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Web3 is centralized

blog.wesleyac.com

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Re: Web3 is centralized

#71

Post by yrral »

bpfrh wrote: post #58
yrral wrote: post #33

Web3 is less centralized in that the user data is exposed and freely available to be composed upon. For example, when someone makes a deposit (say of ERC20 USDC to earn interest, around 3.0% currently) on https://compound.finance , that data is freely available and the "receipt" becomes another token (the ERC20 USDC cToken). [1] This token can now be used for other things, on any other protocol, without the involveme…

That is not exclusiv to web3 and is not new. If I buy a house, I can take a credit on that house. If I bought some stock, banks will let me take a loan on them afaik. I can also borrow some money and choose something expensive that I own for a collateral. Maybe crypto makes the last one easier, but then it will lead to a lot of fraud, because veryifing that the item I set as collateral is the difficult and expensive…

Sure, but that information today is gatekept quite well and impossible for you or me to pull or integrate without partnerships or paying up heavily. For example, plaid is a company worth 13.4b where largely all they do is log in to your financial accounts on behalf of another (usually financial) institution to scrape your account data. If you try doing that yourself, you will be blocked by the risk systems of the various banks.

Other companies like mint and byallaccounts largely did the same thing and were aquired at $170 per account and $33 per account respectively. So obviously someone is making money on keeping your data gatekept.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#72

Post by neuroma »

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.

It's a pity because I'd love to hear quality thought on the space.

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.

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.

Can someone recommend places to read or be involved in non partisan discussion about these topics?

Re: Web3 is centralized

#73

Post by AnthonyMouse »

sebow wrote: post #44

[This is not necessarily about web3] I've said it before, and it needs repeating: we >need can't 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…

Hardware to do this kind of thing is commercially available and some people are doing it, e.g.:

https://www.nycmesh.net/

The main problem is that unlicensed spectrum has limited range and most places don't have enough density to make it work when only For longer range there is still Ham Radio. Check if they give the ham radio exam at your local hackerspace.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#74

Post by [deleted] »

vmception wrote: post #46
me_me_mu_mu wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I don't trust Big Tech, I'm somehow supposed to trust groups of sketchy people who do things like give up their US citizenship (as an immigrant to the USA - the privilege is real) to move to {insert sketchy country or a known haven for certain activities - its legal there!} so they can now facilitate millions of dollars moving each day outside of any government jurisdiction.

I mean, yeah. There is a privilege associated with that. The US is a great starting point, but you can outgrow it, especially when it comes to financial services if you aren't interested in the incumbents. People with money in stable economies aren't clamoring for US citizenship, some are interested in it but its just an option. The whole continent is populated by people that lost consensus wherever they came from. L…

[deleted]

Re: Web3 is centralized

#75

Post by ojkelly »

nootropicat wrote: post #56

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…

> 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.

How is global consensus not centralisation though?

Humans are notorious for disagreeing on everything. Having one global arbiter of truth/consensus seems implausible at best.

Anything that could provide global consensus will need to be backed by something formed from a human brain. And our brains are not perfect. We keep updating code because we miss things. Who would maintain the system for global consensus? And how would they not just be our new rulers?

As a perfect example you mention ownership as a feature of global consensus. What do you own with an NFT? Who enforces that ownership? What stops someone pirating an NFT image?

Ultimately this screams of solving a people problem with a technical one. That never works. Not without strong co-operation of the people involved, and even then technology plays a very small role in the solution.

> The scalability argument is true in isolation - everyone agrees it's currently a problem, but has nothing to do with centralization or not.

It does in that a truly decentralised system inherently cannot suffer from the scaling problems cryptocurrencies have.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#76

Post by bg24 »

web3 is a marketing term. There are some problems to be solved.

1) Giving more $$ and ownership to media creator than curator (platform).

2) Faster and efficient financial transactions.

3) Improving online identity.

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?

The opportunity for new so-called web3 applications will be because of inertia on part of existing platforms.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#77

Post by chrisco255 »

mattlondon wrote: post #64
chrisco255 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 centr…

> 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.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#78

Post by root_axis »

euske wrote: post #63

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.

Web 2.0 was a post-hoc description of interactive web pages, there were no web 2.0 evangelists pushing web 2.0 as the future, it simply happened organically based on its own merit. The web3 movement is astroturfed by enthusiasts trying to make a buck.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#79

Post by birracerveza »

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.

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?

Re: Web3 is centralized

#80

Post by kkjjkgjjgg »

"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'"

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.

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