Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Web3 is centralized and inefficient

neelc.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

751–760 of 769 posts

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#751

Post by eternityforest »

thebean11 wrote: post #724
eternityforest wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's fine. It's what we have now , and centralized finance has a huge advantage in that there is human review to reverse fraud and theft.

I am perfectly fine using centralised finance to buy things that are mostly already inherently centralized, which is pretty much all common purchases for most people, since buying anything that can be made cheaply by an individual is rare for most.

A huge number of things can be done purely P2P with no payments, with almost no infrastructure. That should be the core feature of Web4.

Even more things can be done semi-decentralized as in BitTorrent+a seedbox, and that works just fine.

Some of those things can even be donation supported in a profitable way and don't need payment from most users in any way that actually connects to the service. They can just put a PayPal and bitcoin link and people can donate however they want.

In Wikipedia can do it, Facebook and maybe even Youtube can, with appropriate P2P load balancing.

This is almost essential because the competing centralized services are totally free(via you-are-the-product models).

An email service or something that costs money and requires linking your bank to some coin payment service is going to have a hard time competing with gmail for the general public.

If something needs payment, it probably shouldn't be a core layer of the whole system. The first priority should be make things too cheap to meter where you can, and then figure out how to decentralize the remaining stuff, assuming there is demand.

Blockchain inherently can't do offline first LAN apps properly, you can't have consensus without communication. If I can't talk to someone on a mesh network without internet, a large amount of the advantage of P2P is gone.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#752

Post by alexb_ »

jker wrote: post #727
alexb_ wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

>unless there's some kind of enforcement of the "property" rights it suggests.

That's the entire point of a blockchain. It's valuable because other people agree that it is. Of course, the actual JPEG can be copied, but that doesn't mean your blockchain ownership of it does. You are kind of shouting dibs, but the difference is that a lot of people care. And as long as someone cares enough to pay you money for your dibs, then it has value.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#753

Post by pharke »

thinkmassive wrote: post #742
pharke wrote: post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> a mechanism that allows two completely unrelated & unconnected blockchains to transfer tokens between eachother Atomic swaps already exist. I still have no idea what that has to do with the nonsensical metaphor "a blockchain is a bank"

The essence of both a bank and a cryptocurrency is the ledger. Everything else is an implementation detail.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#754

Post by thebean11 »

eternityforest wrote: post #751
thebean11 wrote: post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's fine. It's what we have now , and centralized finance has a huge advantage in that there is human review to reverse fraud and theft. I am perfectly fine using centralised finance to buy things that are mostly already inherently centralized, which is pretty much all common purchases for most people, since buying anything that can be made cheaply by an individual is rare for most. A huge number of things can be…

Using a centralized form of payment completely defeats the purpose of a peer to peer system. The system is as strong as its weakest link; if your payment processor has the ability to take down your service (by blocking payments) you might as well be hosting the service itself on a centralized system too!

I agree that not everything requires payment, but the things that do cannot truly be p2p without p2p payments.

Let me pose the question in a different way: why do you see p2p filesharing, hosting, communication etc as valuable but p2p payments as non-valuable?

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#755

Post by jdrc »

bitcoin_anon wrote: post #423
jdrc wrote: post #359

The mortal sin is to consider artificial rarity a good thing . The internet is infinite, the appeal of the metaverse is exacty because you can be infinitely young, infinitely rich, have infinite partners, break ouf of the constraints of this world. Constrained virtual worlds are called games and have a different objective. If we are to build a zero sum world, we d better stick to the physical one.

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.

bitcoin is not about creating artificial rarity, it's a different kind of system that creates real rarity, and can defend itself. Artificial rarity is when copiable or physical items are being considerer rare by fiat of a smart contract that cannot enforce itself, is not fundamentally tied to the item, and ultimately depends on the kindness of strangers to keep functioning.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#756

Post by TimJRobinson »

eru wrote: post #750
melomal wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Royalties. The ticket seller can set that and every time the ticket is resold, they will get % of that sale. For an artist that would mean they can sell a ticket with % royalty set and then profit from future sales on an ongoing basis.

Why not auction the tickets off in the first place?

They can do both. They get royalties on all resales.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#757

Post by boomlinde »

divs1210 wrote: post #745
boomlinde wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So ticket scalping. This was never desirable to anyone except the reseller in the first place. Concert goers hate scalpers, arrangers hate scalpers and the reseller adds no value to their service. I don't see how it's the least bit interesting.

I'm not talking about scalping. Woodstock was a legendary event. The tickets would now be considered collectors items.

In that sense you can already resell your Woodstock tickets on an open market. NFTs don't really add anything to this market in particular, so I don't get your point.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#758

Post by boomlinde »

0xRolex wrote: post #715
boomlinde wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No need to expose yourself, possible anonimity and most important one That is an advantage if you're going to engage in behavior any reasonable person would despise you for. > the absolute lack of need of a third party If you're scalping tickets, you are the third party.

Anonimity and privacy on internet are a right and you don't need to do shady stuff to enjoy them and outside of the immediate risk caused by doxing oneself when having a heavily valued crypto/nft portfolio I agree that it's not always needed. It still should be an option though as when selling valuable stuff p2p some protection is always appreciated. I don't really get the part on how selling something you own p2p ma…

I'm obviously not making a point against anonymity in general, so spare me the spiel.

> I don't really get the part on how selling something you own p2p makes you a third party and I don't care about the 2nd hand tickets market, I'm only intrested in a safe decentralized p2p market

The peers in this transaction are the event organizer and the person who ends up with a ticket. The ticket scalper is third party that "facilitates" the transaction at a cost. Essentially a broker that no one asked for.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#759

Post by eru »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #756
eru wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not auction the tickets off in the first place?

They can do both. They get royalties on all resales.

If you don't tax resales, first auction will go for a higher price.

(Just like houses that come with less ongoing taxes or other burdens go for more money.)

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#760

Post by thinkmassive »

pharke wrote: post #753
thinkmassive wrote: post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a mechanism that allows two completely unrelated & unconnected blockchains to transfer tokens between eachother Atomic swaps already exist. I still have no idea what that has to do with the nonsensical metaphor "a blockchain is a bank"

The essence of both a bank and a cryptocurrency is the ledger. Everything else is an implementation detail.

The essence of banks is dealing in risk. A ledger is one tool they use.
Post reply on HN