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Web3 is centralized and inefficient

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Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#61

Post by bigbonch »

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/

Walmart Canada has used blockchain [1] to better their supply chains systems. I suspect when you say you "haven't found one legitimate use case for blockchain" you're referring to the consumer space based on current offerings. I would argue that "blockchain" just as an idea and technology has plenty of use cases.

[1] https://hbr.org/2022/01/how-walmart-canada-uses-blockchain-t...

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#62

Post by mtkhaos »

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 believe in a decentralized web, but one that you don't need a data center to participate in; nor, a buy in to participate.

As at the end if the day, that's what the web was back in the day. And still is if you ignore the main stays.

It's silly really, but it's more of a question as to what is possible with access to a boundless tape of computers. How do you organize and for what purpose.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#63

Post by xiphias2 »

,, But for me to go into crypto, the ship has sailed a long time ago’’

I have heared this over and over from people since when Bitcoin was $200.

Bitcoin mining is sadly somewhat centralized, but people fleeing Ukraine and Russia sometimes don’t have much choice of how they move all their net worth through the borders.

A CEO of an American company with Russian employees said that Bitcoin practically saved their lives and the CEO could help them escape the totalitarian regime.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#64

Post by valcron1000 »

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/

What about international transfers without a middle man dictating what, when and how? If not for blockchain I would probably be working on a completely different field. Just because you don't find it useful does not mean that it's the same for everyone else

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#65

Post by TobyTheDog123 »

mccorrinall wrote: post #60
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…

If we “missed the boat” for Web3, does that imply that it isn’t going to bring its benefits to all of us?

I was speaking from an investment perspective there, not a utility one.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#66

Post by omgitsabird »

adamkochanowicz wrote: post #17

> Look at email, while the protocol is technically “decentralized”, but look at how big Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 is. Sure, you can easily set up an email server on a $5 VPS, I do it with my domain, but most people just leave it to big providers. Web3 is no different. This is an interesting argument to make but I wouldn't say having large subsets belonging to single entities equates to it being "not decentra…

Also, those services are much more than email, so the analogy that the author is trying to build to bolster their argument doesn't really work.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#67

Post by 3np »

TheCowboy wrote: post #43
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 m…

The majority of people in the world? No, that's correct. The majority of people who use Ethereum today, or hang out on HN and would be inclined to do so? Absolutely feasible. I was recently set straight on this[0]. Things have been improving a lot even since that blog post by vb, and ongoing efforts are still progressing. And note that in the linked thread, I was pushing for full archive nodes. While it's desirable that this is feasible to have a healthy network, most people have their needs served by having pruned full nodes, which requires a fraction of the storage space. Also, several clients (at least geth and erigon) allows for split storage, where you have recent/hot state on faster storage like nvme, and historical archive on a larger drive.

If you are up for it, you may want to give it another shot. My 3400G now handles this fine, alongside other workloads.

I have not tried myself yet, but it does seem realistic to run a full node on an rpi4b with usb3 storage now, if you don't need to run heavy RPC queries on it.

It seems to be common practice to do the initial sync on a beefier machine with more RAM and IO, and then migrate over to a more lightweight instance for the ongoing.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30584184

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#68

Post by freeone3000 »

ipnon wrote: post #53
djur wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that the point? Web technology is decentralized, but as an economic and cultural force it's dominated by a small number of corporations. Web3 has the exact same problems with economic centralization, and "rolling your own" requires all of the same investments and sacrifices as doing so on the existing web, plus more.

The general consensus seems to be that while both crypto and the Web share this problem, the Web is ultimately redeemable while crypto should be nuked from orbit. It's an interesting contradiction in public opinion, probably stemming from all of the money involved.

All of the cryptocurrency and "web3" marketing (including the proponents up and downthread!) seem to be interested only in the money, and not how it can actually help people any better than the existing products they're replacing. The web, for all of its faults, actually does help people with things. It's also very feasible and reasonable, for instance, for a pizza place to run their own website! This is a thing that has been done! If they can't do it themselves, it's easy to set one up! Very affordably! And all of the cryptocurrency and blockchain stuff seems to firmly go in the opposite direction, with the complexity seemingly the point and the resources required for even the simplest thing multiplying endlessly.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#69

Post by dmead »

bigbonch wrote: post #61
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/

Walmart Canada has used blockchain [1] to better their supply chains systems. I suspect when you say you "haven't found one legitimate use case for blockchain" you're referring to the consumer space based on current offerings. I would argue that "blockchain" just as an idea and technology has plenty of use cases. [1] https://hbr.org/2022/01/how-walmart-canada-uses-blockchain-t...

so would a database, or a linked list, or literally any data structure...

again, a solution looking for a problem.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#70

Post by mccorrinall »

ipnon wrote: post #55
mccorrinall wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As decentralized as in “someone stole my funds, let’s roll back the whole chain”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum_Classic

What's more decentralized than being able to fork an open source blockchain solely on the basis of majority consensus? The hullabaloo over the DAO fork arises because decentralization is conflated with fairness. Was the fork fair? Maybe, maybe not. It's irrelevant to the question of whether Ethereum is decentralized. Ethereum prevailed over Ethereum Classic precisely because the majority of users switched to the fork…

The whole idea of the blockchain is to prevent the double spending problem.

You realize that hacker sends funds to his own wallet -> ETH Foundation decides to roll back and contacts their miner bros, who had ZERO problems performing a 51% attack -> ETH Foundation can send the same funds again is essentially a double spend? And that the network is centralized and tightly controlled by $CEO_OF_BLOCKCHAIN_ENTITY?

Also, it’s not just their transactions who get rolled back, but everyone’s! People who sent goods after seeing 20 confirmations on the blockchain already dispatched them and lost both: the funds AND the goods.

How is this fair?

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