Web3 is centralized and inefficient • Hacker News Board

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#571

Post by dmitriid » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 3:46 PM UTC

jcbrand wrote: post #549

dmitriid wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> So you extrapolate from one HN comment to all libertarians?

Yes. Because all of their notions of "one true free market" require unlimited resources and ability to immediately create anything from scratch.

> can be easily interpreted as "additional concerts similar to Woodstock"

Same thing, different attempt to argue semantics.

> 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

I'll repeat this again for the fourth-fifth time in this thread. Literally thousands of concerts exist, "simply" driven by "people who are motivated to do so by virtue of the profit motive". And yet, Woodstock is Woodstock. And Sziget is Sziget etc. I wonder why.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#572

Post by giantrobot » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 3:47 PM UTC

ipnon wrote: post #53

djur wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 general consensus seems to be that while both crypto and the Web share this problem, the Web is ultimately redeemable while crypto should be nuked from orbit. It's an interesting contradiction in public opinion, probably stemming from all of the money involved.

> It's an interesting contradiction in public opinion, probably stemming from all of the money involved.

It's not the fact money is involved. It's the way money is involved.

If I want to participate in web3 I have to take real money and buy cryptocurrency funny money. Every aspect of loading a simple web page (web3 page?) charges me some amount of funny money. The amount charged can't be meaningfully predicted. A service might charge me a funny penny for a transaction but today that funny penny is worth a real penny while tomorrow the funny penny is worth a real dollar. Every web3 transaction ends up being like the guy that bought a pizza with a Bitcoin.

All the extra rent extraction of web3 is on top of me paying for my ISP, cell provider, and all my devices. Even with the money I have to pay over the top for web3 participation I end up with a slower and shittier experience than the traditional web. If I decide I'm done with web3 I may not ever be able to cash out the funny money I had to buy.

So the fact web3's design is built entirely around generating greater fools for cryptocurrency Ponzi schemes makes it a stupid and undesirable system.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#573

Post by usrbinbash » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 3:47 PM UTC

0xRolex wrote: post #510

usrbinbash wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the most common way to do blockchain transactions are broker services which do require user information. This, combined with the fact that the blockchain is an immutable public ledger (meaning any transaction can be traced back indefinitely), and there goes anonymity.

By brokers you mean Centralised Exchanges ? If yes I agree it's an aberation as we've with recently with Russia's problems people getting banned from it because these exchanges are bounded to obey country's laws. Everyone should leave CEXs to get on DEXs and learn about DeFi but as cool as it can be it's everything but userfriendly and as it is it'll never make it to public adoption. About tracing transactions as lon…

> Everyone should leave CEXs to get on DEXs and learn about DeFi

That is not going to happen, for the same reasons why most people don't dig their own wells, learn carpentry to make their own furniture, or weave their own cloth and learn how to tailor clothes.

Every complex enough system will always have centralized points, aka. gatekeepers. That is how human society self-organises.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#574

Post by dmitriid » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 3:47 PM UTC

drugstorecowboy wrote: post #557

dmitriid wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, grandparent is absolutely correct. It's not magic, if they charged what tickets are actually worth, there would be no scalpers. That is not a libertarian fantasy or anything close to it, in fact it's not even controversial.

> if they charged what tickets are actually worth, there would be no scalpers

Scalpers' motive is to gain profit off of a limited resource. It doesn't matter if the tickets cost even less than the concert costs to produce.

By the way, who determines the "actual worth" of tickets?

> That is not a libertarian fantasy or anything close to it

That is not what I was responding to.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#575

Post by ClumsyPilot » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 3:48 PM UTC

lal wrote: post #518

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe it's just me, but unless I'm crazy you've just listed all of the reasons it's actually an entirely workable analogy.

I dont get it- how does lack of blueprints and IP protection apply to blockchain, where all code is public?

