Web3 is centralized and inefficient | Hacker News Reader

Web3 is centralized and inefficient

neelc.org

801 pointsneelc751 comments

People use centralized systems because they actually like the convenience that comes with it. And with that, comes the decentralized system changing in such a way that it changes to almost NEEDING centralization. The problem is that engineers and cybersecurity people all think that everyone else thinks like they do, when in actuality the complete opposite is true.

The biggest example is the internet itself - the internet is a completely decentralized network until it wasn't, with website certs becoming required. People use popular web hosting because it's easier and just better than what they could do. Email is completely decentralized, and it's very easy to set up your own web server - as long as you want every single spam system to immediately block all of your messages.

"Decentralized" systems will all go the exact same way. And it's because people don't want to spend time setting up their own shit, they are very happy to pay in either money or data to have someone else do it for them. Yeah, it's very easy to say "well just set up your own thing" but once you get to a critical mass of everyone using Gmail instead of their own server then the system becomes unusable without centralization.

Decentralization is a fantastic idea, and it works great in theory, but it fails to actually consider any of the practical problems that come with decentralization and doesn't consider what people who aren't programmers actually want to do with their time and money.

This. The sad thing is that people like the convenience of centralized systems.

Humans are lazy. They'll go with the #1 option, even if it means building a centralized monopoly.

I should've made this point clearer.

Note: I am the article's author.

Even then, I think blaming it on laziness is really not a good idea. People are not lazy for not understanding how systems work - not every single person has time for that, or cares about decentralization. Laziness implies it's a problem, and programmers have an unhealthy fascination with seeing problems and thinking they can all be fixed somehow if they just technology hard enough.

You have to look at the individual decisions that people make, and actually make it worth someone's time to do something themselves. For some people, they care a lot about decentralization, are anti-corporate, etc., but most people don't care. They see that they could either spend money on a cheap PC and 10 hours learning about, setting up, and troubleshooting their own mail server; or they can get a gmail account in 2 minutes and get the exact same practical result. The same will apply to web3 systems. It's not laziness, it's people making rational decisions.

>programmers have an unhealthy fascination with seeing problems and thinking they can all be fixed somehow if they just technology hard enough.

This. It's not up to techies to decide what people value. The philosophical problem with web3/blockchain/whatever is that it assumes "decentralization" is a valuable thing in and of itself, without really tying it into what people actually value.

It's almost as if trust turns out to be some kind of dominant strategy.

thank you

I don't think it's necessarily sad at all. It seems like centralized systems make the most sense in, well, most systems. And safeguards can be put in place to prevent the centralization from being abused.

I think people have some big misunderstandings about power. You’re right, centralized systems can lead to monopolies. On the other hand, decentralized systems where no one has absolute power can make important changes difficult to implement. See: changes to Bitcoin and Ethereum’s protocols to address issues with mining.

Why is this sad? We live in a world of Ikea furniture and cabinetry, of fast food and passionate gourmet, there's room in the world for the convenient and the passionate tinkerers. Everyone is different and likes to allocate their time in different places. My partner will not put a sticker on her laptop that she hasn't designed and drawn herself, while I type on a handmade desk. That there are easy and hard ways to do things is fantastic; it means I can pick the lazy choice for things I don't care for and the passionate things for those I do. Do you really want a world where everyone cares about the same things you do? I feel the world is better for its diversity.

> Humans are lazy. They'll go with the #1 option, even if it means building a centralized monopoly.

Am I lazy because I don't forge spare parts for my car and install them myself? No. I leave this to the huge, rich, established company that manufactured my car, and their contractors. Why? Because the only times I ever repaired anything in a car, was in videogames. And I want to be sure that the thing that I entrust my safety to while traveling, is in excellent working order.

For the same reason, most people don't setup their own mail servers, don't setup their own racks to run webapps, invent their own currencies, grow their own food, produce their own electricity, or dig wells.

Our society runs on a huge variety of systems, most of which are too complex individually for any single human to fully understand/make/maintain on his own. Centralization is not a bad thing to be avoided, it's an inevitable consequence of technological development.

This example is silly - it's actually impossible for you to forge spare parts for your car, as most of them require multi-million dollar machines to manufacture, the information on how they are made, blueprints or schematics are not avaliable to you. And even if you succeed, someof them are IP protected so this is a terrible analogie.

I can give you plenty of more feasible analogies;

Do I make my own bread? Sure, sometimes I do. Baking bread isn't that hard. But do I do it every day? No. Why? Because it takes time to do, my kitchen counter is usually a mess afterwards, and the result usually doesn't taste anywhere near as good as the 20+ bread varieties I can buy at the corner store. I sometimes do it for fun, but I wouldn't do it every day.

Let's go to macro scale: What's the better solution: 1000000 people each baking their own bread (1 loaf a day), or a giant company baking all the bread? A million stoves are most certainly less energy efficient than the professional industrial ones at the company. Having to divide the resources into many small packages and distributing them to each individual households is less efficient. The quality of the bread will vary widely. And lets say baking takes 0.5 hours, that's 57 person years wasted per day to do something the bread factory can probably do with a few dozen employees.

'Let's go to macro scale: What's the better solution: 1000000 people each baking their own bread (1 loaf a day), or a giant company baking all the bread?'

The same argument advocates monopoly or central planning by government?

If not, you have to jistify where is centralised enough. Now, if we have a 20,000 different bakeries, is that actually centralised?

Decentralisation of plumbers doesnt mean everyone does his own plumbing, it means anyone willing to learn can become a plumber and there is no plumbing monopoly.

Also we should debate the actual subject, not debate it indirectly throufh analogie, it just introduces an extra step of inaccuracy and cultural baggage.

> The same argument advocates monopoly or central planning by government?

My argument isn't "centralization is good no matter what".

My argument is "centralization is not inherently a bad thing that is to be overcome. Done correctly, as demonstrated by many existing systems in our society, it is a great way to make things our society needs work at scale in an efficient manner."

I think centralization is often the most efficient solution, the assumption being that the central authority has implemented the most efficient system. The problem though is the same as governments. Dictatorship is the most efficient way to run a country, people do as the dictator says there is no questioning it. All choices of the dictator are made and no waste is done in thinking or processing of the decision. The problem becomes that these centralization solutions almost always turn sour. The central authority (dictator) may have started off benevolent/perfect but either they eventually turn bad, successors turn bad, or the central authority becomes inefficient in new environmental conditions.

Decentralization like democracy introduces inefficiencies but at the same time provides safeguards against these conditions. The goal is to provide the minimum amount of inefficiencies while providing the maximum amount of safeguards.

> Decentralization like democracy introduces inefficiencies but at the same time provides safeguards against these conditions.

Most democracies are not purely decentralized systems, however. There is still a central government, the difference is how it obtains its ruling power.

Even the elections themselves are not de-centralized, as in "everyone run his own DIY election system and we'll see what sticks". There are central authorities for tallying votes, providing election sites, safeguarding and vetting the process, declaring rules, etc.

Which is a perfect example for how cenralized systems can be both efficient and safeguarded.

I know you wanted to veer back to the topic, but just to add another example to the pile: the math on mass transit is just blindingly obvious. A cheap centralized transit system is wildly more efficient for moving people around than individual cars. And investments in it will "lift all boats" socioeconomically speaking.

