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Web3 is centralized and inefficient

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Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#721

Post by usrbinbash »

0ldskool wrote: post #671
usrbinbash wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Decentralization like democracy introduces inefficiencies but at the same time provides safeguards against these conditions.

Most democracies are not purely decentralized systems, however. There is still a central government, the difference is how it obtains its ruling power.

Even the elections themselves are not de-centralized, as in "everyone run his own DIY election system and we'll see what sticks". There are central authorities for tallying votes, providing election sites, safeguarding and vetting the process, declaring rules, etc.

Which is a perfect example for how cenralized systems can be both efficient and safeguarded.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#722

Post by usrbinbash »

0xRolex wrote: post #717
usrbinbash wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> That is not going to happen IT's actually being worked on, it's something sometimes refered as a "layer 3" even if it's not realy one when you look at what are layers 1 and 2 but the goal of this logical "layer" is to make abstraction of everything, make crosschain needs and moves absolutely transparent. It's one big point for mass adoption and great thinkers and workers know that and are already working on that. >…

> it's something sometimes refered as a "layer 3"

Again: Most people will not use a more complex solution when a simpler one exists, regardless of whether the simpler solution requires a central authority. Example: People used to use IRC, which is a really easy to use system. Then along came chatrooms, and then centralized messenger systems. Sure, some people still use IRC, but they are not the majority.

> That's where the problem is. 3rd partys have been introduced for security reasons but are nowadays far from it and that's what some people are actually fighting for.

Which systems are "far from it"? The financial system? I get my paycheck every month, all payment processes work fine. The government systems? Elections in my country work flawlessly, tallied and protected by central authorities. The power grid? I haven't had an outage in 4 years, and the last one lasted all of 10 minutes. Public Transport in my country is affordable, well maintained and usually on time.

So it seems to me that centralized systems work just fine in the vast majority of cases.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#723

Post by socksset »

usrbinbash wrote: post #392
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…

> It could just as easily be "This isn't decentralized! Let me fix that!" First I would like to be convinced that centralization is actually a problem. Most things in our daily lives are centralized: Power Generation and Distribution, Water Distribution, the Logistics which put food in our stores, Infrastructure setup and maintenance, to name just a few. Yes, even our financial systems work fine. I get my paycheck on…

In the abstract, centralization bad, decentralization good.

There is no deeper thought going on here than the above. These are barely thought out, quasi religious beliefs as moral justifications for get rich quick schemes and frauds.

The same conversation about nothing, ad nauseam.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#724

Post by thebean11 »

eternityforest wrote: post #696
0ldskool wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are mistaken in 2 aspects. Blockchain != web3. Blockchain + cryptocurrencies make up a large part of web3 because they provide an incentive mechanism to be decentralized. Web3 is about decentralization, other solutions that follow the goals of decentralization of the web can fall into web3. I would say IPFS falls into this category. Other possible solution/algorithms that focus on decentralization could a…

Web3's model involves users actually paying for stuff. Even with all the tracking, the ad model is a win for accessibility to the poor. I'd rather be completely tracked everywhere I go then left out of all the important conversations. Web3 kind of IS just blockchain at this point. Some are even calling for a Web4, as a non blockchain more performant version of web3 not focused on financial features. I suspect if any…

How will you pay for things in “web4”? If the answer is “you don’t” it makes tons of things impossible (any sort of large scale hosting, storage, commerce)

If it’s credit cards..we’ll now you’ve created a massive centralized link in your “p2p” system.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#725

Post by darkerside »

pharke wrote: post #502
darkerside wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's creative destruction. When you decentralize, you are destroying institutions and tradition that are slowing us down. That doesn't mean you don't want new ones to rise up in their place. It's not that centralization is bad, it's just that _sometimes you centralize the wrong thing_ and this is how you fix it.

I think it's more of a Goldilocks problem. Too little centralization and things are nearly impossible to do because you have to host your own email, website, blockchain, VOIP, photos, etc. Too much centralization and you have a single dinosaur of a corporation controlling everything and probably doing it poorly for a high cost to the consumer. You need something in the middle where you have ample competition, choice,…

What do you think "in the middle" means? Everything is semi centralized? No, it means we've centralized the right things and not the wrong things.

Sorry, it just bugs me when people talk like this. Politics, too. People want us to do things "in the middle". What does that mean? Like a single payer system that pays for half of everything? What people actually mean is, they want a better solution that works for everyone. It's not a split the difference situation.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#726

Post by Arkhaine_kupo »

everfree wrote: post #675
Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> mutability can be programmed in to particular tokens at the smart contract level.

Yeah but contingencies not predicted in the original contract cannot be added, hence they are immutable from the original design. Something legally not really enforceable as laws change making previously written contracts or clauses void.

