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Comment by yosamino | Hacker News Reader

I think you are not giving enough credit to the whole argument that André is making.

He is not saying

> See I found a few people who do run servers, therefore your argument is invalid.

His point is:

> It is correct that only a tiny percentage of people do run servers. But it is exactly this tiny percentage who make certain projects successful.

He then generalizes this observation. To paraphrase: "People don't want to run their own servers" is similar to "People don't want to write their online encylopedia" - true, but not the defining point.

In a sense this article doesn't say that the argument "people don't want to run their own servers" is wrong, but that it is the wrong argument.

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But the point from the original Moxie article was petty clear: web3 protocols are designed in a way that is only distributed if everyone runs their own server. You can't access the Blockchain from a client (e.g. a mobile device). You can either run your own server, just for you; or, you can rely on the next Facebook or Amazon to run a node for you to connect to from your mobile device.

So, the fact that a few people can and will run their own servers doesn't help the vast majority who will not. Just like the fact that someone is running their own mail server will not allow me to have an email address: I can either run my ownail server, or use Gmail or maybe some smaller provider.

And in the past, the vast majority have chosen Gmail, because the email protocol didn't have a client app that could connect to the distributed mail network.

Similarly, the vast majority will choose, say, OpenSea if there is no client that can talk directly to the distributed NFT system in the Blockchain. And if everyone is using OpenSea, the Blockchain becomes irrelevant, just like the email standards are quasi-irrelevant for Gmail.

GP got it right.

the whole article is fight over semantics that adds very little. i wanna hear about turning phones into servers, not the nick-picking. but yes, he wrote that what Moxie wrote was, and i quote, "factually wrong and sound like mere ideology".

I don't think that's the case. From what I've read, the goal of this web3/crypto stuff is to bring decentralization to the masses. If only a subset of "nerds" want to run servers, that still doesn't cut it.

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