But it is more about the problems than the methodology. Centralized/Cooperative methods are more appropriate to solving a complex problem for which you know the solution (building a house, mass transit, maintaining highways). Distributed/Competitive methodology is better for exploring a problem space (determining the most energy efficient house design, innovative bus or train engines, cost effective highway surfaces). If you use cooperative when you should be using competition, you get a cartel. If you use competition when you should be cooperating, you get extreme inefficiency and long delays (I don't think we have a word for when we force groups who should be cooperating to compete with each other for resources).

> I don't think we have a word for when we force groups who should be cooperating to compete with each other for resources

I agree in terms of forcing, but we have plenty of ways to describe the general idea of choosing this direction, typically in exchange for a (real or perceived) benefit, but almost always with the inefficiency/delay you mentioned:

homegrown

homemade

handmade

handcrafted

artisan

DIY

roll your own

The long arc of human civilization absolutely points toward unification of society and government, not balkanization into independent city-states.

Maybe it's just me, but unless I'm crazy you've just listed all of the reasons it's actually an entirely workable analogy.

I dont get it- how does lack of blueprints and IP protection apply to blockchain, where all code is public?

Maybe not all of the things you listed, but the comparison to forging your own materials with expensive equipment in a painstaking process that takes a long time is very, very comparable to the requirement web3 places on individuals to invest massive amounts of resources, time, and effort to do basic things that they can do right now very simply without any such obligations. Until web3 manages to overcome these limitations your vision of a future utopian internet where everything is slower and the planet catches on fire won't be adopted by anyone except niche enthusiasts (just like building your own car).

This isn't laziness. This is different priorities. Few people think that decentralized systems are an important thing in and of themselves. Laziness would be believing the decentralization is good without working to achieve it.

this statement is embarrassing. specialization and division of labor is not due to "laziness"

Do you knit?

Do you wear sweaters?

The sweaters you have -- did you knit them?

Do you wear shirts?

Did you sew them yourself?

If not, why are you so lazy?

Not everything is centralized. Internet routing infrastructure (e.g. BGP) is decentralized. Capitalism itself is decentralized allocation of resources. Power grids are decentralized loads and (increasingly) generation.

It's true that centralization & decentralization tend to operate like a pendulum over time. Having a blockchain that provides historic cryptographic evidence of provenance with a modicum of worldwide trust seems like a generally valuable capability to combat all forms of digital newspeak.

'Capitalism itself is decentralized allocation of resources'

So long as you keep monopolies and abuse of power in check, in the past 30 years we have gone from a dozen conpetitors to like 2 or 3 player cartel in many industries

Notably, this is the result of a failure in our (necessarily) centralized anti-trust system. In the past 30 years, the government has been reticent to pursue anti-trust cases against the growing number of monopolies/oligopolies.

Without the centralized regulation of decentralized system, they seem to consistently centralize around a few key players to the detriment of the system.

The problems you’re describing are problems of the internet, not decentralization. Few could’ve predicted what the initial rules of the internet would generate after a few decades. We can learn from the outcome and come up with new rules.

The point about how “people want centralized systems” reminds me of the initial response to Apple’s privacy strategy. At the time, it was met with skepticism, to say the least. Privacy wasn’t something that normal people obsessed over, and it came at the expense of wonderful features that were only possible through centralized archival of personal information.

Since then, a steady drumbeat of surveillance scandals, security incidents, and technological innovations have turned data retention into more of a liability than an asset.

Yeah, and Apple sold people on "privacy" and now operate a surveillance network against Chinese citizens. They are the archetypical example of this playing out. Promising decentralization and instead you get metamask overriding the blockchain because some jpegs are illegal.

Isn’t Metamask opensource? Why don’t people maintain a fork without the censorship?

The initial "rules" of the internet did not come from any legislation. They were not forced into existence, because the internet is a decentralized system. It's rational people finding out that trusted systems actually do work for most cases, and they work SIGNIFICANTLY better and with less problems than decentralized systems. So eventually, everyone used centralized systems because that was the rational thing to do, and it reached a critical mass where you assume anyone who is not part of the establish trusted system is malicious (which is true, 99% of the time).

>surveillance scandals, security incidents, and technological innovations have turned data retention into more of a liability than an asset

LOL! I actually cannot believe that you seriously think this. Yes, Apple is very big on privacy. It is not the reason that people buy Apple products outside of a very small portion of users. And data retention, collection, tracking, etc. is such a gigantic business and is so central to the very function of tech giants that you are actually completely deluded if you think that "data collection is a liability". Almost nobody cares about their data. They are happy to give it up for free in exchange for being able to use websites and services. And why wouldn't they? I don't care how much you think that you are private, how much you think you've bested the giant tech companies with entire teams of the smartest engineers on the planet figuring out how to optimally harvest more data, how much you think you've been able to seclude yourself from the 99% of rational people. You have lost. You have no privacy, period. Privacy as a concept has been dead for years, so the only people who even value it anymore are people like you who think they can somehow best this system.

Apple suggested that people would care about privacy, and there was skepticism. Of course, privacy had been the status quo in an earlier era of the internet, and the lack of privacy didn't enable much in terms of novel user experience (turns out all the crap about "people would rather have personalized ads" was crap).

Now a crowd of people are suggesting something very different: that people wouldn't care about giving up the conveniences of today's centralized systems. But we do have experience with a less centralized web, and it wasn't a lack of "web3" tech that resulted in the centralized systems gaining their current position. It was open competition with the less-centralized old status quo. The centralized systems that won are very different than the older centralized systems that had lost - AOL tried to force everything inside of its wall; Facebook and Twitter merely extend their reach so that they can touch everything, and won out as aggregators vs doing in-house content production.

So why would the desire to have such convenient, one-stop-shop, minimal-setup centralized aggregator services go away?

But it wasn't just "open competition." Many actions of the centralized de-facto internet monopolies of today (Facebook, Google, etc) were—and continue to be—horribly anticompetitive.

Furthermore, just like in the offline world, "open competition" doesn't consider externalities, like the loss of privacy, and the massive social and political influence that these behemoths have gained.

I suspect a lot of that is driven by a small number of privacy advocates, and I really don't like the extremism.

There are people who, if they had their way, would probably ban or highly regulate CCTV cameras.

And somehow, after all these years, right to encrypt and right to use anonymity routing is still under attack at times.

The previous approach to internet privacy assumed it was a public place. The current assumptions are totally unprecedented, they are basically trying to make every interaction not only private but as confidential as a therapists office.

And, even beyond that, they want to eliminate things that even possibly could be used to violate privacy, removing features rather than allowing opt-in, only allowing a weak revokable consent to data processing, etc.

I would much rather they apply a targeted approach of ensuring privacy is always available to those who want it, without trying to eliminate public digital spaces as a category.

This is a false dichotomy.

Most people don't want to run their own mail servers. That isn't the same thing as saying we need a single entity to be in charge of email. There are thousands of independent email providers. Your emails get marked as spam if you have two users, not if you have two thousand. And small providers getting marked as spam isn't because it's necessary to prevent spam, it's because large providers would rather kill them on purpose and force more people to use them. Which we could fix it if we wanted to.

Everything could work this way, and should. You don't run your own social network instance, but you can, and thousands of independent entities do, and you can take your pick of them and move between them.

And we can learn lessons from the past. Major one from email: Addresses should be portable, or at least have zero-cost permanent forwarding built into the protocol.

