Web3 Is Not Decentralization
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invisibleup.com
Ethereum as a whole and the raw smart contracts of most DApps actually are decentralized, but there are SPOFs in the UI, name service, and transaction gateway. If you aren't willing to run your own geth instance and understand Solidity/EVM, it's not really decentralized for you.
How does that work?
If you’re not validating transactions - you’re trusting a third party. There are no light clients that avoid this problem. It remains to be seen if they are even possible.
The way it works is that there is a committee of validators in the consensus protocol that is required to sign the head of the chain. We use cryptography known as BLS signatures to perform signature aggregation, meaning you can verify a single signature to ensure that whole committee is correct. The state of the chain can be represented as a Merkle trie, and we can obtain the actual committee as a branch of this tree which can be used during the verification process.
https://medium.com/chainsafe-systems/lodestar-releases-light...
It's really neat and there are working prototypes out there today.
This is how I feel about the exchanges generally, which wield an incredible amount of influence in the crypto markets, for better or worse. It's a complete tangent, but reading about Tether's shifting story around its capital reserves terrifies me.
I have yet to see a blockchain implementation that's easy enough to use on its own that it could achieve widespread adoption without a strong market desire to have someone else manage the complexity of it for you. People talk about decentralization all day long while completely ignoring the fact that we've just shifted the centralized authority from one entity to another.
The system is not simple at all.
The benefits are only potentially here (eth fees are wild).
The solution involves the opposite of religious principles the mob believes in.
Isn’t the whole point of a market that we trust each other enough to have a shared understanding of what value is? How can a market function when you trust no one else in it? Cash is a perfect example of this: it’s only worth something because we all agree that it’s worth something, we can’t eat it or do anything else with it other than to exchange it for goods. Crypto isn’t any different.
It will be interesting how this holds up if Tether is actually just “printing” money as they go. If the rumors are true and they go bust or are shut down, one could easily see that event catalyzing a crypto market meltdown similar to what we saw in 2008 where speculation was out of control. Will the energy remain in the crypto space if the crypto markets fall victim to the very thing they were created to prevent?
Yes, because the energy in the cryptocurrency space is based not on rational analysis but religious fervor. The inconvenient objective facts will be explained away rather than addressed.
No, hence why we need the state to print the money, regulate the markets, and put the bad guys in jail.
This isn’t really true as there’s a bunch of decentralized AMM’s(automated market maker) now: uniswap, sushiswap, pancakeswap
Bitcoin core is pretty easy to run yourself, no technical skills required.
Now there are lots of rpc providers and it is much easier to spin up your own node
Check out erigon client it is an archive node with much lower resource requirements than geth archival nodes, about 1/10th the requirements and that gulf will likely expand
pruned geth is still much lower than that though, but at least erigon gets rid of some of the state-storage centralization arguments (and lets inquisitive people browse prior chain states and simulate environments)
anybody that wants their own privacy has much better ways to get it
But Tails + TorBrowser + Metamask extension is also good enough if you want to hide info from Infura, analytics packages etc
If you are communicating directly to the node.
Infura, on the other hand, uses a load balancer so it receives transactions before they hit their nodes, which means that server can assume it was the first to receive.
If you are operating on clearnet then you need your own node for privacy.
A TorOS lets you do this on darknet just fine though, its some random onion or exit node IP.
That's a good indication that it is not decentralized ;).
One of the weirdest trends I’ve seen in Web3 discussions is the insistence that better alternatives exist, but for some reason nobody is using them, talking about them, or even naming them in discussions.
There are many, many WalletConnect https://walletconnect.com/ compatible wallets that can be used with most dapps as well. There are close to 100 of these: https://walletconnect.com/registry/wallets
As for RPCs, here's a list for you: https://github.com/arddluma/awesome-list-rpc-nodes-providers
If you want to run you're own RPC node, it's not so hard as there are docker and docker-compose images that will let you get geth (or nethermind, or erigon) that will let you spin up an RPC pretty trivially.
The more important thing for decentralization IMO, is that you can reasonably switch, even if most people don't. Think about how this plays out in the browser or email markets and compare it to how much of a difference that is to completely locked in services like Facebook.
https://moralis.io/ and https://www.alchemy.com/ are Infura alternatives
You can Google "metamask alternatives" if you want, there are lots. I won't vouch for any of them.
That's just overly reductive. You certainly benefit from all kinds of vectors of decentralisation regardless of you using MetaMask, or possibly having connectively problems if a popular nodes goes down.
You can test this very simply, because regardless of the common node you are using, are still exposed to all the downsides and responsibilities that decentralisation brings, such as the possibility of losing your private key and being unable to recover your funds. So the decentralisation is still clearly there.
Still, decentralized naming and digital signatures go a long way towards turning p2p filesharing into something more. I think it'll all come together eventually.
There are about 15 million new registrations per year, which is only one every two seconds. That's also easily within today's capabilities.
Throw in rollups and data sharding, and names barely make an impact at all.
If you have a full node then reads are from your local disk. If not, there's network latency like anything else.
My regular domain names cost money too.