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#576

Post by unixbane » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 3:50 PM UTC

This article doesn't even explain how web3 is centralized (it is in many ways). All I see is some stupid non-technical blog trying to orient blockchain as part of the enemy along with "wh*te", "0.1%", and "bro". The irony is that this is a techbro-tier article.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#577

Post by dns_snek » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 3:51 PM UTC

moffkalast wrote: post #556

jermaustin1 wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a normal user of bitcoin or any crypto, but I have not seen large unpredictable fees in a while. My transaction fees are almost always 0.00001 BTC or less, with my typical transfer being anywhere from 0.0004 BTC to 0.002 BTC. Sure its a little different than most payment providers where the person initiating the payment pays the fees, but the fees are well under credit card rates.

Assuming you want to actually get bitcoin first you'll need to buy it on an exchange which will charge your absurd fees to transfer it into your own wallet. And if you ever want to do the reverse you'll get charged those same absurd fees again. In the middle you have the space where you can do BTC to BTC transactions with somewhat smaller fees, sure.

That depends on the exchange, some charge extremely high fees, others charge minimum fees.

As an example, Coinbase charges reasonable withdrawal fees that correspond to the actual TX fee, around $0.05 when I last used it a few weeks ago. Others charge absurdly high fees, biggest examples of that being Binance and Bitstamp that charged ~$20 for a Bitcoin withdrawal around the same time Coinbase was charging $0.05.

Point being, different exchanges charge different fees, and LocalBitcoins is always an option if you want to avoid exchanges altogether.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#578

Post by geraldyo » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 3:52 PM UTC

unixbane wrote: post #576

This article doesn't even explain how web3 is centralized (it is in many ways). All I see is some stupid non-technical blog trying to orient blockchain as part of the enemy along with "wh*te", "0.1%", and "bro". The irony is that this is a techbro-tier article.

There's a few examples on how it is centralized, not sure what you were looking for?

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#579

Post by littlecranky67 » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 3:52 PM UTC

throw_nbvc1234 wrote: post #563

littlecranky67 wrote: post #550

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.

This is too nuanced a take for most people, the kind who want to engaged in polarized 'discussions', to care about. Or use-case specific coins that solve a particular problem (Filecoin IPFS relationship). Web3, crypto, blockchain have all become poisoned topics that are mostly divorced from the technological characteristics underneath them. This combined with the idea that if those technologies don't solve a problem…

The thing is that no one has the authority to decide what "Web3" even is. It kind of implies a succession to the established Web 2.0 term. But Web 2.0 is also no clearly defined term, and it was also not established a-priori. I.e. the term Web 2.0 was somehow coined as a reference to a broad set of technologies in the Web sphere that were supposed to change the web. It is mostly associated with the evolution from the "Web 1.0" desinged for news-paper/static content style of content, to a web of rich, dynamic applications. The technologies often associated were the (then upcoming) HTML5 standard, plus advances in JavaScript and browser technology (stuff like AJAX but which existed in all major browsers when the term was coined). But these technologies were all on the horizon/in development when the term was coined.

Now, with the term "Web3", crypto enthusiasts try to establish it a-priori. That is, nobody knows exactly what kind of technologies/changes will be in "Web3" and even the problem it solves are not considered problems that need fixing by others. And it doesn't matter, because whether "Web3" will be a thing that changes the web as we know it will not be decided by evangelists, it will be decided when it has been adapted by the broad majority - and my personal take is that what currently is proclaimed as Web3 will not see broad adaption (by users, enterprises, network operators etc.).

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#580

Post by kllrnohj » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 3:56 PM UTC

thebean11 wrote: post #541

kllrnohj wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> 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.

That transaction fee is itself highly variable & dependent on load, though. The more people that actually try to use bitcoin to transfer money, the more expensive it gets. It actively resists using it to transfer money.

That, combined with the long transaction times, make it completely useless as a general purpose currency. You can use it as a variant on a wire transfer, where you only use it for rare, large transactions. And even then only one where you're ok waiting load spikes out (which can last for months as was the case in the first half of 2021). But then you're still spending extra time & money on each side of that transaction moving back out of bitcoin and into something usable for "normal" transactions.

> 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.

But that's not what web3 proponents claim it is. Yes right now all the "web3 dApps" are money-related (or less charitably but more accurately, pyramid schemes), I don't disagree with you on that at all. But the claims are that it can be a decentralized replacement for web2. And web2 does a whole lot more than just shuffle money around.

That's why it's billing itself as "web3" and not, idk, "visa2".