My First Impressions of Web3

I'm curious what would happen if somebody uploaded illegal data (e.g. child porn, sensitive PII, or government secrets) to an Ethereum contract. Would these nodes be legally required to filter it? If you look at something like the Pirate Bay, it's not simply enough that you are an allegedly content-unaware service -- once you become aware of your service being used for or distributing something illegal, you are required to mitigate it. At the end of the day, these are businesses which operate within a jurisdiction and must act in self-preservation.

But at the point where they start filtering transactions/addresses, there's going to be big questions about what is the true view of the blockchain.

Hm, I think my point might not have been clear enough. I would find it hard to function without interacting with central system, like sending an email to someone on gmail. Just today, I emailed a plumber on gmail, but it could easily have been an old friend or a relative or whatever.

How do you email the plumber, is my question?

So if I own an NFT and make sure to store the hash, does that mean I also own all collisions?

> Even nerds do not want to run their own servers at this point. Even organizations building software full time do not want to run their own servers at this point.

I want this to be wrong.

Broadband providers make it very difficult to run your own server. Server construction is also in a very bad place as well, so this has spread from consumers to companies. There are just too many externalities from all of your vendors that are left to you to solve and that opens up space for a small number of companies who have people who work on those problems as a full time job, amortized out over X vendors and Y customers.

Until or unless that changes, a bunch of things I'd like to have happen won't happen. I should be able to pull files from my home computer when I'm stuck in an airport in Paris. That was the original promise, but we ended up with something else that has a lot of rent-seeking involved.

I think there are a few people working on the servers problem, probably nowhere near enough, but Broadband companies are also largely to blame for this. I'm not sure if Starlink or municipal broadband that is run like power and water, are ways out. But what we have isn't going to work, and consolidation is just going to get worse and worse until someone fixes it.

> People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will.

This depends on what you mean by servers.

Nobody wants to pay money for dedicated hardware and experience service interruption if they fail to constantly provide it with power and internet.

But a lot of the need for "servers" could be eliminated by running a Tor onion service on your phone and accepting connections from peers. You can get e.g. direct messaging from this without any "servers" of your own, but also without any Facebooks playing MITM between you and your peers.

> A protocol moves much more slowly than a platform.

I could make two criticisms of this.

One, sometimes stable is good. We all whinge about the decades-old protocols that were designed for mainframes the size of buildings with less memory than a toothbrush, but now try to think of something you want from current day Reddit that you didn't get from ten years ago Reddit. Maybe the problem is some things got frozen before they were cooked, not that stability is bad once you have something that works.

Two, a lot of this is survivorship bias. If it's easy to push changes to all the clients you're either already centralized or you're susceptible to EEE. Protocols like that got absorbed into some centralized product already, so the ones that are left are the ones with more protocol implementations than there are tech companies. Then if there is any problem with the protocol at all it's impossible to make changes, but that's the very reason it's still in use.

If the other protocols eventually get replaced by something centralized, that eventuality only comes after the defects become fatal. When they're so bad that the problems exceed the network effect. But that's also the same time when you can release a new protocol version and people will adopt it for all the same reasons. You just need the replacement to be another protocol instead of a platform.

> Recreating this world

This seems to be a problem. We know generally what we want, e.g. P2P to the extent possible and completely fungible untrusted commodity servers when it isn't.

Then the people writing the code are also the people running the servers, so they're willing to write code that makes the servers stop being fungible and untrusted and we're right back where we started.

> This might suggest that decentralization itself is not actually of immediate practical or pressing importance to the majority of people downstream, that the only amount of decentralization people want is the minimum amount required for something to exist, and that if not very consciously accounted for, these forces will push us further from rather than closer to the ideal outcome as the days become less early.

Nobody cares about decentralization until the centralized entity becomes adversarial or unreliable, but then it's too late. The time to start caring about fire safety is not when you are already on fire.