I agree with this, artificial scarcity is a lousy way to get anything done. The end-game of economics ought to be to eliminate scarcity, artificial or otherwise. But if the alternative to NFT's is the status quo, then you're choosing between a system where only the privileged get to set up artificial scarcity games (usually there are lawyers...) versus one where anyone can do so. It still sucks, but it sucks less.
> Naturally, the exploitation of natural resources and absurd energy demands solely to enforce the value of made up internet items would be the endgame [of NFTs].
I think that the endgame is to exchange NFTs as proofs of contribution to the public good. I minted this NFT by sequestering a kilogram of carbon, by filling this pothole, by serving in a jury, that sort of thing. As it stands it's not really clear why I should accept a dollar from a stranger--for all I know, they made that dollar by making the world worse. Why should I participate in a scheme that enables them to continue doing so? But with NFT's I can look at the circumstances of its minting and decide for myself whether that's the kind of thing I want to see more of.
This doesn’t really follow. Why would NFTs be the only way to generate artificial scarcity when people have been doing it forever with one-off art, private experiences and concerts, and limited edition runs?
NFTs seem like a step in the wrong direction: You still don’t have the original art or thing that the NFT supposedly represents. You just have a new blockchain entry that says “This NFT represents <thing>“
> As it stands it's not really clear why I should accept a dollar from a stranger--for all I know, they made that dollar by making the world worse. Why should I participate in a scheme that enables them to continue doing so? But with NFT's I can look at the circumstances of its minting and decide for myself whether that's the kind of thing I want to see more of.
This doesn’t make any sense either. Why do you implicitly trust what people tell you about an NFT but not a dollar?
There’s nothing magical about NFTs that solves the social problems you’re describing. An NFT is just a blockchain entry with associated cryptographic procedures for changing said blockchain entry. It doesn’t give you insight into the circumstances around it. You still have to take whatever people say at face value, just as you would with the dollar example.
But with the NFT you have to pay a lot of money just to accept it. Money which goes to miners who are burning energy at a furious pace just to keep the NFT existing, in a system that becomes ever less efficient as more miners join. That’s probably not what people had in mind when it comes to making the world a better place.
And yeah, when it comes to NFT's for some random jpeg... That's pretty useless. But that's all that can be done with them right now because there's infrastructure available to connect the NFT with whatever supposedly valuable side-effect it's supposed to go with. That'll take time. But when it's ready, the side effects won't be some random jpeg, they'll be things that you can touch. It'll be obvious that continuing to support the people who do whatever-the-thing-is is a good idea, and that's why we'll value the associated token.
> It doesn’t give you insight into the circumstances around it. You still have to take whatever people say at face value,
That's the missing supporting infrastructure I'm talking about. If a bridge washes out because of a storm, and somebody repairs it and mints an NFT of the before/after photos, that's just an image. But with a supporting web of trust, complete with verifiers who inspect the bridge afterward and put "yeah that's a good job, and this is the only NFT for it" on the blockchain... now you've got something more.
You can already donate to people doing good things across a whole spectrum of options and see tangible side effects. You don’t have to wait for NFTs to maybe grow infrastructure to allow this! You can literally build bridges, schools and all sorts of infrastructure for people around the globe right now!
> There was a pothole in the road at such-and-such time and place, and now there's not. Validated by users X, Y, Z
Just little promises, and don't value the token if your don't trust the validator.
The only kind of trust that's a problem here is custodial trust. A platform can never be more trustworthy than its least trustworthy admin.
And yes, I know that I don't need a blockchain to do good things, but I do need a blockchain to retire on having done good things. And more importantly, to live in a world that's full of people doing the same.
Centralized institutions become less trustworthy over time, so whatever work I put in to curry favor with whatever authority might reward me will be lost when that authority falls to corruption.
I don't think a case has been made for that yet. For example:
> We can implement webs of trust on chain and incentivize trusted individuals to validate whatever relationships between the chain and the real world that the NFT's represent.
This sounds amazing! Except it falls into a recursive problem. You need to trust the knowledge about the real world so you validate it but you also need to trust the validators so you need to validate them somehow and that reoccurs. You could argue that there is a social proof in terms of users vouching for one another a 'web of trust' but those are easily gamed. You exchange explicit centralization for implicit centralization so not only have the issues of a centralized institution anyway but all the extant issues we see in crypto land in terms of fraud and so on. It's also veering into dystopian territory in terms of keeping an immutable reputation score about people which is deeply disturbing.
Re: reputation, I agree that some kind of trustworthiness score is a dystopian outcome, provided that it's a single number that the network has universal consensus on. But I think it's a lot less onerous if the score is calculated via graph traversal.
Don't ask "how trustworthy is user A," instead ask, "given users A and B, who does A trust that trusts B (and what kinds of trust have they configured)?" I'm not angling for a credit score, I'm angling to replace implicitly trusted institutions (like banks) with explicitly trusted third parties (like mutual friends, or people that users A and B both recognize as an expert).
