It never ceases to amaze me just how incredibly naive even the tippy-top biggest thought-leaders in crypto are. He clearly doesn’t understand why centralization happened on the web and why “web3” is wholly insufficient to solve that. He’s got major blinders on, I suspect in part because he’s deeply financially invested in this supposed solution.
Why Decentralization Matters (2018)
21–30 of 78 posts
Re: Why Decentralization Matters (2018)
#22I don't understand why the message ends up "let's go crypto" and not "make protocols, not startups". He started by talking about the good old days. He clearly identifies the issues of crypto and that there was nothing wrong with open protocols besides speed to market (which is easier to fix than the snafu of crypto) He identified Wikipedia vs Encarta and Wikipedia is a success but has nothing to do with crypto. There…
existing protocols were not built around identity, but the new ones do, and in order to avoid the centralization that is inherent to identity, they have rely on blockchains or something equivalent (which doesnt exist), hence the crypto connection. It doesnt have to involve money, but the solutions are equivalent. E.g. metamask can be a wallet or an authentication mechanism.
Re: Why Decentralization Matters (2018)
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. If payments / incentives are required, then Bitcoin can be used. For example, there's decentralized Sphinx Chat which runs on the Bitcoin lightning network: https://sphinx.chat I haven't seen any of the 'cryptojunk' tokens implement an actual service like the Sphinx chat, which is quite telling in my opinion.
No. It cannot. Bitcoin cannot be used, because the rate of transactions is much to low for such an application. Currently its only use is gambling and burning the planet.
Haha. It almost sounds like you're serious.
Re: Why Decentralization Matters (2018)
#24What I find curious in that web3 scenario is this: 1. Today's internet is decentralized because people can't run their own web, smtp, nntp, xmpp, servers, WP blogs. Which is true, we can't expect people to run this the same way we can't expect every car owner to have a mechanic shop. 2. The proposals for "web3", to the best of my understanding, require people to run their own blockchain nodes, manage wallets, etc. Ba…
Others can run the nodes. The point is the network of nodes are distributed and no node is more important than any other. They are all just peers.
You can make the same arguments but with servers instead of nodes. That's how things are today. But the web isn't decentralized.
Re: Why Decentralization Matters (2018)
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Burning the planet is the primary effect. The beer is a side effect :)
Under 10 transactions per second globally is why Bitcoin isn’t used in retail. Micropayments and nanopayments require thousands and tens of thousands TPS. There are newer generations of crypto that can do that and with none of the energy consumption problems of Bitcoin and other Proof of Work systems.
Sphinx chat payments work exclusively on Lightning and so is the El Salvador Chico wallet. Why do people keep using the same uninformed arguments every time bitcoin is mentioned?
Re: Why Decentralization Matters (2018)
#26What I find curious in that web3 scenario is this: 1. Today's internet is decentralized because people can't run their own web, smtp, nntp, xmpp, servers, WP blogs. Which is true, we can't expect people to run this the same way we can't expect every car owner to have a mechanic shop. 2. The proposals for "web3", to the best of my understanding, require people to run their own blockchain nodes, manage wallets, etc. Ba…
Exactly! And, in addition to that complexity, there are scalability issues that are easier to solve with some amount of centralization. Would you rather build on a platform where you're paying a well known company or a platform comprised of a bunch of anonymous nodes trying to minimize operating costs? That Filecoin thing is a great example. Yeah, I want to store my mission critical data on a bunch of EoL, consumer g…
It is not some amount of centralization. Our experimental university work sees all startups cheat with servers. They still sell it as Web3. If you run the servers, you need to police the service! You simply become Web2 again. It should be self-organising and pure, like Bitcoin.
Scientifically Web3 consists of: peer-to-peer technology (e.g. Bittorrent) with a distributed ledger (e.g. Bitcoin) and the social practice of sharing (e.g. Github). This will take 10-15 years more to develop further. The startups are very noisy and are now discovering that doing real "distributed systems" is very hard. They consistently cheat by using central servers. Adversarial Byzantine attacks are unsolved (or require wasteful proof-of-work to yield no performance).
Re: Why Decentralization Matters (2018)
#27And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And people forgot how the internet works, and reinvented the _decentralized internet_. Behold, the engineers of now give you… Web3!
Re: Why Decentralization Matters (2018)
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. It cannot. Bitcoin cannot be used, because the rate of transactions is much to low for such an application. Currently its only use is gambling and burning the planet.
Last time I checked, in El Salvador you could buy beer from a machine with a cell phone using Bitcoin.
People aren't actually making transactions within the Bitcoin chain there. It wouldn't work out, the on-chain fees are outrageous.
Re: Why Decentralization Matters (2018)
#29Three years ago, I had written this as a response.
https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/03/change-my-mind-abo...
I don't see any better arguments, development put forth since then
Re: Why Decentralization Matters (2018)
#30Decentralization is good, but there's no need to bring cryptojunk into the discussion since that's far from decentralized. IMHO. Bring back the use of open protocols, add IPv6 support throughout and add a sprinkling of peer-to-peer.
Why is everyone talking about decentralized. Current internet is decentralized. People seem to be clamoring for distributed.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58727b5a9de4bb...
