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Web3 is centralized and inefficient

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Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#761

Post by preseinger »

landemva wrote: post #709
preseinger wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I care about the bloggers that make these flippant dismissals instead of talking about the impractical things that are possible. I simultaneously observe that the impractical things can be made more practical. Why, though? What's the sell? What does a decentralized future get me, concretely , that I don't have now? Appeals to user privacy and data ownership aren't concrete things. Concrete things are faster loading…

Those fortunate to live in a place with somewhat stable currency, decent rule of law, and decent banking often don't see the advantages of holding assets without custodians. My keys, my coins.

> Those fortunate to live in a place with somewhat stable currency, decent rule of law, and decent banking often don't see the advantages of holding assets without custodians.

This describes every place on Earth except -- arguably -- Venezuela and Somalia. And the solution to Venezuela and Somalia is to fix the government! Not to just sigh and assume their broken societies are somehow inevitable and to treat them as default.

---

> My keys, my coins.

When you lose your keys -- which, statistically, you absolutely will -- is it appropriate that you should also forfeit your wealth? (This is a rhetorical question.)

"Custodians" are not a bug. They are a feature.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#762

Post by eternityforest »

thebean11 wrote: post #754
eternityforest wrote: post #751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The main value I see in everything else P2P is that they're resistant to network failure. If a wannabe Kaczynski somehow takes out all the data centers, you'll still be able to set up a mesh and have essential communications.

Uncensorable payments are important for some and detrimental for others, since the majority of people have no need or desire to do anything that would get them shut down by a bank, and in fact actively benefit from the ability to "censor" fraud.

Putting something like that in the core of a protocol as a mandatory element doesn't make a lot of sense. There's an incredible amount of overhead involved, and it means the protocol is no longer general purpose, it's optimized for doing stuff payment processors don't want you to do, at the expense of the other use cases.

Which would be fine, if it weren't for the fact that almost all p2p projects have become money-centric, and payment free P2P has almost totally stalled.

For most use cases, payments aren't really a weak link. Their tech is highly reliable. If I were to host something with 3 different cheap seedboxes, I'd expect very good reliability, because mastercard probably won't have a long enough outage to make an invoice overdue.

P2P payments are definitely valuable, just a bit more niche.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#763

Post by eternityforest »

thebean11 wrote: post #728
eternityforest wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Part of what makes tech great is reducing the need for physical objects.

Open source software already is literally free. Almost all the good stuff is developed by corporations at a pretty high price, but it's still not much considering billions of users.

Hosting apparently costs so little to provide that just a few ad clicks and some data collection, or a donation model like Wikipedia, can be way more than enough.

Some of it appears to even be given away just as a promotion.

It's not literally free, but it's getting close to irrelevant costs per megabyte of data.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#764

Post by Siira »

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…

The problem is that self-hosting is pretty difficult. If one could just run a docker image, only setting up the absolutely needed personal info, it would become a lot more common. Not on the personal/everyday level, but for professional (money generating) settings, it can absolutely become mainstream.

The spam problem is also simply the decentralized system not working; it has no protections against unwanted incoming messages.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#765

Post by Siira »

polyomino wrote: post #140
cmelbye wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problems you’re describing are problems of the internet, not decentralization. Few could’ve predicted what the initial rules of the internet would generate after a few decades. We can learn from the outcome and come up with new rules. The point about how “people want centralized systems” reminds me of the initial response to Apple’s privacy strategy. At the time, it was met with skepticism, to say the least. Priv…

Yeah, and Apple sold people on "privacy" and now operate a surveillance network against Chinese citizens. They are the archetypical example of this playing out. Promising decentralization and instead you get metamask overriding the blockchain because some jpegs are illegal.

Isn’t Metamask opensource? Why don’t people maintain a fork without the censorship?

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#766

Post by hanniabu »

lumost wrote: post #542
hanniabu wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe lens.dev or poap.xyz for social uses

hmm those both look like B2B things of one kind or another (Social media building block and NFTs for social events). Is there something I might like as a consumer? could be literally anything that I could try. I'm just curious about the user experience.

Poap.xyz is a fun user focused project

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#767

Post by genge »

preseinger wrote: post #761
landemva wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those fortunate to live in a place with somewhat stable currency, decent rule of law, and decent banking often don't see the advantages of holding assets without custodians. My keys, my coins.

> Those fortunate to live in a place with somewhat stable currency, decent rule of law, and decent banking often don't see the advantages of holding assets without custodians. This describes every place on Earth except -- arguably -- Venezuela and Somalia. And the solution to Venezuela and Somalia is to fix the government! Not to just sigh and assume their broken societies are somehow inevitable and to treat them as…

> This describes every place on Earth except -- arguably -- Venezuela and Somalia.

That's just ignorance. Argentina, a G20 member, has had banks not allow it's citizens access their accounts in 2002. Currently they don't allow their citizens to buy dollars and have a black market for it. Banks change rules constantly trying to adapt to new laws. This is a similar thing occuring in many countries. Russia and Ukraine have also strong issues due to the current situation, and citizens are adopting crypto because of it.

Just because you don't know about it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

>And the solution to Venezuela and Somalia is to fix the government

Oh. So as a citizen I have to just fix my goverment! Thanks for the suggestion.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#768

Post by genge »

acejam wrote: post #638
Nav_Panel wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you put a photograph on the blockchain directly? The chain is for transaction processing, stuff like proof of ownership. Want decentralized storage? Toss it on IPFS.

To flip your own comment back on you: Why would you toss it up on IPFS? IPFS isn't a decentralized storage network, it's a data routing/transmission protocol with a DHT.

You just join IPFS with things like https://crust.network/ and that's 'sufficiently decentralized'. People confuse decentralized with sufficiently decentralized which is what most Dapps are focusing.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#769

Post by preseinger »

genge wrote: post #767
preseinger wrote: post #761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those fortunate to live in a place with somewhat stable currency, decent rule of law, and decent banking often don't see the advantages of holding assets without custodians. This describes every place on Earth except -- arguably -- Venezuela and Somalia. And the solution to Venezuela and Somalia is to fix the government! Not to just sigh and assume their broken societies are somehow inevitable and to treat them as…

> This describes every place on Earth except -- arguably -- Venezuela and Somalia. That's just ignorance. Argentina, a G20 member, has had banks not allow it's citizens access their accounts in 2002. Currently they don't allow their citizens to buy dollars and have a black market for it. Banks change rules constantly trying to adapt to new laws. This is a similar thing occuring in many countries. Russia and Ukraine h…

Argentina has a curious economic situation but inarguably the rule of law and a coherent banking system. Russia self-subverts their currency but is otherwise stable. Ukraine is under siege so many things are up in the air. None of these nations qualify under your rules.

And yes, you have to fix your government. That's how society works.

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