Why Decentralization Matters (2018)
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Why Decentralization Matters (2018)
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Re: Why Decentralization Matters (2018)
#2(2018)
Meanwhile, PeerTube v4 release candidate is out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29390312.
Re: Why Decentralization Matters (2018)
#3Decentralization is good, but there's no need to bring cryptojunk into the discussion since that's far from decentralized. IMHO.
Bring back the use of open protocols, add IPv6 support throughout and add a sprinkling of peer-to-peer.
Re: Why Decentralization Matters (2018)
#4nah, I don't buy this. Education matters. Let the folks educate on how to spin up their own website on a VPS. Let folks educate how to subscribe via rss or websub and get notifications. Let folks educate how to add "donate me" button on their website.
Instead, people are educated on how to use useless NFT's and how to burn their time trading air on binance. Web3.0 is the definition of vanity.
All of the tools required for freedom are there. You just need to have the honesty and willingness to use them. Instead everybody waits for some web3.0 magic, which will make everybody rich.
Edit: typos
Re: Why Decentralization Matters (2018)
#5Decentralization is good, but there's no need to bring cryptojunk into the discussion since that's far from decentralized. IMHO. Bring back the use of open protocols, add IPv6 support throughout and add a sprinkling of peer-to-peer.
Exactly.
If payments / incentives are required, then Bitcoin can be used. For example, there's decentralized Sphinx Chat which runs on the Bitcoin lightning network: https://sphinx.chat
I haven't seen any of the 'cryptojunk' tokens implement an actual service like the Sphinx chat, which is quite telling in my opinion.
Re: Why Decentralization Matters (2018)
#6The points about centralized power make sense, but why http, smtp, and social media became centralized in the first place wasn’t grappled with at all.
Running your own servers is attractive for some, but they aren’t the majority and never will be unless it requires something as simple as buying a $35 box and plugging it in at home with no additional setup. Social media is hard to accomplish without a centralized discovery server. See Torrents before they figured out a mechanism or Matrix.
The author didn’t address these forces driving web content to centralized platforms, and web3 isn’t likely to avoid the same incentive structure from what I can tell. Bitcoin and Ethereum both have significant centralization problems for how people use them. More wallets are in Coinbase and other central providers than are run privately. Mining power is centralized among a small population as well. Even current crypto is driving toward centralization to get new people onto the technology, so how do you prevent it in web3?
Re: Why Decentralization Matters (2018)
#7Decentralization is good, but there's no need to bring cryptojunk into the discussion since that's far from decentralized. IMHO. Bring back the use of open protocols, add IPv6 support throughout and add a sprinkling of peer-to-peer.
Exactly. If payments / incentives are required, then Bitcoin can be used. For example, there's decentralized Sphinx Chat which runs on the Bitcoin lightning network: https://sphinx.chat I haven't seen any of the 'cryptojunk' tokens implement an actual service like the Sphinx chat, which is quite telling in my opinion.
No. It cannot. Bitcoin cannot be used, because the rate of transactions is much to low for such an application. Currently its only use is gambling and burning the planet.
Re: Why Decentralization Matters (2018)
#8The points about centralized power make sense, but why http, smtp, and social media became centralized in the first place wasn’t grappled with at all. Running your own servers is attractive for some, but they aren’t the majority and never will be unless it requires something as simple as buying a $35 box and plugging it in at home with no additional setup. Social media is hard to accomplish without a centralized disc…
> The author didn’t address these forces driving web content to centralized platforms, and web3 isn’t likely to avoid the same incentive structure from what I can tell.
A decentralized system driving to centralization is much better than centralized overlords having a full control over users in a walled garden reinforced by network effects. As TFA says, "Decentralized networks aren’t a silver bullet that will fix all the problems on the internet. But they offer a much better approach than centralized systems."
> Running your own servers is attractive for some, but they aren’t the majority and never will be
And it's not necessary as the existing servers federate between each other and allow the users to register normally.
Re: Why Decentralization Matters (2018)
#9What I find curious in that web3 scenario is this:
1. Today's internet is decentralized because people can't run their own web, smtp, nntp, xmpp, servers, WP blogs. Which is true, we can't expect people to run this the same way we can't expect every car owner to have a mechanic shop.
2. The proposals for "web3", to the best of my understanding, require people to run their own blockchain nodes, manage wallets, etc.
Based on our collective experience in (1), how does anyone believe that (2) is a reasonable proposal? Handling these over to someone else will just result in another new set of platforms that web3 proponents so desperately want to run away from.
Not to mention someone still needs to actually run the servers, reintroducing the same complexity from (1).
Re: Why Decentralization Matters (2018)
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. If payments / incentives are required, then Bitcoin can be used. For example, there's decentralized Sphinx Chat which runs on the Bitcoin lightning network: https://sphinx.chat I haven't seen any of the 'cryptojunk' tokens implement an actual service like the Sphinx chat, which is quite telling in my opinion.
No. It cannot. Bitcoin cannot be used, because the rate of transactions is much to low for such an application. Currently its only use is gambling and burning the planet.
Last time I checked, in El Salvador you could buy beer from a machine with a cell phone using Bitcoin.