chrisco255 5y ago
    The existing internet is dominated by trillion dollar monopolies. How do you reconcile that Web3 is less democratic than a megacorp oligopoly than can unperson people at will? Web3 has decentralization, freedom of speech, anti-gatekeeping, permissionlessness and inclusiveness, at its core.
    • systemsignal 5y ago
      Are you using any decentralized social networks significantly?
      • chrisco255 5y ago
        I've tried Mastadon and Matrix (using Element). I think they're two of the best examples. But I think for none of these have quite nailed the UX of existing social networks (Mastadon's not quite as good as Twitter and Element is not as feature-rich as Discord). I really think it's as much of a UX problem as a technology problem and not enough decentralized projects have top-tier UX and UI talent to compete. Mirror (https://mirror.xyz/ https://mirror.xyz/) is an interesting Web3 alternative to Medium. I think they have gotten a lot of the elements right. Blog posts are backed up to Arweave perma-storage and they have easy point and click integration for crypto donations (with automatic splitting for multiple authors), NFT auctions, and crowdfunding. At any rate, I think decentralized social networks are still nascent and we haven't yet seen a break out success on the level of Discord or Twitter or Facebook, but I remain optimistic that it will come.
    • zaptheimpaler 5y ago
      For one, the author pointed out that Opensea NFTs are stored on the Google Cloud Platform, one of those trillion dollar monopolies. Proof of stake means the largest stakeholders can unilaterally reject transactions. Technically the chain could fork. Practically, convincing everyone to move to a new chain seems about as difficult as everyone moving off Facebook because a few people get banned. Proof of work means the richest people can afford more miners and completely control the chain. So where is the decentralization? The only realistic decentralization I can make out is that its possible to build alternative chains, but that very thing is possible today. Its possible to build an alternate payment processor or social network if Visa bans your business, the really hard part is building it and getting the entire ecosystem to actually use it.
  • JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
    You pay now by paying with your privacy. Someone makes great money by tracking you and selling it but it isn’t you.
    • nextaccountic 5y ago
      Web3 is even less private, since your stuff is stored in a public chain that can be deanonymized even years later.
      • mattwilsonn888 5y ago
        > Web3 is a grift. > I am openly ignorant of recent innovations and make statements demonstrating I believe they don't exist. Never change, HN.
        • nextaccountic 5y ago
          What do you mean?
    • ridethebike 5y ago
      not sure how web3 would solve any of that
      • JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
        https://oarex.com/industry-news/basic-attention-token/ https://oarex.com/industry-news/basic-attention-token/
  • echelon 5y ago
    > My main concerns with Web3 are that it is "pay to play" in many aspects and it's less democratic than the existing Internet. You could say that Web3 is WebBourgeoisie.
  • nicbou 5y ago
    Not only that, but the price is not adjusted to the local cost of living, making it more expensive to poorer nations. The payment gate isn't as high for every one. I can't justify an internet that hinders the free flow of information.
• Ambolia 5y ago
  I don't know, seems kind of a stretch to say crypto is decentralized because everybody uses the same protocol. Is the IP protocol centralized too by that standard? On the other side yeah, most of the goals of decentralization could be achieved by looking at things like the Bittorrent / Pirate / Scihub projects which have been delivering content consistently in a distributed way for decades. A blockchain is only necessary if you need an immutable history for some reason for a specific part of a process that you want to implement, but every other part of the process can live apart and work without any blockchain tech.
  • sergiomattei 5y ago
    I felt the same way… it’s arguing that cryptocurrency is not decentralized because there’s a general consensus on the protocol? By that measure, parent comment is right, IP isn’t decentralized either because we agreed on it?
  • errantmind 5y ago
    There are a lot of bullshit blockchain projects. That said, the reason tokens are tied to so many of these projects is to act as incentive and to quantify participation. There is no reason for people to, say, seed torrents aside from feeling good about sharing with other people. Financializing this process brings an incentive to participate in decentralized projects that otherwise would have no way to exist. Sure, most of the projects will fail and perhaps only existed in the first place to enrich the founders, but isn't that true of the startup space as well? The projects that succeed will succeed big, but I estimate we are still years away from an example that will be overwhelmingly convincing. By then most the profit will have been made and there will still be people on HN saying the whole cryptocurrency space is a scam. It is my opinion they are wrong, let history be the judge.
    • pharmakom 5y ago
      Funny that one of the most successful decentralised technologies (torrents) has no token for incentives.
      • 5y ago
• encryptluks2 5y ago
  Web3 is a marketing buzz word and nothing more. You can have a decentralized app but it is still probably going through at least one centralized gateway. Until everyone is running IPFS or something similar and people are going to want to host multiple copies like a torrent, then you'll be stuck paying for and hosting the only reliable copy. You're also going to have a lot of people building some censorship control to prevent users from distributing illegal content. Otherwise that first use for Web3 would be pirated content.
• Anon1096 5y ago
  I think this is a pretty weak article regarding web3. The author wants to claim Ethereum or Bitcoin are more centralized than HTTP, but that isn't a valid comparison. Anyone can spin up their own blockchain exactly in the same fashion of spinning up their own webserver. It's more comparable to something like AWS or Discord or Twitter. Now, I would still say the majority of all things developed on the blockchain are very centralized, from DAOs to NFTs to dApps. And I definitely agree that it's because they're mostly all cash grabs. But the articles being published every day criticizing the web3 world recently have been pretty terrible imo.
  • Findeton 5y ago
    I recommend looking into BSV, as you can store data on-chain for cents, but it looks like any comment mentioning it will get automatically moderated for some reason.
    • pcthrowaway 5y ago
      Ahh the blockchain created by the fraudster claiming to be Satoshi.
      • Findeton 5y ago
        Sure but have you looked into the technology?
        • lpcvoid 5y ago
          There is absolutely nothing worth looking at with regards to cryptocurrency/blockchain junk.
        • pcthrowaway 5y ago
          It's not bad, but it's proof of work which I'm not really interested in at this point.
  • Findeton 5y ago
    Also you can use BSV (Bitcoin Satoshi Vision) to store the whole images on-chain, literally for cents on the dollar. And yes, BSV also has smart contracts, just like the original Bitcoin did. 53% of all transactions happen in BSV, more than Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP together: https://bitinfocharts.com/cryptocurrency-charts.html https://bitinfocharts.com/cryptocurrency-charts.html
• r_hoods_ghost 5y ago
  The main issue with "Web3" is that it moves records of transactions from many private places to one public place. Sure this one place may not be controlled by a single entity, but it facilitates tracking at an unprecedented level. Cryptocurrencies are the ultimate example of this and are an absolute boon to tax collectors, forensic accountants and fraudsters. In our current economy financial transactions are recorded in millions of individual ledgers that are kept private, or in the case of cash transactions are often not recorded at all, or are not linked to an individual. There is no central ledger. With crypto currencies however you can not only see all transactions but also trace them back to individual users as long as you can link a wallet to a person. This is a massive increase in centralisation yet discussion of whether this is a good idea seems to be entirely missing. The notion that centralising transactions in one place is somehow an example of decentralisation just seems mad.