Yes, like a Ponzi scheme or MLM for example. That's literally a web of trust setup to defraud people and one that often relies on pre-existing trusted relationships to spread. Almost all crimes involving social engineering like fraud are going to involve exploiting webs of trust. And whilst your friends may never steal your tools other people do end up being robbed by their friends.
> Don't ask "how trustworthy is user A," instead ask, "given users A and B, who does A trust that trusts B (and what kinds of trust have they configured)?" I'm not angling for a credit score, I'm angling to replace implicitly trusted institutions (like banks) with explicitly trusted third parties (like mutual friends, or people that users A and B both recognize as an expert).
Right and people won't create fake webs of trust with this to engage in scamming like they do in the real world already? No one would try to ruin your reputation this way and so forth. It feels like proponents of these social credit schemes do literally zero adversarial thinking. Similar to the way no one seemed to have thought about the rampant bot fraud now occurring on NFT marketplaces which are probably a scheme to setup false identities more than offload low value NFTs. But theft, fraud and automating it seem to not have occurred to the designers.
The problems that you're describing only come up if there's a centralized oracle for a globally consistent reputation score. But the only angle where we need global consistency is re: who has what token. Reputation can be ad-hoc and only locally consistent. And since you're trading goods for NFT's you're probably co-located with all of the right people anyway. After all, an NFT for filling a pothole is worth more to the people who had to deal with that pothole than it is to people far away.
If somebody is out to ruin your reputation, then they're unlikely to be involved in the transitive trust pathways that are used to validate tokens, so unless you're trying to do business with them I'm not sure why it would matter.
Yeah, there's always the possibility that somebody you trust has decided to trust a bad actor, but someone's going to know about the deception because the alleged impact is nowhere to be found, so get together as a community and figure out who the liar is and revoke their trust.
If you're going to reject the demands of foreign money, local money has to be different in some way that makes it hard for outsiders to get without demonstrating some level of givashit about the locals. It can't just be a matter of exchange rates.
So yeah, it's overkill for most things, but the things it's justified for are really important.
And yeah there are lots of places that local government sucks but there are also lots of places where it doesn’t and I guarantee you the reason isn’t tech.
Whether they can scratch the itch in peer-to-peer mode is an unanswered question, but I think we'll get to find out.
If you don't need it trustless, then you don't need a blockchain.
Blockchain is too specific, but you're going to need some kind of consensus tech to achieve the latter without the former.
.. while emitting another ten.
> for all I know, they made that dollar by making the world worse ... with NFT's I can look at the circumstances of its minting
Ah, so the opposite of financial privacy, you get to inspect how someone made their money before you accept it?
And also, I'm not proposing that we make the entire pathway auditable. You don't get to know what each user spent it on before it reached your hands, you just get to know that somewhere, at the end of the line, is the guy who minted it. And whether you value it should come down to whether you want to live in a world with more of whatever he's doing.
You are never going to convince more than a small number of suckers that any of this is true or worth it.
For instance, you could use them to keep track of responsibility/permissions: "The holder of this token is the project maintainer, only they can approve pull requests". That sort of thing.
Interpretation is up to the users, I'm really just talking about nonfungibility in general here.
This is exactly the kind of thing that is said before complete implosions or complete disruptions. Time will tell!
Reminder: same was said about BTC.
How do you have an economy without scarcity? What are the substantial differences between artificial and natural scarcity?
So for example perhaps we sample 50,000 people and say 75% of people keep access, say when they vote. If you bid in the top 75%, you keep access for the period, and you pay the value that the bottom person that kept access bid. That money is then not used to pay for the IP, some other tax will fund the IP or Open Source Software or Meme, that 25% will then go to all the voters for providing their values. So the average bidder will pay nothing, the below average bidder will lose something they value low, but gain, and the highest bidders will fund that. We then take some other collection and sample another 50,000 people, until we find out the value of all of these digital items to people.
If you do the subsidization process correctly, I think the idea of IP owners holding their supply back would go away, as releasing it to all would always provide more value than holding it back. I think at the very least this would be an obvious answer to Open Source Software, and this would easily fund things like Linux and Firefox. I think this would stretch further to research, and colleges would now be funded through this mechanism, and the professors who currently waste enormous amounts of time doing grant writing would be able to be productive. Thus the whole issue of journals goes away. Even things like ads, people would bid on their service less because of them, so there would be no fundamental reason to include them as it would reduce the subsidy.
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> The end-game of economics ought to be to eliminate scarcity
This doesn't make sense. Economics isn't something with a goal, it's a praxis which exists solely to manage scarcity. Eliminate scarcity and economics disappears.
There will always be new things to create. Some think that because IP is a monopoly, you should tax the monopoly. But that's going at it from the wrong direction. Creating new things produces a positive externality to others. You want to reward that. This is a scheme that might possibly do so.
There are other things that have zero marginal costs, and can indeed eliminate scarcity. But if you eliminate scarcity on those items, there becomes no incentive to create new things, as the natural price of anything with infinite supply is zero.
The creation of new digital items needs to be balanced with the very real scarcity of natural resources. The essence of your question is - how do we reward the creation of things if we can not restrict the use of it? And so we need to find a way to figure out the value of infinite supply items.
It's easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.
