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Web3 is centralized and inefficient

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Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#231

Post by LegionMammal978 »

distortedsignal wrote: post #203
majormajor wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the answer to why one chain is better than many chains is because it’s way harder to 51% one chain with many applications rather than having to 51% one chain with one application. I don’t know enough about blockchain tech to KNOW this is correct, but it’s something interesting that kinda falls out of the theory.

I guess the natural response would be that the companies running these myriad chains simply wouldn't care about abstract cybersecurity concerns like 51% attacks, but instead selling services to users. Just consider all of the companies today which have horrible security. The main factor that they care about is whether their business will get attacked in practice, which is infrequent enough that it always makes the news.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#232

Post by sirnicolaz »

greggsy wrote: post #227
sirnicolaz wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the world of digital art, there are actually people developing NFTs that are purely generated on-chain. It's still a relatively small school, but you can check some of them out here https://www.0xchain.art/

Almost all of these are just graphic doodles with an arty name, or low res avatars. They’re art in the sense of being made and appreciated by someone, but they’re certainly not worthy of being called ‘fine art’, or unique.

Yeah well, let's not open that pandora's box

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#233

Post by mmaunder »

testesttest wrote: post #219
mmaunder wrote: post #188

I still can't get over that NFT's are just a URL pointing to the data. They don't even have an on-chain hash of the digital asset. It's like selling a sign pointing to houses for the price of the house, and claiming you own the house, hoping that the sign will increase in value the way the house does, and bragging about it. For reference: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

> They don't even have an on-chain hash of the digital asset Yea... 45% of NFTs have their hash on chain https://yournfts.org/#stats . It isn't great but it isn't none.

Interesting point from the same source:

> For example, OpenSea serves most of the NFTs they mint over HTTP. If the OpenSea ever collapses, ~8% of NFTs vanish.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#234

Post by nootropicat »

djur wrote: post #40
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…

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 difference is that 'centralized' parts are a commodity. Infura itself is centralized, but if it creates problems, it can be replaced with any other rpc, including your own node. Therefore, those services have zero power over the user.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#235

Post by sMarsIntruder »

I liked this post till the bullshit paragraph on mining which is wrong on many sides. Bitcoin makes 0.1% rich richer? That’s it? What the heck man, Bitcoin is a gift to humanity and it’s truly decentralised compared to others. Bitcoin mining isn’t centralised, there’s a decent percentage of solo mining which it’s increasing over time. But I get your point. Also what’s wrong this kind of centralisations on mining pools? They’re just coordinators and there are many. Unfortunately I see biased information on that part.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#236

Post by oblio »

threatripper wrote: post #226
mmaunder wrote: post #188

I still can't get over that NFT's are just a URL pointing to the data. They don't even have an on-chain hash of the digital asset. It's like selling a sign pointing to houses for the price of the house, and claiming you own the house, hoping that the sign will increase in value the way the house does, and bragging about it. For reference: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

Legally owning a house is literally just having your name and the address of your house in a book. EDIT: The actual power does not reside in the book. It resides in the mindshare this specific book has. Anyone can put anything in a book but only some people control the book that people pay attention to. Similar it is with fiat, cryptos and nfts. The power is not in the technology itself but in the mindshare they occu…

I physically live in that house and nobody can trivially and completely legally take it down for good.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#237

Post by threatripper »

oblio wrote: post #236
threatripper wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legally owning a house is literally just having your name and the address of your house in a book. EDIT: The actual power does not reside in the book. It resides in the mindshare this specific book has. Anyone can put anything in a book but only some people control the book that people pay attention to. Similar it is with fiat, cryptos and nfts. The power is not in the technology itself but in the mindshare they occu…

I physically live in that house and nobody can trivially and completely legally take it down for good.

You can physically live in a house that you don't legally own. Those are two different concepts.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#238

Post by smt88 »

exdsq wrote: post #212
mmaunder wrote: post #188

I still can't get over that NFT's are just a URL pointing to the data. They don't even have an on-chain hash of the digital asset. It's like selling a sign pointing to houses for the price of the house, and claiming you own the house, hoping that the sign will increase in value the way the house does, and bragging about it. For reference: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

To be specific, an NFT can be anything - even a Turing complete program - but common ones are simply containing a string of a URL. Edit: I was loosely involved in some of the conversation around smart contract and token implementation on a top 10 chain and there’s actually a lot of interesting issues with on chain data, such as if child pornography is added suddenly in some countries hosting a node can be seen as dis…

Digital licenses and tickets are useless if the central authority doesn't honor them. There's absolutely no benefit to making NFTs out of them.

For example, if I buy an NFT ticket to a concert and the venue doesn't let me in, what was the point of the decentralization?

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#239

Post by nootropicat »

mccorrinall wrote: post #70
ipnon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Everything you wrote is incorrect.

>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?

This is how a rollback happened in bitcoin two times: during the value overflow bug and during the database incompatibility bug (2013). The bitcoin blockchain was rolled back via a coordinated 51% attack. In the second case at least one double spend happened. Ethereum never had a rollback, the change was a hard fork that changed ownership of eth previously owned by the dao hacker.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#240

Post by AnthonyMouse »

majormajor wrote: post #160
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

People try to solve everything with blockchains. It's not always necessary. Cryptography yes. Blockchain only if you need distributed consensus for something.

Most of what people actually don't want to do is reliability engineering. You can host it off your phone, but then it goes down if you're out of range or the battery dies. You can host it in your basement, but now you need to buy hardware and it goes down if you lose power or internet. And you have to keep up to date with patches etc. So just pay someone But the design should make that thing the most commodified thing in the world. You should be able to switch to self-hosting and back or to another provider by just changing the host's address in your configuration. Everything should still point to you on the new host. Your own device should keep a copy of everything needed to switch even if the existing provider is unexpectedly incinerated by a meteor. They should not have the ability to prevent it and should be untrusted to the fullest extent possible.

You can get that with ordinary cryptography. The thing you can't get from ordinary cryptography is disintermediated payment processing. Which you do actually want, but that's something else.

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