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

201–210 of 769 posts

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#201

Post by yashg »

blowski wrote: post #190
mmaunder wrote: post #188

I still can't get over that NFT's are just a URL pointing to the data. They don't even have an on-chain hash of the digital asset. It's like selling a sign pointing to houses for the price of the house, and claiming you own the house, hoping that the sign will increase in value the way the house does, and bragging about it. For reference: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

I too struggle with the concept. But I imagine the supporters of NFTs would say the value is in being the only person who can put that sign. It seems like an extremely bizarre form of conspicuous consumption, but there we go.

>being the only person who can put that sign And even that is not true. There is nothing preventing literally anyone from creating as many signs they want and point it to any house they want.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#202

Post by gorgoiler »

auggierose wrote: post #131
cardy31 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turns out most people wanting to do international transfers without a middleman are criminals. Regular people are for the most part fine with international transfers going through banks, likely via SWIFT.

Except if you live in Russia, of course. Or are you saying every Russian is a criminal?

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

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#203

Post by distortedsignal »

majormajor wrote: post #160
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a false dichotomy. Most people don't want to run their own mail servers. That isn't the same thing as saying we need a single entity to be in charge of email. There are thousands of independent email providers. Your emails get marked as spam if you have two users, not if you have two thousand. And small providers getting marked as spam isn't because it's necessary to prevent spam, it's because large providers…

Email is one I keep coming back to when I try to picture a future that runs on blockchain tech. It seems like even if there are enough situations where the zero-trust nature proves to make sense to users, it would be silly for them to all use the same chains. Why deal with the overhead and transaction costs? Why wouldn't there be as many chains as their are email providers, and then most of them would only have value…

I think the answer to why one chain is better than many chains is because it’s way harder to 51% one chain with many applications rather than having to 51% one chain with one application.

I don’t know enough about blockchain tech to KNOW this is correct, but it’s something interesting that kinda falls out of the theory.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#204

Post by yrral »

The author is just defining "decentralized" based on what he can come up with arguments against. In doing so, he misses some very important properties of this decentralization (that he either doesn't realize or doesn't have arguments for).

To me, web3 is decentralized in that the user data is exposed and freely available to be composed upon.

For example, when someone makes a deposit (say of ERC20 USDC to earn interest, around 3.0% currently) on https://compound.finance, that data is freely available and the "receipt" becomes another token (the ERC20 USDC cToken). [1]

This token can now be used for other things, on any other protocol, without the involvement or permission of compound itself. For example, there is a "compound" pool on https://curve.fi that allows users to deposit cTokens so that they can earn interest on their stablecoins while also providing liquidity for stablecoin swaps and earning swap fees as well on top. [2] In fact, with this pool, the user can deposit/withdrawal just pure ERC20 USDC instead and curve will deposit/withdrawal that into/from compound on behalf of the user, again, with no involvement of compound at all. (other than interacting with its "immutable" smart contract)

> As a sidenote: Note that with web2, much of your data is locked away. Eg, twitter's closed api, gmail marking so many emails from self-hosted as spam, fb everything, American airlines not allowing scraping of a user's point wallet, cc points being non-transferrable, etc etc.

This deposit then gives the user back another ERC20 token "cCrv" that can then be used in other DeFi protocols without the involvement or authorization of curve.

At this point people are talking past each other because "centralization" can be used to refer to many things. The author's is just critiquing a tiny portion of the term decentralization (infrastructure), which I guess he most understands since his day job involves that.

[1] https://compound.finance/docs/ctokens

[2] https://curve.fi/compound

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#205

Post by mewse »

bobsomers wrote: post #198
hannasanarion wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A public ledger is not inherently valuable. A trusted ledger is valuable, but a ledger doesn't have to be public to be trusted. When I swipe my card at the grocery store, I'm not shaking in my boots with my fingers crossed, doubting whether the transaction will be recorded as transmitted or not. If for some looney toons secret agent reason you need a transaction to be public, you can tweet a picture of the receipt. O…

> A trusted ledger is valuable, but a ledger doesn't have to be public to be trusted. When I swipe my card at the grocery store, I'm not shaking in my boots with my fingers crossed, doubting whether the transaction will be recorded as transmitted or not. Of course, because as the customer nothing bad happens to you if it’s not. Worst case scenario, the merchant doesn’t accept your payment and you either have to pay w…

How does the ledger being public fix the scenario you’re talking about, here?

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#206

Post by vmception »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #193
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…

> suggest people actually compile and run a node themselves yeah just buy an 86TB drive every year and run the node 24/7 to avoid penalties >You should inspect their smart contracts how many people are actually able to do this I'm not against crypto and i'm not sure yet about web3 but if it requires buying some kind of token to participate then i am skeptical.

> yeah just buy an 86TB drive every year and run the node 24/7 to avoid penalties

This is healthy skepticism, these are things the crypto community would write in jest, on twitter. For the most part this is a massive exaggeration lol.

> how many people are actually able to do this

Not many, but a rapidly growing number of people are. Its more of a consumer protection problem and people are getting better at it.

> I'm not against crypto and i'm not sure yet about web3 but if it requires buying some kind of token to participate then i am skeptical.

There are certainly node based projects like that. Some are interesting, some should be avoided, some use tokens as a prerequisite for access, some don't, some are articulately explained and have free testnets you can simulate things on. Its up to the individual or team that created the project.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#207

Post by LdSGSgvupDV »

mmaunder wrote: post #188

I still can't get over that NFT's are just a URL pointing to the data. They don't even have an on-chain hash of the digital asset. It's like selling a sign pointing to houses for the price of the house, and claiming you own the house, hoping that the sign will increase in value the way the house does, and bragging about it. For reference: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

Sound like "pointer" to me.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#209

Post by ShamelessC »

vmception wrote: post #39
taywrobel wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re falling into the same trap as tech enthusiasts in web1. Sure, you could scan blockchains and extract NFT data yourself, and sure you could run your own node for every blockchain that interests you (paying god only know how much for storage and bandwidth). Just like how in web1 you could run your own email server to handle email and have your own blog server to publish info and your own git server to host your…

But I don't care about that the impractical enthusiast stuff, 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 . For example, Metamask with a non-default RPC node is great compared to using crypto before Metamask. Phantom wallet on Solana is even further impro…

> Node software still sucks! It can be improved!

Talk is cheap. Show me the code.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#210

Post by yashg »

mplewis wrote: post #92
fryingneurons wrote: post #25

Quoted post unavailable.

I thought Web3 was going to change the world. Has that already happened?

Soon. Check again in a decade or two. Blockchain has only been around for 14 years. Sill early days. Here is an awesome token me and my buddies have just launched. It's going to change the world. Join our Discord and Telegram where we can tell you how awesome our project is. Oh and also bring some money. We will give you a cool monkey JPG wearing a pirate costume that will go to moon by the end of this year.
Post reply on HN