And I'd say scarcity is artificial if making more of it requires you to break somebody's rules.
Currently, most people don't consider whether using a given type of money is in line with their personal values because we all value food and shelter and clean water, so there's enough common ground that it's not worth splitting hairs over. But if you chart a course to a post-scarcity world, then it will take you through a time when food and shelter and clean water are no longer scarce. There will still probably be people causing problems in the world (and using money to do it), and the nonviolent way to take the wind out of those people's sails is to stop valuing their money because it's encouraging behavior that's not in line with your values.
This might happen several times before the greedy learn to behave, so in such a world it might be difficult to decide which type of fungible token to use. If you end up using tokens minted by people that ultimately end up pissing off the masses, those masses might reject your money. One way to hedge against this kind of risk is to just go around doing things that you're pretty sure everybody will agree are good things. For each public good provided, mint an NFT and use it as money. Initially we'll need some way to burn stale NFT's to keep the scarcity-logic in check, but this is the road to post-scarcity. Once we're well practiced in valuing a token for its effects, rather than for its scarcity, we'll be prepared to let go of the scarcity logic entirely. Or at least that's the plan.
Bitcoin isn't a currency. NFTs aren't money.
> money has value because we choose to value it
Yes, in a broad sense.
> and fungible tokens often don't give you enough information to adequately make that choice
If by "fungible tokens" you mean things like fiat dollars or crypto bitcoins, then this is a nonsensical statement. The "we choose" of the prior clause isn't an individual choice, it's a collective choice expressed via government.
> which means that nonfungible tokens have a bigger part to play than their current form would indicate
This doesn't follow at all.
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> the endgame of NFT's
What is the endgame of NFTs? It seems like you're speculating about a post-scarcity society? But in that scenario there would be no reason for any money, fungible or non-fungible, to exist at all. Money is an abstraction, a time-tested mechanism for economic exchange and growth. And the purpose of economics is to _manage scarcity_. If you remove scarcity then economics, money, bitcoins, NFTs, they all have no reason to exist and disappear.
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> If you anticipate that whatever government mandates your money will still be around when you retire
Yes. Obviously this is true. China and the yuan, Russia and the ruble, Europe and the euro, America and the dollar, they will all be around, in one form or another, when I retire. And when you retire. And when my children retire. And their children.
Sovereign states are the evolutionary output of humanity's effort, over all history, to achieve peace, growth, and stability. They're not problems waiting to be disrupted. They're solutions that we as a species have arrived at, after enormous toil and suffering.
I'm open to hearing alternatives, but the best I can come up with is a system where we allocate whatever resources remain scarce based on merit. Not merit like whoever manages to wrest more money from whoever else wins, but merit like wow that's a really great contribution to society--I personally value what you've done, so I'm going to behave in a way that benefits you. A generation that grows up thinking along those lines just as often as they think in terms of market clearing price is more likely to produce the magical commit that redirects the robots from competition to cooperation, and fungibility just doesn't fit that use case very well.
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In the more immediate term, I wish that I shared your optimism about the stability of sovereign states. I'm not saying that we should disrupt the government, I'm saying that the government is doing a fine job of disrupting itself and I wish we had some kind of backup system in place.
You are otherwise describing a barter meritocracy, which is dystopian :(
> The "we choose" of the prior clause isn't an individual choice, it's a collective choice expressed via government.
But I guess it's ok that we disagree about which modes of exchange are desirable, the world is probably big enough for both :)
When I said that I'd prefer to live in a world with decentralized power structures, I should've said that I'd prefer it to a centralized one that's on the decline. I think we need to iterate faster on our societal structures until we find one that works for everybody, and bail earlier on things that clearly don't work. Probably, when we find it, the ideal system will involve some central authority--though held better accountable.
100 years ago, getting creative with how we structure society meant starvation and bloodshed. I see crypto as an opportunity to build a stop gap. It need not be better than whatever we build that follows it, it just needs to hold us over until we can figure out what that's going to be.
The concert venue is an unavoidable central authority. You don't need to melt the arctic for a fully decentralized trust-nobody system that merely manages a database of a single ultimate authority that can't be removed from the equation.
This problem can be solved with a REST API and it will have the exact same amount of (de)centralization and trust.
"A resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory" as the adage goes coined by Elinor Ostrom (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom#Ostrom's_law).
You don't need blockchains to be decentralized. Continuing to dunk on "web3" over here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Web3Skepticism/
[1] https://nebairevelations.substack.com/p/a-successful-busines...
I would be more interested on the web3 as an end-user if there was zero change of it being used as an investment.
The actual problem is that there's a fundamental distinction between the "2.0" -and "1.0"- tag and the "3.0" tag.
"Web 2.0" was a term coined to describe something which had already occurred, at least to a substantial extent. This is made obvious by the fact that it was coined in conjunction with "Web 1.0". It was defined on some -more or less defined- characteristics that were there already and were used to point out a change that had already happened. It was "Ok, this has happened; let's call it 2.0 (and, for contrast, let's call 1.0 what existed previously)". People generally agreed on the name and that was it.