  • ericd 5y ago
    I’m not an expert, but my impression is that lightning makes this not so much the case - that payments are routed through a web of peer to peer nodes and they only do periodic net settlement on the public blockchains.
  • meowtimemania 5y ago
    I think of it as centralization in that all transactions will be stored in one “database”, but decentralized in that the database has millions of nodes and anyone can add their hardware as a node
    • phoe-krk 5y ago
      That's centralization, just replicated for redundancy.
      • theK 5y ago
        Not completely. The main difference between blockchain and classical banking is that the protocol defines what transaction can be done and the network of block producing nodes manages the evolution of its state. In classical banking you have multiple routes that go around the protocol (law in this case) and you also live in a federated feudal system where your bank reigns supreme in what you own.
• daraosn 5y ago
• RVuRnvbM2e 5y ago
  I think the author makes the mistake of assuming that web3 is a meaningful, tangible term being used in good faith. In reality, web3 is a marketing buzzword that cryptocurrency boosters have started promoting in an attempt to legitimize their resource intensive and otherwise useless financial speculation.
  • ThalesX 5y ago
    So if I just stop using web3 as a catch-all for the things I work on (i.e. IPFS, Crypto Wallets, Merkle Trees) and just start naming them one by one everything will be OK and it's not a marketing buzzword anymore? Or should I be aware that I am in fact only building marketing funnels even though I find value in the technology being built?
    • shrimpx 5y ago
      The problem with "web3" is it implies/its proponents claim that it's a successor to web 2.0. How does it make sense for this crypto "assettech" stuff to replace/supersede the current www stack? Naming it "web3" just comes off as a cheap attention grab.
      • udbhavs 5y ago
        From what I've read web3 creates a new stack in the sense that ENS is used instead of traditional domain names, public key cryptography replaces traditional auth, smart contracts replace application backends and the blockchain acts as the database storing assets, user generated content and profiles (with large or volatile data stored on IPFS).
        • davidmurdoch 5y ago
          I find it so strange that connecting the dots you described here is so hard for so many people.
          • acdha 5y ago
• senthilnayagam 5y ago
  web3 is not there yet but people are putting sincere efforts to get there. web3 is more open source than current centralised web, all contracts on blockchain can be read and forked, all coins are open source. forking coins, contracts, communities are all happening, new leaders emerge and consensus build, but new use case emerge where people and their motivations differs, the cycle of forking starts again. NFT content storage is not completely sorted out, many are now using IPFS, we need couple of more distributed alternatives.
  • ojkelly 5y ago
    Are we comparing web3 to FAANG or tcp/http/etc. As the article describes at a protocol level web3 is definitively not more open, it's more centralised as opens you to noisy neighbours. At the application level it may enable finance to be decentralised, but that's only a small part of the web.
  • tough 5y ago
    There's also Filecoin too from the IPFS Protocol Labs. Also arweave is looking interesting.
    • meltedcapacitor 5y ago
      From a cursory look Arweave is not looking interesting: it start with lies that it is censorship proof, but with a way to remove child porn and spam because lawyers, and then lies that a one time payment buys storage for eternity, of course not. I stopped looking for other lies from there. Really don't know why I bothered when there is the Andeersen Horowitz logo at the bottom of the page which tells you all you need to know, these guys would never fund anything that does not involve thinly disguised theft.
• beej71 5y ago
  It's amazing how much I can read about web3 and still be confused as to what problems it solves.
  • ojkelly 5y ago
    That's a feature to draw in more bag holders. The closer you look the more its value disappears.
  • mad182 5y ago
    Moving money upwards in the pyramid.
  • lkrubner 5y ago
    It solves the urgent problem of the terrible scarcity of venues for financial speculation in an era of low interest rates and almost 0% real interest rates. The economist Paul Krugman said that the cryptocurrencies had some of the same ballistics as gold, and gold does well when real interest rates are low, as people lack profitable investment opportunities and so they must seek increasingly aggressive and risky investments. The cryptocurrencies have the advantage over gold that they can claim to not be gold, nor any known thing, they can claim to be something completely new, with unknown dynamics. This allows for a certain amount of hype that simply wouldn't be possible for gold. And of course, in terms of ease of moving it around the planet, cryptocurrencies have some real advantages over gold, and therefore are probably stealing a lot of the risk taking that might have otherwise gone to gold.
  • danjac 5y ago
    It's best to heed Warren Buffet's advice to stay clear of investment opportunities you don't understand. I'm seeing people in tech who are way smarter and more knowledgeable than I'll ever be, scratching their heads around web3 trying to figure out if there's anything of value. If they don't get it, I'm not going to get it, which either means I'm not smart enough to invest time and money in it wisely (as per Buffet) or it's all smoke and mirrors around a giant MLM or Ponzi scheme to relieve lesser fools of their money.
• dudus 5y ago
  Crypto market is really sad. It's a novel technical solution. But it can't find a problem where it fits as a good alternative. It's not a good alternative to banks, art collections or web hosting. But Bitcoin is still worth billions, NFT are all the rage and Web3 went from new concept to "trend" in the span of what feels like a week. But even with all the success they don't seem to be convincing many they have any intrinsic value. So here we go again a clearly horrible solution to a problem most don't care about, but I'm sure will make some early adopters rich, and inevitably end in disaster for most.
  • sergiomattei 5y ago
    Yes, completely glossing over the usefulness of digital-native money: instant, verifiable transactions from anywhere in the world, programmable money and low fees. Oh, and how it disrupts the remittances industry, something extremely useful to vulnerable communities with families abroad. I agree that Web3 is mostly a grift, but cryptocurrencies are quite useful already.
    • discardedrefuse 5y ago
      It's not instant and the fees aren't always low. I was trying to transfer $10 USD in Bitcoin last May, when the BTC market was going insane, and it was impossible.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • emerongi 5y ago
        Additionally: can you make cryptocurrency transactions offline? In my opinion that is a crucial part of the "digital cash" idea. I don't know the technical details so it would be nice if someone more knowledgeable could answer. I'll even throw in a scenario that I've encountered: the card readers in a store aren't working, because there is a connection issue. Instead of using cash in my literal physical wallet, I'd like to pay with my digital wallet. Can I conduct my transaction offline with the store?
• hjorthjort 5y ago
  They're missing the point. The web already allows you to easily spin up a private network where you can set all the rules. Web2 was the cash grab based on the realization that if you can bring all these people under a network you control you can run the web. Web3 is about the meta-features people care about that brought them onto web2 -- shared state, a common truth, enforceable rules -- but putting them at the protocol level, out of the control of a single actor. That takes trade-offs. (If you know how to solve these issues without these trade-offs, let me know and let's build it!) The original web is still there, and it's still useful. So is web2. This is about building an alternative.
