Web3 is not Decentralisation – it’s a Ploy to put Crypto Bros in Charge
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Sure, it's used on the dark Web, but when was the last time you heard someone talk about how great it was to buy something with crypto?
I can't get over the fact that crypto seems kinda useless - in the sense that it doesn't actually get used for anything other than on crypto exchanges.
Talk of Web3 is also equally confusing to me. It seems to me that people want to spend less time with tech these days, not more. If anything it seems that web3 is going to be more about interaction with the real world, especially after pandemic lockdowns.
People talking about social networks paying its users and smart contracts etc... I also just don't understand - these things are already possible but have not been done with existing tech, so why would anything change just because we have NFTs or whatever?
It all smells of greed and feels like people peddling some new MLM system.
You can talk about gov and how the man has us all entrapped in the system or whatever, but we don't typically store lumps of gold in our homes, so why would you do the same with crypto (which is arguably easier to steal)?
Every "currency" (even the legal ones like USD) are in the end "assets"
If people predict that the value (not price) will rise, they hold.
If people predict that the value will drop, they sell (i.e. swap it with something else).
Some legal currencies are issued more and more based on "government credit" instead of real assets like gold will likely have their value drop (supply > demand).
For "Cryptocurrencies" (let's discuss whether they quality as "currency" or not in another place)
Some types of them has limited supply by design (but the supply can still increase slowly for the next N (e.g. 10) years with slower rate each year)
So if the demands goes up (which can also go down) and the supply does not grow too much, the value per "coin" would increase.
The only people I know who "hold" fiat currency either are ridiculously rich, are single with no serious responsibilities or when I was in the Navy, there was scheme thing going around that to get rich quick enough to get out the Navy and fuck off for the rest of days, day trade foreign currency (didn't really work out for anyone).
Unless you spent every dollar or convert all remaining dollars into something else, you are holding those dollars. And some "convert all remaining dollars into something else" actions are sometimes called "investment".
My primary concern, right now, is that Web3 is inaccessible to the majority of people, because its very architecture makes a "free" version of it impossible.
Here it is, people are just confused because there is a strong incentive on this forum to trash anything cryptocurrency related.
Web3 is by far the easiest way to provide auth to a web app right now, if you haven’t experimented with it I highly recommend giving it a try. The react library is a decent place to start.
Easiest by what measure? As I understand it, few browsers (read: only one or two) have built in wallets and outside of that the UX for this auth isn’t great. It’s hard to see how this is better/easier to use than existing OIDC/"Sign In With X" solutions.
Agreed, it’s much the same as OIDC.
Tho personally, beyond GitHub for dev related sites, I won’t use them.
If anything it enables “websites” to be simpler, smaller.
A UI atop a single function.
Without the bloat. Without the “we must do enough to show value to get users to sign up”.
I just auth, use it, and move on with my life.
Sometimes there’s a fee per use. Sometimes that value is exchanged somewhere else in the transaction. But either way, I got what I needed and I’m done.
Web3 is everything we wanted out of auth for the last decade or so.
I do see the value in being able to bring an identity around and store it in a blockchain, but... extreme fragmentation is a bummer.
I don't disagree that having a keypair on the client for authentication is a cool idea, but it's hardly specific to "Web3" (e.g. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/authenticationserv...).
If that's your basis, then I don't think you're inspired by anything other than pecuniary interest, which is the crux of the issue by the OP.
It's pretty well-known that Bitcoin is likely the worst way to digitally send micropayments. The fees are way too high. Bitcoin does not scale.
Yeah, the Lightning Network exists, but that doesn't really solve the problem for one-off microtransactions.
What's expensive is storage and meaningful actions.
In terms of "easy way to provide auth" … for who? Certainly not end users.
Also, the people who want a "pay per use" web are, shockingly, generally people for whom "pay per use" is financially feasible. That is not the majority of people.
[1] https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/faq/#what-is-ipfs [2] https://web3-technology-stack.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Free versions of things are often impractical. Good things take time and effort. How many users host their own email servers or have their own mastodon instance for example? Most people prefer to pay (in fees or in ad attention) for premium versions of these services that are built/maintained by private companies in a closed/centralized manner.
At its best, Web3’s marriage of economics and technology allows for a hybrid model where people pay for premium versions of these products built by people/companies in an open manner. The closed vs. open is key here. Without Web3 you can build something open/decentralized for free or something closed/centralized for profit. Web3 allows building services that are open/for profit.