Email is one I keep coming back to when I try to picture a future that runs on blockchain tech.

It seems like even if there are enough situations where the zero-trust nature proves to make sense to users, it would be silly for them to all use the same chains. Why deal with the overhead and transaction costs? Why wouldn't there be as many chains as their are email providers, and then most of them would only have value insomuch as the things running on them have value? So more like "new way of formalizing coalitions and joint ventures and partnerships where no single partner has full control" than "investment vehicle" or "foundational infrastructure for the whole world."

Email, by being a protocol vs a single implementation, has outlasted many email service providers and will probably outlast many more. Many of those service providers were killed by new entrants that could do it cheaper or better - so it seems crazy to expect otherwise-productive things to remain on these hideously expensive trendy chains of the moment.

I think the answer to why one chain is better than many chains is because it’s way harder to 51% one chain with many applications rather than having to 51% one chain with one application.

I don’t know enough about blockchain tech to KNOW this is correct, but it’s something interesting that kinda falls out of the theory.

I guess the natural response would be that the companies running these myriad chains simply wouldn't care about abstract cybersecurity concerns like 51% attacks, but instead selling services to users. Just consider all of the companies today which have horrible security. The main factor that they care about is whether their business will get attacked in practice, which is infrequent enough that it always makes the news.

If a company didn't care about security or other "abstract cybersecurity concerns" and instead only cared about selling something to their users, why would they use something like blockchain which is entirely based on abstract technical and cybersecurity concepts instead of existing web technologies which are more efficient and easier to use?

In this scenario, presumably so that it can market itself as a Web3 company, which is the Future of the Internet™ and will attract investors. After all, the vast majority of NFT buyers and other crypto holders are in it to make money for free, not because they want to buy and sell real-world goods and services; as long as their money doesn't get stolen, they don't really care about the cybersecurity aspects. Even when cryptocurrencies are used as a medium of exchange or transfer, the main cited advantage is ease of use. I suspect that this comes only from the lack of regulations, and that it will die once governments start cracking down on exchanges, but perhaps I'm just being too pessimistic.

You hit the nail on the head, I'd say. If there is one chain, you need to amass 51% to attack it, which is nearly impossible. If there are 100 chains with 1% of the total hash rate each, you just need to control 0.51% of the total hash rate to take over one of those chains.

This is technically correct, but a lot of applications that use blockchain store the proofs on multiple chains, which in your example is equivalent in hashpower to one big chain. Also you are describing PoW and lots of chains are not PoW now.

People try to solve everything with blockchains. It's not always necessary. Cryptography yes. Blockchain only if you need distributed consensus for something.

Most of what people actually don't want to do is reliability engineering. You can host it off your phone, but then it goes down if you're out of range or the battery dies. You can host it in your basement, but now you need to buy hardware and it goes down if you lose power or internet. And you have to keep up to date with patches etc. So just pay someone <$100/year to do it for you.

But the design should make that thing the most commodified thing in the world. You should be able to switch to self-hosting and back or to another provider by just changing the host's address in your configuration. Everything should still point to you on the new host. Your own device should keep a copy of everything needed to switch even if the existing provider is unexpectedly incinerated by a meteor. They should not have the ability to prevent it and should be untrusted to the fullest extent possible.

You can get that with ordinary cryptography. The thing you can't get from ordinary cryptography is disintermediated payment processing. Which you do actually want, but that's something else.

> Why wouldn't there be as many chains as their are email providers

Email providers can send email to each other, making them all as equally useful. Different blockchains wouldn't be compatible with each other by default, by definition, so it's more of a winner-takes-all situation.

Isn't that a problem worth solving? It had to be solved for banks to work as reliable institutions. Having a single blockchain in the end is probably as bad as having a single bank, although for slightly different reasons.

You’re confusing the money itself with the institutions that manage the money.

I don't think so. They are creating the metaphor that banks == blockchain implementation + stakeholders, money == blockchain tokens. Currently most of the cryptocurrencies you see with ICOs are just erc20 tokens ontop of ETH (therefore centralized). For banks they leverage SWIFT + other more local mechanisms (double entry accounting, etc...) to resolve transfers.

Its possible in the future we will develop a mechanism that allows two completely unrelated & unconnected blockchains to transfer tokens between eachother. I assume there would have to be either an intermediate chain specific to this purpose or both chains would need to follow a similar implementation. So far we started with Proof Of Work, we now have Proof of Stake and Proof of History. There may be more mechanisms in the future.

Does your bank deal in dollars or its own token?

Is a cryptocurrency exchange more like a bank or a currency?

It's an exchange, the cryptocurrency itself is the bank. Banks don't require dollars or any fiat currency to exist, hell they invented paper money. The major difference is that banks had the advantage of gold and other precious metals as a pre-existing common medium of exchange. Cryptocurrencies need a verifiable way to say that you transferred X value from chain A to chain B. I'm sure this is a solvable problem.

> a mechanism that allows two completely unrelated & unconnected blockchains to transfer tokens between eachother

Atomic swaps already exist.

I still have no idea what that has to do with the nonsensical metaphor "a blockchain is a bank"

The essence of both a bank and a cryptocurrency is the ledger. Everything else is an implementation detail.

The essence of banks is dealing in risk. A ledger is one tool they use.

Different blockchains could still agree how to exchange messages and transactions relevant to that exchange. I must have consensus with my employer on how I will be paid, but my employer has no business in my agreement with my landlord. Yet we all 3 have our own “blockchains” (accounting books)

I have a domain with 3 users, I don't have any problems?

The web3 answer here would probably be “use blockchain for identity” which is a hard thing to get right (understatement) when you consider “right to deletion” and various privacy laws, but imagine you could tie an email sender to some pseudonymous trail of transactions that prove it is a real economically transacting agent and not a bot.

I don’t think anyone is proposing to use blockchain for email? (I’m prepared to be wrong here but it’s certainly not a common position to hold). They don’t eschew all the old protocols for every task.

If you want an email and okay with anonymous - send an email. If you want verification of economic activity without the right to see that activity - ask for a credit card.

I trying to figure out the problem you want to solve here and how blockchain is better - but it falls apart. For one, most people don’t buy things with crypto and there are also many different coins on top of that. So even if tie an email to a particular crypto address, it’s not likely the average person can prove they have economic activity.

Then the motives are wrong on both sides anyway - I don’t want services I use to have a copy of my spending history, and they want a way to deanonymize me to discourage abuse, or charge me for their services. Neither of which sounds like it is part of what you are suggesting.

> Email is one I keep coming back to when I try to picture a future that runs on blockchain tech.

Fun fact: bitcoin's pow algorithm was invented to prevent spam.

It's telling that email is the last popular, useful protocol. Almost every application (chat, video conferencing, file sharing etc.,) since then have been proprietary and closed wall gardens. It is as if big corporations clearly saw open protocols being a big threat to their monopoly and either didn't bother building apps that adhere to existing protocols or were openly hostile to them.

Actually the other protocols all exist, and work fine, thanks.

The major exception was high bandwidth communication, where it remains cost prohibitive to do without scale - video has come a long way, to be sure, but large image, audio, video processing have remained difficult to do at scale and right, at least without the correct hardware and supporting algorithms.

