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Web3 is centralized

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Re: Web3 is centralized

#191

Post by xondono »

numtel wrote: post #177
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…

A few issues with this: 1. Not all crypto currencies are public. See monero, haven, secret network. Although that last one depends on some specific features of some Intel processors... I'm of the opinion that the pseudonymous nature of public blockchains is very beneficial to society. I would love it if I could see what companies, governments, and people near me were spending their money on. It would enable me to mak…

> I'm of the opinion that the pseudonymous nature of public blockchains is very beneficial to society.

Have you tried to “steelman” this? Because I don’t think it will pass basic scrutiny.

The same companies and governments you want track have more incentives and resources to hide their transactions than any individual, so, either all transactions are public or they’ll be able to hide while most individuals won’t.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#192

Post by norswap »

elevader wrote: post #139
cryptica wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that big corporations and big investment firms are pumping a lot of money into the cryptocurrency space to prevent innovation and to encourage scams in order to discredit the space. They want to buy it up, hype it up, then dump their bags on mom-and-pop investors while attempting a controlled demolition of the space. This might sound far-fetched to outsiders, but not so far-fetched to those who have worked…

Honest question from a total outsider: What is the difference between a "shitcoin" and a "legitimate token"? And who gets to decide that?

You decide for yourself, but generally shitcoins are regarded as forks without any technical innovation who are not credibly trying to solve any problem or try out a new idea - just make money. They're often meme-themed (though not always, and there are many legitimate projects that are meme-themed).

Re: Web3 is centralized

#193

Post by CJefferson »

darawk wrote: post #87
neuroma wrote: post #72

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…

Agree completely. There is a ton to criticize about crypto and "Web3" (I hate the term, tbh). It's rife with scams and unearned wealth. Even the things that aren't outright scams are mostly people selling hype. But this technology does enable something novel. Digital self-custody of scarce assets is a new thing. A thing that nobody could do before this stuff. And if that has utility, then the infrastructure for tradi…

Literally every online game has been doing digital scarcity forever. Let's see if any of the NFT collections end up having the success and lifetime of Eve Online or World of Warcraft.

I realise there are hypothetical advantages to NFTs over in-game items, but I am not yet sure they will be worth it in the long term.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#194

Post by tough »

senthilnayagam wrote: post #18

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…

There's also Filecoin too from the IPFS Protocol Labs.

Also arweave is looking interesting.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#195

Post by xondono »

post_below wrote: post #115
ojkelly wrote: post #49

Web3 feels like the next grift after we caught on to ICO's. From the article: > 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 decentralizati…

The ecological problem is, in my opinion, what should lead the conversation. Climate change being what it is, we shouldn't even be considering technologies with carbon footprints as large as existing blockchains. In theory that problem is solvable, but in the present, it should be a deal breaker

> The ecological problem is, in my opinion, what should lead the conversation.

I don’t because it’s a very weak argument. You could conceivably run all crypto on renewables and excess energy.

The fact that the main purpose of the network seems to be running ponzi schemes, even in poor countries, is much more damning IMO.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#196

Post by dave_sullivan »

neuroma wrote: post #72

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…

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

The ethereum developers mailing list or something, I'd expect? I agree with your sentiment, I find the cutoff is "programming crypto stuff" vs "not doing that".

Actually I find the same is true of AI, if you don't know how to train a classifier or what a vector space is, your comment about AI is probably dumb.

Everyone's got opinions I guess, I just find builders have more varied, interesting things to say.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#197

Post by mbesto »

neuroma wrote: post #72

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…

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

When there is literal money involved with I think it's basically impossible to have a forum that is unbiased. Good luck.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#198

Post by chrisco255 »

lewispollard wrote: post #146
chrisco255 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> 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. Aren't most NFT assets hosted on cloud platforms? OpenSea on GCP for example

No. OpenSea is a centralized NFT marketplace not unlike how Coinbase is a centralized marketplace for fungible cryptocurrencies.

OpenSea uses GCP for hosting. But OpenSea does not own your NFTs nor choose where NFTs are hosted. OpenSea does use GCP as a caching layer for NFTs, since it's not scalable to fetch from thousands of different sources at load time.

An NFT is created by deploying a smart contract, and the creator of that contract is free to choose how that asset is hosted. Some NFTs are made entirely of on-chain (typically SVG) assets. Some choose IPFS and post the verifiable hash of the file on the blockchain (much smaller footprint and particularly important for large files). IPFS content must be pinned or hosted in order to guarantee availability and a lot of projects will rely on Filecoin or Arweave for decentralized archival of these assets. They may also host a pinning service on one of the big 3 cloud platforms for additional availability and responsiveness. In that case, even if the content was booted from the cloud co's site, the community could easily fall back on Filecoin or Arweave pin and move their content to another caching layer, with users having guarantee that the data matches the IPFS hash. And then again, some NFT projects do centrally host the content and metadata, and do so intentionally so that they can add interactivity or upgrades. For some NFTs, that's perfectly fine. It really depends on the goals of the creator. Not everything has to be perfectly pure. It's a spectrum of choice and optionality for users and makers. If you only want to purchase decentralized NFTs, then check the baseURI and contractURI of the contract (https://etherscan.io/token/0x1CB1A5e65610AEFF2551A50f76a87a7... as an example).

Re: Web3 is centralized

#199

Post by didroe »

darawk wrote: post #87
neuroma wrote: post #72

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…

Agree completely. There is a ton to criticize about crypto and "Web3" (I hate the term, tbh). It's rife with scams and unearned wealth. Even the things that aren't outright scams are mostly people selling hype. But this technology does enable something novel. Digital self-custody of scarce assets is a new thing. A thing that nobody could do before this stuff. And if that has utility, then the infrastructure for tradi…

> But this technology does enable something novel. Digital self-custody of scarce assets is a new thing.

It's unfortunately also pretty much pointless. Digital assets aren't scarce, and physical assets mean leaving the system and losing the properties of it.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#200

Post by chrisco255 »

root_axis wrote: post #97
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. No, web3 has "make as much money as possible" at its core - any of those other tertiary values are expendable in the name of getting rich. The trillion dollar companies also only care about getting rich, but they at least produce useful products, unlike the cryptocurrency ecosystem which is overwhelmin…

No, it doesn't. That's a narrative you are imposing in your own head based on dubious surface-level analysis despite being hugely unfamiliar with the space.
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