• yrral 5y ago
  Web3 is less centralized in that the user data is exposed and freely available to be composed upon. For example, when someone makes a deposit (say of ERC20 USDC to earn interest, around 3.0% currently) on https://compound.finance https://compound.finance, that data is freely available and the "receipt" becomes another token (the ERC20 USDC cToken). [1] This token can now be used for other things, on any other protocol, without the involvement of compound itself. For example, there is a "compound" pool on https://curve.fi https://curve.fi that allows users to deposit cTokens so that they can earn interest on their stablecoins while also providing liquidity for stablecoin swaps and earning swap fees as well on top. [2] In fact, with this pool, the user can deposit/withdrawal just pure ERC20 USDC instead and curve will deposit/withdrawal that into/from compound on behalf of the user, again, with no involvement of compound at all. (other than interacting with its "immutable" smart contract) This deposit then gives the user back another ERC20 token "cCrv" that can then be used in other DeFi protocols without the involvement or authorization of curve. At this point people are talking past each other because "centralization" can be used to refer to many things. The author's analogy is arguing about the direction/standardization of the technology, and the proponents of the technology are talking about the user data. [1] https://compound.finance/docs/ctokens https://compound.finance/docs/ctokens [2] https://curve.fi/compound https://curve.fi/compound
  • bpfrh 5y ago
    That is not exclusiv to web3 and is not new. If I buy a house, I can take a credit on that house. If I bought some stock, banks will let me take a loan on them afaik. I can also borrow some money and choose something expensive that I own for a collateral. Maybe crypto makes the last one easier, but then it will lead to a lot of fraud, because veryifing that the item I set as collateral is the difficult and expensive part.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • yrral 5y ago
      Sure, but that information today is gatekept quite well and impossible for you or me to pull or integrate without partnerships or paying up heavily. For example, plaid is a company worth 13.4b where largely all they do is log in to your financial accounts on behalf of another (usually financial) institution to scrape your account data. If you try doing that yourself, you will be blocked by the risk systems of the various banks. Other companies like mint and byallaccounts largely did the same thing and were aquired at $170 per account and $33 per account respectively. So obviously someone is making money on keeping your data gatekept.
• macrolime 5y ago
  The author thinks that to be decentralized, you should have your own chain. Holochain has one chain per app, more similar to what the author wants. It's not exactly a blockchain though. There are quite a few other non-blockchain projects in development also. Found an overview that shows non-blockchain projects. Not sure whether or not it's an accurate comparison of features, but it's the best of list I've found of alternative crypto technologies. https://i.postimg.cc/05RJqbYB/SN-Comparative-Analysis-v4-1-Inforgraphic-4-K.jpg https://i.postimg.cc/05RJqbYB/SN-Comparative-Analysis-v4-1-I...
• a-dub 5y ago
  peer to peer cryptocurrency networks are a weird corner case in open source software. they're open source and they're peer to peer... but they also form gigantic singletons that have applied cryptography level protocol strictness requirements. i think the argument that many are trying to make is that perhaps you could see more openness built upon these singletons. whether or not that is true remains to be seen.
• kangaroozach 5y ago
  Does IPFS and blockchain domains mitigate BGP risk?
  • easrng 5y ago
    BGP is about routing IP packets, not name resolution. In practice IPFS and your blockchain of choice will need IP connectivity.
• sebow 5y ago
  [This is not necessarily about web3] I've said it before, and it needs repeating: we >need< hardware solutions for creating decentralized networks: mesh-networks, fog networks, etc. So far the solutions realistically are null: there has to be a way for the average person to buy the hardware, create the network or join one, and then use it.Software-wise there are some promising protocols but obviously you >can't< be sure how good they are until they're put to the test.And we don't even need protocols that work 100%, given that nowadays one can theoretically use software that adapts to whatever the conditions of the hardware are.I refrain myself to use buzzwords here, but the software is more accessible and you don't even need 100% compatibility between all the protocols out there, as long as you get that respective data correctly between A and B. But there will not be any progress to any decentralized internet unless we get solutions to the average joe, the consumer, to do this.Obviously this is not in the interest of corporations, governments, and other entities that have control, but in the case of a disaster or collapse of a society, a change of regime towards a totalitarian state, what other viable solutions are besides hoping those in power will "bide by their principles"[assuming they exist]? That's why frankly any decentralization software-wise is good but quite useless at the same time, including web 3.0, including anything running on IP protocol or through an ISP that is governed by a state.You literally have to cut <=5 "internet cables" worldwide and you got rid of the internet to the vast majority of the planet.Yes Starlink exists but how many people use it and how resilient is it?
  • JofArnold 5y ago
    This is 100% true but even worse I think; a lot of people talk about blockchain being censorship-resistant... But what if Intel/AMD/Apple/NVIDIA are forced to have hardware blocks for specific wallet addresses for instance?
  • AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    Hardware to do this kind of thing is commercially available and some people are doing it, e.g.: https://www.nycmesh.net/ https://www.nycmesh.net/ The main problem is that unlicensed spectrum has limited range and most places don't have enough density to make it work when only <1% of the population is on the network. So it works in places like New York City. It requires a high enough density of people inclined to do this sort of thing. It could work elsewhere but it's kind of chicken and egg. For longer range there is still Ham Radio. Check if they give the ham radio exam at your local hackerspace.
• m00dy 5y ago
  I like to login web-apps using my wallet. I like to see things that I own in my wallet. I think we should give a chance to web3.
  • foepys 5y ago
    This is all possible today, no web3 required. Logins with client certificates were solved decades ago and "owning" items digitally is something many services can do for you, see Steam, Amazon Video, Apple iTunes etc. To get those services to give up control and put all their things into web3 is a pipedream.
    • colesantiago 5y ago
      > Logins with client certificates were solved decades ago Just because you claim it was ‘solved decades ago’ doesn’t mean it’s easier for the average joe. I find that wallet login is much easier, no fumbling around with ‘certificates’ required, and I even hate crypto.
      • emerongi 5y ago
        ...aren't certificates "crypto", just in the actual original meaning of the word?
        • exo762 5y ago
          Both of them are crypto in original meaning of the word. The difference - UX of wallet-based solutions is infinitely better that UX of browser-handled user certs.
    • m00dy 5y ago
      I want to own things I want to have permission-less world
• ojkelly 5y ago
  Web3 feels like the next grift after we caught on to ICO's. From the article: > The problem here is the profit motive: people who are working on web3 generally want to get paid for it, but it's fundamentally harder to extract rent from truly decentralized systems than it is from centralized ones. Because of that, people end up building systems that are centralized at their core, with some aesthetics of decentralization smeared on top, and call it web3. I remain curious that there are practical applications for blockchain outside digital gold style securities. But web3 feels like a land grab for the mindshare of the future. Trading off the philosophies that got us here, while subverting them with the very things the web fought against (centralisation, pay-to-play and so on). A big red flag is the level of complexity of web3 compared to say HTTP. I rarely see practitioners of web3 talking with clarity, instead hand waving and double-speak is far more common. Yes, sometimes the most exciting things are emergent, but it's been over a decade of the blockchain field of dreams and we're still talking in hypotheticals are what it will be good for. Gall's law seems more prescient than ever: > A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system. At the network layer tcp/ip/http are relatively simple compared to blockchain. At the application layer a web server/cloud is still simpler than a dApp. At the user layer a credit/debit card is still simpler than paying with crypto. To say nothing of the ecological impacts. You may think web3 is the future, but we cannot ignore the fact that http is greener. Yes, I know proof of stake will make crypto green but I'm not convinced it's possible [0]. [0] https://yanmaani.github.io/proof-of-stake-is-a-scam-and-the-people-promoting-it-are-scammers/ https://yanmaani.github.io/proof-of-stake-is-a-scam-and-the-...