Imagine the power of capitalism harnessed by open projects. Maybe I’m crazy, but that’s what excites me about Web3.
And nothing is stopping anyone, today, from building open things, while making money.
- If Web3 advocates move essential internet services on-chain, that would centralize into a single-database-like source of truth - not decentralize.
- Web3 will not eliminate hierarchies of influence.
The second is unambiguously true. For the first, in my view, there's a sort Schrodinger's cat thing with crypto. DAOs seem much more open than corporations - and they're also creating mini-economies which can lock out non-token holders, privileging the financialized. So it's also kind of true, but the matter is complex.
Any odds, there are a lot of sincere and smart people in crypto, and dismissing them all as basically evil is silly.
In "Blockchains Are a Bad Idea", James Mickens gives several arguments against blockchain-based systems like Bitcoin:
See his presentation here: https://youtu.be/15RTC22Z2xI
1. People have out-of-band trust relationships in real life which reduce the likelihood of malice. Bitcoin-style anonymous identities undermine trust relationships and are not needed for legitimate (not illegal) transactions.
2. Real life legal systems encourage good behaviors. If you have a dispute with someone, you can sue them. Bitcoin and related systems lack these protections.
3. Existing tools such as public-key cryptography and digital signatures can provide most of the functionality that applications need without the problems that blockchain-based systems have.
2. Real life legal systems can still be used. Stolen coins can and have be blacklisted by court of law and chainanalysis companies meaning they are frozen immediately at fiat off ramps. Just like would happen with a fungible physical asset like gold.
3. This is 100% true. The thing is one of the problems that is fixed by blockchain based systems is trust. Trust that the source code won’t be changed because of the very pecuniary incentives people keep hating on.
I think BGP routing tables, ARIN, ICANN, whois records, and DNS root servers are equally as centralized as a blockchain would be - in that they form top level federations, sort of how "the internet" is centralized when you call it one thing. Cloudflare, Akamai, AWS etc are more centralized as single companies. Blockchains are essentially nested application/data layer federation protocols.
It's hard to respond with more charity than he ventured, so I'd ask if there is a smarter form of his argument I should consider. It may be worth hearing what the concern is rooted in.
They are trustless, that's the biggest advantage.
If something like a social network on top of Bitcoin takes off, the Crypto Bros will have far, far less control than Mark Zuckerberg does over Facebook.
> The idea of the Decentralised Autonomous Organisation that runs itself by consensus, where nobody is really in charge, is illusory. Some individuals will always find a way to be more influential, whether that’s through money, connections or rhetoric. A DAO doesn’t change this simple fact of life; it simply hides it with a new layer of obfuscation.
DAOs don't solve socio-political issues, because technology can't do so.
I've only heard the term from people pushing their investment in crypto so maybe I'm biased against it. The whole "decentralised" part of it is already here in the form of peer to peer networking and regular old web servers anyone can run. The fediverse is also great at replicating information across networks. Is that what's meant by web3?
People and companies choose to centralise the internet because it's easy and because it's cheap. Graph theory is hard to get right in software, after all.
Now this makes sense for a number of industries, particularly financial, where the data is small, and the rewards are large. Storing petabites of porn on a distributed blockchain, probably not efficient.
Telex (anti-censorship system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex_(anti-censorship_system)
Internet censorship circumvention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_circumvent...
I don't see how decentralizing anything helps.
For sure! Pumping and dumping overvalued equity to bigger fools together with his cousin.
The skepticism I feel is about the web3 meme and the additional meme that it must be good because old people don't understand it. Web3 is a basket of experimental technologies that may or may not bear fruit, but don't tell me it's so new that skeptics are people who are incapable of understanding it. I'm looking for more detail and I get a lot of hand waving. But I'm open to it.
This is survivorship bias stretched to a pretty crazy extreme. I'm pretty sure you could make a much larger list of differences in the evolution of the web and web3 than similarities.
I was a teenager in the 90s, and my dad was my current age and working for an ISP. Everyone there was around his age or older, and they all understood the potential of the early internet and the web. Most of the people in the early 90s internet era that built out the tech were older. It's one thing to say people outside of the tech field can't see the potential in technology, but it's a completely different thing to say that older people in an industry can't see the potential.
