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Web3 is centralized and inefficient

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Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#581

Post by happymellon »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #335
happymellon wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Scalping is only an issue if the sales price of products is artificially depressed. No offense, but you do not understand art. Yes, there are a lot of bands that could sell higher priced tickets but don't because they want to be accessable to everyone, not just people with money to burn.

If they sold higher priced tickets, more bands would have incentive to tour. This would make live music more accessible, not less. Right now they're not accessible to everyone, they're accessible to rich people and a lottery of poor people.

Blockchain solves none of this.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#582

Post by pharke »

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…

I think we just need a balance between decentralization and centralization. Think of banking as an example. If you want to be fully decentralized you can just use cash only and keep all of your money (or gold) in a safe at home. A fully centralized option is to have one national bank that everyone uses. Neither are great options but they both exist in practice. What's currently prevalent in a lot of places are a few big services that cooperate, same thing in tech right now too. What we want is a large number of small to medium sized services that are interoperable but also reliable. Make it easy for people to start their own service through laws or code and you've gone a long way towards solving the problem without putting extra work on the consumer.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#583

Post by littlecranky67 »

panick21_ wrote: post #559
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.

Having been interested in decentralization for many years, I never heard the term 'Web3' before 'Crypto'. Maybe it existed but certainty hear it about 1000x more now.

But the web is not a decentralized place. You put content on servers, and everybody downloads that content from there. There a copies or caches, yes (CDNs but also old-school http proxy caches). But if I remove content from my server (or a tweet), its no longer accessible by standard means. We build a whole set of technologies to not have a single-point-of-failure (i.e. load balanced servers + replication) but for example in CCN/IPFS you can publish content a single time from a very slow dialup line, and in theory it could be accessed by millions of users (which in todays world is only possible if you put it on a CDN or run your own datacenter to satisfy requests at that scale).

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#584

Post by delaaxe »

GuB-42 wrote: post #569
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…

> Addresses should be portable You need centralization for that. And in fact, you can already do it. Just register a domain name and use it for your email address. Most registrars offer a mail redirection service. And if you don't like your registrar, there is an official procedure to transfer your domain name, and therefore you email address. There are also official procedures regarding getting back a stolen domain…

ENS names on Ethereum work this way and are decentralized

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#585

Post by vmception »

unmole wrote: post #310
vmception wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, this was fun, past tense. analogies compare the ways dissimilar things are similar, not the ways they aren't. this is a thread about selling them and not asking why people are willing to pay for them. so what you or I need isn't relevant, if you don't want to buy one then don't buy one. if you want to make money, sell one. unless there was some point you were trying to make, in which case there are plenty of si…

You came up with an analogy that doesn't make sense.

the similarity is that they store images for viewing

neuro-typical people got it

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#586

Post by thebean11 »

kllrnohj wrote: post #580
thebean11 wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Are prediction markets pyramid schemes? What about collateralized loans?

I'm not sure what specific claims you're arguing against, but most people in the space aren't making them. It's a straw man. It sounds like you mainly take issue with the name web3, which I don't disagree with.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#587

Post by spookthesunset »

amyjess wrote: post #519
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…

Just look at git adoption. Git's selling point is that it's decentralized and distributed... but just look at the shitshow that happens whenever GitHub goes down. Git may allow for developers to all pull from each other, but in practice your employer will always have a canonical repo that's blessed as the official source, and if that one becomes unavailable for any reason work grinds to a halt. And that goes double i…

It’s not really lack of repo access that makes GitHub outages bad. It’s all the “value-add” stuff on top of the repo that makes outages suck.

You’ve got workflows bolted on top that block forward progress when it goes down. Hooks for when push requests happen, when commits happen, etc. You’ve got code reviews in your workflow that cannot happen when the service is down.

Basically there is much more to a service like GitHub / gitlab than just “write code, commit”. These services enable powerful workflows. When those go down all you can do is write code locally. The rest of the pipeline is dead in the water, which in many cases makes your overall ability to work virtually impossible.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#588

Post by thinkmassive »

pharke wrote: post #495
hiq wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Isn't that a problem worth solving? It had to be solved for banks to work as reliable institutions. Having a single blockchain in the end is probably as bad as having a single bank, although for slightly different reasons.

You’re confusing the money itself with the institutions that manage the money.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#589

Post by NationalPark »

amyjess wrote: post #519
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…

Just look at git adoption. Git's selling point is that it's decentralized and distributed... but just look at the shitshow that happens whenever GitHub goes down. Git may allow for developers to all pull from each other, but in practice your employer will always have a canonical repo that's blessed as the official source, and if that one becomes unavailable for any reason work grinds to a halt. And that goes double i…

I think that's mainly cultural, actually. "Github is down" is seen as "take the day off". But it actually is pretty easy to work around a remote being temporarily down. Developers can use their local copies of code and merge them when the remote is back up. Or whoever has the latest commits can start a temporary git server in an EC2 instance and tell the developers on slack to update their remote URLs.

Of course, if your build process is tied into github actions or something, that will still be broken. But that problem also exists for any other 3rd party build/deploy service you might use, independent of git-the-VCS-tool.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#590

Post by spookthesunset »

TheCowboy wrote: post #43
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…

> Run your own node. This is lazy reporting It isn't practical for the majority of people to run their own node. Even Vitalik Buterin acknowledges[1] this isn't realistic for the current state of things. Last year I was interested in running a sidechain node and I was shocked when I looked at minimum system requirements. I can't just run it in the background and I have a 5600X Ryzen. Plus my NVMe drive needed to be m…

> It often seems like crypto is trying to take something less complicated and make it complicated.

That could be intentional. The more complex it is, the harder it is to “prove” the whole thing is nothing more than a twist on classic pyramid schemes and Ponzi schemes. The more complicated it sounds the easier it is to bamboozle people into handing over their hard earned fiat to earlier generations of holders.

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