There are solutions, most of the ones I can think of involve paying money versus using some "free" service - this is why you don't see a lot of private fileshares with random videostreams between friends, not so much technical reasons.

vishnugupta said "popular", you replied with "works fine".

While protocols may exist that "work fine", it seems clear that for "chat, video conferencing, file sharing" (as well as social media), proprietary networks are more much much more popular than standardized protocols.

Email being a notable still-popular exception, when it comes to internet communications.

Is it really relevant that email is standardized when no one will relay your messages if you're a nobody? I can send messages from myself to myself, whoop-de-doo.

    > proprietary network

The statement was protocols, not networks. Not all protocols involve networks. But let's assume you did mean protocol here and not network.

    > it seems clear that for "chat, video conferencing, file sharing" (as well as social media), proprietary networks [protocols] are more much much more popular than standardized protocols.

No that's categorically false. HTTP came into existence in 1989 and HTTP/1 was fully spec'd out in 1996. The three major protocols for emails: POP3, IMAP, and SMTP: 1988, 1988, and 1981.

HTTP is used for communication and social media. So is HTTPS. Want to use an SSD for your operating system to load programs off-of for your games and communication? That requires SATA or NVMe. Want to play games that require non-trivial graphics? That requires PCIe.

Want to use Discord or Zoom or Slack Huddle or your own in-browser (or "desktop" [really a browser] app variant of those)? That's WebRTC which uses TLS and SCTP.

Where is the proprietary here? Where are you pulling this information from?

I think we're talking about different things. I'm not sure if you know we are talking about different things are are doing it intentionally, or if we are just talking past each other.

I can't say for sure what vishnugupta meant, but what I thought when I read their comment are:

* Most people's chat goes over things like Slack or MS Teams -- proprietary protocols. Not the open protocols that do exist like IRC.

* Most people's "instant messaging" goes over things like Signal, Whatsapp, or Facebook Messenger, all proprietary protocols. Even if open protocols like XMPP exist, they are less popular.

* Most people's video conferencing goes over things like Zoom, MS Teams, Apple Facetime -- proprietary protocols.

* I am not familiar with the "file sharing" protocols popular, but I assume the same.

HOWEVER, most people's email goes over open protocols. It's an outlier when it comes to these higher-level interpersonal communications.

(Do you disagree? I'm not sure if you do, or if you're just talking about something else!)

But yes, of course, there are other open protocols that are still very much in use. Including things like TCP/IP and UDP (which almost all of the protocols we are talking about function on top of) and HTTP (which some may as well). Most of these popular infrastructural protocols are also older, where vishnugupta suggested "since then", new protocols that become popular tend to be proprietary. An example of a newer network protocol that was open and standardized and also had a lot of uptake would be good to hear!

What? Microsoft uses UDP/TCP for teams, Signal uses the open-source Signal protocol, Whatsapp uses XMPP, Facetime uses many open standards, "file sharing" all uses https (centralized) or bittorrent (decentralized). I don't think you understand what you are really talking about. Almost every single company does not take the time to develop their own protocol just to be an asshole. They are built for maximizing profit at minimal cost, and not using open standards is unnecessary cost.

Did you see where I already wrote "Including things like TCP/IP and UDP (which almost all of the protocols we are talking about function on top of)"? So I'm not sure what you are disagreeing with or not understanding to say "what?".

You are proposing an explanation for why most of these things run on proprietary protocols, an explanation I agree is a component of what's going on, I didn't say anythign to the contrary -- I'm still stuck on trying to demonstrate that proprietary protocols for these things are more popular than open standard ones -- which is being disputed -- before we can even get to talking about what explains this state of affairs!

Thank you so much for taking time and effort to elaborate what I exactly meant.

FTP is the closest file sharing protocol I could think of when I wrote my comment above.

Moxie touched on this topic in his article about web3, where he compared and contrasted protocols Vs platform. He explains why he believes platforms, once they gain a big enough distribution, are inherently at an advantage because they can change and adopt fast.

Http?

What?

HTTPS, HTTP, TCP, UDP, ICMP, ACME, DNS, NVMe, PCIe, SATA, WS.

WebRTC (used for communication) uses SCTP and TLS. SMTP (email) came out in 1981. SCTP in 2000. There are _many_ _many_ _many_ more examples, but that beats your statement by a solid 19 years.

I could keep going but I think you get the picture.

> Addresses should be portable

You need centralization for that. And in fact, you can already do it.

Just register a domain name and use it for your email address. Most registrars offer a mail redirection service. And if you don't like your registrar, there is an official procedure to transfer your domain name, and therefore you email address. There are also official procedures regarding getting back a stolen domain name, and ways to avoid losing it by accident (grace periods, etc...), made possible because it is centralized.

ENS names on Ethereum work this way and are decentralized

Not completely:

  > Who owns the ENS rootnode? What powers does that grant them?
  > The root node is presently owned by a multisig contract, with keys held by trustworthy individuals in the Ethereum community...

To be fair, they did a good job at decentralizing what can be decentralized, but there is still a central authority. But DNS is also mostly technically decentralized, most root servers are actually multiple machines spread all over the world, and there are several roots. People don't talk to ICANN directly, instead they use registrars that talk to ICANN. And ICANN delegates authority to TLD owners. Besides storing the database on a blockchain, ENS is not so different. Even payment is in dollars (converted to ETH, but the official numbers are dollars).

I didn't look it up too much but it looks like a key difference is that once you register a domain, it is yours for as long as you have paid for and no one can change that (or maybe it isn't, in this case, it is exactly like DNS). It is a good and a bad thing. It is good against censorship, but it also means that if someone registers a domain under your company name (or personal name) and point it to child porn, there is nothing you or anyone else can do.

People are fine with centralized systems that make sense and brings value.

To me the best part of decentralized systems is that they allow for centralized sub-systems to emerge organically, instead of being decided top-down.

For instance, I don't think that when launching the first internet nodes we would have anticipated that certs should have centralized entities, it happened that it made more sense that way once we saw the issues emerging from actual use.

Centralization also comes from the problem of trust. Who do you trust? For example certs. I can build my on CA fairly quickly. The trick is getting anyone to trust me and my certs and say 'yeah I will add your certs to the pile'. DNS is slightly similar. In that I can stand up my own DNS central authority node. Now will anyone use it? Probably just me.

The early net code assumed trust. Email, DNS, FTP, etc. You were trusted or authorized to use particular computers. Getting on those meant talking to someone with a bit of sense not to let spammers/trolls onto their networks. Then if they did get someone like that they walked over to their terminal and just locked them out of their account. It was also why they heavily stayed away form corp interests for so long. As many times a small cohort of people will ignore doing the right thing if it gets them some sort of power/wealth. So we end up with central authorities who can either limit or kick off those who do trolly things.

It is not going back to that. It cant. But the trick is can we get those distributed properties back? Yet still keep the spammers at bay?

Most people who use these systems could not care one whit if it is centralized or not. They just want to send some cat pics and watch a video of someone doing something silly and give a thumbs up to that.

Centralization is a cost cutting measure, nothing more. Don't be fooled.

As it turns out, rational people actually want to cut costs. This is true even down to the individual level. And time is money, so nobody wants to spend the effort to be decentralized when a centralized system exists that takes less money. Rational choices are what bring centralized systems into existence.

Buying a car from a dealership instead of mining metal from the ground and building it from scratch is a cost cutting measure.

