Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Web3 is centralized

blog.wesleyac.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 497 posts

Re: Web3 is centralized

#481

Post by kkjjkgjjgg »

acdha wrote: post #442
kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Banks follow laws, which is also a hard requirement for cryptocurrency businesses" Laws are not always just, and not everybody who is prosecuted by some government is a criminal. Governments can seize bank accounts. You can be labeled a nazi for nothing these days, and then businesses (including banks) who do business with you will receive threats and shitstorms to make them stop doing business with you. It can happ…

> Laws are not always just, and not everybody who is prosecuted by some government is a criminal. Governments can seize bank accounts. Yes, but that doesn't change the fact that there isn't a magical technological fix for that problem. Wanting something to be useful for dissidents doesn't make it so and it's irresponsible to tell them otherwise just because adoption would be personally profitable for you. > You can b…

"Yes, but that doesn't change the fact that there isn't a magical technological fix for that problem."

Well there kind of is, at least Bitcoin is better than other things in some regards.

"Do you have citations on “nothing”? The examples I've seen are all of people who were doing things most people find objectionable and they didn't get a blanket ban on banking or being online but rather a specific company chose not to associate with them. Even actual Nazis like Stormfront don't seem to stay offline for that long."

I don't really keep score. An example that comes to mind is JK Rowling being disinvited from the anniversary celebration of the Harry Potter movies for saying "Transwomen are not women". Or Gina Carano being fired from the Mandalorian for warning about singling out people using a picture of the Holocaust. It's not a blanket ban, but the proponents of cancel culture are generally pushing for blanket bans. They will write letters to employers and business partners (including banks) of people they want to destroy and ask them to fire/stop doing business with them. Are you sure your employer and bank will double check such claims before firing you?

(Edit: here is an example of a bank cancelling the account of a feminist organisation for saying the same thing as JK Rowling - https://www.rebelnews.com/dutch_banking_service_terminates_f... )

An example for banks messing up stuff, PayPal freezing Wikileaks bank account: https://www.wired.com/2010/12/paypal-wikileaks/

Where does Stormfront hosts their servers? Parler took a long time to get back online, but maybe they wanted to overhaul their tech first.

And more and more frequently it will just be bots that brand you a nazi. As I said, I was banned from Twitter by a bot misinterpreting some keywords ("hopefully" and "die" appearing in the same tweet - at least that is the only explanation I can find, as they disallow things like "I hope you die", but that was not the content of my tweet). And the beauty of banning people from social media is that nobody can check why it happened anymore, so people will just assume that "there must have been a reason".

"Think about what trying Monero would mean"

As I said, life under authoritarian regimes won't be easy either way. I don't defend all the sales people saying stuff about crypto coins. Some of it is true, some of it is bullshit. Just because some people tell nonsense, doesn't make all of it wrong.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#482

Post by cormacrelf »

ThalesX wrote: post #448
cormacrelf wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you should stop using it. Here's Wikipedia's definition of the web: > The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs, such as https://example.com/ ), which may be interlinked by hyperlinks, and are accessible over the Internet. The only one of the three you referenced that has anything like th…

Would it be better if we (the shill council for naming things) just renamed it to ‘net’? You seem to imply that ‘web’ is taken by our current stack Would the fact that ‘net’ is aiming to make content-addressing a first hand citizen give any weight into being some sort of web? (this seems to be what the paragraph you quoted seems to be mostly concerned with) Would being able to authenticate to websites with your crypt…

It seems you have understood. The web is a specific thing, in the same way a printing press is a specific thing. The folks who named the web didn’t call it “electronic printing press” in the same way they named email, because it is a unique and separate idea. The people who named Web 2.0 recognised it was not all that different from before, just a few less page reloads. All your suggestions are unique and separate ideas from the web, and that is great. It’s not that difficult to understand. Give them a different name.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#483

Post by Ekaros »

me_me_mu_mu wrote: post #37
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…

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.

