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Web3 is centralized and inefficient

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671–680 of 769 posts

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'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?' The same argument advocates monopoly or central planning by government? If not, you have to jistify where is centralised enough. Now, if we have a 20,000 different bakeries, is that actually centralised? Decentralisation of plumbers doesnt mean everyone does his ow…

> The same argument advocates monopoly or central planning by government? My argument isn't "centralization is good no matter what". My argument is "centralization is not inherently a bad thing that is to be overcome. Done correctly, as demonstrated by many existing systems in our society, it is a great way to make things our society needs work at scale in an efficient manner."

I think centralization is often the most efficient solution, the assumption being that the central authority has implemented the most efficient system. The problem though is the same as governments. Dictatorship is the most efficient way to run a country, people do as the dictator says there is no questioning it. All choices of the dictator are made and no waste is done in thinking or processing of the decision. The problem becomes that these centralization solutions almost always turn sour. The central authority (dictator) may have started off benevolent/perfect but either they eventually turn bad, successors turn bad, or the central authority becomes inefficient in new environmental conditions.

Decentralization like democracy introduces inefficiencies but at the same time provides safeguards against these conditions. The goal is to provide the minimum amount of inefficiencies while providing the maximum amount of safeguards.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is about sound money in the real world. Artificial rarity is a feature in that space. Proof of work is about grounding the system in the physical world.

And now we have 90000 Bitcoin clones with only slight differences. Every dollar invested into these shitcoins is a dollar not invested into Bitcoin. So much for rarity

If I sell you fools gold or silver, does that change the rarity of gold?

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

' My interest for running a node was ... to attempt to counter frontrunning aka sandwich attacks. ' You may have misunderstood the eth tech stack. Running your own node is not a means to prevent sandwich attacks.

I specifically said "counter" not "prevent". I explained in another post.

Running your own node neither counters nor prevents front running your transactions. If you send tx to standard mempool, the tx can be seen and front run.

There are existing solutions for the narrow use case you seem to have - flashbots and a few others. And they have cost savings to you of not running your tx (saving eth gas fees) if your tx submission does not win.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are just some of the use cases 1. 100x cheaper, faster cross-border transfers 2. Immutable, digital, accessible, secure ownership of music, video, real-estate, cars, gaming assets, health data 3. Instant access to nearly all possible financial products (loans, lending, startup investments etc.) without a middle man There are many, many more use cases. Crypto drastically increases accountability, transparency, ac…

1) would be just as expensive if taxed properly, so not cheaper just illegal 2) immutable is a pretty shitty property for some of those assets, also its a pretty negative turn of society to go and try and make fungible products like music listening into private non fungible ownable assets 3) The middle man is usually there for a number of reasons. Same way exchanges showed up almost immidietly after crypto, you would…

> immutable is a pretty shitty property for some of those assets

Because smart contract chains allow for turing complete code, mutability can be programmed in to particular tokens at the smart contract level.

> regulation is there for a reason, for every extra fee you pay to do cross border money transfer, some money is not being laundered.

It shouldn't be my personal financial responsibility to pay for a corporation to double check my own assertion that I am not breaking any law.

> With crypto right now you lose all that protection in exchange for a slow, expensive gas fees, environmentally destructive proofs of work and absolutely no legal protection if you get scammed in the end.

I'm breaking this down.

> slow

Taking Ethereum as an example, payments generally go through within 15 seconds, compared to several hours for a same-day wire transfer or several days for an ACH payment.

> expensive gas fees

Gas fees are expensive because too many people are using it. Ethereum processes over a million transactions daily, not including Layer 2 and side chains which have increased that capacity and lowered gas fees in practice.

> environmentally destructive proofs of work

Proof of Stake reduces energy consumption by over 99%, and most blockchains currently use it.

> absolutely no legal protection if you get scammed in the end

The standard way to send money abroad, international wire transfer, also gives you next to no legal protection if you get scammed.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your jurisdiction has imposed sanctions on Russia but you then help a Russian national bypass sanctions then you are the criminal.

If you are a Russian, and you want to bypass sanctions imposed on you by others, are you then a criminal, too?

If it's illegal for me to send $200 back home to help my family pay for food to be able to eat, call me a criminal I guess.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#677
post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo had a revenue of $7.4bn in 2020 and Yahoo was many times smaller and less impactful than Facebook. Facebook will bury us both.

I personally think facebook saw itself dieing which is why it focused so hard on the Metaverse and acquiring companies. Facebook as its own product may die but the company will probably live on in some form or another. I feel like unlike Yahoo, Facebook is full of very capable and technical people. Even if they make a bunch of misteps and bad predications they will find alternatives and will make a come back.

Yahoo was also full of extremely talented and capable people at one time.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Small organizations use github. Really large organizations have their own git servers. I have worked on both sides of that.

I’ve worked for a number of very large, enterprise companies. They use Github Enterprise.

Even banks are moving to SaaS first for their core applications.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#679
post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'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?' The same argument advocates monopoly or central planning by government? If not, you have to jistify where is centralised enough. Now, if we have a 20,000 different bakeries, is that actually centralised? Decentralisation of plumbers doesnt mean everyone does his ow…

I know you wanted to veer back to the topic, but just to add another example to the pile: the math on mass transit is just blindingly obvious. A cheap centralized transit system is wildly more efficient for moving people around than individual cars. And investments in it will "lift all boats" socioeconomically speaking. But it is more about the problems than the methodology. Centralized/Cooperative methods are more a…

> I don't think we have a word for when we force groups who should be cooperating to compete with each other for resources

I agree in terms of forcing, but we have plenty of ways to describe the general idea of choosing this direction, typically in exchange for a (real or perceived) benefit, but almost always with the inefficiency/delay you mentioned:

homegrown

homemade

handmade

handcrafted

artisan

DIY

roll your own

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And billions in international foreign and military aid through non-crypto means That doesn't invalidate crypto > Traditional banking and fiat money is good With flaws that crypto solves > nobody actually pays anything with crypto because of inconvenience, transfer costs, speed and value instability False, there are merchants that accept payments in crypto and stablecoins. Though it is true that asset transfers are…

If you have to do so much of your own research to finally find a useful use case for crypto or grasp the genius concept behind NFT. If no one can understand why it is so revolutionary. Is it maybe that there is nothing to be found behind the artificial complexity? Something so revolutionary should be easy to understand. The concept of Internet was easy to understand (fast communication, availability of information,..…

> The concept of Internet was easy to understand (fast communication, availability of information,...)

Not really - I think you're introducing hindsight bias. This famous David Letterman clip with Bill Gates is pretty representative of the population's poor understanding of the benefits of the Internet. This clip was from just over a decade after the Internet was invented, so roughly the same amount of time that we are right now since the concept of distributed ledger technology was invented.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gipL_CEw-fk

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