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Web3 is centralized and inefficient

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Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#81

Post by hannasanarion »

ipnon wrote: post #49
thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, j…

Heartbleed didn't cause tens of thousands of financial transactions totalling billions of dollars to be retroactively reverted with a technically guaranteed lack of recourse to the people whose accounts were drained as a result.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#82

Post by smackeyacky »

vmception wrote: post #39
taywrobel wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re falling into the same trap as tech enthusiasts in web1. Sure, you could scan blockchains and extract NFT data yourself, and sure you could run your own node for every blockchain that interests you (paying god only know how much for storage and bandwidth). Just like how in web1 you could run your own email server to handle email and have your own blog server to publish info and your own git server to host your…

But I don't care about that the impractical enthusiast stuff, I care about the bloggers that make these flippant dismissals instead of talking about the impractical things that are possible. I simultaneously observe that the impractical things can be made more practical . For example, Metamask with a non-default RPC node is great compared to using crypto before Metamask. Phantom wallet on Solana is even further impro…

This sort of argument reminds me of the old doctrinaire Marxists, who insisted communism could work if only it could be done without authoritarianism.

Turns out Web3, in theory, sounds fine, but the implementations and uses of it all fall back to centralised networks and nefarious purposes.

I think it's time to recognise Web3 for what it is: a massive con fronted by people who sell a fantasy of open, decentralised computing designed to free everybody from the excesses of government, but are actually implementing something far worse than the system it's supposed to replace.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#83

Post by djur »

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.

The Web is here, useful, has much lower barriers of entry, and although it's wasteful of energy in a lot of ways it isn't as aggressively and intentionally wasteful as cryptocurrency. I will happily stop using this argument against the crypto ecosystem as soon as it is not true.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#84

Post by hunterb123 »

cmdli wrote: post #78
bigbonch wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I just don't see how that use case couldn't have been more easily served with a boring old centralized database. Why do you need a trustless system where all the users are either in-house or contractually obligated to not screw each other over?

Probably in logistics where many nodes of many companies need to record offline quite often.

Trucks, warehouses, resellers, manufacturers, all with their own systems and problems can record to the same ledger reliably.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#86

Post by mccorrinall »

hunterb123 wrote: post #59
mccorrinall wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Coins have different attributes and use cases. Who is to say who can make what. The best of the niche needed will win out, just like every other sector of all industries. Ethereum has it's EVM. Monero has it's RandomX algo to prevent ASICs, and it's Ring signatures to prevent tracing. Some coins are pure Proof of Stake and try to solve scaling differently, see Algorand and Cardano. There are altcoins that are just cl…

Just because you can’t buy an ASIC Ant miner doesn’t mean that they have not developed one internally and are running a monopoly. (Spoiler: Bitmain already developed several ASIC miners for Cryptonight in the past)

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#87

Post by Karrot_Kream »

wnolens wrote: post #42

> 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.

A lot of anti-crypto technical people are also very interested in a subculture I like to call "ethical computing" and part of that subculture is constantly talking about how ethical you are, how much FOSS you use, and how evil tech $TECH is destroying the world (where you can substitute "ads", "blockchain", "GUI interfaces", or "Golang" in depending on what you want to cast as unethical/what you dislike). There's usually (though not always) a grain of truth to these positions, but I personally find the movement to be facile and adherents are usually zealous in their ideology.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#88

Post by TheCowboy »

xiphias2 wrote: post #56
TheCowboy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Regarding Ethereum you’re right, it’s centralized. With Bitcoin I run my node and check the incoming transactions with it whenever I make a big money transfer (for outgoing transactions a full node is not really needed, as I don’t care if the network doesn’t accept it as long as my counterparty does). Running a Bitcoin node is practical (less than a day of running in the background on the first run) if the amount of…

If we limit ourselves to Bitcoin then we're at a sliver of the web3 ecosystem everyone is casting their hopes upon. And Bitcoin in its current state still seems more like a blockchain working prototype and isn't 'feature-ful' enough to replace centralized finance.

But proof-of-work's energy consumption is what kills Bitcoin for me.

For what it's worth, I consider myself crypto agnostic. If a tech delivers something better then great.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#90

Post by hannasanarion »

Victerius wrote: post #2

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

Crypto is a scam that is approaching bezzle, and the early entrants need one last big round of rubes so that they can cash out, web3 is the latest of a long series of meaningless buzzwords to draw in the last suckers.
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