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Web3 is centralized

blog.wesleyac.com

21–30 of 497 posts

Re: Web3 is centralized

#21
post #8
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.

Democracy isnt free. Pay to play is exactly what makes it democratic. Free is more like a benevolent dictatorship.

Clarification?

I can participate/play in my democracy with little to no cost. Unless you are arguing time (~20 minutes/year) commitments to vote?

Re: Web3 is centralized

#23

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 spect…

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

It is very common to track people by the tokens they hold and target them for theft and fraud.

One example is to airdrop a backdoored token, and when the user tries to move it they wind up authorizing movement of their other valuable tokens. Or to just use the airdrop to lead a curious user to the airdrop event's website, which is then a phishing campaign that achieves the same result.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#25
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.

Are you using any decentralized social networks significantly?

Re: Web3 is centralized

#26
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.

You pay now by paying with your privacy. Someone makes great money by tracking you and selling it but it isn’t you.

Web3 is even less private, since your stuff is stored in a public chain that can be deanonymized even years later.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#28
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.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#29
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.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#30
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.

You pay now by paying with your privacy. Someone makes great money by tracking you and selling it but it isn’t you.

not sure how web3 would solve any of that
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