In fact in the history of the internet I cannot find a single example of any technology working better in a decentralized fashion compared to centralized for the end user
It’s not about “open finance” versus “centralized finance”, it’s about “our finance” vs “their finance”, our ledgers versus their databases. This is no different than Silicon Valley starting as David and turning into West Coast Goliath, wrestling with the East Coast Hegemony for status and power.
I get the sentiment, but code doesn’t fix people problems. I am not without curiosity, but web3 still has much work to do to show both novel and meaningful use cases.
As technologists, we ought to be better than this. Think about this like we do with on-prem vs cloud. It is decentralization vs. centralization, but far more muted and less political. We should approach this with a mature contemplation, not cheap tribalism.
As technologists, we ought to recognize the difference and see the forests for the trees. As a technologist, I cannot unsee the patterns nor look away.
I’m sure you’d find similar musings in 2600 or Phrack decades ago.
> Do you refuse to acknowledge the value-add to decentralization that the first group brings?
Decentralization needs the blockchain less than the blockchain needs decentralization.
Short of a worldwide communist revolution, that's just going to continue to be the case for any up and coming technologies that make money. Who benefitted most from the enormous gains in tech stocks over the last 25 years? I'll wager it isn't the minimum wage employees.
> Decentralization needs the blockchain less than the blockchain needs decentralization.
Name for me any other way of transferring money to a stranger over the internet in a decentralized fashion. Name for me any other way of executing Turing complete code in a censorship-resistant fashion. These are two big parts of decentralization that crypto solves. Do you refuse to acknowledge that?
There's a reason the Silk Road only appeared after Bitcoin came on the scene. Tor's been around a long time, PGP's been around a long time, but Bitcoin was the missing puzzle piece. I'm not saying drugs are good, I'm just saying decentralization tech didn't reach the level required to implement Silk Road before crypto came on the scene.
These decentralised systems are a natural abstraction for so many different types of problems and systems. If you leverage them you can still get high performance systems in a centralised manner but the hard work making those systems resilient, localised, and highly available has already been solved. If you design your systems on top of this technical layer you can leverage the benefits without the costs of centralisation for the most part.
The other academic argument to be made is that this is basically the only industry that is meaningfully pushing cryptography forwards (IMHO). Concepts like Functional Encryption, Fully Homomorphic Encryption, Secure Multi-Party Computation, and Zero Knowledge Proof Systems have been primarily funded by cryptocurrency research and towards the application in decentralised zero trust systems (which are basically the "ideal" environment for exploring cryptography and game theoretic technologies).
Code doesn't fix people problems but it can augment existing systems and letting those systems evolve to their logical conclusions is a worthwhile endeavour.
If not for AML, KYC and basically the fact you just can't really use cash any more in significant sums for anything we wouldn't have had to bother.
I have 200,000 bitcoin, or maybe I have 0.2, no-one knows other than me. Good.
The same is far from being true via other means such as the legacy banking system or cash. I mean, you can try and send a briefcase full of notes in the post cross-border, it might work, I wouldn't know or care to try.
Obviously the Government can attempt to, or pass laws, to censor anything at any time for any reason. In my country it was illegal for me to visit family for about 6 months this/last year, there's nothing special about Bitcoin, power will attempt to fuck with you simply because they can.
Well, they did. They pretty much all failed or were made to fail (DigiCash[0], Flooz, e-gold, etc.) or were subsumed into the existing system (eg. PayPal).
As far as I can tell, the big picture hope this time around is that the existing system will be subsumed into one or more successful cryptocurrencies, rather than the other way around (which defeats the decentralization).
[0] DigiCash was an anonymous, nominally distributed, system, which is a different set of properties than current cryptocurrencies.
For many use cases, BitTorrent is a superior file distribution mechanism compared to centralized alternatives.
We assume everyone in the world has access to non-rug-pulling companies like, say, BofA or TD Ameritrade but that's really not the case. These institutions have become trustworthy through decades of lawsuits and regulations.
Anecdote: My parents immigrated to the US from Albania, a few months before our planned move my dad's bank just decided to stop existing and the owners fled the country with all the (paper) money. My parents came to a new country with no money to their name because the FDIC is an American invention that a bunch of other countries still haven't copied.
So, I can see how it would work in that context, but I would agree here in the US where our tech overlords are generally benevolent it doesn't seem much more useful over web2.
> I don’t understand what problem web3 can solve that a trusted entity cannot.
The lack of trustworthy entities.
> And let’s keep in mind your reply to this comment will be using a trusted entity.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/259/257/342...
> In fact in the history of the internet I cannot find a single example of any technology working better in a decentralized fashion compared to centralized.
Strong objections to most Web3 concepts can actually be derived from the idea that “there is no algorithm for truth.”
We can imagine an NFT that claims to be a deed for a house. We can also imagine:
* Someone with a fleet of tanks forcing me to leave the house, and then keeping me and my heirs from moving back in. Regardless of what the NFT says, by no means do I own the house.
* I might guess someone’s password and give their NFT to myself, and if it was government binding, convince the rest of society to go along with this. Maybe this counts as owning the house, but it definitely shouldn’t.
Political tools can live or die by being realistic, or by being just and fair. Etherium has managed the astonishing feat of being popular without achieving either.
