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Web3 is centralized and inefficient

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Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#541

Post by thebean11 »

kllrnohj wrote: post #535
thebean11 wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Blockchain is also nearly useless at transferring money or money-adjacent things.

We'll probably have to agree to disagree there. I could send you $5 in Bitcoin right now no matter what country you're in, what bank you use, and without knowing who you are. It would cost like a $1 which is high for a $5 transaction, but that price wouldn't go up for a more significant amount of money.

> But we're talking web3 here, not money, so whether it's good or bad at handling money is irrelevant?

I think you have a misunderstanding of what exactly web3 is. All the apps with any traffic (loans, gambling, NFTs, insurance, derivatives) are using the money transfer capabilities of blockchain. It's the whole point.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#542

Post by lumost »

hanniabu wrote: post #513
lumost wrote: post #499

I'm curious, Are there any web 3 sites worth visiting? Can someone point to something that I should try out to access web 3?

Maybe lens.dev or poap.xyz for social uses

hmm those both look like B2B things of one kind or another (Social media building block and NFTs for social events). Is there something I might like as a consumer? could be literally anything that I could try. I'm just curious about the user experience.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#543

Post by SparkyMcUnicorn »

Tade0 wrote: post #445

To 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…

I was disappointed by this piece. It's very short-sighted.

Tech that's currently on testnets solves all the "problems" mentioned. It doesn't mention any of these solutions.

Also, use the right tool for the job. Storing a 4MB file on the ETH chain is probably not the right tool for the job.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#544

Post by nthj »

hiq wrote: post #309
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…

> Why wouldn't there be as many chains as their are email providers Email providers can send email to each other, making them all as equally useful. Different blockchains wouldn't be compatible with each other by default, by definition, so it's more of a winner-takes-all situation.

Different blockchains could still agree how to exchange messages and transactions relevant to that exchange. I must have consensus with my employer on how I will be paid, but my employer has no business in my agreement with my landlord. Yet we all 3 have our own “blockchains” (accounting books)

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#545

Post by theptip »

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…

The web3 answer here would probably be “use blockchain for identity” which is a hard thing to get right (understatement) when you consider “right to deletion” and various privacy laws, but imagine you could tie an email sender to some pseudonymous trail of transactions that prove it is a real economically transacting agent and not a bot.

I don’t think anyone is proposing to use blockchain for email? (I’m prepared to be wrong here but it’s certainly not a common position to hold). They don’t eschew all the old protocols for every task.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#546

Post by kllrnohj »

black_puppydog wrote: post #295
Kiro wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would the image being on the chain change? You're buying a signature.

you would be, if the reference at least contained a content hash. as is, you literally just buy a link

What you're literally buying is just a uint256 number + the address of the minting wallet, not even a URL or link. The URL comes from feeding that number into a function of the smart contract, but you don't "own" that smart contract. You just "own" the number.

See the spec as it were: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721

> The pair (contract address, uint256 tokenId) will then be a globally unique and fully-qualified identifier for a specific asset on an Ethereum chain.

And while the code of that smart contract is immutable, it's still code and the outputs of any given function can change even when given the same inputs. The code can of course poison itself by observing other state or even delegating to other contracts, allowing forms of mutability of the contract itself.

Which, reminder, you don't own in an NFT. So hope you really really like the uint256 you bought. Also hope you have a good grasp of solidarity & really did an analysis of that smart contract first. That's a totally reasonable thing to expect people to do, right?

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#547

Post by HWR_14 »

silisili wrote: post #184
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…

Complete opposite take. Imagine putting all your eggs in Myspace, Geocities, Angelfire, AOL, or probably soonish, Facebook. The internet would have up and died. Yet these centralized providers come and go, but the web remains. Decentralization isn't about doing things yourself, it's about having constant choice. To flee sinking ships, to bet on rising stars. The web is fine. Web3 will pass like myspace, and the web w…

Something like 1/3 of the world uses FB. Do you really see it dying soon?

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#548

Post by hunterb123 »

yashg wrote: post #122
hunterb123 wrote: post #84

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.

It is a Walmart owned database. It's a distributed p2p database via a private blockchain.

Lots of end clients that go offline often and need to resync.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#549

Post by jcbrand »

dmitriid wrote: post #509
jcbrand wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have it backwards. Markets exist because of scarcity, not because of abundance. If something is available in unlimited abundance, there's no need of a market for it.

I don't think I got it backwards. This is the original statement: "In a proper market, it is impossible to resell because the sales price is the production price. So if the free-market price of the ticket is higher than the sales price, people should be producing additional Woodstocks until the prices match". The only free market where this is possible is a magical place where there are unlimited resources and abilit…

So you extrapolate from one HN comment to all libertarians?

You are interpreting the original comment as uncharitably as possible.

"Additional Woodstocks" can be easily interpreted as "additional concerts similar to Woodstock" without changing the meaning of the comment.

Also, you don't need unlimited resources to create new concerts, and you don't need the "snap of a finger", you simply need people who are motivated to do so by virtue of the profit motive (as well as their love for music and live shows) incentivized through the price mechanism.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#550

Post by littlecranky67 »

The issue is that crypto-rooters took the term "Web3" and inevitable tied it to crypto. There are other decentralized approaches that could become a decentralized successor to todays web, (CCNs, IPFS) but are not blockchain/crypto related. So please don't buy into the "only crypto/blockchain" is the future of the decentralized web narrative.
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