Web3 is centralized and inefficient

An immutable database guarantees that the "paper trail" has not been tampered with.

In supply chains, there's a lot to be said for having a paper trail even if (or especially if) some of the papers are fraudulently written.

Even then, I think blaming it on laziness is really not a good idea. People are not lazy for not understanding how systems work - not every single person has time for that, or cares about decentralization. Laziness implies it's a problem, and programmers have an unhealthy fascination with seeing problems and thinking they can all be fixed somehow if they just technology hard enough.

You have to look at the individual decisions that people make, and actually make it worth someone's time to do something themselves. For some people, they care a lot about decentralization, are anti-corporate, etc., but most people don't care. They see that they could either spend money on a cheap PC and 10 hours learning about, setting up, and troubleshooting their own mail server; or they can get a gmail account in 2 minutes and get the exact same practical result. The same will apply to web3 systems. It's not laziness, it's people making rational decisions.

Not everything is centralized. Internet routing infrastructure (e.g. BGP) is decentralized. Capitalism itself is decentralized allocation of resources. Power grids are decentralized loads and (increasingly) generation.

It's true that centralization & decentralization tend to operate like a pendulum over time. Having a blockchain that provides historic cryptographic evidence of provenance with a modicum of worldwide trust seems like a generally valuable capability to combat all forms of digital newspeak.

This is a good example of a problem that's common to most web technology: the people using the tech have absolutely no clue how it works and have no way to confirm any of it.

It's like when I give my credit card info to PayPal. There's a picture of a lock on the bottom of the page, so probably safe, right? I'm on OpenSea and it says the NFTs are "decentralized" and that I have absolute ownership if I buy one. So how come people can still right-click-save-as when I post the image on Twitter?

The tech is solid. There really are NFTs and they cannot be stolen etc etc (barring bugs and phishing of course!). It's just that there's no way for a layperson to confirm any of that. People are just as likely to use some random Django+Postgres app than they are a real blockchain system because they're indistinguishable as long as everything's going smoothly.

Remember this: https://media.wired.com/photos/593230395c4fbd732b5511e3/mast...>

History is repeating itself, old thinking + new technology is never going to create innovation, it's just going to end like a blazing trail of a shooting star, a tale to tell. We are pretty much heading in the same direction with blockchain.

Decentralization is smexy but it comes with a price, it disrupts everything, starting from the way we build it.

I agreed entirely that VCs are building monopolies and that money are pouring into the space for no obvious practical reason but it is inevitable until we find a better model of building. And those who are trying to build a web2 version of something in web3 will most likely fail because web3 isn't a replacement or better alternative to web2. Hence it is pointless to compare what we are have, i.e. a decentralized email server.

Decentralization, in my humble opinion, is putting the decisions/ownership back to the users but it is never going to liberate the users from a centralized entity. The things we choose to use/consume will inevitably be owned by a centralized entity, the key difference is whether or not we can seamlessly migrate to another platform of choice. And instead of one big entity controlling everything, we get multiple smaller space that makes their own rule providing the same service.

NFTs marketplace is an example of this, you own the NFT, you can take it and move it to another platform and you can even access directly via your own node without any platform. The problem with NFT however, is the usefulness itself, not the nature of NFT.

Imagine having multiple social networks that you can join with a wallet address, each with their own rules and networks. Instead of a Metaverse, think Multiverse.

Imagine having multiple ads platform that you can choose to integrate with your daily browsing and earn tokens to use in a certain way while doing so. Think Brave but instead of just Brave, you get different ads agencies with different collection of ads.

The main problem here is that our old business model doesn't work here, we are most likely going to end up broke running something that is ideally "decentralized". The fallback plan? Sit and write about how centralized web3 is OR experiment by building on top of blockchain technology, fail miserably as a joke, make some noise and motivate someone to "think different".