  • post_below 5y ago
    The ecological problem is, in my opinion, what should lead the conversation. Climate change being what it is, we shouldn't even be considering technologies with carbon footprints as large as existing blockchains. In theory that problem is solvable, but in the present, it should be a deal breaker
    • xondono 5y ago
• nootropicat 5y ago
  The author doesn't understand the primary goal. It's precisely to have global consensus that proceeds according to its logic - so if you own something it can't be taken away from you. Everyone running their own private blockchains isn't decentralization, it's federalization. In the internet context, we know exactly how it would look like - initially an ecosystem of independent forums, each a fiefdom of the moderating caste, or subreddits on an alternative reddit that doesn't have global administration. Network effects would inevitably concentrate most activity to few hubs (which is how we ended with facebook, reddit, and twitter consuming the old internet of phpbb forums). Except instead of posts, now the new powers-that-be would have absolute control over people's wealth. What he in effect, unintentionally, proposes, is to give the equivalent of facebook absolute control over people's wealth. In fact facebook itself tried exactly that with Libra - but fortunately got shut down by governments. Honestly, I would prefer a state-run blockchain over the inevitable final form of his proposal. At least it would be regulated by actual laws instead of T&C that give the company near absolute power. There were crypto experiments of this type, most notably EOS. They had their own 'court' that ended up blacklisting dozens of addresses based on weak claims of theft. Eventually all DPoS networks are going to decay to something like that - because with just few publicly known validators escaping legal liability for not enforcing confiscation and freeze orders from real world courts is impossible. The scalability argument is true in isolation - everyone agrees it's currently a problem, but has nothing to do with centralization or not.
  • ojkelly 5y ago
    > The author doesn't understand the primary goal. It's precisely to have global consensus that proceeds according to its logic - so if you own something it can't be taken away from you. How is global consensus not centralisation though? Humans are notorious for disagreeing on everything. Having one global arbiter of truth/consensus seems implausible at best. Anything that could provide global consensus will need to be backed by something formed from a human brain. And our brains are not perfect. We keep updating code because we miss things. Who would maintain the system for global consensus? And how would they not just be our new rulers? As a perfect example you mention ownership as a feature of global consensus. What do you own with an NFT? Who enforces that ownership? What stops someone pirating an NFT image? Ultimately this screams of solving a people problem with a technical one. That never works. Not without strong co-operation of the people involved, and even then technology plays a very small role in the solution. > The scalability argument is true in isolation - everyone agrees it's currently a problem, but has nothing to do with centralization or not. It does in that a truly decentralised system inherently cannot suffer from the scaling problems cryptocurrencies have.
• CryptoPunk 5y ago
  Vitalik Buterin on different axes of centralization: https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentralization-a0c92b76a274 https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentrali... >>Ethereum is only decentralized in the way that doesn't matter — you're free to join the decentralized system, under the condition that you act in the exact same way as every other actor in that system. This is centralization of logic, that establishes uniformity of the protocol, but it is a decentralized configuration of power, where every party is subject to the same rules for accessing the blockchain. Fees are a limiting factor, but all data is treated the same with respect to fee calculation, irrespective of who submits it for inclusion in the blockchain.
• bellajbadr 5y ago
  These type of articles always lack a definition of what is decentralization! You can't evaluate a system if you don't define your metrics well
• euske 5y ago
  The discussions around web3 reminds me of the days when people were looking for a "killer app" for Web 2.0. Was there any? I don't remember much, but I don't think there was a single thing that stood out as "the" Web 2.0 app. I expect web3 to be more or less the same. A lot of buzz, not much material.
  • EtienneK 5y ago
    Wikipedia was the example most people pointed to. What is the web3 version?
  • paulgb 5y ago
    I don’t recall anyone looking for a killer web 2.0 app, because they already existed when the term was coined. Examples included Flickr and Wikipedia; YouTube came not long after. https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.ht...
  • root_axis 5y ago
    Web 2.0 was a post-hoc description of interactive web pages, there were no web 2.0 evangelists pushing web 2.0 as the future, it simply happened organically based on its own merit. The web3 movement is astroturfed by enthusiasts trying to make a buck.
    • denton-scratch 5y ago
      > it simply happened organically based on its own merit I think I agree with you. I'm not sure I agree with "organically", though - it happened almost instantly[0] when IE delivered XMLHttpRequest. It was irresistible because it was so useful. [0] By "almost instantly", I mean over about 6 months. By the time Firefox delivered XMLHttpRequest, AJAX was already everywhere.
  • cehrlich 5y ago
    If you define Web 2.0 as content being created by users and using AJAX or something similar to create interactivity on websites, then I'd say Web 2.0 was enormously successful - Facebook, Twitter, etc. fit that definition. I guess the big difference is that none of them got there by yelling from the rooftops, "Look at us, we're Web 2.0".
• disruptalot 5y ago
  Web3 is a highly ambigious term so there's no point discussing whether it's decentralized - it simply depends on what system you are referring to. For the sake of simplicity we stick to the authors main claim. That Ethereum is centralized. > while anyone can join the Ethereum or Bitcoin network, you can only join if you agree to follow the same protocol In which other protocol is this not the case? Can you communicate with a web page without using the protocol that it required? Furthermore, as blockchain protocols are all open source, they allow their network rules and data to be easily forked and run. This is not at all dissimilar to an example provided further that explains that anyone can run their own web network. > Ethereum is only decentralized in the way that doesn't matter — you're free to join the decentralized system, under the condition that you act in the exact same way as every other actor in that system. The opposite in fact. The author misses that Ethereum allows anyone to encode their own protocol into the network. Blockchain nodes, simply enforce that those rules are being adhered to by the participants. This is perhaps the only way that matters for what etheruem wants to do. Blockchains are not websites, their purpose is not to serve you data. The purpose is, given a pre existing set of rules - which anyone can code permanently into the blockchain, clients understand exactly in what way those states can transition, and are capable of executing the state transaction as equally as all other peers. Let's take a practical example. Say you want to publish torrent links. I hope I don't need to explain why dencetralisation matters and what propoerties you are looking for. If someone encodes a smart contract on Ethereum that allows anyone to submit a name, along with a torrent link but not able to delete it. In the Ethereum world, this protocol lives forever more. On the traditional web world, you will: - Have ISP, hosting provider take your website down - The web owner may decide to arbitrarily take down specific torrents or the application as a whole This is where decentralisation matters and what it means.
  • captn3m0 5y ago
    I’m very much interested in finding out the answer the “blockchain vs the DMCA” question. A node operator serving any copyright content (irrespective of it being served over HTTP or a DLT) is liable. What happens when Disney starts suing node operators? Your ISP still gets a notice right?
