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Web3 is centralized and inefficient

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Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#461

Post by melomal »

dalbasal wrote: post #315
melomal wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Royalties. The ticket seller can set that and every time the ticket is resold, they will get % of that sale. For an artist that would mean they can sell a ticket with % royalty set and then profit from future sales on an ongoing basis.

So... A method for scalping scalpers?

Pretty much. 1000 true fans is essentially the backbone of the NFT argument which basically revolves around artists and their fans parting ways with cash for collectable items. With NFT tickets, the artist always gets paid no matter who is selling the ticket and how many times it get sold. I would say that this is a win for the artist.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#462

Post by jrochkind1 »

smaudet wrote: post #300
vishnugupta wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's telling that email is the last popular, useful protocol. Almost every application (chat, video conferencing, file sharing etc.,) since then have been proprietary and closed wall gardens. It is as if big corporations clearly saw open protocols being a big threat to their monopoly and either didn't bother building apps that adhere to existing protocols or were openly hostile to them.

Actually the other protocols all exist, and work fine, thanks. The major exception was high bandwidth communication, where it remains cost prohibitive to do without scale - video has come a long way, to be sure, but large image, audio, video processing have remained difficult to do at scale and right, at least without the correct hardware and supporting algorithms. There are solutions, most of the ones I can think of…

vishnugupta said "popular", you replied with "works fine".

While protocols may exist that "work fine", it seems clear that for "chat, video conferencing, file sharing" (as well as social media), proprietary networks are more much much more popular than standardized protocols.

Email being a notable still-popular exception, when it comes to internet communications.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#463

Post by harel »

genge wrote: post #442
harel wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lack of balance here. Yashg is not wrong in his assertions, and nor are you, that time will tell if the non-scammers are successful or not. I was laughing at the concept of bitcoin when it was mere cents to the coin and some pizza was bought. I'm not laughing now, but I'm also well aware that if you need to explain why something is NOT a Ponzi scheme, it's a Ponzi scheme. I've done a fair bit of work in th…

If it helps you understand, there's blockchains being built with close to none tokenomic concept to it. Meaning, there's no value on investing on their token but on using the platform. In some cases it's posible, in others it's not since you need to leverage costs/incentives in some way (but they still manage for it to remain low price through inflation, etc).

There are too many blockchains being developed. Which one are you referring to? (also help me understand what part?)

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#464

Post by eternityforest »

lfkdev wrote: post #451
eternityforest wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If blockchain had never been invented, we'd be a lot farther ahead. BitTorrent proves the idea can work. And Tox is already totally usable, aside from it's mobile data usage. Federation is the other problem. It's decentralized without real end user benefits other that a bit of censorship resistance, within the limits of the hosting company. It doesn't add reliability or offline communications on the LAN.

"a bit of censorship resistance" tell that to the russians right now, or to all the other 3. world countrys whose only hope for usable currency is bitcoin

I'm not sure how much Federation would do against government censorship in practice, for an average person. It's not like it can bypass a firewall or protect you legally if you connect them with an illegal VPN or something.

It's great if Facebook is censoring you, but it doesn't seem strong enough to protect you all that strongly against someone bigger who can just shut down a platform if they don't like the content it allows.

Bitcoin does have a use in some places with no other alternatives, but I'm sure glad I'm not forced into that position with their unpredictable fees that often go way above credit card fees.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#465

Post by user-the-name »

topranks wrote: post #450
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…

“Have fun staying poor” It’s so obnoxious to assert that poverty is a choice, or falsely claim that anyone can get rich by investing in crypto.

No post body was provided.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#466

Post by sumtechguy »

makeitdouble wrote: post #161
alexb_ wrote: 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…

People are fine with centralized systems that make sense and brings value. To me the best part of decentralized systems is that they allow for centralized sub-systems to emerge organically, instead of being decided top-down. For instance, I don't think that when launching the first internet nodes we would have anticipated that certs should have centralized entities, it happened that it made more sense that way once w…

Centralization also comes from the problem of trust. Who do you trust? For example certs. I can build my on CA fairly quickly. The trick is getting anyone to trust me and my certs and say 'yeah I will add your certs to the pile'. DNS is slightly similar. In that I can stand up my own DNS central authority node. Now will anyone use it? Probably just me.

