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Web3 is centralized and inefficient

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Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#41

Post by yashg »

Victerius wrote: post #2

Can someone explain what Web3 is in 50 words or less to a layman?

Someone created a JS library to interact with the Ethereum blockchain and named it web3. Making it appear like it was future of the web. In reality it was just one more attempt to make blockchain look authentic and useful.

Blockchain has only one real use - storing tokens. Someone needs to pay real money for the tokens for the token creators to cash out. So they keep cooking up new ways to attract unsuspecting common people into the cryptoverse. Web3 is that.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#42

Post by wnolens »

> Sure, I work at Microsoft 365, because I had to. It was join Microsoft, or be dependent on my dad for money.

That's a false dichotomy if I've ever seen one! And out of the blue.. the author seems ashamed but trying to justify why they shouldn't be.

> But hey, working at Redmond beats taking Miami and Houston underwater just to make a few white crypto bros happy.

yikes.. ok.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#43

Post by TheCowboy »

vmception wrote: post #5

> A lot of Web3 platforms are in fact centralized. Your wallet (MetaMask), marketplaces (OpenSea), APIs (Alchemy) are all central platforms. Sure, they use a distributed database (blockchain), but before that it’s still a Go app on AWS, meaning its centralized. > Your wallet (MetaMask) Run your own node. This is lazy reporting to reach the end point about fawning over FreeBSD (its in the article, literally an article…

> Run your own node. This is lazy reporting

It isn't practical for the majority of people to run their own node. Even Vitalik Buterin acknowledges[1] this isn't realistic for the current state of things.

Last year I was interested in running a sidechain node and I was shocked when I looked at minimum system requirements. I can't just run it in the background and I have a 5600X Ryzen. Plus my NVMe drive needed to be much bigger. It also can eat through SSDs, and HDDs are considered too slow.

Worse to me: It looks like another time consuming hobby. I spent a lot of time even just getting up to speed on the current ecosystem, the jargon, best practices, etc. It often seems like crypto is trying to take something less complicated and make it complicated.

It just seems like people are simply pushing a technology that isn't ready yet for what people in the scene think is currently possible.

My interest for running a node was for prediction market trading to attempt to counter frontrunning aka sandwich attacks. Another ridiculous problem that many people in the scene act like isn't a big deal.

1. https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/05/23/scaling.html

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#44

Post by djur »

peterburkimsher wrote: post #37
Victerius wrote: post #2

Can someone explain what Web3 is in 50 words or less to a layman?

Web1: run a server, people (clients) post content, and you save it on your server. Web2: pay someone else to run a server "in the cloud". They save the content. Web3: run a server with all your own content. Other people run clients that index and let you search other peoples' content. Concisely: Web3 is the same as Web1, but with client-server the other way around.

Except that "smart contracts" etc. are very much paying someone else to run a server in the cloud.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#45

Post by mccorrinall »

yashg wrote: post #31

Agree 100%. Web3 is useless. The whole web3 thing is an extension to get more people and more real money to get into the crypto ecosystem and provide liquidity to the early adopters and insiders. I haven't found one legitimate use case for blockchain. The only thing it is useful for it speculative gambling. I wrote about it some time ago and and shared here on HN https://yash.info/blog/what-is-web3/

I know exactly one legitimate use case for blockchain: a public ledger like bitcoin.

The thing is that you don’t need more than this one online currency though, right? It’s also the safest in terms of PoW [1]. I don’t see any reason for all other altcoins to exist other than charting and trading on exchanges (which is certainly fun, but does not provide value).