Buying my food from a market instead of foraging for it is a cost cutting measure.

One problem is that decentralization sometimes doesn't scale. It's cool to have completely decentralized email, but once many people use it, there will be lots of spam, and it's hard dealing with that in a decentralized way, I guess.

Decentralization doesn't scale well, that is sure. But humans are inventing new tools to improve the decentralization over time, give new options. Sometimes the jumps are bigger, sometimes smaller.

Regarding decentralized email: there are technical solutions to spam like Hashcash [0]. It has drawbacks, like a bit of energy consumption. On the other side it keeps big corps reasonable (or gives them an upper limit to how bad they can behave), as if they start to behave too bad, such solutions would likely see increasing adoption.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

On top of this, if you're into self hosting the one thing people don't recommend to self host is an email server. It can be done but it's a real pain.

Complete opposite take. Imagine putting all your eggs in Myspace, Geocities, Angelfire, AOL, or probably soonish, Facebook. The internet would have up and died.

Yet these centralized providers come and go, but the web remains.

Decentralization isn't about doing things yourself, it's about having constant choice. To flee sinking ships, to bet on rising stars.

The web is fine. Web3 will pass like myspace, and the web will remain.

I'm often confused because "decentralized" means different things to different people, like the fable of the blind men and the elephant.

BitTorrent and other peer to peer apps are decentralized, but are they really when the data flows through the pipes of a few Telco's?

I think web3 means there isn't a central authority for conducting transactions with other people, but I have a nagging feeling that this could be accomplished without a blockchain and proof of work waste.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant

Without decentralization you wouldn't have "A few Telco's" you would have 1 global telco. The most hardcore form of decentralization usually means that there is no centralization ontop of the decentralize medium. I think this is in general unlikely. People are lazy and tend to congregate together and therefore there will always be some form of centralization. Not everyone wants to think about the implementation details and just wants stuff to work without caring how. Whats important with decentralization is choice and future proofing. When one company dies or becomes untrustworthy you can jump onto a different one.

Proof of Work is one implementation but not the only one, there are many more efficient versions now. You might as well complain about Dial-up saying internet is a waste and will never amount to anything because the phone line is always tied up....

Something like 1/3 of the world uses FB. Do you really see it dying soon?

Soon in the relative sense, perhaps...I didn't mean to imply like next year. But 5-10 years from now? I can see it.

Yahoo had a revenue of $7.4bn in 2020 and Yahoo was many times smaller and less impactful than Facebook.

Facebook will bury us both.

I personally think facebook saw itself dieing which is why it focused so hard on the Metaverse and acquiring companies. Facebook as its own product may die but the company will probably live on in some form or another. I feel like unlike Yahoo, Facebook is full of very capable and technical people. Even if they make a bunch of misteps and bad predications they will find alternatives and will make a come back.

Yahoo was also full of extremely talented and capable people at one time.

Most centralized systems exist because the best way to extract profit from whatever they do is to maintain control. It's possible to profit from part of a decentralized system, but if you want to maximize your take then centralization is the way to go.

Every decentralized system that works was created with a goal other than directly profiting from it to start with, and succeeded because someone found a way to profit from some part of it. Eventually though, in most cases, the companies and people that run the system coalesce until its effectively centralized, with a few single entities running the points of failure. See electricity generation, car manufacturing, news media, game publishing, book publishing, glasses manufacturing, etc for examples. The Internet is still in the "companies coalesce" stage which is why it still looks decentralized, but those companies merge or vanish quite regularly, with fewer and fewer getting more and more control.

If we don't stop blaming people for the choices they make for reasons we don't understand we won't effect change to the world.

Internet started being centralized when companies started making decisions instead of keeping it collegial and use IETF RFC's.

Business companies all strive to get monopolies, hence they build things to capture consumers. Same companies are more attractive than open standard because making things not interoperable is more agile/faster as you can break things whenever you want. Thus companies build more attractive things to the users and users get captured in those shiny gold plated cells.

If blockchain had never been invented, we'd be a lot farther ahead. BitTorrent proves the idea can work. And Tox is already totally usable, aside from it's mobile data usage.

Federation is the other problem. It's decentralized without real end user benefits other that a bit of censorship resistance, within the limits of the hosting company. It doesn't add reliability or offline communications on the LAN.

"a bit of censorship resistance"

tell that to the russians right now, or to all the other 3. world countrys whose only hope for usable currency is bitcoin

I'm not sure how much Federation would do against government censorship in practice, for an average person. It's not like it can bypass a firewall or protect you legally if you connect them with an illegal VPN or something.

It's great if Facebook is censoring you, but it doesn't seem strong enough to protect you all that strongly against someone bigger who can just shut down a platform if they don't like the content it allows.

Bitcoin does have a use in some places with no other alternatives, but I'm sure glad I'm not forced into that position with their unpredictable fees that often go way above credit card fees.

I'm not a normal user of bitcoin or any crypto, but I have not seen large unpredictable fees in a while. My transaction fees are almost always 0.00001 BTC or less, with my typical transfer being anywhere from 0.0004 BTC to 0.002 BTC.

Sure its a little different than most payment providers where the person initiating the payment pays the fees, but the fees are well under credit card rates.

Assuming you want to actually get bitcoin first you'll need to buy it on an exchange which will charge your absurd fees to transfer it into your own wallet. And if you ever want to do the reverse you'll get charged those same absurd fees again.

In the middle you have the space where you can do BTC to BTC transactions with somewhat smaller fees, sure.

That depends on the exchange, some charge extremely high fees, others charge minimum fees.

As an example, Coinbase charges reasonable withdrawal fees that correspond to the actual TX fee, around $0.05 when I last used it a few weeks ago. Others charge absurdly high fees, biggest examples of that being Binance and Bitstamp that charged ~$20 for a Bitcoin withdrawal around the same time Coinbase was charging $0.05.

Point being, different exchanges charge different fees, and LocalBitcoins is always an option if you want to avoid exchanges altogether.

Like I said, I don't use crypt much, I mine it, then transfer around what I've mined, and use it to buy if the option exists.

Google tells me that 0.0004BTC is over 16 dollars.

Credit cards are 2 to 4 percent.

Most people pay their only large payments(Rent and bills) with cheaper direct transfer schemes from zero to a few USD.

For a 16 dollar fee to be better than 3%, you would have to spend 480USD in one transaction, on the kind of thing that you'd normally have a fee at all for. Something I have only done an extremely small handful of times in my entire life.

A few of my more well off friends might have computer parts or jewelry worth that much. My laptop is the only single thing I own close to that price, and even then, it's not much over it.

For a trip to the grocery store for a single person, bitcoin would probably be a 8% to 20% fee.

Flat fees are a regressive sales tax.

You’ve misread. When sending $16, I am charged a fee of $0.40 or less.

Ah. Some people seem to be reporting much higher fees in the $10 to $25 range at times.

Okay, now think about that a little more carefully:

1. Russia's problem is that other countries are choosing not to do business with them. The mechanism doesn't change that (China and India will do business, at a hefty discount, but that's true for gold, too) and Bitcoin adds some risks because the blockchain model is perfect for enabling censorship because it not only allows people to avoid transactions with sanctioned entities up front but adds retroactive risk: if you accept Bitcoin from someone on that list your transactions and everyone downstream can also be blocked, driving down the value of those coins and reducing your potential buyers.

