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Comment by wyck | Hacker News Reader

MetaMask is a wallet, its not ingrained into any blockchain, your free to use alternatives, and many protocols don't support it. The centralized aspect of a chrome app and marketplace like opensea is very well know issue and talked about a lot in crypto, the problem of course comes down to lack of education, which is apparent in this very post.

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Can you point me to where this insightful discussion happens? And where can I educate myself? 99,99% of content and forums I find online about crypto only care about promoting coins, nfts or services basing only on futuristic visionary promises, hyping up the users and attempts at FOMO. It's almost literal spam. This is the first time I read something that just explains how thing works from a technical standpoint and what challenges are there.

This is the best place for deep, technical discussions free of shilling: https://ethresear.ch/

Its almost entirely done on crypto twitter. You follow the builders and they talk about this stuff. Tweet threads are terrible but that is where the good information is.

Twitter is frustrating in that the good content is buried and if you follow the wrong people they just spam your feed.

Its a constant battle to keep the signal to noise ratio of your feed high and the right people to follow constantly changes.

I got into web3/crypto (hate both those terms) Twitter a few months ago and it took a very significant amount of time to find the signal among the noise if you will. Twitter’s algorithms heavily favor engagement which in turn favors “influencers” who lack a lot of technical knowledge and peddle hype. I can see why curious skeptics are so quickly turned off, but there really is a gold mine of good discussion out there.

@das_connor is an awesome follow. He works for Avalanche (which I believe will be a massive player in enterprise blockchain adoption).

Who are some of these people in your experience?

I agree about Twatter being difficult. And it is time consuming. Some projects have decent Discord channels. It depends on the devs and community there.

It is quite difficult because indeed everyone has a profit motive to shill. The only way I could get a good read on anything was by experimenting with the tech.

Some of the most interesting tech focused people I've found on twitter:

- @VitalikButerin

- @Hasufl

- @ePolynya

- @gakonst

Can see who they're following as a launchpad into the more interesting ecosystem

The Daily Thread on https://old.reddit.com/r/ethfinance has a number of folks who are in it for the the tech and generally some pretty good takes on protocol/ecosystem tech. It is better than any other crypto subreddit I've come across.

David Lancashire has given numerous interviews on the subject of Ethereum's issues around node operation.

People are certainly free to use alternatives, but if they aren't spinning up their own nodes what will they be using, another centralized node service? Most people aren't going to run their own node and for good reason, its expensive and profitless. Sure a cryptographic/economic layer on top of Ethereum could incentivize people to run nodes and have users pay for decentralization, but at the end of the day people will use Infura or a competitor because it is cheaper, and when these companies control who gets transactions they also influence who can make blocks.

Ethereum is fundamentally flawed in this sense - it only pays for mining (and in the future, staking). The work of routing and storing data is done by the most prolific miners and businesses reliant on Ethereum to keep it from collapsing; there is no sustainable model where a decentralized cohort of nodes can run Ethereum without fundamentally changing how Ethereum pays for infrastructure.

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