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Web3 is centralized

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Re: Web3 is centralized

#321

Post by UncleMeat »

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…

> "Web3" is about decentralization but it doesn't necessarily mean storing data on a blockchain. The most important aspect is that users no longer have to sign up or log in. They submit responses which are signed by a key pair, which is their identity instead of a record in a "users" table.

It is a record in a "users" table. It is just that this table is the publicly readable blockchain.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#322

Post by cmeacham98 »

kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #84
dudus wrote: post #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 in…

"problem most don't care about" Just as Chinese citizens seem to be mostly happy about the politics in their country. Maybe that is the actual problem, people not caring about issues like free speech until it is too late. (Julian Assange is still imprisoned in the UK and almost nobody cares)

Even if I assume you're completely correct and that is a problem, they're still totally correct that cryptocurrencies are solving problems that almost nobody cares about.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#323

Post by paulryanrogers »

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.

> Yes, that's the current pension system.

If benefits-defined pensions are any indicator then both are unsustainable, and certainly not the future.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#324

Post by mattwilsonn888 »

reilly3000 wrote: post #10
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.

Agreed. The one dollar-one vote concept is fundamentally flawed, but has become the main model for crypto community governance. There aren’t a lot of viable alternatives, especially as there is no concept of a person, just free, infinite wallets and limited coins. As such, the interests of the wealthiest steer the entire community, and a bad actor could derail a project with malevolent use of voting powers. Democracy…

That's an interesting point. I would make the refutation that a system where large 'voters' in a DAO are forced to lock up their tokens after votes proportional to their power would prevent them from sabotaging the project, but if they had even more money at stake in a competitor its easy to imagine scenarios where such foul play may happen.

The interesting thing about governance is that it existed before the term: In Bitcoin the community governs the direction of the protocol by directing their hash power, perceived value, and simple use of the network towards their desired fork. You can't do this with contract tokens unless you want to fork the entire Ethereum Blockchain for the sake of one DAO.

Despite this limitation, if DAO pay to vote schemes could be combined with 'vote with your feet' you could have the clean, efficient governance of a DAO with the fully actionable emergency escape (a fork) in case foul play is sniffed out.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#325

Post by lukeramsden »

captn3m0 wrote: post #150
disruptalot wrote: post #67

Web3 is a highly ambigious term so there's no point discussing whether it's decentralized - it simply depends on what system you are referring to. For the sake of simplicity we stick to the authors main claim. That Ethereum is centralized. > while anyone can join the Ethereum or Bitcoin network, you can only join if you agree to follow the same protocol In which other protocol is this not the case? Can you communicat…

I’m very much interested in finding out the answer the “blockchain vs the DMCA” question. A node operator serving any copyright content (irrespective of it being served over HTTP or a DLT) is liable. What happens when Disney starts suing node operators? Your ISP still gets a notice right?

How does DMCA handle steganography? For example, you could post hex-encoded bytes of a copyrighted image in a Facebook post - obviously a trivial example, but with a minor amount of effort and some more obtuse encoding it would be nigh-on impossible to tell otherwise. This is exactly what it looks like when putting copyrighted content on blockchains like on Ethereum. It's also _prohibitively_ expensive to store data on even alternative L1 chains.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#326

Post by chx »

lukeramsden wrote: post #315
chx wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

> 1. There's no set of players who are guaranteed to win Pension fund managers are guaranteed to win, and they win more as life expectancy goes down. > 2. There's no set of players who are guaranteed to lose Literally everybody else loses, as inflation eats away at the buying power of older peoples' ongoing or soon-to-start pension payments, and young people pay in to a system that there is now no guarantee they will…

You have a political axle to grind, fine, but that's not relevant to the discussion here.

Maybe the current US pension is set up like this, maybe not, that's debatable perhaps. But it's not an inherent feature of the systems everywhere unlike the problem with crypto"currencies".

Re: Web3 is centralized

#327

Post by chx »

delaaxe wrote: post #301
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

Doesn't matter. It doesn't change the fundamental scam nature of the game. You are describing game rules, it's typical of people in the game -- but it's participating in the game which makes people lose money. It utterly does not matter what happens inside the walled garden of crypto"currencies".

Re: Web3 is centralized

#328

Post by api »

vmception wrote: post #309
seanhunter wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's a technical problem in that this shows the the VM for smart contracts is a mess. It should not be so easy to do such things.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#329

Post by mattwilsonn888 »

nextaccountic wrote: post #26
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Web3 is a grift.

> I am openly ignorant of recent innovations and make statements demonstrating I believe they don't exist.

Never change, HN.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#330

Post by UncleMeat »

jakupovic wrote: post #216
SoldShort22 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Do you need someone to repeat what's scarce? The digital anything can be written down in the blockchain notebook with your name/key and it's yours then. Same as when you would get a C from your teacher who would write it into one of those big notebooks with everyone's names. That combination of your name + class + grade is the asset uniquely assigned to you. Now when you asked your teacher to change that C to a B, to…

But why would you want your grade history to be public so that anybody can read it? And adjusting grades is a valuable feature, given that some teachers do really make legitimate grading mistakes that should be corrected.
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