I see lots of potential in newer technologies, but web3 is trying to build an inferior version of what we currently have, with rent-seeking middlemen. It's doing so with blockchains, a 13 year old tech, which most of us have been saying for 13 years is a solution in search of a problem (and we've been right so far). Web3 is yet another way of trying to package up and sell it, primarily being pushed by people who have a monetary interest in having you use it, because they're the landlords.
But I agree with Stan Druckenmiller that Bitcoin is a brand now and is an asset. It has finally found its purpose.
Also crypto for cross border transactions, unless regulations kill them
And DeFi for cross border finance, again regulation can kill this.
Cross-border transactions are an incredibly niche use-case, and my guess would be that it's primarily used for money laundering. AML laws will probably kill this off, since you still need to turn that crypto into fiat to use it.
DeFi's purpose is avoid taxes on crypto gains. Otherwise, it's the worst form of banking possible.
There are a lot of ideas out there for what web3 would be, but sooner or later, some rubber has to be put to the road. The reason we don't "get it" is because "it" is so nebulously defined.
You can use this for any authentication with an ethereum-like address, eg: 0x06012c8cf97bead5deae237070f9587f8e7a266d
Spending coins is not actually the point. Its to authenticate with a public key, the same way SSH public key authentication works. Most of the time, one should not be spending coins on random websites anyway.
This complaint is like saying public key authentication is a plot to put big-PKI in charge. Nonsensical.
Oh I know, why don't we build some kind of economic incentive that pays whoever wants to run one of these servers some small amount of money for doing so, and we all pay a little to these servers when we want to do things with the network?
Information wants to be free, fuck economic incentives. Stop financializing everything.
Most people are not ready for this kind of responsibility--living without social contract. (Maybe I am using wrong words)
And I especially don't want to see the entire tech world stagnate because there are basically no new P2P projects not ruined by a blockchain(That's not P2P, it's P2MiningFarm)
If you even remotely value your privacy you won’t support blockchain backed web3
If you had mailed CDs of pictures and all your data to everyone in town, you mostly gave up your privacy already. And then you want a magic delete-all-CDs button?
You may want to explain how mailing CDs to everyone in town allows an expectation they will destroy the CDs when you press the magic delete-all-CDs button.
If you want to publish your info on a public ledger, and you want privacy, you would be studying zk proofs rather than learning about selfdestruct().
Again, your link doesn’t explain how something is deleted for everyone. Your link doesn’t say that it’s deleted, simply sent to another address.
The most relevant thought leaders in the crypto world are people who have no intention of "owning it", meaning being at the helm of an organization.
They are the so called hodlers and traders, like Microstrategy CEO.
People like Vitalik Buterin would deserve to be in charge because they seem genuinely interested in providing soltions, but he seems very ineffective because he's in search of a problem.
Why does this kind of trash get upvoted here?
Web3 is inclusive in the fullest sense of the term. It does not care if you are a bro. It doesn't even know if you are a bro. It doesn't care where you live, what your name is, what your opinions are, what your hair or skin color is, what your credit score is. Nothing. Anyone and everyone on planet Earth can use it. This is not true of traditional banking and other web2 services. Where people get locked out or denied entry every day by central actors.
Furthermore, all activity is transparent. Everyone can see the database. History can't be altered and the rules can't suddenly be changed. We have no real transparency into the stock market, banks, twitter.com. They can and do selectively edit their databases and change the rules at will. The public can't audit what they are doing. They public can audit the blockchain. The more our institutions become corrupt, the more important transparency and full inclusivity is.
It's a bit strange IMO when someone shows absolutely no doubt on a topic that is so divisive and controversial.
anyway: anyone on planet Earth can use the web too, proof is everybody already does.
Only to those that hold the tokens. Web1 and Web2 seem to be more inclusive.
> Nothing. Anyone and everyone on planet Earth can use it. This is not true of traditional banking and other web2 services.
How is web2 more inaccessible than web3? Also banking is accessible to more people than the internet. The vast majority of unbanked aren't unbanked because they don't have access to banks but because they are so poor that they have no need for banks. How will crypto/web3 help those people?
> Furthermore, all activity is transparent.
Fuck no!
https://polygonscan.com/ https://etherscan.io/ https://www.bscscan.com/
The transaction logs, events and spends are all public. It is very transparent.
Only to those who hold internet-capable computing devices. Newspapers seem to be more inclusive.
Wow, that sounds like a stupid comparison doesn't it.
And web1 and web2 are somehow not accessible to those people? How?