So, how do we actually ensure that the database reflects the underlying social reality? That’s the part where all these supposedly “decentralized” applications punt, either by explicitly relying on a centralized entity, hoping the government goes along with it, or not having the database really reflect anything outside itself (a very small niche).
> The lack of trustworthy entities.
Note that trusted != trustworthy.
In security parlance a trusted entity is one you must trust, that can fuck you over (eg. 'Control' in popular culture, handlers in actual HUMINT, a bank that has your deposited money, etc.).
In that same parlance, trustworthy isn't really a thing. You can raise the cost of violating that trust in various ways (assets held by a theoretically disinterested third party with different incentives, reputational costs that foreclose future participation in the system, credible threats of legal action, etc.), but there isn't anything that you can do if the trusted entity is willing to pay that cost (or is unwilling to pay the cost of not violating that trust) to prevent the trust violation.
I tend to think its not worth the trade off (and the "decentralization" is questionable in practise), but this line of criticism is basically begging the question.
Becoming a trusted entity is hard. Crypto allows for the creation of systems that don't require trusted entites. That's a huge win for the little guy and catalyst for innovation.
The real questions to ask with blockchain stuff:
- at what cost does this lack of trusted entitids come at? I don't just mean in terms of money but also engineering complexity
- what are the hidden trust relationships? Plenty of blockchain stuff still involved trusted entities, its just hidden through layers of indirection. The only thing worse than a trusted entity you dont trust is a trusted entity you don't even know exists.
Sorry to be sarcastic.
I am still skeptical of most web3 use cases touted on twitter, but have personally experienced a few that have made me pause and be a bit more open minded.
Personal experiences: - Transferring money was in seconds, compared to Fidelity/Venmo which took 3 days!!! - Very easy to loan money against crypto holdings vs stocks - ResearchDao's like ResearchHub
You’re paying fees to transfer crypto.
That said, it’s free and instant with services like Zelle.
This is a problem that can be solved sans web3.
I think it's a wrong example. Email provides light-speed delivery, dirt-cheap cost, and brain-dead convenience on top of also being able to mail. So email actually never competed with mail.
Web3 is yet to strike any decisive blow against today's web (or it may never). It's more like another part of the web.
> Transferring money was in seconds, compared to Fidelity/Venmo which took 3 days!!! - Very easy to loan money against crypto holdings vs stocks - ResearchDao's like ResearchHub
For a smaller amount of money (<$100k), banks already can transfer money within seconds. I've seen people sending $1Ms only using their phones, but, IIRC, you need a good record to do that.
The US is very slow to move money, I still dread any time I have to use my old US bank accounts to get things done.
These advantages are obvious now. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gipL_CEw-fk . My point being that blockchain does offer some new capabilities that were hard to build before. We maybe oblivious in what applications that may unlock.
Regarding money transfer, I know the technology exists, but all providers don't built it. That is native technology in blockchain.
Trust cannot solve the problem of giving too much power to trustee. The fact that IT giants are collecting people's data to manipulate people's mind is one good example. We should be able to control the level of trust we can provide to other parties.
Torrents?
Twitter won't allow you to say what the CDC says on viral transmission. They won't allow you to say that men aren't women. They hide posts as "sensitive content" that show crime in the cities that people of the same mindset run. Their CEO doesn't believe in freedom of speech.
Blockchain is currently a set of underwhelming technologies, but in a world of 0 or 1 existentials, it's a driving force to allow the open expression 90s tech people said they wanted but lied about.
I think we can analogize to open source and closed source software: "I don’t understand what problem [web3] can solve that [a trusted entity] cannot."
"I don’t understand what problem [open source software] can solve that [close source software maintained by a well funded and benevolant company] cannot."
A point of open source software isn't that it can create software that would be impossible given the correct closed-source company, the point is to not be beholden to them in the first place. You want to make a change to the software, make it. It's your right.
The same idea for web3. Want to make an application to do something and accept payments for it? Release it as a dapp and charge for each interaction. Nobody can stop you from doing that.
As for the second part, "the things built will inherently be centralized". I'm not sure what you mean. The dapp gets published, you can now interact with it and it doesn't run on any one specific machine. The interaction consists of you and the dapp (and the miners who adds your transaction to the chain). What part is centralized?
So that means HN really loved the .org takeover [0], and the price increases for .io [1] and now the holder of all our beloved trendy top level domains are going into the hands of the great Ethos Capital (again) who are going to do all of the above again. [2] /s
Nothing terrible to see here folks, its for your own good! /s
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21611677
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/04/ethos-capital-grabbing...
[2] https://www.geekwire.com/2021/domain-name-registry-donuts-ac...
Usenet.
Usenet itself was more centralised in most regards than Reddit is today. And even then it proved nonviable.
Is there a difference between buying a "comment on HN" and the text of that comment?
NFTs require at least one of two centralized services to remain functional - the original URL and the Opensea cached URL. So proof of ownership is decentralized, but the actual image is not.
People can then choose to value that ledger entry, or not.
Everything else, such as the ability of n app to figure out an image URL for the NFT, is just sugar on top.
NFT people will value a Bored Ape token whether the URL is valid or not - and they are entirely right to do so. The Cryptopunks don't even have a URL!