"Web 3.0" was never anything like that. It has always been co-opted to promote someone's ideas/hopes/vision/technologies. It is always "Ok, I/we want to go in that direction; I/we will call that "3.0" and hope the world shares my view and allows me to use that name for my vision". As a fairly old example:
> The Semantic Web (sometimes known as Web 3.0) ... [0]
But, of course, being something which isn't there just yet, a lot of groups want to own the term for their thing.
- You don't own your content unless you run your own node
- You don't own your username, unless you run your own node
- From the previous 2, you can't easily move your stuff to a different node. If the node dies it's an issue.
- Nodes decide who they federate with, so you depende on your node to build your social network relations
Get a wordpress up on a shared host and install the ActivityPub plugin for the minimum viable fedi presence.
I'm not trying to discount the issues you bring up.
Imagine if you were earning money every time someone read that comment you posted!
Moving authentication to the user removes the need for 3rd party websites to store passwords. It eliminates the need to sign up for websites. You just give websites access to your identity. Decentralization is a feature of cryptocurrency.
Web3 is about owning your identity, which is enabled by people having their own keys.
The problem was that approximately zero users cared, and sites had no incentive to support a login method that didn't have a good solution for account recovery in the inevitable cases of users losing their access.
We've also had TLS client certs with straight up private keys. We have SSH keys too. We have U2F/Webauthn. Using private keys for auth is the easy part. Key management (i.e. people being careless and losing/leaking keys) is the hard unsolved part.
Also, you don't need a blockchain system to have a private key. It's literally just a random number. Blockchains only happen to use them as one of their components. It's like cars have radios, and car wonks saying "cars are about having your own music player. You should put a car in your bedroom to listen to music".
How is this different than the single-signon systems which people have been using for decades? In particular, why should we expect this to be more successful than, say, Mozilla's Persona was?
It would be especially useful if the marketing materials covered the requirements for a serious system like recovering from a compromised or lost key, or how it would avoid the privacy impacts of the same key being used in many places including for purchases? It would be especially important to think about how this would work for normal people — it's not decentralization if you're simply saying that instead of everyone using Google/Facebook/Apple for SSO you're switching to e.g. MetaMask, so a key question would be how reasonable and safe it is for a normal person to operate independently.
'normal persons' will have to change habits. In the physical world, you can lose a coin , irreversibly. Same goes for the virtual. There are no ready made solutions. Lets not assume people are stupid and inflexible, they can adapt to new realities provided the benefits outweigh the drawbacks
How do you think that works? Google can refuse to do business with you but that doesn't mean you can't use a different email provider.
Similarly, if your particular identifier is on some kind of list, changing from an email address to another public identifier doesn't force anyone to allow you access they weren't otherwise planning to give you. If your email address ends up on a list of known spammers, etc. there's no reason why a blockchain address won't go the same way (and if the answer is “I'll keep making new ones”, ask how that's gone for email spam).
> 'normal persons' will have to change habits. In the physical world, you can lose a coin , irreversibly. Same goes for the virtual. There are no ready made solutions. Lets not assume people are stupid and inflexible, they can adapt to new realities provided the benefits outweigh the drawbacks
I'm not assuming they're stupid and inflexible, I'm assuming they're not going to give you money to use a new system which doesn't give them something in return. For example, your conflation of losing a coin with losing control of a wallet is leaving out a lot: if I lose a quarter on the street, I'm out a tiny amount of money but I don't also permanently lose my life savings, mortgage, and ability to login to web sites as in your proposed alternative.
Once you start thinking seriously about real-world usage, you see why even most cryptocurrency proponents pay companies to deal with those issues for them and those banks in all but name are going to be what most people end up using for compliance reasons.
Wallets can indeed be very large "coins". People are going to come up with creative solutions for this, eg. you can split each bitcoins in a different wallet, share the keys with trusted people etc. Cryptocoins are not yet widely used, but there is nothing stopping people from coming up with new ingenious ways to store their hard money safely as they have done in real life. It 's a change of mindset, that it is possible to lose digital assets permanently. I think many people can come to terms with that in the end
You have created a problem where none existed previously, and now speculate about creative solutions to that problem. What isn't answered here is why I should opt-in in the first place.
> It's a change of mindset, that it is possible to lose digital assets permanently. I think many people can come to terms with that in the end
The underlying issue here, I think, is that you perceive all of the systems you're up-ending and re-writing as fundamentally technical in nature. But that's wrong: banking and assets and governance and contracts and everything crypto stakes out as it's domain, they're all fundamentally social problems. You can't write an algorithm to run a country. It's just the wrong model.
So, no, people aren't going to come to terms with the notion that if your ledger slips out of your pocket and into the sewer that your entire identity or all of your wealth or whatever is irrevocably lost. That's just not gonna fly.
Think about this more: we're not talking about a blockchain where the failure is permanent and irreversible. If you forget your Gmail password or someone phishes you, you can go through Google's reset process and regain control. It's still a mess but it's repairable. Similarly, if you don't like Google for whatever reason, email is a distributed system which means you can run your own server or switch providers easily. Similarly, most sites have the concept of linking multiple email addresses or other means to perform a password reset. Nothing about this problem requires turning your internet experience into a series of microtransactions (often not so micro).