The early net code assumed trust. Email, DNS, FTP, etc. You were trusted or authorized to use particular computers. Getting on those meant talking to someone with a bit of sense not to let spammers/trolls onto their networks. Then if they did get someone like that they walked over to their terminal and just locked them out of their account. It was also why they heavily stayed away form corp interests for so long. As many times a small cohort of people will ignore doing the right thing if it gets them some sort of power/wealth. So we end up with central authorities who can either limit or kick off those who do trolly things.

It is not going back to that. It cant. But the trick is can we get those distributed properties back? Yet still keep the spammers at bay?

Most people who use these systems could not care one whit if it is centralized or not. They just want to send some cat pics and watch a video of someone doing something silly and give a thumbs up to that.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#467

Post by nfin »

janjones wrote: post #175
alexb_ wrote: 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…

One problem is that decentralization sometimes doesn't scale. It's cool to have completely decentralized email, but once many people use it, there will be lots of spam, and it's hard dealing with that in a decentralized way, I guess.

Decentralization doesn't scale well, that is sure. But humans are inventing new tools to improve the decentralization over time, give new options. Sometimes the jumps are bigger, sometimes smaller.

Regarding decentralized email: there are technical solutions to spam like Hashcash [0]. It has drawbacks, like a bit of energy consumption. On the other side it keeps big corps reasonable (or gives them an upper limit to how bad they can behave), as if they start to behave too bad, such solutions would likely see increasing adoption.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#468

Post by samoit »

dthul wrote: post #263
samoit wrote: post #258

For those who want to know what is a NFT: Imagine you get the hacker news logo (or any other digital asset, like an image,video,song etc). Then I take that image and apply to it a hash funtion to generate an id, a number that later I put into any blockchain (usually ethereum). As the blockchain is ordered the first one who does this process stores in the blockchain the asset... and so its property. Later someone else…

This document describes the smart contract for an NFT: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721 The base contract does not contain any info about the asset the NFT applies to and the metadata extension only allows you to store a name and a URI (which hopefully still works and still points to the object in the future). There is no object hash as far as I can tell. Afaik there can be several NFTs for the same object (URI…

Please avoid to comment if you are not an expert, thanks

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#469

Post by usrbinbash »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #433
usrbinbash wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humans are lazy. They'll go with the #1 option, even if it means building a centralized monopoly. Am I lazy because I don't forge spare parts for my car and install them myself? No. I leave this to the huge, rich, established company that manufactured my car, and their contractors. Why? Because the only times I ever repaired anything in a car, was in videogames. And I want to be sure that the thing that I entrust m…

This example is silly - it's actually impossible for you to forge spare parts for your car, as most of them require multi-million dollar machines to manufacture, the information on how they are made, blueprints or schematics are not avaliable to you. And even if you succeed, someof them are IP protected so this is a terrible analogie.

I can give you plenty of more feasible analogies;

Do I make my own bread? Sure, sometimes I do. Baking bread isn't that hard. But do I do it every day? No. Why? Because it takes time to do, my kitchen counter is usually a mess afterwards, and the result usually doesn't taste anywhere near as good as the 20+ bread varieties I can buy at the corner store. I sometimes do it for fun, but I wouldn't do it every day.

Let's go to macro scale: What's the better solution: 1000000 people each baking their own bread (1 loaf a day), or a giant company baking all the bread? A million stoves are most certainly less energy efficient than the professional industrial ones at the company. Having to divide the resources into many small packages and distributing them to each individual households is less efficient. The quality of the bread will vary widely. And lets say baking takes 0.5 hours, that's 57 person years wasted per day to do something the bread factory can probably do with a few dozen employees.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#470

Post by activitypea »

dvt wrote: post #54
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

I know you're being a bit snarky, but the miners voted on that decision and decided, collectively, to fork. It's decentralized in the sense that there's no central mandate, and everyone needs to agree with a decision or that decision will ultimately fizzle.

That's not how "decentralization" should work.
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