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Web3 is centralized

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Re: Web3 is centralized

#61

Post by JofArnold »

sebow wrote: post #44

[This is not necessarily about web3] I've said it before, and it needs repeating: we >need can't But there will not be any progress to any decentralized internet unless we get solutions to the average joe, the consumer, to do this.Obviously this is not in the interest of corporations, governments, and other entities that have control, but in the case of a disaster or collapse of a society, a change of regime towards…

This is 100% true but even worse I think; a lot of people talk about blockchain being censorship-resistant... But what if Intel/AMD/Apple/NVIDIA are forced to have hardware blocks for specific wallet addresses for instance?

Re: Web3 is centralized

#62

Post by [deleted] »

chrisco255 wrote: post #16
r_hoods_ghost wrote: post #9

The main issue with "Web3" is that it moves records of transactions from many private places to one public place. Sure this one place may not be controlled by a single entity, but it facilitates tracking at an unprecedented level. Cryptocurrencies are the ultimate example of this and are an absolute boon to tax collectors, forensic accountants and fraudsters. In our current economy financial transactions are recorded…

> are an absolute boon to tax collectors, forensic accountants and fraudsters Weird that it would be a boon for both forensic accountants and fraudsters. How do you reconcile that sentence? The fact that something is done in public does not mean that it is centralized. There is public and decentralized, public and centralized, private and centralized, and private and decentralized. Decentralization itself, is a spect…

[deleted]

Re: Web3 is centralized

#63

Post by euske »

The discussions around web3 reminds me of the days when people were looking for a "killer app" for Web 2.0. Was there any? I don't remember much, but I don't think there was a single thing that stood out as "the" Web 2.0 app. I expect web3 to be more or less the same. A lot of buzz, not much material.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#64

Post by mattlondon »

chrisco255 wrote: post #19
jsemrau wrote: post #3

My main concerns with Web3 are that it is "pay to play" in many aspects and it's less democratic than the existing Internet.

The existing internet is dominated by trillion dollar monopolies. How do you reconcile that Web3 is less democratic than a megacorp oligopoly than can unperson people at will? Web3 has decentralization, freedom of speech, anti-gatekeeping, permissionlessness and inclusiveness, at its core.

> Web3 has decentralization, freedom of speech, anti-gatekeeping, permissionlessness and inclusiveness, at its core.

We already have all of that in the existing web infrastructure, and have had it since the very beginning.

I can spin up a HTTP server on a raspberry pi running in my basement right now and anyone on the internet can access it for free and without any hinderence.

With web3 there is gatekeeping and centralisation as I cannot spin up my own server any more without buying crypto and then paying someone on a centralised database just so that I can do everything I could do before for free on my own.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#65

Post by discardedrefuse »

sergiomattei wrote: post #51
dudus wrote: post #28

Crypto market is really sad. It's a novel technical solution. But it can't find a problem where it fits as a good alternative. It's not a good alternative to banks, art collections or web hosting. But Bitcoin is still worth billions, NFT are all the rage and Web3 went from new concept to "trend" in the span of what feels like a week. But even with all the success they don't seem to be convincing many they have any in…

Yes, completely glossing over the usefulness of digital-native money: instant, verifiable transactions from anywhere in the world, programmable money and low fees. Oh, and how it disrupts the remittances industry, something extremely useful to vulnerable communities with families abroad. I agree that Web3 is mostly a grift, but cryptocurrencies are quite useful already.

It's not instant and the fees aren't always low. I was trying to transfer $10 USD in Bitcoin last May, when the BTC market was going insane, and it was impossible.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#66

Post by [deleted] »

bpfrh wrote: post #58
yrral wrote: post #33

Web3 is less centralized 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 involveme…

That is not exclusiv to web3 and is not new. If I buy a house, I can take a credit on that house. If I bought some stock, banks will let me take a loan on them afaik. I can also borrow some money and choose something expensive that I own for a collateral. Maybe crypto makes the last one easier, but then it will lead to a lot of fraud, because veryifing that the item I set as collateral is the difficult and expensive…

[deleted]

Re: Web3 is centralized

#67

Post by disruptalot »

Web3 is a highly ambigious term so there's no point discussing whether it's decentralized - it simply depends on what system you are referring to.

For the sake of simplicity we stick to the authors main claim. That Ethereum is centralized.

> while anyone can join the Ethereum or Bitcoin network, you can only join if you agree to follow the same protocol

In which other protocol is this not the case? Can you communicate with a web page without using the protocol that it required? Furthermore, as blockchain protocols are all open source, they allow their network rules and data to be easily forked and run. This is not at all dissimilar to an example provided further that explains that anyone can run their own web network.

> Ethereum is only decentralized in the way that doesn't matter — you're free to join the decentralized system, under the condition that you act in the exact same way as every other actor in that system.

The opposite in fact. The author misses that Ethereum allows anyone to encode their own protocol into the network. Blockchain nodes, simply enforce that those rules are being adhered to by the participants. This is perhaps the only way that matters for what etheruem wants to do. Blockchains are not websites, their purpose is not to serve you data. The purpose is, given a pre existing set of rules - which anyone can code permanently into the blockchain, clients understand exactly in what way those states can transition, and are capable of executing the state transaction as equally as all other peers.

Let's take a practical example. Say you want to publish torrent links. I hope I don't need to explain why dencetralisation matters and what propoerties you are looking for. If someone encodes a smart contract on Ethereum that allows anyone to submit a name, along with a torrent link but not able to delete it. In the Ethereum world, this protocol lives forever more. On the traditional web world, you will:

- Have ISP, hosting provider take your website down

- The web owner may decide to arbitrarily take down specific torrents or the application as a whole

This is where decentralisation matters and what it means.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#68

Post by EtienneK »

euske wrote: post #63

The discussions around web3 reminds me of the days when people were looking for a "killer app" for Web 2.0. Was there any? I don't remember much, but I don't think there was a single thing that stood out as "the" Web 2.0 app. I expect web3 to be more or less the same. A lot of buzz, not much material.

Wikipedia was the example most people pointed to.

What is the web3 version?

Re: Web3 is centralized

#69

Post by vmception »

lawn wrote: post #31
r_hoods_ghost wrote: post #9

The main issue with "Web3" is that it moves records of transactions from many private places to one public place. Sure this one place may not be controlled by a single entity, but it facilitates tracking at an unprecedented level. Cryptocurrencies are the ultimate example of this and are an absolute boon to tax collectors, forensic accountants and fraudsters. In our current economy financial transactions are recorded…

This is not true for Monero, that hides the sender, receiver and amount for all transactions by default.

And also Secret Network, which hides smart contract variables, which therefore includes token and wrapped token amounts, along with the current owner. Monero has a trustless-enough bridge over to there.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#70

Post by paulgb »

euske wrote: post #63

The discussions around web3 reminds me of the days when people were looking for a "killer app" for Web 2.0. Was there any? I don't remember much, but I don't think there was a single thing that stood out as "the" Web 2.0 app. I expect web3 to be more or less the same. A lot of buzz, not much material.

I don’t recall anyone looking for a killer web 2.0 app, because they already existed when the term was coined. Examples included Flickr and Wikipedia; YouTube came not long after.

https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.ht...

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