    • 5y ago
• neuroma 5y ago
  It's fascinating how on hacker news one typically finds detailed, reasoned and thoughtful comments. However on the topic of crypto and web3 the comments reliably degenerate into partisan tit for tat, consisting mainly of poorly researched, unreasoned sound bytes. It's a pity because I'd love to hear quality thought on the space. My personal view is that crypto and Web3 "are a thing" (Mean Girls) and will continue to be a thing. But the sector is very very new, and supercharged by capital, leading to tumerous horrors. People get burnt, robbed, and jealous, and it leads to nasty feelings. I find the space interesting and exciting, over all. Also massively frustrating of course. But I try to judge all things not by the worst cases of them (Daniel Dennet - I.e. cars are often good, they aren't always murder boxes). Looking at good examples also gives perspective on what work still needs to be done in the rest. Can someone recommend places to read or be involved in non partisan discussion about these topics?
  • CJefferson 5y ago
    To me, web3 is just the "tech bro" version of LuLaRoe or beany babies. There is plenty of thoughtful discussion of both, but none of it positive.
  • baxtr 5y ago
    I feel the same. There is only hate and despise for crypto. I’m also skeptical but I’d love to see a more nuanced discussion. To your question, I like https://www.rekt.news/ https://www.rekt.news/
  • vmception 5y ago
    People mostly email me about very specific topics. Nobody "still doing research™" about the broad topic of crypto is getting anywhere because they get bounced from the funnel immediately and paint the whole space with an equally as broad brush. Its decade 3 and this is where we are, so what do people really want to know? To me, there's lots of killer apps, to others I don't really care to debate any longer, who cares about "mainstream" when there's already 2-3 trillion dollars of value to attract to any product you release. It's not 2009 any more when most of this level of depth (or lack thereof) was relevant. I personally wouldn't know where to point you, and sadly its more likely you too will run into disillusioning use cases from your own exploration (or wind up in a cult to bolster an implementation that is going nowhere). For me, it's been more interesting to accept that no state of the these technologies is set in stone, that I can influence the future state, and that the monetary incentives to build and influence the future state are phenomenal. Better option than smugly exploiting myself at an adtech conglomerate, for less money. There is room for more specific things to be discussed, like if you look at the frontpage right now, there is a thread about "Deserializing JSON fast" or "A comparison of Rust and Zig". There could just as easily be discussions about "Solidity vs Vyper" or a thread every time a new version of one of those languages used in Ethereum Virtual Machines is out. Or node technology and processing transactions faster. Things that can inspire, but instead we just get these broad think pieces from wannabe angel investors and some influential VCs. As this is what makes it, it shows that this isn't the community to expect a deeper discussion right now.
• bg24 5y ago
  web3 is a marketing term. There are some problems to be solved. 1) Giving more $$ and ownership to media creator than curator (platform). 2) Faster and efficient financial transactions. 3) Improving online identity. These can be, and will be improved on incrementally from web2. If FB decides to pay more $$ to content creators and toggles the switch to better detect original content and give due credit, what is the business case for an equivalent web3 clone? The opportunity for new so-called web3 applications will be because of inertia on part of existing platforms.
• birracerveza 5y ago
  Wesley is complaining that people "are still using Discord"... as opposed to what? Stuff is being built. Right now everything is centralized, you have to give time for actual decentralized stuff to pop up and hopefully eventually replace old apps. That stuff takes time. Years, decades even. Also, I keep seeing the "yeah but you can just run a centralized database/private ledger though", but how about I DON'T NEED TO run a centralized database/ledger and just use the public decentralized one?
  • kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
    Matrix would probably be a better choice by now?
    • birracerveza 5y ago
      Probably, but everyone has a Discord account, so if you want actual users you essentially have to use Discord (yay centralization).
      • int_19h 5y ago
        It feels like switching from Discord to Matrix is an easier proposition than switching from whatever currency people are using to cryptocoins.
        • birracerveza 5y ago
          I don't understand this kind of comment. Why not just use both? You don't need to convert your whole networth into crypto, only in the currency you actually need: to use the (decentralized) service you need to buy the service's cryptocurrency. The end user is still paying for the service they use, but instead of being a "balance" on a private centralized database it's an actual balance on a public ledger. The only problem is that right now you need a wallet and to actually buy the token, but fiat on-ramps and wallets are getting better by the day, and the UX gap is closing. Eventually people will use "cryptocurrency" without even realizing it.
• kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
  "it's decentralized in that many people can join the network, but not decentralized in that people can't easily spin up their own networks that are separate from other peoples'" Maybe he missed how Amazon switched off Parler's servers, or Google and Apple started censoring Mastodon clients that did not exclude gab.ai? If you want to do anything that may be disliked by current authorities, it may not be that easy to spin up your own network.
• qaq 5y ago
  One issue with Web3 is that there are already decentralized solutions in many categories that Web3 will supposedly solve and yet they never really caught on. It just might be that general public really does not care about the decentralized part.
• rambambram 5y ago
  I'm not for or against, I just find it strange that stuff that already has a name (like blockchain, crypto, etc.) somehow needs another name or some new kind of umbrella name. I'm not for or against, because it's unclear what there is to be for or against. Web3 is nothing but an echo chamber. A very empty echo chamber, so it echoes pretty nice. I'm back to the world wide web. I've been designing and programming for the web and internet for a long time now, and I took one break of a couple of years in between. When I came back there suddenly was this 'cloud' thing. I kept looking for answers. What is this? What's new? And although I found snippets here and there that made sense (it was basically infrastructure based, I found), it took me years eventually to really realize it was nothing more than the internet I already knew, but then decorated with marketing speak and buzz words. I'm not opposed to new things, not even to new names, but I can sniff a name without meaning from miles away now. It looks like when big money is ready for the internet the whole thing needs a new name, the same now with blockchain, etc. So I find it kind of funny I guess, hearing the proponents and opponents of Web3 speak.
  • ur-whale 5y ago
    > I just find it strange that stuff that already has a name This is called marketing. Entire industries depend on it or even simply exist because of it. For a closer to home example, see Free Software (which scared businesses away because it had the word "free" in it) vs. Open Source (which made folks understand they could escape things like vendor lock-in)
    • rambambram 5y ago
      No, it's not. With marketing it's more clear where the message is coming from. With marketing it's more clear what the message itself even is. This is way more sinister, it's wordplay on a bigger level. Maybe call it public relations. Your examples miss my point. Your examples are clear enough and have an understandable meaning (once you know what it is). I stick with my comparison of 'the cloud' and 'web3', because they both were names before getting any significant meaning.
      • 5y ago
• basisword 5y ago
  The cynicism in these threads on this topic is really something. It seems to correlate with an overall change in mindset in the tech space (maybe driven by the younger generation?). I remember when startups and making lots of money was cheered on HN. A decade ago people would have been looking at the positives of this tech, figuring out how they could get involved and how they could make money and try to make it succeed. There was a much more optimistic atmosphere. It now seems that people making lots of money are reviled. It gels with the anti/post capitalism memes that are quite prevalent. I’m not judging this view (I often find myself swinging between capitalist views and socialist views and try not to strongly subscribe to either) but I think it explains the cynicism in these “crypto” threads.
