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Comment by joosters | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of the hack,

..."Wormhole said earlier that the network was down for maintenance."

A great summary of so-called 'DeFi'. How can a system be decentralized if someone can unilaterally decide to take it down for maintenance?

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DeFi definition of “decentralized” is “everyone is anonymous and nobody pays taxes”, not “does not have central point of failure”.

The definitions (or rather, "goals") of most things from the cryptocurrency sphere appear to conveniently and arbitrarily change in adaptation to flaws being pointed out.

DeFi is “decentralized” in that saying so increases its price.

They seem to have a similarly creative definition for security too.

No one says that bridges are DeFi or decentralized. Only people who don't understand what they're talking about sum up everything under one term and then complain that their definition doesn't fit.

Yeah the running joke about this chain is how centralised it is.

To highlight solanas centralisation as a failure for crypto ignores how big the crypto space is and how much solana doesnt reflect the rest of the space

I wrote this a few years back. It is more relevant than ever: In cryptoland “decentralized” doesn’t mean what you think it does

https://medium.com/@josusanmartin/in-cryptoland-decentralize...

Very well written and explained and very helpful. Thank you.

Bridges like that are not decentralized and rely on trust, I don't think anyone consider them to be DeFi.

Everyone in the DeFi space knows Wormhole (which is on Solana) is not decentralised because Solana is banked, run, and paid for by VCs.

Yet another out of touch comment on HackerNews -- a place where people should be doing even a modicum of research instead of making things up.

This, absolutely nobody thinks solana is decentralised

Wormhole isn't centralized because it's on Solana (it's not like Sol devs/nodes will mess with the chain to stop it) but because it's a bridge which is an inherently centralized service since it cannot work fully on-chain by definition.

It's 1984 and everything is called by opposite names.

You can shut down a centralized system when all node operators agree to do so, which happened here.

just the default response for the news/general public. Bad PR to say "we fucked up" or something to that effect.

The non-decentralization of DeFi is something that along with using too much energy while being very slow at processing transactions, will be fixed in the future. Way, way into the future. This is a good thing, btw. It means there's still plenty of time for you to "get in".

You say "get in" as if the goal is making money, and not the technology or capability that it enables. Which is a perfect example of why crypto is a bubble.

I think your read on the parent is right but despite that, I'd encourage you to check it out. IMHO, the most interesting developments in computer science are happening right now in web3. Stay away from the NFTs/DEFI and just learn about the new systems being built. If you look into the technical details of these new distributed systems, game theory applications, and zero-knowledge proofs, I have a hard timing believing any programmer can't see the new features unlocked in how we build things.

It's also socially important for well intentioned people to join the system right now. Web3 is a thing, it will happen. Mobile happened and now two companies worth roughly a trillion each control it entirely. Web3 is roughly on the same path. It's being built right now to gate keep and capture value. If you don't want to the internet to continue to dwindle down to a privatized button pushing consumption app, the battle ground is web3.