2. If your concern is censorship by the government where you live, think very carefully about whether you'd want to be someone in Russia using an application which requires a great deal of very easily detected network activity and maintains a full public transaction history for the convenience of the cops who just illegally searched your phone. Each time someone you've interacted with is compromised, they now have a hard record to go after everyone else in their history so you're not just at risk at the time of the transaction (as with cash) but for years afterwards, hoping that nobody you know has been compromised and wondering whether the police are monitoring you to see whether you lead them to anyone more interesting.

This is where Monero comes in.

Which statistically nobody uses, is far from proven against nation-state level attacks, and if it fails to meet KYC will be banned in most countries. There just isn’t a technical way to magically nullify the power of the government controlling where you live.

Russia is not a third world country. Rather, it is a second world country.

BitTorrent works great, for transferring files. It is completely useless at transferring money or money-adjacent things. That's the fundamental innovation.

Blockchain is also nearly useless at transferring money or money-adjacent things.

But we're talking web3 here, not money, so whether it's good or bad at handling money is irrelevant?

> Blockchain is also nearly useless at transferring money or money-adjacent things.

We'll probably have to agree to disagree there. I could send you $5 in Bitcoin right now no matter what country you're in, what bank you use, and without knowing who you are. It would cost like a $1 which is high for a $5 transaction, but that price wouldn't go up for a more significant amount of money.

> But we're talking web3 here, not money, so whether it's good or bad at handling money is irrelevant?

I think you have a misunderstanding of what exactly web3 is. All the apps with any traffic (loans, gambling, NFTs, insurance, derivatives) are using the money transfer capabilities of blockchain. It's the whole point.

> We'll probably have to agree to disagree there. I could send you $5 in Bitcoin right now no matter what country you're in, what bank you use, and without knowing who you are. It would cost like a $1 which is high for a $5 transaction, but that price wouldn't go up for a more significant amount of money.

That transaction fee is itself highly variable & dependent on load, though. The more people that actually try to use bitcoin to transfer money, the more expensive it gets. It actively resists using it to transfer money.

That, combined with the long transaction times, make it completely useless as a general purpose currency. You can use it as a variant on a wire transfer, where you only use it for rare, large transactions. And even then only one where you're ok waiting load spikes out (which can last for months as was the case in the first half of 2021). But then you're still spending extra time & money on each side of that transaction moving back out of bitcoin and into something usable for "normal" transactions.

> I think you have a misunderstanding of what exactly web3 is. All the apps with any traffic (loans, gambling, NFTs, insurance, derivatives) are using the money transfer capabilities of blockchain. It's the whole point.

But that's not what web3 proponents claim it is. Yes right now all the "web3 dApps" are money-related (or less charitably but more accurately, pyramid schemes), I don't disagree with you on that at all. But the claims are that it can be a decentralized replacement for web2. And web2 does a whole lot more than just shuffle money around.

That's why it's billing itself as "web3" and not, idk, "visa2".

Are prediction markets pyramid schemes? What about collateralized loans?

I'm not sure what specific claims you're arguing against, but most people in the space aren't making them. It's a straw man. It sounds like you mainly take issue with the name web3, which I don't disagree with.

I think you are mistaken in 2 aspects. Blockchain != web3. Blockchain + cryptocurrencies make up a large part of web3 because they provide an incentive mechanism to be decentralized. Web3 is about decentralization, other solutions that follow the goals of decentralization of the web can fall into web3. I would say IPFS falls into this category. Other possible solution/algorithms that focus on decentralization could also fall into this category.

Blockchain provides incentives, those incentives can be transformed into cash for the end user. Web2 basically focused on 2 aspects. Transforming the browser into a OS that can run on any computer, using advertising for the generation of money for stakeholders. In regards to advertisement the reason why this was use d was because it worked in the past. Printing press --> newspaper --> advertisements, Radio --> audio advertisements, Movies --> pre-movie advertisements, tv --> commercials. This mechanism has worked before and worked for web2.0. The problem now is that so many companies are involved in data collection on individuals that it has become quiet scary, this was not possible with previous mediums (not to the same degree). Game companies have tried to transition to micro-transactions, psudo-gambling, upgrades as a payment form. Web3 offers a different incentive model that if successful can replace these arguably more scary methods.

Web3's model involves users actually paying for stuff. Even with all the tracking, the ad model is a win for accessibility to the poor. I'd rather be completely tracked everywhere I go then left out of all the important conversations.

Web3 kind of IS just blockchain at this point. Some are even calling for a Web4, as a non blockchain more performant version of web3 not focused on financial features.

I suspect if any P2P tech gets big without a token, people won't actually call it web3.

How will you pay for things in “web4”? If the answer is “you don’t” it makes tons of things impossible (any sort of large scale hosting, storage, commerce)

If it’s credit cards..we’ll now you’ve created a massive centralized link in your “p2p” system.

That's fine. It's what we have now , and centralized finance has a huge advantage in that there is human review to reverse fraud and theft.

I am perfectly fine using centralised finance to buy things that are mostly already inherently centralized, which is pretty much all common purchases for most people, since buying anything that can be made cheaply by an individual is rare for most.

A huge number of things can be done purely P2P with no payments, with almost no infrastructure. That should be the core feature of Web4.

Even more things can be done semi-decentralized as in BitTorrent+a seedbox, and that works just fine.

Some of those things can even be donation supported in a profitable way and don't need payment from most users in any way that actually connects to the service. They can just put a PayPal and bitcoin link and people can donate however they want.

In Wikipedia can do it, Facebook and maybe even Youtube can, with appropriate P2P load balancing.

This is almost essential because the competing centralized services are totally free(via you-are-the-product models).

An email service or something that costs money and requires linking your bank to some coin payment service is going to have a hard time competing with gmail for the general public.

If something needs payment, it probably shouldn't be a core layer of the whole system. The first priority should be make things too cheap to meter where you can, and then figure out how to decentralize the remaining stuff, assuming there is demand.

Blockchain inherently can't do offline first LAN apps properly, you can't have consensus without communication. If I can't talk to someone on a mesh network without internet, a large amount of the advantage of P2P is gone.

Using a centralized form of payment completely defeats the purpose of a peer to peer system. The system is as strong as its weakest link; if your payment processor has the ability to take down your service (by blocking payments) you might as well be hosting the service itself on a centralized system too!

I agree that not everything requires payment, but the things that do cannot truly be p2p without p2p payments.

Let me pose the question in a different way: why do you see p2p filesharing, hosting, communication etc as valuable but p2p payments as non-valuable?

The main value I see in everything else P2P is that they're resistant to network failure. If a wannabe Kaczynski somehow takes out all the data centers, you'll still be able to set up a mesh and have essential communications.

Uncensorable payments are important for some and detrimental for others, since the majority of people have no need or desire to do anything that would get them shut down by a bank, and in fact actively benefit from the ability to "censor" fraud.

Putting something like that in the core of a protocol as a mandatory element doesn't make a lot of sense. There's an incredible amount of overhead involved, and it means the protocol is no longer general purpose, it's optimized for doing stuff payment processors don't want you to do, at the expense of the other use cases.

Which would be fine, if it weren't for the fact that almost all p2p projects have become money-centric, and payment free P2P has almost totally stalled.