> Cryptocoins are not yet widely used, but there is nothing stopping people from coming up with new ingenious ways to store their hard money safely as they have done in real life.
Yes, and they've largely picked the traditional banking system. Most cryptocurrency users use exchanges because those are hard problems which require 24x7 security and operations, and the vast majority of people choose to outsource it.
This is why I suggested studying the long history of this because while the internet has always been decentralized many things people use have increasingly centralized _by user preference_. OpenID had an unfriendly design but it's far from the only thing people have tried, Persona being an obvious example, and in general the public hasn't cared about this enough to even switch to a free service much less a microtransaction-based one.
> It 's a change of mindset, that it is possible to lose digital assets permanently. I think many people can come to terms with that in the end
People have been getting familiar with that for half a century. The difference is that the proposed systems are designed to be fragile rather than robust, cost more to use, and the proposal is to link more of your entire life into those systems without a recovery path. If there isn't a really clear, compelling benefit this is not going to be a successful sales pitch.
Similarly, unless the plan is to tell people that one mistake or hardware failure means they irrecoverably lose their identity, the same process which allows replacing an old key with a new one can be used to replace you.
Finally, there appears to be either no benefit or a big privacy impact mapping keys to profiles on sites. If I go to a website and see “J. Random User” I have to trust that the owner of that site verified their identity against the expected source; if I see something like a signature against a particular key, there's a privacy issue from making it so easy to link you across sites and other activity (yes, people can use ), and if you don't trust the site operator you still have the problem of them showing a different ID when they're doing something dodgy.
I thought, this is one of the main points we want to avoid here, so why are you phrasing it as something so unimportant?
The larger point here is that there's no benefit to the user if the experience is replacing “Login with Google” with “Login with <large exchange>”, which is what it would be for the vast majority of users. If it's saying “Login with your private key”, it would be important to think about why OpenID/Persona didn't catch on or the already-supported x509 key support which has been available for decades.
Why did SIM chips take off? Why did credit cards with smart chips take off? These both embed private keys. Even desktop computers are now embedding private keys in their motherboards.
Clearly, something is missing from your analysis.
- for one-off payments it doesn't matter anyway, you just start using the new card and that's it
- and for recurring payments all businesses already need to allow for updating your credit card details because credit cards regularly expire anyway, so having to possibly manually update all your recurring payments might be a bit tedious and annoying, but it's certainly no impossible, out-of-the-ordinary task
And yet you are unable to say what or offer relevant examples. Do you login in to websites using the key on your phone's SIM or your credit card? Both of those are amusing because they're bot not only irrelevant to the scenario in question but also something people use because that's what they were given, not something they sought out.
> what part of that says “here's a benefit to you which is worth paying $$$ for!” to a normal person?
You get to keep your contacts even if you get booted off the platform (or your contacts do).
And it doesn't cost anything.
* Cancel your account for suspected fraud
* Fall for a password recovery or other attack on your credentials
* Cancel the entire service
* Introduce fees for the service
* Disconnect the identity service from the site where you authenticate
* A blockchain could increase the fees for service. Wait, that happens on a daily basis and you have no control over it.
* A blockchain user could fall for an attack. Unlike the Google scenario, there's no way to regain control of your account – time to setup a new one and convince everyone you work with to update.
* The site you're actually trying to use could switch to a different blockchain (which is more likely than only offering login with Google or that being canceled).
* The site you're using could check a list of addresses and ban yours because it's suspected to be associated with fraud
This is why I suggested taking off your salesguy hat and thinking about what this is like for normal people. Switching to a system which has mandatory upfront inconvenience and expense needs to have a big win to be worth it for people. If it's all “you'll find something to do with it later” you'll get adoption like GPG did.
In this case, I think the key thing to consider is why people use Gmail. It's not like you can't run your own email server, but most people don't want to be responsible for something that important.
A blockchain can be used to tie additional information to the public key.
> The site you're actually trying to use could switch to a different blockchain (which is more likely than only offering login with Google or that being canceled).
I hope they don't use any blockchain at all.
> Unlike the Google scenario, there's no way to regain control of your account
Recovery mechanisms for private key based identities have been designed and implemented.
That is not how blockchain works. Once someone has your private key they can make any transactions that they want, you cannot undo those changes once they are on the blockchain.
So, at best case we have some proof that our key is created/controlled by “me” via a trusted channel but not a centralized authority. Do I upload a video of me showing my public key to the world and upload to some hosting site? Could a deep fake me do that too? Then of course the gpg web of trust model comes to mind, if we attend key signing parties and sign each other’s keys we can verify through associative trust vs centralized trust.
Or is really the point to not have a real world to key identity linkage at all, for “privacy reasons,” and we just all do our business online with full anonymity?
Crypto is just like every other system - ostensibly distributed but centralised in practice.
The great exception to this seems to be BitTorrent. It remains decentralised and I wonder - what is so special about BitTorrent that means it hasn’t been replaced by a hierarchical system? Is it just “piracy” or is there something deeper we can learn from it?