  • rmsaksida 5y ago
    I disagree. I think the cynicism is there because the audience on HN is more aware of the technical aspects of crypto and thus has a better understanding of its flaws. The criticisms of web3 are legitimate, especially when it comes to the question of decentralization.
  • elevenoh 5y ago
    True. What's discussed & lauded on here is more zero sum & identity politics based than ever. Just like San Francisco. Sad to see.
• yosito 5y ago
  I too, believe that while blockchain technology holds a lot of promise, it is not fulfilling the purpose of decentralization, due in large part to so many transparent cash grabs. The current crypto craze is nothing more than a fancy gold rush. It will be interesting to see where blockchain technology ends up after the gold rush is over.
  • mattwilsonn888 5y ago
    Mate this is the third gold rush. Whether the price is up or down there are legitimate people working hard all the time; the ones who don't put all their energy into marketing.
  • dmead 5y ago
    Nowhere. It will end nowhere. If you want to build consensus or make sense of things then a first past the post vote on the truth isn't helpful. This is all entirely motivated by cash grabs and not an interest in developing useful things.
• Uptrenda 5y ago
  The name 'web3' has almost nothing to do with the world-wide web. The problem-space is focused on managing trust relationships (heavy focus on financial contracts but trust is so generic it extends to far more uses.) You can focus on infrastructure as part of that dynamic (decentralized platforms help build resilience), but its not the actual purpose of the tech. Comparing blockchain technology to the web misses the point of what is being built on top of new ledger technology.
• indigodaddy 5y ago
  Makes me wish it was 1985 again and all we had was the magic of our Atari 400s and C64s..
• Uptrenda 5y ago
  BTW: I see people being confused about what web3 even means. If I had to define it I'd say its the group of technologies and infrastructure that support 'decentralized applications.' The term probably comes from Ethereum where several layers are used to run an application: like 'decentralized DNS' (find an app), 'decentralized file storage' (stores front end code), 'business logic for the application' (blockchain), and so on. It's a powerful idea but it doesn't make sense to try write every app as a dapp. For example, there's probably no benefits to putting cat pics as a dapp and making them sharable in perpetuality. But a decentralized exchange could be useful.
• mattwilsonn888 5y ago
  > The problem here is the profit motive: people who are working on web3 generally want to get paid for it, but it's fundamentally harder to extract rent from truly decentralized systems than it is from centralized ones. Because of that, people end up building systems that are centralized at their core, with some aesthetics of decentralization smeared on top, and call it web3. There are a lot of dumb thoughts about web3 on HN; this is a valid criticism and it doesn't so obtusely assume that because web3 is new, it has grifters, and it has broken promises, that every issue arising from it is somehow unsolvable.
• fastball 5y ago
  The central premise of this article is that agreeing to use a protocol makes that protocol "centralized". This is nonsense, and so the rest of the article falls apart. Maybe the author is thinking of federation?
• ngcc_hk 5y ago
  We need both decentralised internet and decentralised web. Internet is an architecture issue. It was promised but not in real life. Due to isp and mobile intraf, like it or not, so easy to be firewall by national totalitarian country. Web is originally decentralised as long as the people want to. There is nothing controlled you you must go through Facebook. That can change say if Facebook sent data to china as of now. Frankly internet and web is still young. But we hope humanity can be free not bounded. Prometheus please.
• runeks 5y ago
  > If web3 people cared about decentralization, then starting a private ledger should be as easy as starting a private IP network, or even easier. Why would people want to start a "private ledger"? What's the use case? And how would it be meaningfully different from spinning up a private SQL database?
• ngcc_hk 5y ago
  Blockchain is horrible as it is totally logged and transparent for all. It is totally centralised from totalitarian country point of view. The security by covering up does not work for many, let alone you use this for web access. Think China every time you do any human work. Be free and not be bound. Totalitarian does not pay for humanity.
  • exo762 5y ago
    I agree with you on some level - blockchains have an financial information leakage problem that needs to be addressed. But the difference with legacy systems is not on the government level - you don't have ANY financial privacy from your government, and this is by design. There is difference however in that on blockchain you have no financial privacy from anyone (so from other government, including totalitarian ones, from moral busy-bodies, from criminals etc). There are some projects that try to address this. For payments that is (famously) Monero and ZCash. There is nothing in production for smart-contract-like capability ATM. But there are attempts to build such capability on top of ZEXE [0] paper and there is Aleph-Zero [1], which is unlikely to succeed (they bought DAG idea, and they will fail), but their research/code is likely to spawn better variants. [0]: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9152634/ https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9152634/ [1]: https://alephzero.org/ https://alephzero.org/
• jeroenhd 5y ago
  I'm still not 100% clear what web3 is supposed to be and why it's mostly advertised by cryptocurrency enthusiasts. We have IPFS and several projects like it, and web3 seems to be that but on a blockchain? What does crypto add to "web3"?
  • mattwilsonn888 5y ago
    I think some grassroots web3 people will agree with you, web3 is not simply about blockchain and IPFS would certainly be included in their definition. To answer your question, 'crypto' adds the ability to store valuable data trustlessly. This means any data for which there is profit in manipulating, user accounts, key-stores, accounting (obviously). In practice most of web3 should take place off chain - 'crypto' or blockchains are suited for the most important data. Its much like the difference between the foundation of the building and the interior - it may be easy to take for granted what you don't often see or interact with.
    • jeroenhd 5y ago
      Storing user information on be blockchain not only sounds unnecessary, it's also illegal in the EU. I get the advantage of blockchains and such for trading virtual currencies, but I'm still not sure why you'd need a public ledger to accomplish anything new that a standard PGP signature wouldn't already accomplish. Is the idea of web3 to put the entire internet on some kind of blockchain to replace HTTP? Wouldn't that be crazy inefficient?
      • mattwilsonn888 5y ago
        > Storing user information on be blockchain not only sounds unnecessary, it's also illegal in the EU. It's necessary for the most basic of blockchain functions; you cannot transact and have a coherent model of accounts without identifying users on chain, even if its done confidentially. Unless owning coins on a blockchain is illegal in Europe, you'll have to clarify. The extension of blockchain to store information other than account balance of the native chain is natural - so long as that information has comparable value to coins on the chain and you can justify it having all those properties. It's already massively useful for wrapped assets. If you can figure out how to make a crypto that only requires PGP keys then you've solved a massive problem about storing account balances or other information you would like to take on the properties of data on chain - congratulations. > Is the idea of web3 to put the entire internet on some kind of blockchain to replace HTTP? Wouldn't that be crazy inefficient? This comes up a lot. No. No serious, competent person in crypto has ever entertained putting the whole internet on the blockchain despite the being what many a skeptic retort. As I said earlier, as much should be off chain as possible, meaning either web2 or peer to peer access. When blockchains people use are a factor better at scaling this will include more and more data and uses. With current scaling and capital allocation (mostly in the slow, expensive Eth) the only businesses that can justify their existence on chain must offer some sort of monetary interest to their users. I'm sure you have a lot more questions and well reasoned doubts that many in the crypto space have realized and are working on, I enjoy chatting about this stuff but am going to cut myself off before I go too long. If you wanna chat more you can always DM me.