For most use cases, payments aren't really a weak link. Their tech is highly reliable. If I were to host something with 3 different cheap seedboxes, I'd expect very good reliability, because mastercard probably won't have a long enough outage to make an invoice overdue.

P2P payments are definitely valuable, just a bit more niche.

> Blockchain + cryptocurrencies make up a large part of web3 because they provide an incentive mechanism to be decentralized

What incentive? Users forced to mine to view content? Or just as a paywall? Because the former isn't an incentive (it's just ads taken to an even more extreme level), and the latter is already doable on 'web2' and vastly cheaper at that.

> Blockchain provides incentives

No, it absolutely does not. Blockchain is just a public ledger. It doesn't provide incentives of any kind, just an append-only list. Proof of Work provides "incentives" to burn power pointlessly, which is a pretty awful incentive. Proof of Stake provides incentives to hoard "money", which is... well actually a pretty big regression from the current state of the world, even. And that's about it.

And in both of those cases the money (and thus "incentives") still have to come from somewhere. Blockchain technology itself isn't generating any value, nor do things like IPFS. They need externalized funding to function. Filecoin then tries to make IPFS make sense for people to participate in, but that's then just a mediocre twist on AWS S3 or Backblaze or any other cloud storage provider. "Mediocre" because it completely lacks things like customer support & uptime guarantees. Kinda important things if you're trying to build a business on top of it.

That's the problem. Web3 adds payment layers to things, instead of finding ways to make things "too cheap to meter".

Decentralized insurance seems like a horrible idea. Who makes the decisions? And who do you sue if they turn out to be a scam? How can you sue anyone without a centralized legal system?

At best, DeFi seems like a last resort, being marketed as a replacement for the whole bank system, while still not providing core services the current system does, and calling the lack of those services a feature rather than a bug.

It may have uses to certain niche groups, but the name web3 implies it's some kind of revolution on the scale of web2.

But most people have exactly no use for cryptocurrency. I don't want my money outside the traditional reversible financial system.

DeFi loans seem to mostly be based on large amounts of collateral. Greatly defeating the purpose of taking out a loan, which, unless you are rich and doing wierd finance stuff, is because you need money that you don't have.

I know very few people with any reason to touch Web3, unless it provides something of interest for anyone but rich people with a grudge against the government.

It would be fine as a niche thing, but unfortunately it has completely taken over the tech scene to an insane degree.

Hosting, storage, software, human-provided services, physical objects etc will never be "too cheap to meter".

Part of what makes tech great is reducing the need for physical objects.

Open source software already is literally free. Almost all the good stuff is developed by corporations at a pretty high price, but it's still not much considering billions of users.

Hosting apparently costs so little to provide that just a few ad clicks and some data collection, or a donation model like Wikipedia, can be way more than enough.

Some of it appears to even be given away just as a promotion.

It's not literally free, but it's getting close to irrelevant costs per megabyte of data.

> But we're talking web3 here, not money

What exactly, do you think web3 is?

This is a question that legitimately needs to be asked. web3 is not just about money, or it should not be called web3.

I think that the lack of a consistent definition and understanding of what web3 is supposed to solve is why every thread about it turns into a bit of a mess.

e.g IPFS is generally considered part of web3, and is not about money at all.

Not all about money, but they now have a couple questionable endeavors like Filecoin and NFT.storage. It seems they are more interested in making money than improving their project, and IPFS has many outstanding issues and limitations.

Using blockchain ontop of IPFS is to provide incentives. I don't know what is "questionable" about Filecoin, it seems fine to me. I used IPFS before blockchain but mostly just to play around with, never for any serious projects. Filecoin is simply a way to get more people to use IPFS. NFT.storage is the same, they see a market they would be a perfect fit for and try to get more and more people using IPFS.

The last I checked Filecoin cost around $17/TB of storage, which is ridiculously high. Like most cryptos they pumped the market and profit from hype than actually providing a competitive service. It is lower tier storage too than you'd get through something like OneDrive or Google Drive.

NFT.storage is well, to put it nicely, a scam platform to drive traffic to Filecoin.

IPFS is still complicated and inefficient because it spews provider records to bazillions of blocks, because they insist on random access to files and chunks.

As far as I know it also still spews your entire wantlist to all peers, which could be hundreds, in hopes that maybe one of them happens to have a popular block you want.

It's also immutable first. So you can't change anything without changing the parent, and so on all the way up the tree, which is fine for some kinds of content but not others.

It's creative destruction. When you decentralize, you are destroying institutions and tradition that are slowing us down. That doesn't mean you don't want new ones to rise up in their place. It's not that centralization is bad, it's just that _sometimes you centralize the wrong thing_ and this is how you fix it.

I think it's more of a Goldilocks problem. Too little centralization and things are nearly impossible to do because you have to host your own email, website, blockchain, VOIP, photos, etc. Too much centralization and you have a single dinosaur of a corporation controlling everything and probably doing it poorly for a high cost to the consumer. You need something in the middle where you have ample competition, choice, and variety.

What do you think "in the middle" means? Everything is semi centralized? No, it means we've centralized the right things and not the wrong things.

Sorry, it just bugs me when people talk like this. Politics, too. People want us to do things "in the middle". What does that mean? Like a single payer system that pays for half of everything? What people actually mean is, they want a better solution that works for everyone. It's not a split the difference situation.

In the middle means that you have a large number of small centralized services that are interoperable. That way you get most of the benefits of centralization e.g. someone else manages the technical details, you benefit from the network effects of the service, the service can provide things at scale that you can't on your own and you get most of the benefits of decentralization e.g. you get to choose a service that is more in alignment with your principles, has the bucket of features you prefer, has the community you want to interact with, you can switch to a new service whenever you like. You also have to lose something in exchange, you can't fully customize everything the way you like and not everyone in the world will have exactly the same features available to them. It's a compromise. The key to making it work is having a common protocol and everyone agreeing to at least speak to each other rather than building their own walled garden Utopia™.

> Decentralization is a fantastic idea, and it works great in theory, but it fails to actually consider any of the practical problems that come with decentralization and doesn't consider what people who aren't programmers actually want to do with their time and money.

The fallacy here is most centralized services are implemented on top of the biggest, most successful decentralized system: the web.

> And it's because people don't want to spend time setting up their own shit, they are very happy to pay in either money or data to have someone else do it for them.

I'm not so sure. For really important tasks, I'm routinely amazed by what people cobble together to solve the problem, especially when they can't build software. Perhaps there are just a lot of things that if made easy, provide enough value they are worth buying, but aren't important enough to people to invest a year or two building a product for. Regardless, most modern centralized systems are simply nodes on a decentralized system.

More broadly, any decentralized system that interacts with the process of capital accumulation will centralize, as this is an emergent feature of capitalism.

Just look at git adoption.

Git's selling point is that it's decentralized and distributed... but just look at the shitshow that happens whenever GitHub goes down. Git may allow for developers to all pull from each other, but in practice your employer will always have a canonical repo that's blessed as the official source, and if that one becomes unavailable for any reason work grinds to a halt. And that goes double if your company's deployment process is tied to GHA.

Small organizations use github. Really large organizations have their own git servers.

I have worked on both sides of that.

I used to work for a company that used on-prem BitBucket. And even there, "Stash is down" caused development to grind to a halt. Yeah, sure, our outages weren't synchronized with the rest of the world's outages, but the end result is the same: productivity depends on the uptime of our authoritative repo. That all the developers have clones of that repo on our own boxes is irrelevant... nobody's going to bother pointing our remotes at each other's workstations or reconfiguring Jenkins.