US citizenship is also one with most burden from having it. At least compared to many other stable ones. Yes, you can make great money there, but also the taxation is not done by vast majority of other citizenships. So getting rid of it for anything slightly worse makes lot of sense from individual stand point.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#484

Post by doomleika »

aiisahik wrote: post #228

So many people complaining about web3 being: - more centralized - more controlled by VCs - less performant / reliable / secure than web2 These are probably all true for now. They failed to see the key features web3: 1. the possibility (but not guarantee) to operate in a hostile government / regulatory environment 2. the possibility (but not guarantee) to operate without a legal entity without shareholders / boards We…

If I am a hostile government I'll simply shut your miner nodes down. It's like wearing blackclad outfit while wielding weapons in the broad daylight, it sends all the bad signal.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#485

Post by bravenous »

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…

True but you missing the point. This shared database gives the power of decentralisation- you won’t get cancelled - the so called permission less data. Nobody is control yet everybody has some control - true democracy.

The public transaction problem is solved by bullet & zero knowledge proofs in currencies like Monero & Zcash. I trust Monero more as it seems Zcash has a on demand back door to unravel specific transactions.

Web3 is a panacea but it might take a decade to arrive as the building blocks are in place.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#486

Post by vmception »

fragmede wrote: post #471
vmception wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The technology is almost irrelevant at this point. There I disagree, my news feeds in other places are heavily populated by development discussion, and word travels fast in the crypto-sphere. So aside from noticing that HN consensus is distinctly not part of it, it would be hard for me to agree less or disagree more. But people are here, they just arent the active contributors and arent coordinated to elevate their…

> Deploying stuff onchain is lucrative enough. That seems very interesting! But how does deploying stuff on-chain change the calculus? An unknown person with no Twitter following who's not a member of a Yacht Club/other NFT gang can deploy a contract, but getting people to want to use the contract seems to be a problem for a lone-wolf developer. Or am I only seeing the tip of the iceberg for the ecosystem?

Yes, tip of the iceberg.

Getting people to use it is not as hard as you think, unless it’s an entirely new concept. Do more of what works and improves people’s experience, undercut fees from existing contracts. Or make a premium version for that audience segment.

AMMs

Farming

Bridges

Wrapping services

Zapping services (wrapping + amm lp + farming in one transaction)

Yield optimizers (slightly solving issue with LP farming and AMMs)

And if you create a token it advertises itself, bots watch for LPs on AMMs to interact and humans notice the interaction, but another area you can compete is based on how community minded the token is, versus obvious self enrichment

I intentionally chose not to make this a primer on all the acronyms

I also scan the blockchains for certain method signatures of previously popular, which appear when they are invoked. So I find copycat contracts this way, which helps me know about new projects and communities.

Either way to your original question: The time to market is extremely short, the funnel is nearly non-existent with crypto natives, and the overhead costs are lower if you can code - all compared to SaaS deployment or being employed by a SaaS service

Re: Web3 is centralized

#487

Post by nextaccountic »

mattwilsonn888 wrote: post #329
nextaccountic wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you mean?

Re: Web3 is centralized

#489

Post by indoor_fern »

Built on centralization but the centralized platforms only offer NFT speculation and take a huge fee. I’ll get to the “only offer speculation” in a minute. First, a huge part of NFTs’ fundamental value is people perceiving these things as valuable, ownable, rights-assigning assets, but how much would this be true if there wasn’t OpenSea? Simply because one can look up and see them on OpenSea gives NFTs value. If OS went down for an extended period, top NFT collections would drop in value.

Also the only platforms that can exist at this point are JPEG “trading” platforms like OpenSea simply because speculation is the only thing that's profitable, and because there isn’t yet any legal precedent allowing real assets to be traded using ERC721. I mean, yeah someone can try to put their deed on IPFS but what happens when something like this hits a snag and has to head to court? The fact that no one can convincingly say a judge would side with the ledger is a huge, and the reason NFT use cases are stuck in casino mode.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#490

Post by danlugo92 »

ViViDboarder wrote: post #379
UncleMeat wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

Exactly. And, if everyone is using the same blockchain for names (to get the universal login experience), then that becomes centralized source for user accounts. Compare that to today where I have distinctly separate accounts on nearly all platforms.

You can create infinite identities :shrug.
Post reply on HN