• jakupovic 5y ago
  The author is arguing if he were to use a different implementation of tcp/ip with the current web it would be the same as having his own chain, which is possible today, but completely meaningless as none would/could connect. Pretty pointless argument, the reasoning is just sad really.
• T3RMINATED 5y ago
• hbogert 5y ago
  All the arguments made can be made in the context of the internet as well. It is acknowledged at some places, but is then shoved aside with hand wavery counter arguments. I also don't understand the jab at gcp for honoring DMCA. You're always reliant on an ISP on some level, there's no real self hosting from the bottom up without having to play nice with other parties, in this example, honor DMCA.
• aiisahik 5y ago
  So many people complaining about web3 being: - more centralized - more controlled by VCs - less performant / reliable / secure than web2 These are probably all true for now. They failed to see the key features web3: 1. the possibility (but not guarantee) to operate in a hostile government / regulatory environment 2. the possibility (but not guarantee) to operate without a legal entity without shareholders / boards Web3 is not a guarantee of decentralization or security or anything else that people often mistakenly attribute to it. Web3 has one superpower in that it can say a huge FU to gov and FU to big tech. Web2 can't. That's it. It's ok to be disappointed by this superpower. But after reading "the Sovereign Individual", I am a believer in this superpower as being incredibly meaningful and impactful in the longer span of human civilization.
  • shrimpx 5y ago
    The problem with that superpower being the key thing is that only a small number of people care about it -- and actually run their own nodes, etc. The vast majority of the millions of users holding coins and NFTs hold them with middle men.
  • aflag 5y ago
    Isn't it harder to operate in a hostile government with a centralized ledger? Once the government somehow gets a hold of which wallets you use, they will be able to track down all your steps.
    • cassepipe 5y ago
      I don't about other block chains but that's a problem that Monero has (partially?) solved by tying transactions to two other wallets each transaction so that it is hard to follow your steps. Of course it doesn't solve all other blockchains problems but I would be curious to see it discussed more. The main criticism I have seen about it is that it allows criminality to move funds under the govts radar, which is not a criticism I'd brush off lightly but I don't how do you combine privacy and protection from govts.
      • 5y ago
• exo762 5y ago
  Very curious. I'll go point by point. > while anyone can join the Ethereum or Bitcoin network, you can only join if you agree to follow the same protocol that all the other nodes use. Just reiterated definition of the protocol. Absolutely irrelevant to decentralization topic. > The way this protocol is decided on is not exactly centralized, but it's not exactly decentralized either. Decentralization is not "I do whatever I want". It's "other people can't force their arbitrary will on me". > The entire blockchain world is focused on building systems for global consensus, but global consensus is a goal that is fundamentally at odds with the goal of decentralization. Once again complete confusion of terms. Global consensus is on question of property. Property is by definition a right to thing that excludes everyone else's rights to the thing. This you can't have two different opinions about ownership and be able to cooperate effectively. Thus - global consensus. This critique reminds me "blockchain + X" dynamic. You don't need blockchain if you are not talking about global consensus. You don't need blockchain for the use-case where HTTP is enough. > Ethereum is only decentralized in the way that doesn't matter — you're free to join the decentralized system, under the condition that you act in the exact same way as every other actor in that system. No! This way of decentralization matters a lot, since it deals with money. Go and read about people who got cut off the banking system as a result of political censorship. > I care about decentralization is primarily to avoid global failures Ethereum competes with banking system (global and local) and with great amount of other chains. Author problem is with notion of owneship / property, not with Ethereum. > If you're trying to run a DAO, why build it on Ethereum... ? Ethereum is a part of web3, not whole of web3. If you build your DAO on other chain, you will not have this problem. > It's much more damning to me that the fundamental technology these people choose — Ethereum and similar blockchains — is more centralized than the web. Author provides this claim while providing no evidence. And they even agree that blockchains are censorship resistant elsewhere in the text. I see no point in continuing. This article is a critique by a person who got a wind of some buzzwords and now think that they can contribute an insightful opinion.
  • kortex 5y ago
    Yeah the whole point about "everyone agrees on a protocol therefore it is centralized" is one hell of a strawman. Centralized means "some small number of entities can unilaterally decide to change the rules". Anyone can change the rules at any time and users can decide to follow or not. This is just a hard fork.
• d6a0r0t 5y ago
  What if I Set up a node with an independent protocol who has followed regulation and keep it up and all of us do the same.... Then WE- are web 3. Its only centralized if we ALL do not stay true and totally redesign!--usually for profit. Should we judge the chess board before we play? Believing decentralization promises are gone again then, Jojo? Dont believe scared billionaire news. They want you banking on CBDCs --and they cant get that until all of the threats (programmers contributing to HN) are full of disillussionment and quit dissenting and creating well designed decentralized blockchains. Get away from sold out Bitcoin and ETH and coinbase and the like. Node up with projects that are Designed for and Maintain Decentralizarion. My fav is Polkadot. Doing Our part by never working for or supporting sold out protocols is centralizations' threat. When CBDCs come around its free coins and those are going to be like zombie manna. Dont eat zombie manna. So node up. We still write the rules! Until its MUSK Web3, its still open game for us to make it-- ours. What are you here for anyway? Node up. Just pick an independent project thats adhereing to regulations. Below is proof of my argument. (view all for full effect) coindesk.com/markets/2016/01/30/how-to-save-bitcoins-node-network-from-centralization/ protocol.com/fintech/polkadot-ethereum-gavin-wood "Whether a blockchain is centralized or decentralized simply refers to the rights of participants on the ledger, and is therefore a question of design." https://www.finra.org/sites/default/files/2017_BC_Byte.pdf https://www.finra.org/sites/default/files/2017_BC_Byte.pdf
• pictur 5y ago
  web3 is a collection of nonsense that will make a group of rich people richer.
• d6a0r0t 5y ago
  It is my observation that the time good programmers spend validating (with full or master nodes) on projects designed to be decentralized can win web 3.0 in our favor with protocols that don't plan on selling out for profit.
• swalsh 5y ago
  He throws around the phrase "Other Blockchains" pretty casually, but then only focuses on Eth. Many of the problems in Ethereum are solved in Avalanche in my opinion. That's why I've heavily invested in it. Avalanche is already PoS, it can support a high transaction rate (estimated >4500 tps), and it has something called SubNets, which is the secret sauce. Subnets can have custom vm's for example. The idea of an application moving to a custom subnet is you can horizontally scale, customize, and future proof itself.
• gumby 5y ago
  > but global consensus is a goal that is fundamentally at odds with the goal of decentralization. I’ve long fantasized that machines should “evolve” the network protocols they use to communicate. Parts of packet protocols they never use to communicate might gradually be dropped while common higher level portions always needing to be used might migrate lower. Of course more “formal” protocol specification would still be used when communicating with strangers. In this it would be like the specialized jargon interest groups adopt.