[1] https://howmanyconfs.com/

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#46

Post by TobyTheDog123 »

djur wrote: post #29
TobyTheDog123 wrote: post #15

This seems like the angry ramblings of someone who missed the boat. I'm not invested in cryptocurrency or other tokens, but this seems very unfair to the ecosystems that power them. Sure, there are centralized wallets, marketplaces, APIs, but that's just not the point, not the problem they're trying to solve. If Google deletes your account, that's it. If OpenSea deletes your account, another app will happily connect…

Continue where you left off, except without access to OpenSea (or whatever other vendor), in an economy where the value of the contents of your wallet is increasingly dependent on the availability and visibility of your "digital assets" on vendor services. But you're right. Decentralization is not the problem that the crypto community is trying to solve, because they don't actually care about a decentralized "Web3".…

I don't see it quite as pessimistically. Of course people are going to try to make as much money as possible being early to something they consider the next big thing. Of course there were going to be ridiculous dogecoins and shibcoins and peepeepoopoo coins that make people rich just because people are having fun and being reckless in this new wild west of online currency.

That doesn't make legitimate projects null and void, or devalue the problems they're trying to solve.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#47

Post by shp0ngle »

vmception wrote: post #5

> A lot of Web3 platforms are in fact centralized. Your wallet (MetaMask), marketplaces (OpenSea), APIs (Alchemy) are all central platforms. Sure, they use a distributed database (blockchain), but before that it’s still a Go app on AWS, meaning its centralized. > Your wallet (MetaMask) Run your own node. This is lazy reporting to reach the end point about fawning over FreeBSD (its in the article, literally an article…

Lol have you tried running own Ethereum node?

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#48

Post by fastball »

djur wrote: post #29
TobyTheDog123 wrote: post #15

This seems like the angry ramblings of someone who missed the boat. I'm not invested in cryptocurrency or other tokens, but this seems very unfair to the ecosystems that power them. Sure, there are centralized wallets, marketplaces, APIs, but that's just not the point, not the problem they're trying to solve. If Google deletes your account, that's it. If OpenSea deletes your account, another app will happily connect…

Continue where you left off, except without access to OpenSea (or whatever other vendor), in an economy where the value of the contents of your wallet is increasingly dependent on the availability and visibility of your "digital assets" on vendor services. But you're right. Decentralization is not the problem that the crypto community is trying to solve, because they don't actually care about a decentralized "Web3".…

If you get banned from OpenSea but still want to sell your Bored Ape, you definitely still can, and almost certainly for whatever the market rate on OpenSea is.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#49

Post by ipnon »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #26
ipnon wrote: post #7

Some platforms like Ethereum are completely decentralized. You forfeit some of this decentralization bit by bit when using MetaMask, OpenSea or Alchemy, but the platform itself is still decentralized. The Web is completely decentralized, by you forfeit some of this decentralization bit by bit when using Paypal, Facebook, or AWS. The trend in technology has always been to trade control for convenience. This doesn't st…

> When these occur it will be the decentralized blockchains like Ethereum with failsafes in place to survive, and it's the centralized blockchains like Binance that will implode. Didn't Ethereum recently disclose a major settlement vulnerability discovered by a researcher that could've forced a hard fork had this person chosen to exploit it? He got a multi-million dollar bounty for it I believe. This kind of certain…

This is like saying Heartbleed is proof the Web will never work. You can't even guarantee secure connections! What will happen when the spy agencies start using these?! Decentralization isn't proof a system has no bugs, it's proof the system works without an authoritative governance, which I will remind you is the topic at hand in this particular comment section. Is crypto a scam? Maybe, maybe not. If you think so, just don't use it!

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#50

Post by vmception »

mbesto wrote: post #36
vmception wrote: post #5

> A lot of Web3 platforms are in fact centralized. Your wallet (MetaMask), marketplaces (OpenSea), APIs (Alchemy) are all central platforms. Sure, they use a distributed database (blockchain), but before that it’s still a Go app on AWS, meaning its centralized. > Your wallet (MetaMask) Run your own node. This is lazy reporting to reach the end point about fawning over FreeBSD (its in the article, literally an article…

> Yep. It is a GUI ontop of their smart contracts (public access backend code). You don't have to use their GUI. So what happens if someone just copies the JPG and puts on their web host? Isn't that essentially what OpenSea is...a hosted service for the JPG.

You'd have to be conflating about half a dozen different concepts to write that sentence. I can't help you. If you want to learn, you can.
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