Web3 is centralized • Hacker News Board

Re: Web3 is centralized

#301

Post by delaaxe » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 2:11 PM UTC

chx wrote: post #288

The problem with web3 is not that it's centralized -- that's irrelevant. The fundamental problem with all crypto"currencies" is as follows: the world uses real currencies and there is only one way this enters into the world of crypto"currencies": by someone selling a coin to someone else. Thus, regardless of what crypto"currency" we are talking about, it would be a zero sum game if not for transaction fees. However,…

Nobody thinks of crypto in terms of currencies anymore.

They’re the same old running on different infrastructure: assets, shares of ownership in a business/protocol, certificate of ownership of a digital item, and yes occasionally, currencies

Re: Web3 is centralized

#302

Post by jimkleiber » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 2:12 PM UTC

SoldShort22 wrote: post #125

darawk wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Digital self-custody of scarce assets is a new thing But what really are the "scarce assets" that Web3 is enabling self-custody for? A token on a blockchain that has metadata pointing to a digital file that anyone can view and reproduce? By definition, every NFT is scarce in that each one is non-fungible. But this scarcity doesn't mean there's any meaningful value. An NFT alone doesn't inherently give you ownership…

At least one way I've tried to see a lot of this stuff is that it's people exploring what governance of the internet looks like. Right now, governments (analog) don't seem to know how to regulate the internet (digital). From this perspective, I can see cryptocurrencies as digital currencies, NFTs as digital property deeds, and DAOs being digital corporations/cooperatives. Others are talking of digital nations, which may get more towards the actual governance systems of these digital spaces, including property rights, freedoms, etc.

So while these digital deeds don't seem to have much connection to the analog world, they may not need to, if digital governance comes about.

That being said, I wonder if the main challenge with digital governance is not so much the digital part but the cross-border part. In other words, governments have jurisdiction over physical land and digital interactions transcend those boundaries. I wonder if many of the things people are trying to solve with crypto would be solved if we had more global governance. Global property deeds (right now, typically at most nation-state level, but also can be very local to city level), global currency (de facto USD right now but no official one), global company registration (at most nation-state level, but also lower as well), and global governance (the UN is there and many other standards bodies, but governance of many things still at most at nation-state level).

So, it says to me there's a desire for more global (read: physical borderless) ways to interact, own, and regulate all of that and that much of crypto seems to be the skirting of nation-state laws and almost reinventing governance from scratch.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#303

Post by mattwilsonn888 » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 2:17 PM UTC

kortilla wrote: post #111

vmception wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People mostly email me about very specific topics. Nobody "still doing research™" about the broad topic of crypto is getting anywhere because they get bounced from the funnel immediately and paint the whole space with an equally as broad brush. Its decade 3 and this is where we are, so what do people really want to know? To me, there's lots of killer apps, to others I don't really care to debate any longer, who cares…

> or a thread every time a new version of one of those languages used in Ethereum Virtual Machines is out. But the majority of people interested in crypto don’t care about the technology, they are in it to get rich. Articles talking about the new technologies underpinning crypto do exist and get submitted, it’s just that to a rough approximation nobody cares about the actual technology. Look at the level of discussio…

> But the majority of people interested in crypto don’t care about the technology, they are in it to get rich.

So too are the majority of investors in anything there to make money; you think they care about 'The Project' past its profits for shareholders? Developers who are only in it to make money is another thing, but even that group has nuance - some of them understand that the best way to make money long term is to build something valuable, and don't expect to get rich in one month.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#304

Post by chx » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 2:18 PM UTC

btdmaster wrote: post #295

chx wrote: post #288

The problem with web3 is not that it's centralized -- that's irrelevant. The fundamental problem with all crypto"currencies" is as follows: the world uses real currencies and there is only one way this enters into the world of crypto"currencies": by someone selling a coin to someone else. Thus, regardless of what crypto"currency" we are talking about, it would be a zero sum game if not for transaction fees. However,…

Though I generally agree with the sentiment, there is one significant use case -- transferring money across country borders. Currently, transaction fees on cash transactions are much much higher than they are on cryptocurrencies (maybe except bitcoin) and so this would mean that, in theory, they could be used as a way to transfer goods across country borders.

This doesn't change the scam nature of the underpinning mechanism. As I said: it doesn't matter what you do with your coin.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#305

Post by mattwilsonn888 » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 2:20 PM UTC

root_axis wrote: post #121

darawk wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Over the years I've witnessed a lot of heated debates on HN... Is the JS ecosystem actually too complex? Is PHP really a fractal of bad design? Is learning vim worth the effort or is it all hype? Is golang fundamentally broken because it lacks(lacked) generics? Does anyone ever actually need k8s? Is nosql always the wrong choice? Is the linux desktop experience truly productive or should you just use a mac? Types or…

That's because crypto currencies and distributed consensus are inherently economic protocols. They must have monetary value or their consensus mechanisms do not work, which is why proof of work makes you shell out 'value' in the form of energy upfront.

