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Web3 is centralized

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Re: Web3 is centralized

#11

Post by meowtimemania »

r_hoods_ghost wrote: post #9

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…

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

Re: Web3 is centralized

#12

Post by lwansbrough »

r_hoods_ghost wrote: post #9

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…

Web3 is more of a problem soup, I don't think it's accurate to say there's any one specific "main" problematic aspect of it. The whole ecosystem is one terrible idea built on another in the name of achieving a worse version of what we already have.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#14

Post by RVuRnvbM2e »

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.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#15

Post by Findeton »

Anon1096 wrote: post #6

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 v…

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

Re: Web3 is centralized

#16

Post by chrisco255 »

r_hoods_ghost wrote: post #9

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…

> are an absolute boon to tax collectors, forensic accountants and fraudsters

Weird that it would be a boon for both forensic accountants and fraudsters. How do you reconcile that sentence?

The fact that something is done in public does not mean that it is centralized. There is public and decentralized, public and centralized, private and centralized, and private and decentralized.

Decentralization itself, is a spectrum and not a binary quality. Just as, I assume, public / private also falls on some sort of spectrum spanning from everyone in the world being able to see to VISA/Mastercard corporate privacy policy to national intelligence agencies to group or individual privacy.

It is completely possible to conduct transactions privately on blockchains. Monero and z-cash (using zero knowledge proofs) are the best examples of this.

The biggest blockchains choose not to either due to legacy design choices (zero knowledge systems are a recent innovation) or the benefits of openness. For example, public transaction history allows for development of an on-chain reputation for a pseudo-anonymous account. It's also quite useful for managing decentralized organizations, as the treasury and spending records is meant to be public to keep the DAO accountable to its members and prospective members.

With the recent introduction of zk rollups on Ethereum, it's now possible to have the best of both worlds, in my opinion (see https://aztec.network/index.html). Transactions that need to be private will be conducted on zero-knowledge rollups built for privacy. Mastercard is working on this with Consensys for Ethereum (https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/12/16/consensys-colla...).

Re: Web3 is centralized

#17

Post by errantmind »

Ambolia wrote: post #4

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 neces…

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.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#18

Post by senthilnayagam »

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.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#19

Post by chrisco255 »

jsemrau wrote: post #3

My main concerns with Web3 are that it is "pay to play" in many aspects and it's less democratic than the existing Internet.

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.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#20

Post by edderly »

r_hoods_ghost wrote: post #9

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…

Not sure about the fraudsters necessarily, but it seems like a core irony of the so called web3 is that the concepts involved could have great utility for governance of individuals and companies in an economy where a great deal of effort is spent tracking down tax dodgers. However, the web3 anti-establishment shtick seems to sell better at the moment.
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