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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

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.
- chrisco255 5y ago
  Opensea uses Google as a caching layer. NFTs on OpenSea can either be created by going through their centralized, counterfactual layer (which doesn't cost gas until someone purchases) or by deploying your own ERC721 smart contract to Ethereum or Polygon and hosting the content however you like. If you follow the ERC721 standard, you can take that NFT to any web store. It is not limited to OpenSea, even if that happens to be the most popular at this time. > 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. On a POW system such as Bitcoin or ETH1, you'd need 51% or more of the hash power on the network, which is more than a hundred Google datacenters worth of hashpower, and you'd have to spend a vast amount of energy in order to execute the attack, and at the end of it all, the community would mount a fork and initiate a change that left your attack out of history. It is quite difficult to coordinate a vast amount of people to fork a major chain and have that fork be recognized as the New Bitcoin or the New Ethereum. That is where the decentralization comes in and where the guarantees of execution comes in. Blockchains are protected by cryptography and economics (game theory) as well as social consensus. From V. Buterin: "Theoretically, a majority collusion of validators may take over a proof of stake chain, and start acting maliciously. However, (i) through clever protocol design, their ability to earn extra profits through such manipulation can be limited as much as possible, and more importantly (ii) if they try to prevent new validators from joining, or execute 51% attacks, then the community can simply coordinate a hard fork and delete the offending validators’ deposits. A successful attack may cost $50 million, but the process of cleaning up the consequences will not be that much more onerous than the geth/parity consensus failure of 2016.11.25. Two days later, the blockchain and community are back on track, attackers are $50 million poorer, and the rest of the community is likely richer since the attack will have caused the value of the token to go up due to the ensuing supply crunch. That’s attack/defense asymmetry for you. [1]" [1] https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/a-proof-of-stake-design-philosophy-506585978d51 https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/a-proof-of-stake-design-p...
paulgb 5y ago
The underpinnings of the web are effectively decentralized; I can host a blog for a nominal monthly fee and have a bunch of hosts competing for my business. It’s only become centralized because we’ve allowed our attention to become centralized, and given it all to twitter/facebook/etc. We’re already seeing the same thing happen in web3. OpenSea can (and does) remove NFTs from its marketplace if it wants to. Like the web, there are other markets you can use, and you could even permissionlessly start your own, but you’d be giving up the attention that comes from using an established platform.
mattlondon 5y ago
> Web3 has decentralization, freedom of speech, anti-gatekeeping, permissionlessness and inclusiveness, at its core. We already have all of that in the existing web infrastructure, and have had it since the very beginning. I can spin up a HTTP server on a raspberry pi running in my basement right now and anyone on the internet can access it for free and without any hinderence. With web3 there is gatekeeping and centralisation as I cannot spin up my own server any more without buying crypto and then paying someone on a centralised database just so that I can do everything I could do before for free on my own.
- chrisco255 5y ago
  > With web3 there is gatekeeping and centralisation as I cannot spin up my own server any more without buying crypto and then paying someone on a centralised database just so that I can do everything I could do before for free on my own. Web3 includes all of the previous web technologies and adds optional layers on top. It is a superset of all web tech. You can totally setup an HTTP server on a Raspberry Pi, that's totally still Web3, but good luck building a truly scalable multi-million user application and competing with AWS on that. If your app is such that it relies on user-generated content, it wouldn't be Web3 for you to host it exclusively on your Pi, because the users generating the content would not own it, or have guarantees that the data on the Pi was not being manipulated or misused by you. The key idea of Web3 is user ownership and community ownership. > With web3 there is gatekeeping and centralisation as I cannot spin up my own server any more without buying crypto and then paying someone on a centralised database just so that I can do everything I could do before for free on my own. You can set up your stack however you like. You don't even have to be using cryptocurrency for payments to be "Web3". You could, for example, allow someone to login with their Ethereum wallet and use their ENS domain name as a username in your chat app rather than adding Google Auth. That doesn't even require a transaction on the blockchain, it's just verifying a cryptographic signature.
  - root_axis 5y ago
    > allow someone to login with their Ethereum wallet and use their ENS domain name as a username in your chat app rather than adding Google Auth You're basically describing OpenID, which predates cryptocurrency by several years.
root_axis 5y ago
> Web3 has decentralization, freedom of speech, anti-gatekeeping, permissionlessness and inclusiveness, at its core. No, web3 has "make as much money as possible" at its core - any of those other tertiary values are expendable in the name of getting rich. The trillion dollar companies also only care about getting rich, but they at least produce useful products, unlike the cryptocurrency ecosystem which is overwhelmingly made up of scams and vaporware.
- chrisco255 5y ago
  No, it doesn't. That's a narrative you are imposing in your own head based on dubious surface-level analysis despite being hugely unfamiliar with the space.
kortilla 5y ago
Dominated but not controlled. You can still run your own mail server, websites, etc all without depending on any FAANG infra.
brightstep 5y ago
This is a real problem that will not, and can not, be solved by Web3. The power of corporate tyranny extends beyond the technological realm. It is political, cultural, and economic to name a few. You simply can't meaningfully challenge that with a technology alone.