  • kortex 5y ago
    That is certainly a cool idea, but how would a system like that cope with getting "wires crossed"? The nice thing about standard protocols (a form of consensus) is that there is a schema and at least at the transport level, there are no unambiguous values. Without consensus, you have the risk of party A saying something, and party B interprets it in a different way than intent.
    • gumby 5y ago
      The machines would handle such problems the same way humans do. This approach would be handy for extremely bandwidth- and power-constrained environments, i.e. actual IoT.
• quantum_mcts 5y ago
  So the argument starts with a (rather bizarre) claim that blockchains are centralized because one have to use the protocol that the rest of the network is using. The argument goes on with an attempt to contrast blockchains with the "web as it exists" and claim that one can "speak whatever protocol you want" in it -- with a caveat that "one have to put significant work" to convince others to use it. It is quite ironic that author is basically explains the concept of a hard fork [1] while never even mentioning those. Most likely because he is not familiar with basic blockchain concepts. Or, to put it more bluntly, has no idea what he is talking about. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(blockchain) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(blockchain)
  • notpachet 5y ago
    I agree that there's a little confusion in the article regarding the role of protocols in the decentralization equation. That said, I do think the larger point (global consensus protocols are just another form of centralization) is valid and worth discussing.
    • quantum_mcts 5y ago
      > I agree that there's a little confusion No - that's not a "little confusion". It is almost total lack of knowledge of the subject at hand. So many concrete examples by the author are not valid. Changes and forks in blockchain protocols happen all the time. You can start your own local blockchain in your own private IP subnet or whatever. You can create your own private ledger on the global net in less than a minute [1]. [1]: https://vittominacori.github.io/erc20-generator/ https://vittominacori.github.io/erc20-generator/
    • arbol 5y ago
      You could say that this new form of centralisation has the potential to allow governance systems that breakaway from, modify or usurp nation States. All of it being economically incentivised. This is pretty interesting IMO.
• elevenoh 5y ago
  This is a static, no-innovation lens through which to view the world/web. The future has always belonged to bold creators. Not pessimistic, static-lens detractors.
  • notpachet 5y ago
    The future belongs to all of us, it's just a question of which kind of future is equitable for the largest subset of the human population. One person's acceptable externalities could constitute their neighbor's breaking point. It's fine to say that creation and innovation are Good Things, all else being equal. But we need to ensure that the externalities of new creations are justified in light of the social good they bring.
• chx 5y ago
  The problem with web3 is not that it's centralized -- that's irrelevant. The fundamental problem with all crypto"currencies" is as follows: the world uses real currencies and there is only one way this enters into the world of crypto"currencies": by someone selling a coin to someone else. Thus, regardless of what crypto"currency" we are talking about, it would be a zero sum game if not for transaction fees. However, with transaction fees it becomes a scam because there's a set of players who are guaranteed to win and there's another set of players who, en masse, are guaranteed to lose. It utterly doesn't matter what you do with your crypto"currency", this is the underpinning scam of it. And once you entered the game, the only way for you to not lose money is to find a greater fool who will take over your crypto"currency", everyone who owns some becomes a proponent of it. It's an ingenious scam. And no, nothing in the real world is like this. In the real world, the amount of currency increases when a bank extends a loan which then creates more value by such things as being using as capital, allowing you to enjoy a home now instead of decades later and so forth. Also, stocks are not a zero sum game -- companies actually create value and so forth.
  • btdmaster 5y ago
    Though I generally agree with the sentiment, there is one significant use case -- transferring money across country borders. Currently, transaction fees on cash transactions are much much higher than they are on cryptocurrencies (maybe except bitcoin) and so this would mean that, in theory, they could be used as a way to transfer goods across country borders.
    • chx 5y ago
      This doesn't change the scam nature of the underpinning mechanism. As I said: it doesn't matter what you do with your coin.
      • pibechorro 5y ago
    • thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
• cranx 5y ago
  The problem is that everyone assumes crypto is some type of panacea. People keep saying transparency and distributed as keys words to engender an idea. People are believing the idea, but I’m skeptical the idea can “walk the walk.” Could you show my grandmother how to see the transactions on the block chain easily for any crypto? IMHO Web3 is more of an idea people are using to profit than a real thing to create equality.
• echopurity 5y ago
• withinboredom 5y ago
  The only value I see with crypto and web3 is when we finally leave the earth and transactions need to be reconciled over billions of kms. Before then, it really doesn’t have much value. IOW, each planet or system would have its own fork. A “Wild West” scenario is the only time this kind of tech really makes sense.
• squabble 5y ago
  It's about fixing asymmetries of information and control. It's not necessarily about "centralized" vs "decentralized".
• theK 5y ago
  > The entire blockchain world is focused on building systems for global consensus, but global consensus is a goal that is fundamentally at odds with the goal of decentralization. This whole article starts by missunderstanding logical and operational decentralization. Blockchain tech succeeds in allowing developers that don't know each other come to a consensus about how a financial system should work (logical centralization) and then operate an instance of that in a completely trust less, participatory environment (complete operational decentralization). This is "works as intended" and explicitly good. It shows that consensus on what is right can be achieved over an anonymous internet. Based on that, I'd say improbable that anything insightfull remains inside this article.
• stickyribs 5y ago
  Laughs into my millions of dollars of investment earnings. In all seriousness, I do get a wiff of traditionalists complaining about an emerging change that isn’t a straightforward understanding. Take Tesla short sellers for example: they just can’t contain their frustration for all the billions they lost over the past years and love to tell everyone about it and the haters come out in droves with theory of X and Y but no real theory is proven without s proper set of experiments. We’ll be playing the crypto experiment for decades.
• arcadeparade 5y ago
  https://cobie.substack.com/p/wtf-is-web3 https://cobie.substack.com/p/wtf-is-web3
• indoor_fern 5y ago
  Built on centralization but the centralized platforms only offer NFT speculation and take a huge fee. I’ll get to the “only offer speculation” in a minute. First, a huge part of NFTs’ fundamental value is people perceiving these things as valuable, ownable, rights-assigning assets, but how much would this be true if there wasn’t OpenSea? Simply because one can look up and see them on OpenSea gives NFTs value. If OS went down for an extended period, top NFT collections would drop in value. Also the only platforms that can exist at this point are JPEG “trading” platforms like OpenSea simply because speculation is the only thing that's profitable, and because there isn’t yet any legal precedent allowing real assets to be traded using ERC721. I mean, yeah someone can try to put their deed on IPFS but what happens when something like this hits a snag and has to head to court? The fact that no one can convincingly say a judge would side with the ledger is a huge, and the reason NFT use cases are stuck in casino mode.
• ca98am79 5y ago
  Handshake, to me, is an example of a better version than the current version of the web. I would rather have a decentralized root zone on a blockchain than a centralized root zone controlled by ICANN. This fixes a lot of problems, including no need to trust certificate authorities. Others may not agree and would rather it be centralized and controlled by ICANN. But you can't deny that it is more decentralized to have the root zone on the Handshake blockchain.