Every time a top of hierarchy node pops up too high it gets whacked by copyright enforcement. This is an effective pressure against centralisation. Otherwise every decentralised system tends to converge into central systems, like planets forming out of an accretion disk.
Surprisingly the copyright industry is far more effective at driving global law enforcement to do its bidding than the financial regulators are.
It doesn't make sense to refute the argument by saying the argument is true.
What the proponents really mean when they use the whole "web3 is the solution to Big Tech monopolies" pretext, is that they want to introduce new monopolies, and in the process get rich quick. Given the background of many of the figures at the top of these schemes, e.g. serial fraudsters, convicted criminals, pathological liars, etc., the new monopolies will almost certainly be significantly worse than the existing Big Tech monopolies. Normally I wouldn't be so concerned, because I have faith that better technologies will win, but with cryptocurrencies I am genuinely concerned for the future, because the noisy zealots (with their high paid lobbyists[0]) are drowning out all the quiet thoughtful rational ones.
Like "superfoods"
How does it not exist to you?
I can create a package right now, call it "web4", and return an empty web page. Inferring the future of the web from it would be foolish. The web is used daily by billions of people who use the word to mean something specific, and a few cryptocurrency enthusiasts don't get to decide what it should now be.
These are both libraries for frontend code to interact with smart contracts. All I'm trying to say is that they do exist and developers have been using them for years.
IPFS is a great example the author points to as to what I understand web3 infrastructure to be; it seems to be a very strong example of decentralization.
Web 3.0 is supposed to be a continuation of the trend of making the Internet "of the people". Web 1.0 was open to anyone. Web 2.0 was more open. Web 3.0 will be even more open. (In theory.) Web 3.0 isn't about Reddit or the other sites this person mentions. It's about all the new technologies people are coming up with to enable participation on the Internet free from the control of a few centralized corporate platforms. Blockchain is a big part of that, and cryptocurrencies. But so is tildeverse and Mastodon and Gemini and all that stuff.
Also, it's not the case that ARPANET was designed to stay up "if the Soviets took down important cities or strategic datacenters". Bob Taylor, the man who literally made the decision to authorize and fund the ARPANET, has said so himself. "The creation of the ARPAnet was not motivated by considerations of war."
To me decentralization is a value. It's a goal, and yes, a goal that almost every web3 project falls short of in some way. But I think values are important. Values play a huge part in guiding human behavior. And the human side of web3 is MASSIVELY underrated in my opinion.
I don't think people realize that we can shape web3 by building up the right culture around it. By teaching people what things they should look out for. Because without that, they'll just be drawn in by blind profits and screwed over because we didn't tell them how to think about web3.
To a certain extent web3 critics are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. They are simultaneously criticizing web3 for valuing decentralization while also criticizing web3 for not being decentralized enough. It creates apathy around decentralization and other web3 ideas.
I think web3 critics would serve people better not by criticizing web3 but instead criticizing projects for not being web3 enough. What I don't think people on HN or Twitter understand is that right now web3 is a foundation. We can build technology and culture around it to help people.
But the whole point of building these systems is to get away from the entrenched interests of centralized authority, and if these systems can't actually deliver on that, then what's the point of adopting them? At least my bank accounts are insured if the bank fails and transactions have to clear ACH. If my credit card gets stolen, I call Visa and they make it go away in a matter of minutes. If someone gets access to my private key, that's it, there's nothing I can do to get my crypto back. I don't want "kinda decentralized", I want "definitely decentralized". This attitude represents a major goalpost shift for this kind of movement.
> But I think values are important. Values play a huge part in guiding human behavior.
This seems to be a bit romantic to me. The community can talk about values all they want, but it doesn't change the fact that shitcoins are everywhere. We can all agree murder is bad, but that isn't going to stop murders from happening.
Another example is the immutability of smart contracts. If someone updates a contract and you don't like it then you can keep using the old one. Go ask robinhood if you can use an old version of their app.
As far as private keys, I really don't know what to tell you. People lose their passwords all the time. Also smart wallets will help you recover you crypto wallet. UX is moving in the right direction here.
> This seems to be a bit romantic to me. The community can talk about values all they want, but it doesn't change the fact that shitcoins are everywhere. We can all agree murder is bad, but that isn't going to stop murders from happening.
So should we stop using email because of phishing? Or stop using phones because of spam calls?
We educate people on phishing. We educate people on scam calls. We educate people on the dangers of investing in penny stocks. We educate people on the dangers of options trading.
Why can't we educate people on shitcoins and decentralization? That's my point, crypto is a wild place but we can absolutely create a culture that moves things in the right direction.
Visa's source code is incidental to the value it provides me.
> Go ask robinhood if you can use an old version of their app.
The version of the Robinhood app I'm using is incidental to the value it provides me. Their value is actually pretty strongly correlated with their ability to evolve their codebase in response to market demands without being burdened with backwards compatibility.
> People lose their passwords all the time.
Yep, and then they recover them, which isn't possible with a lost private key.