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.

chrisco255 5y ago
Opensea uses Google as a caching layer. NFTs on OpenSea can either be created by going through their centralized, counterfactual layer (which doesn't cost gas until someone purchases) or by deploying your own ERC721 smart contract to Ethereum or Polygon and hosting the content however you like. If you follow the ERC721 standard, you can take that NFT to any web store. It is not limited to OpenSea, even if that happens to be the most popular at this time. > 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. On a POW system such as Bitcoin or ETH1, you'd need 51% or more of the hash power on the network, which is more than a hundred Google datacenters worth of hashpower, and you'd have to spend a vast amount of energy in order to execute the attack, and at the end of it all, the community would mount a fork and initiate a change that left your attack out of history. It is quite difficult to coordinate a vast amount of people to fork a major chain and have that fork be recognized as the New Bitcoin or the New Ethereum. That is where the decentralization comes in and where the guarantees of execution comes in. Blockchains are protected by cryptography and economics (game theory) as well as social consensus. From V. Buterin: "Theoretically, a majority collusion of validators may take over a proof of stake chain, and start acting maliciously. However, (i) through clever protocol design, their ability to earn extra profits through such manipulation can be limited as much as possible, and more importantly (ii) if they try to prevent new validators from joining, or execute 51% attacks, then the community can simply coordinate a hard fork and delete the offending validators’ deposits. A successful attack may cost $50 million, but the process of cleaning up the consequences will not be that much more onerous than the geth/parity consensus failure of 2016.11.25. Two days later, the blockchain and community are back on track, attackers are $50 million poorer, and the rest of the community is likely richer since the attack will have caused the value of the token to go up due to the ensuing supply crunch. That’s attack/defense asymmetry for you. [1]" [1] https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/a-proof-of-stake-design-philosophy-506585978d51 https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/a-proof-of-stake-design-p...

paulgb 5y ago

The underpinnings of the web are effectively decentralized; I can host a blog for a nominal monthly fee and have a bunch of hosts competing for my business. It’s only become centralized because we’ve allowed our attention to become centralized, and given it all to twitter/facebook/etc. We’re already seeing the same thing happen in web3. OpenSea can (and does) remove NFTs from its marketplace if it wants to. Like the web, there are other markets you can use, and you could even permissionlessly start your own, but you’d be giving up the attention that comes from using an established platform.

mattlondon 5y ago

> Web3 has decentralization, freedom of speech, anti-gatekeeping, permissionlessness and inclusiveness, at its core. We already have all of that in the existing web infrastructure, and have had it since the very beginning. I can spin up a HTTP server on a raspberry pi running in my basement right now and anyone on the internet can access it for free and without any hinderence. With web3 there is gatekeeping and centralisation as I cannot spin up my own server any more without buying crypto and then paying someone on a centralised database just so that I can do everything I could do before for free on my own.

chrisco255 5y ago
> With web3 there is gatekeeping and centralisation as I cannot spin up my own server any more without buying crypto and then paying someone on a centralised database just so that I can do everything I could do before for free on my own. Web3 includes all of the previous web technologies and adds optional layers on top. It is a superset of all web tech. You can totally setup an HTTP server on a Raspberry Pi, that's totally still Web3, but good luck building a truly scalable multi-million user application and competing with AWS on that. If your app is such that it relies on user-generated content, it wouldn't be Web3 for you to host it exclusively on your Pi, because the users generating the content would not own it, or have guarantees that the data on the Pi was not being manipulated or misused by you. The key idea of Web3 is user ownership and community ownership. > With web3 there is gatekeeping and centralisation as I cannot spin up my own server any more without buying crypto and then paying someone on a centralised database just so that I can do everything I could do before for free on my own. You can set up your stack however you like. You don't even have to be using cryptocurrency for payments to be "Web3". You could, for example, allow someone to login with their Ethereum wallet and use their ENS domain name as a username in your chat app rather than adding Google Auth. That doesn't even require a transaction on the blockchain, it's just verifying a cryptographic signature.
- root_axis 5y ago
  > allow someone to login with their Ethereum wallet and use their ENS domain name as a username in your chat app rather than adding Google Auth You're basically describing OpenID, which predates cryptocurrency by several years.

root_axis 5y ago

> Web3 has decentralization, freedom of speech, anti-gatekeeping, permissionlessness and inclusiveness, at its core. No, web3 has "make as much money as possible" at its core - any of those other tertiary values are expendable in the name of getting rich. The trillion dollar companies also only care about getting rich, but they at least produce useful products, unlike the cryptocurrency ecosystem which is overwhelmingly made up of scams and vaporware.

chrisco255 5y ago
No, it doesn't. That's a narrative you are imposing in your own head based on dubious surface-level analysis despite being hugely unfamiliar with the space.

kortilla 5y ago

Dominated but not controlled. You can still run your own mail server, websites, etc all without depending on any FAANG infra.

brightstep 5y ago

This is a real problem that will not, and can not, be solved by Web3. The power of corporate tyranny extends beyond the technological realm. It is political, cultural, and economic to name a few. You simply can't meaningfully challenge that with a technology alone.