Am I wrong in my assumption that centralizing increases efficiency while decentralizing increases costs/inefficiencies but provides security gains. Very broadly speaking
Title seems to be counterintuitive.
Web3 is centralized and inefficient
531–540 of 769 posts
Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient
#532Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Coinbase complies with sanctions. OpenSea removes artwork. Complying with sanctions is a good thing; removing stolen artwork is a good thing. You... know this, right?
I believe his point is that these good things wouldn't be possible if it were decentralized
Oh, if so I totally misread and apologize.
Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient
#533Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 co…
This is precisely correct. I am hugely sympathetic to the theoretical benefits of web3, but it clearly does not deliver on these promises. Rather than move on to something else which can deliver, its proponents are insisting the emperor is fully clothed because honestly most of them don’t care a single bit about the philosophical or political dimensions of the technology but only about the profit margins they can get…
Yeah. Tech (hell, humanity) already has a big enough problem with cults forming around bad or discredited ideas and defending them to the death, but the intrinsic characteristics of crypto make its adherents substantially more aggressive -- specifically the fact that crypto fans are not only emotionally and ideologically invested, but generally also quite heavily materially and financially invested, usually to the tune of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, if not more. The consequences if they're wrong are so much worse which necessitates a completely different level of self-deception and defensiveness.
Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient
#534> 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…
> suggest people actually compile and run a node themselves yeah just buy an 86TB drive every year and run the node 24/7 to avoid penalties >You should inspect their smart contracts how many people are actually able to do this I'm not against crypto and i'm not sure yet about web3 but if it requires buying some kind of token to participate then i am skeptical.
> yeah just buy an 86TB drive every year and run the node 24/7 to avoid penalties
Lazy, low effort, inaccurate comment. A validator node is > how many people are actually able to do this
How many people are able to inspect the code running on their machine? I don't really buy this line of argument. Humans are social animals. Information about what software (on or offchain) is safe tends to propagate naturally.
Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient
#535Earlier 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.
BitTorrent works great, for transferring files. It is completely useless at transferring money or money-adjacent things. That's the fundamental innovation.
Blockchain is also nearly useless at transferring money or money-adjacent things.
But we're talking web3 here, not money, so whether it's good or bad at handling money is irrelevant?
Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient
#536To me the most damning thing said about web3 etc. to date is: https://github.com/cryptog0/welcome2web3#social-media-on-web... > The cost of storing information on the Blockchain is referred to as GAS and at the time of writting costs roughly $2 USD per 1kb of data. To put this into perspective, a high resolution photograph can be upwards of 4000kb, or $8,000. Even if this estimate is three orders of magnitude off, th…
Why would you put a photograph on the blockchain directly? The chain is for transaction processing, stuff like proof of ownership. Want decentralized storage? Toss it on IPFS.
Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient
#537Am I wrong in my assumption that centralizing increases efficiency while decentralizing increases costs/inefficiencies but provides security gains. Very broadly speaking Title seems to be counterintuitive.
Thats the point. Web3 is worst of both worlds. Its centralized yet still very inefficient at its goal
Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient
#538Earlier quoted context omitted.
So then explain it instead of the personal attack. You guys seem fun.
> 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. The question then is whose problem is that? “What happens” to who? There are about 6 or 7 distinct parties in the NFT market, so which person are you thinking about? Who would care and why? What does the rehoster get out of it? That’s a good start
Random example I found on reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/MichaelReeves/comments/js1ib8/someo...
Now let's say instead of Reddit he posted it on OpenSea. The person that owns it OpenSea then lists the image on Redbubble for financial gain. Who then owns it? Clearly the person who owns it on OpenSea? How do we know the person that posted it on Redbubble isn't the true owner and bblaineC isn't the scammer?
Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient
#539Some 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 you can create a service which is controlled by nobody. The "servers" are run by the entire network. Nobody has special permissions on the software, yet this software can accept money, pay money, deploy new contracts (prewritten obviously) etc.
This is one extreme obviously, and applications exist on a spectrum from that to something fully centralized (for example USDT where they have full money printing controls).
The point is that web3 enables building apps anywhere on that spectrum.
Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient
#540Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> proprietary network
> it seems clear that for "chat, video conferencing, file sharing" (as well as social media), proprietary networks [protocols] are more much much more popular than standardized protocols.
HTTP is used for communication and social media. So is HTTPS. Want to use an SSD for your operating system to load programs off-of for your games and communication? That requires SATA or NVMe. Want to play games that require non-trivial graphics? That requires PCIe.
Want to use Discord or Zoom or Slack Huddle or your own in-browser (or "desktop" [really a browser] app variant of those)? That's WebRTC which uses TLS and SCTP.
Where is the proprietary here? Where are you pulling this information from?