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Web3 is centralized and inefficient

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Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#151
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the BTC protocol is limited to an upper limit determined by the maximum blocksize. Last I checked that put the limit of BTC at something in the region of 7 transactions/second without increasing the block size. To match Visa alone you'd need to increase that by a factor of 250 - you could reduce block time, increase block size, whatever. But that would also by necessity increase the storage requirements of each n…

You don’t need to settle every transaction instantly on the blockchain. http://lightning.network/lightning-network.pdf

Ah, yes, a system where you can steal an unlimited amount of money from somebody else without any possibility of recourse by just saying that they agreed and hoping that nobody notices, clearly this is better than a trusted processor with strict legal obligations and easy reversibility in the event of error.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#152
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And they can't on a Walmart owned database based system? You know the good old boring web application? HN is one example. Hundreds of people are using it, upvoting and commenting at at any given second. Works just fine.

Federated database systems are totally a thing also! It's not even that hard to set up a pub-sub system, service bus, or whatever. There's entire ecosystems of vendors that have turnkey or SaaS solutions in this space also.

People just forgot that these things can be done with boring old technology in the excitement of doing something hip and cool.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#153
post #62
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.

The "original" web3 before the cryptocurrency scammers claimed the term was all about the decentralized web with protocols like IPFS backing them. With IPFS, someone needs to host the data (either yourself or some service you pay) but the more popular your data is, the more hosts will have it cached and the quicker and cheaper the content loads.

Even now, after the surge of cryptocurrency gambling, products like NFTs often leverage IPFS to store data, since the blockchains themselves are absolutely useless for actually storing information and nobody wants their decentralized system to rely on someone else's server.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blockchain does not help supply chains. It doesn’t guarantee that things have been tampered with. It doesn’t solve any problems.

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.

If I own every single node it doesn’t guarantee that.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blockchain does not help supply chains. It doesn’t guarantee that things have been tampered with. It doesn’t solve any problems.

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.

No post body was provided.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#157
post #36

> 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.

NFTs are stupid and awful ideas, but I suggest actually reading up about how they work so you can more accurately shit on them instead of repeating things you read on twitter.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does block chain guarentee that something going from A to C via B is not tampered with in anyway?

It doesn't guarantee that. As I said, it guarantees that paper trails are permanent and cannot be fudged after the fact.

So you have a permanent paper trail that cannot be changed, what problem has it solved?

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#159

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.

Is freenet web3?

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#160
post #97

People use centralized systems because they actually like the convenience that comes with it. And with that, comes the decentralized system changing in such a way that it changes to almost NEEDING centralization. The problem is that engineers and cybersecurity people all think that everyone else thinks like they do, when in actuality the complete opposite is true. The biggest example is the internet itself - the inte…

This is a false dichotomy. Most people don't want to run their own mail servers. That isn't the same thing as saying we need a single entity to be in charge of email. There are thousands of independent email providers. Your emails get marked as spam if you have two users, not if you have two thousand. And small providers getting marked as spam isn't because it's necessary to prevent spam, it's because large providers…

Email is one I keep coming back to when I try to picture a future that runs on blockchain tech.

It seems like even if there are enough situations where the zero-trust nature proves to make sense to users, it would be silly for them to all use the same chains. Why deal with the overhead and transaction costs? Why wouldn't there be as many chains as their are email providers, and then most of them would only have value insomuch as the things running on them have value? So more like "new way of formalizing coalitions and joint ventures and partnerships where no single partner has full control" than "investment vehicle" or "foundational infrastructure for the whole world."

Email, by being a protocol vs a single implementation, has outlasted many email service providers and will probably outlast many more. Many of those service providers were killed by new entrants that could do it cheaper or better - so it seems crazy to expect otherwise-productive things to remain on these hideously expensive trendy chains of the moment.

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