> 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.

Someone has to double check the financial and legal frameworks are being abided by in transactions of money, specially cross country. If you do not want to pay it directly in your transfer, then whatever alternative you propose would mean either tax payers or other bank users end up paying more than their fair share if they do not do as many transactions as you.

> 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.

This is a false equivalence. The transaction in ethereum takes however long you wanna pay a gas fee for, the 15 second thing is an average not a median, and certainly not a general use case for smaller transactions.

Secondly, the money in an ACH payment goes through in miliseconds, the 2 day wait is a legal escrow for legal purposes not technological ones. One that crypto should also abide if it had any real use.

> Gas fees are expensive because too many people are using it.

Gas fees are expensive because you can pay to jump the queue, and considering the number of fraudulent transactions, scams etc people are incentivized to over pay to make their quick buck after a rug pull.

> Proof of Stake reduces energy consumption by over 99%,

It also reduces security, increses centralisation and increases fees. Certainly a cure-all for a problem created by crypto in the first place.

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

The 2 day to send allows plenty of time to report a transaction, for the goverment to intervene if flags are raised etc. It certainly offers tons of legal protection.

What it doesn't protect is against Nigerian Prince scams but thats not a failure of the wire transfer, and it certainly is even worse thanks to crypto...

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#727

Post by jker »

alexb_ wrote: post #157
mbesto wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yep. It is a GUI ontop of their smart contracts (public access backend code). You don't have to use their GUI. 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.

NFTs are stupid and awful ideas, but I suggest actually reading up about how they work so you can more accurately shit on them instead of repeating things you read on twitter.

It seems like the person you're responding to is raising a legitimate criticism of NFTs, or at least, criticism of the touted benefits of them: an NFT provides absolutely no value to its owner unless there's some kind of enforcement of the "property" rights it suggests. If I own an NFT of a JPEG, there's nothing to stop anyone else from simply right-click-downloading that JPEG and hosting it somewhere else. At that point, my NFT is just me shouting "dibs!" to a room full of people who don't care.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#728

Post by thebean11 »

eternityforest wrote: post #695
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,…

That's the problem. Web3 adds payment layers to things, instead of finding ways to make things "too cheap to meter". Decentralized insurance seems like a horrible idea. Who makes the decisions? And who do you sue if they turn out to be a scam? How can you sue anyone without a centralized legal system? At best, DeFi seems like a last resort, being marketed as a replacement for the whole bank system, while still not pr…

Hosting, storage, software, human-provided services, physical objects etc will never be "too cheap to meter".

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#729

Post by pharke »

thinkmassive wrote: post #707
0ldskool wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so. They are creating the metaphor that banks == blockchain implementation + stakeholders, money == blockchain tokens. Currently most of the cryptocurrencies you see with ICOs are just erc20 tokens ontop of ETH (therefore centralized). For banks they leverage SWIFT + other more local mechanisms (double entry accounting, etc...) to resolve transfers. Its possible in the future we will develop a mechanism…

Does your bank deal in dollars or its own token? Is a cryptocurrency exchange more like a bank or a currency?

It's an exchange, the cryptocurrency itself is the bank. Banks don't require dollars or any fiat currency to exist, hell they invented paper money. The major difference is that banks had the advantage of gold and other precious metals as a pre-existing common medium of exchange. Cryptocurrencies need a verifiable way to say that you transferred X value from chain A to chain B. I'm sure this is a solvable problem.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#730

Post by pharke »

darkerside wrote: post #725
pharke wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more of a Goldilocks problem. Too little centralization and things are nearly impossible to do because you have to host your own email, website, blockchain, VOIP, photos, etc. Too much centralization and you have a single dinosaur of a corporation controlling everything and probably doing it poorly for a high cost to the consumer. You need something in the middle where you have ample competition, choice,…

What do you think "in the middle" means? Everything is semi centralized? No, it means we've centralized the right things and not the wrong things. Sorry, it just bugs me when people talk like this. Politics, too. People want us to do things "in the middle". What does that mean? Like a single payer system that pays for half of everything? What people actually mean is, they want a better solution that works for everyon…

In the middle means that you have a large number of small centralized services that are interoperable. That way you get most of the benefits of centralization e.g. someone else manages the technical details, you benefit from the network effects of the service, the service can provide things at scale that you can't on your own and you get most of the benefits of decentralization e.g. you get to choose a service that is more in alignment with your principles, has the bucket of features you prefer, has the community you want to interact with, you can switch to a new service whenever you like. You also have to lose something in exchange, you can't fully customize everything the way you like and not everyone in the world will have exactly the same features available to them. It's a compromise. The key to making it work is having a common protocol and everyone agreeing to at least speak to each other rather than building their own walled garden Utopia™.
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