> crypto is a wild place but we can absolutely create a culture that moves things in the right direction
That crypto and decentralization is "the right direction" is absolutely not self-evident. Can you substantiate that position?
In the past Robinhood has done questionable things like halting trading on a specific stock (GME) that other platforms didn't halt. I've also heard horror stories about people getting margin called due to bugs. I'm not saying smart-contracts are immune to these issues but the transparency of the bytecode being public is huge IMO.
This is just a single example of course. Imagine for a moment that we have a decentralized facebook-like app. Wouldn't it be great if we could fork it if they did something we didn't like? You might think that's a pipe dream but my argument is that this becomes less of a pipedream the more we educate people.
> That crypto and decentralization is "the right direction" is absolutely not self-evident. Can you substantiate that position?
My position is that crypto and decentralization give people options and put pressure on existing institutions that IMO have become too powerful. My goal isn't necessarily to destroy Bank of America, Visa, or Robinhood but to inject some real competition into the system. That includes institutions like the federal reserve.
I want there to be a spectrum of centralization <-> decentralization and let people choose what they're comfortable with. I want people to be able to say "Fuck bank of america, I'm going bankless". Or people can stick with what they know. Either way I think competition is good.
The problem is that there is a bunch of people out there that don't want others to be able to do this and will constantly shout about perils of permissionless DLT systems without acknowledging such (or without mentioning the many ways which permissioned non DLT systems have and continue to fail for increasingly more people [or without having any ideas on how to approach solving such problems in general that individuals can adopt for themseleves], which is really fine to me, because those people can't really stop what has been underway for the past 13 years [and often want somebody else to stop it for them, without even understanding how the systems they want to stop work, or putting any work in themselves to stop it beyond open throat/think piece operations])
There is no reason that bank of america or visa couldn't run their own rollup and implement their own fraud system. In fact, visa is likely working on tools like this.
It's computers. Shit happens.
I think this is a tad overrated, honestly. The DAO was open-source and that didn’t prevent it from being hacked and ETH hard-forked. I’m not against this kind of transparency, but DAO proved that it’s no silver bullet because the rate at which they shipped code made the whole transparency point moot.
He told you that there are smart wallets now (like with Argent) that allow you to retrieve access to your account just like you would with anything else. And it's possible to lose your password and not recover them unless you've set up the right recovery measures.
But you can always ring them because financial institutions etc all have customer service teams dedicated to solving problems like these.
Is there going to be an equivalent for Web3 ?
The NPR Planet Money episode "Escheat Show" follows the story of a man who bought some Amazon stock long ago, and purposely never logged in to his online account, letting the stock multiply into a presumed small fortune. Years later he found that due to his inactivity the account had been deemed by his state (Connecticut?) as lost property years prior, liquidated, and entered into the state's escheat program, where one can claim lost property. The stock had been liquidated at a much lower price than its present worth. He wanted to sue since his intention was to leave the stock untouched for years but found there were some complications. He's currently waiting for the stock to hit a valuation where a great lawyer will be tempted to take it on contingency while still leaving himself a fortune.
These wallets are actually smart contracts. One major feature of these contracts are that you can swap out the security keys if certain conditions are met. For example, you can generate 7 recovery tokens such that you only need 5 of the tokens to replace your security keys.
There is nothing stopping bank of america from creating a smart wallet and keeping the recovery tokens. This would allow them to reset your keys if you lose them.
This is a generous description for what's basically AmWay but less useful. Agree w/ your point.
I look at decentralization as a direction for some values.
I have some idea what those values are but still exploring. Could be "separate of risk compared to current centralization". Could be "take back control and responsibility of xxx management". But "web3" or decentralization provides me a great opportunity to think, rethink, and ACT based on thinking results.
We will have limitations, bugs, issues on probably every product made for "web3/decentralization". It's fine to criticize those flaws.
But I think we should separate "criticize product flaws" from "criticize value/direction". Mixing both together makes conversation harder to continue for me.
> DHT with a built-in p2p consensus mechanism
The notion that a p2p network stops being decentralized because it has consensus is silly.
A fool and his money.... At this point, I'd rather just make them my fools - better mine than someone else's. Take their money first, then say "I told you so". Then they might start listening to you.
Some are calling it OpenFinance to step over the optional decentralization.
"Check out my OF" penetrates a much broader audience than "DeFi service"
Still thinking about how I feel about that. Right now, people mainly seem to be using it as a sort of proxy for fine art-style exclusivities people already understand.
An NFT isn't a copyright or anything else. It's just a token that has no inherent meaning. Just like any fiat currency. By convention, it embeds an image -- just like a dollar bill has a picture of George.
But why is this a world we want. What benefit did we create by making profile pictures paid for. NFTs represent the worst of capitalism imo.
EIP721 defines the interface to this unique thing. It's nothing more than a set of functions that enable you to transfer it to another account and approve (and revoke) operators to manage it for you.
what makes nfts "good" or "bad" is how it is getting used. I'm implementing an order-book based dex. Every order is a unique thing, implementing ERC721 adds that extra bit of standardized functionality.
It is. Web3 is whatever you want it to be at this point.