It's a bit goofy to make the comparison you made - I mean you didn't even finish your thought, you just painted a vague yet intense picture you expect people finish for you with the worst possible outlook. You aren't getting rid of crypto, so you'd do more to actually find out what's wrong with it and offer solutions rather than winging about it and praying for authoritarianism.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#306

Post by chx » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 2:20 PM UTC

127 wrote: post #296

chx wrote: post #288

The problem with web3 is not that it's centralized -- that's irrelevant. The fundamental problem with all crypto"currencies" is as follows: the world uses real currencies and there is only one way this enters into the world of crypto"currencies": by someone selling a coin to someone else. Thus, regardless of what crypto"currency" we are talking about, it would be a zero sum game if not for transaction fees. However,…

>And once you entered the game, the only way for you to not lose money is to find a greater fool who will take over your crypto"currency", everyone who owns some becomes a proponent of it. It's an ingenious scam. Yes, that's the current pension system.

It is not. There are many significant differences:

1. There's no set of players who are guaranteed to win

2. There's no set of players who are guaranteed to lose

3. No one is set to gain by advocating for the "current pension system".

Re: Web3 is centralized

#307

Post by qudat » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 2:21 PM UTC

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…

> Yes, sometimes the most exciting things are emergent, but it's been over a decade of the blockchain field of dreams and we're still talking in hypotheticals are what it will be good for.

There’s a reason our current financial infrastructure is still being run on cobol: if it only took 10 years to build it would have been updated already.

Financial tech takes a very long time and with a revolutionary idea such a cryptocurrency, I’m sure it will take even longer.

Things take time, 10 years is not a long time, however I agree with the overall sentiment about web3 and crypto in general in this thread.

Cryptocurrency is less a currency and more another financial investment vehicle for people that are tech savvy enough to get into the game. Put in another way: it’s primarily being used to make money, not trade it for goods/services. Maybe one day it will be used truly as a currency, but txn fees are too high and “HODL”ing makes the person money so they’d rather not trade it.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#308

Post by mattwilsonn888 » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 2:21 PM UTC

manojlds wrote: post #135

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…

And Vitalik has a good blog post on what kind of decentralisation we are talking of with crypto and blockchain. He says blockchain is logically centralized, which is what this post here is essentially talking about. https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentrali...

HN crypto skeptics don't like realizing that there critiques aren't original, even less that there is progress being made on them.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#309

Post by vmception » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 2:23 PM UTC

seanhunter wrote: post #160

vmception wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Looking at the token standards[1], I can't see how you could create a "backdoored token" that would authorize movement of other tokens but that sounds like a scary threat vector. Could you explain how that would work please? I've heard about ERC20 tokens that allowed the issuer to pull them back (that's the SoarCoin thing[2]) but not a token that allowed other tokens to be transferred. [1] https://eips.ethereum.org/E…

You can easily overload the transfer() method with approvals of an array of token contract addresses and the subsequent transfers

Its not really a technical problem its a user got phished problem

Re: Web3 is centralized

#310

Post by acdha » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 2:24 PM UTC

5560675260 wrote: post #297

chx wrote: post #288

The problem with web3 is not that it's centralized -- that's irrelevant. The fundamental problem with all crypto"currencies" is as follows: the world uses real currencies and there is only one way this enters into the world of crypto"currencies": by someone selling a coin to someone else. Thus, regardless of what crypto"currency" we are talking about, it would be a zero sum game if not for transaction fees. However,…

Can't you exchange goods and services for crypto, without using fiat? Transaction fees are obviously unfortunate, but there is just no going around the need for infrastructure. And where is an infrastructure - there are maintenance fees, crypto isn't unique in this regard.

It’s not “without using fiat”: cryptocurrencies are pure fiat currencies but with very weak backing — people need sovereign currencies to pay taxes, pay or get paid for government functions, and participate in large preexisting economies. Nobody has to use cryptocurrency for those reasons and the variable, usually high, fees discourage use — especially in the case of Bitcoin where the economic model incentivizes hoarding.

Speculators can generate a lot of noise but it also creates a toxic atmosphere where anyone spending feels like they’re the sucker for not holding it instead. That’s how after a decade there are a tiny number of non-Bitcoin businesses which would notice if Bitcoin disappeared tomorrow.