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.<p>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.<p>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.
The problem with web3 is not that it's centralized -- that's irrelevant.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
I think the author makes the mistake of assuming that web3 is a meaningful, tangible term being used in good faith.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
Web3 feels like the next grift after we caught on to ICO's.<p>From the article:<p>> 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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>Gall's law seems more prescient than ever:<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>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].<p>[0] <a href="https://yanmaani.github.io/proof-of-stake-is-a-scam-and-the-people-promoting-it-are-scammers/" rel="nofollow">https://yanmaani.github.io/proof-of-stake-is-a-scam-and-the-...</a>
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.<p>I'm not for or against, because it's unclear what there is to be for or against.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>So I find it kind of funny I guess, hearing the proponents and opponents of Web3 speak.
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.<p>It's a pity because I'd love to hear quality thought on the space.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Can someone recommend places to read or be involved in non partisan discussion about these topics?
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?<p>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.<p>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.
So many people complaining about web3 being:<p>- more centralized<p>- more controlled by VCs<p>- less performant / reliable / secure than web2<p>These are probably all true for now.<p>They failed to see the key features web3:<p>1. the possibility (but not guarantee) to operate in a hostile government / regulatory environment<p>2. the possibility (but not guarantee) to operate without a legal entity without shareholders / boards<p>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.<p>That's it.<p>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.
Web3 is less centralized in that the user data is exposed and freely available to be composed upon.<p>For example, when someone makes a deposit (say of ERC20 USDC to earn interest, around 3.0% currently) on <a href="https://compound.finance" rel="nofollow">https://compound.finance</a>, that data is freely available and the "receipt" becomes another token (the ERC20 USDC cToken). [1]<p>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 <a href="https://curve.fi" rel="nofollow">https://curve.fi</a> 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)<p>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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://compound.finance/docs/ctokens" rel="nofollow">https://compound.finance/docs/ctokens</a><p>[2] <a href="https://curve.fi/compound" rel="nofollow">https://curve.fi/compound</a>
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.
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.<p>For the sake of simplicity we stick to the authors main claim. That Ethereum is centralized.<p>> while anyone can join the Ethereum or Bitcoin network, you can only join if you agree to follow the same protocol<p>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.<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>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:<p>- Have ISP, hosting provider take your website down<p>- The web owner may decide to arbitrarily take down specific torrents or the application as a whole<p>This is where decentralisation matters and what it means.
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.
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.
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 <i>you</i> 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.
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.<p>Maybe the author is thinking of federation?
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.
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.
> If web3 people cared about decentralization, then starting a private ledger should be as easy as starting a private IP network, or even easier.<p>Why would people want to start a "private ledger"? What's the use case?<p>And how would it be meaningfully different from spinning up a private SQL database?
[This is not necessarily about web3]<p>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.<p>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]?<p>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?
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?<p>What does crypto add to "web3"?
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.<p>It will be interesting to see where blockchain technology ends up after the gold rush is over.
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....<p>Then WE- are web 3.<p>Its only centralized if we ALL do not stay true and totally redesign!--usually for profit.<p>Should we judge the chess board before we play?<p>Believing decentralization promises are gone again then, Jojo?<p>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.<p>Get away from sold out Bitcoin and ETH and coinbase and the like.<p>Node up with projects that are Designed for and Maintain Decentralizarion. My fav is Polkadot.<p>Doing Our part by never working for or supporting sold out protocols is centralizations' threat.<p>When CBDCs come around its free coins and those are going to be like zombie manna. Dont eat zombie manna.<p>So node up. We still write the rules!<p>Until its MUSK Web3, its still open game for us to make it-- ours.<p>What are you here for anyway?<p>Node up. Just pick an independent project thats adhereing to regulations.<p>Below is proof of my argument.
(view all for full effect)<p>coindesk.com/markets/2016/01/30/how-to-save-bitcoins-node-network-from-centralization/<p>protocol.com/fintech/polkadot-ethereum-gavin-wood<p>"Whether a blockchain is centralized or decentralized
simply refers to the rights of participants on the ledger, and
is therefore a question of design."<p><a href="https://www.finra.org/sites/default/files/2017_BC_Byte.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.finra.org/sites/default/files/2017_BC_Byte.pdf</a>
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
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.<p>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.
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.
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.
> but global consensus is a goal that is fundamentally at odds with the goal of decentralization.<p>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.<p>In this it would be like the specialized jargon interest groups adopt.
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.<p>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?
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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>In fact facebook itself tried exactly that with Libra - but fortunately got shut down by governments.<p>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.<p>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.<p>The scalability argument is true in isolation - everyone agrees it's currently a problem, but has nothing to do with centralization or not.
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.<p>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.
Very curious. I'll go point by point.<p>> 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.<p>Just reiterated definition of the protocol. Absolutely irrelevant to decentralization topic.<p>> The way this protocol is decided on is not exactly centralized, but it's not exactly decentralized either.<p>Decentralization is not "I do whatever I want". It's "other people can't force their arbitrary will on me".<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>> I care about decentralization is primarily to avoid global failures<p>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.<p>> If you're trying to run a DAO, why build it on Ethereum... ?<p>Ethereum is a part of web3, not whole of web3. If you build your DAO on other chain, you will not have this problem.<p>> It's much more damning to me that the fundamental technology these people choose — Ethereum and similar blockchains — is more centralized than the web.<p>Author provides this claim while providing no evidence. And they even agree that blockchains are censorship resistant elsewhere in the text.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(blockchain)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(blockchain)</a>
> 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.<p>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).<p>This is "works as intended" and explicitly good. It shows that consensus on what is right can be achieved over an anonymous internet.<p>Based on that, I'd say improbable that anything insightfull remains inside this article.
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.
> 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.<p>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.
Laughs into my millions of dollars of investment earnings.<p>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.<p>We’ll be playing the crypto experiment for decades.
We need both decentralised internet and decentralised web.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Frankly internet and web is still young. But we hope humanity can be free not bounded.<p>Prometheus please.
Handshake, to me, is an example of a better version than the current version of the web.<p>I would rather have a decentralized root zone on a blockchain than a centralized root zone controlled by ICANN.<p>This fixes a lot of problems, including no need to trust certificate authorities.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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.”<p>Could you show my grandmother how to see the transactions on the block chain easily for any crypto?<p>IMHO Web3 is more of an idea people are using to profit than a real thing to create equality.
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.<p>Think China every time you do any human work. Be free and not be bound. Totalitarian does not pay for humanity.
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.
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.<p>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.
<a href="https://i.postimg.cc/05RJqbYB/SN-Comparative-Analysis-v4-1-Inforgraphic-4-K.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.postimg.cc/05RJqbYB/SN-Comparative-Analysis-v4-1-I...</a>
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?).<p>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.<p>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.
"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'"<p>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.
Vitalik Buterin on different axes of centralization:<p><a href="https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentralization-a0c92b76a274" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentrali...</a><p>>>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.<p>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.<p>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.
This is a static, no-innovation lens through which to view the world/web.<p>The future has always belonged to bold creators. Not pessimistic, static-lens detractors.
web3 is a marketing term. There are some problems to be solved.<p>1) Giving more $$ and ownership to media creator than curator (platform).<p>2) Faster and efficient financial transactions.<p>3) Improving online identity.<p>These can be, and will be improved on incrementally from web2. If FB decides to pay more $$ 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?<p>The opportunity for new so-called web3 applications will be because of inertia on part of existing platforms.
web3 is not there yet but people are putting sincere efforts to get there.<p>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.<p>NFT content storage is not completely sorted out, many are now using IPFS, we need couple of more distributed alternatives.