I’ve worked for a number of very large, enterprise companies. They use Github Enterprise.

Even banks are moving to SaaS first for their core applications.

It’s not really lack of repo access that makes GitHub outages bad. It’s all the “value-add” stuff on top of the repo that makes outages suck.

You’ve got workflows bolted on top that block forward progress when it goes down. Hooks for when push requests happen, when commits happen, etc. You’ve got code reviews in your workflow that cannot happen when the service is down.

Basically there is much more to a service like GitHub / gitlab than just “write code, commit”. These services enable powerful workflows. When those go down all you can do is write code locally. The rest of the pipeline is dead in the water, which in many cases makes your overall ability to work virtually impossible.

And it's going to be the same with cryptocurrencies.

All the interesting stuff for normal people is built on top.

well the case is that if github keeps going down and becomes completely unreliable you can take your decentralized code and more it to a different provider. Those other providers will also have value added stuff and you will not lose the core of your business/work (your source code).

If it was a pure central authority + protocol you would be doomed to live and die with them. Imagine if instead of git + github you had some source code protocol that only allowed you to checkout the latest commit of some branch. All code history needed to be viewed by connecting to the central servers. Why not make it even worse, you could only view+edit a specific file of the latest commit on your machine. All other files must live on the central server, you are not allowed to build/compile code locally either... Centralization is the process of you giving up control to a "trusted" entity. If they fail you lose everything

Ok... how does that help cryptocurrencies, though?

I think that's mainly cultural, actually. "Github is down" is seen as "take the day off". But it actually is pretty easy to work around a remote being temporarily down. Developers can use their local copies of code and merge them when the remote is back up. Or whoever has the latest commits can start a temporary git server in an EC2 instance and tell the developers on slack to update their remote URLs.

Of course, if your build process is tied into github actions or something, that will still be broken. But that problem also exists for any other 3rd party build/deploy service you might use, independent of git-the-VCS-tool.

> I think that's mainly cultural, actually.

Yes, that's my point. It doesn't matter if your protocol is decentralized as long as your business processes rely on having a blessed authoritative repo, which most do. Yes, you can point your remotes somewhere else, but in practice nobody bothers.

I think we just need a balance between decentralization and centralization. Think of banking as an example. If you want to be fully decentralized you can just use cash only and keep all of your money (or gold) in a safe at home. A fully centralized option is to have one national bank that everyone uses. Neither are great options but they both exist in practice. What's currently prevalent in a lot of places are a few big services that cooperate, same thing in tech right now too. What we want is a large number of small to medium sized services that are interoperable but also reliable. Make it easy for people to start their own service through laws or code and you've gone a long way towards solving the problem without putting extra work on the consumer.

My opinion is that the backbone should always be decentralized and open. i.e. the internet.

What is built ontop of it can be pseudo-centralized and/or regulated if needed but there is always the technical ability to re-decentralize if needed. My main concern is that I want the creation to outlast the creators/controllers. What happens if an important company gets bought and its IP split up? What if the new owners simple disable the product or put it behind a paywall. Look at bittorrent, the new owners completely screwed it up but the protocol + previous implementations could continue to be used. Look at Facebook's double standard of how they censor content.

I personally think anything that is popular + important enough to be used by much of the world should always have an open backbone should things go wrong with the current company+implementation. Open source is a form of decentralization. I also think decentralization of networks (backbones) is important to prevent one organization from achieving a "network affect" that makes them the central authority on a given resource (facebook, twitter, etc...)

> The problem is that engineers and cybersecurity people all think that everyone else thinks like they do, when in actuality the complete opposite is true.

In theory yes. In practice, nobody has made this supposedely good for the hacker / engineer system. Otherwise I'd be using it. Since your post is just parrotting the usual anti-decentralized stuff with extremely strange motives, and ignoring obvious facts such as that bittorrent works perfectly even with the legal threat to using it, lets move onto a new topic: What such a system would look like.

I don't want 2FA, phone auth, certs. I want to connect to a service providing my own public key as auth and authenticating it against a known public key which is saved on my computer. I can secure my computer however I want. I also don't want to use a badly designed roundabout way to do this like X.509 with cert pinning. I can just have a <1000LOC lib written from the ground up to do all cryptographic tasks.

I don't want my software to have """human readable""" names that are stored in a centralized directory where they conflict with others with character sets (and restrictions on them) that change every month. Instead, I want content-addressable code (functions, types, etc) which I have a dedicated editor for that allows me to write code against them.

I don't want a weird character set full of unknown functionality like ASCII. I don't want to have untyped data where I or my code is forced to make insecure ad-hoc decisions on how to interpret it (is this ASCII, CP*? UTF?). I don't want a crappy ad-hoc fly by night serialization system (each with its own gimmick such as "speed", "readability") like protobuf, yaml, yet another yaml, toml, yet another toml that doesn't solve any semantic problems associated with serialization. I don't want that protobuf lib where there is no documentation on how it maps types to protobufs and in some cases it leaves pointers initialized to null and in some cases it initializes them to point to an empty struct, based on some stupid intuition I was supposed to pick up if I become a fanboy of this particular serialization lib over the 10,000 others.

Instead, I want to use the same editor mentioned before to view data, which is just data of the ONE programming language on this computer. Algebraic data types serve this purpose almost perfectly. This problem was solved in 1970. I want one serialization format which is just a set of steps on how convert data of one type to bits. Then when I receive this data, I will view it in this editor. The point being that we don't care how the data looks on wire, because it's universally decodeable with the most common tool of the OS.

I don't want multiple programming languages that are each overly designed around strawmen like "the user" and "speed" and "C-like", with tons of edge cases such that even if I learned one well enough to be able to write sound code (you can't: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16159203/why-does-this-j...), it wouldn't matter because your program relies on components written in 15 other such languages.

I want the only language to also be at the very least, such that I can understand what it does on a syntactic level. Again, you can't:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8115522/a-unicode-newlin... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17707290/set-a-variable-... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17662815/how-does-java-d...

I don't want to have to check what ports my program uses and check if the web browser (of course, I don't want a web browser at all) on a malicious page can send a request to those ports that will be processed as some administrative function; I want things not to pointlessly listen for no reason by default in a non-composable way. Instead, I want a program to have a list of channels that only I as the computer owner can choose to link up with other programs I choose to have it communicate with (this is known as the capability security model).

I don't want to host data, I want to refer to them by links in a self organizing anonymous content addressable storage like Freenet. I want to use the same system to distribute code.

I don't want my programming console (essentially what *sh is, just an extremely poor version of it) to be implemented on top of some obsolete tech called a terminal, that you couldn't even explain to the typical software engineer 20 years ago, that goes bezerk when certain characters hit it and has ui interaction quality comparable to a 5 year old's javascript program.

In a nutshell you are saying decentralized advocates forget about the bell curve of "effort" humans are willing to spend.

Isn't this just a design problem, as opposed to an intrinsic problem with decentralization?

I believe that we can design convenient decentralized systems. We definitely have not done this yet, but that does not mean this is an unachievable goal.

There are also human factors which currently are a problem too. The massive increase in people using internet technology (via smartphones obv.) Was not accompanied by massive increase in technology education/expertise.

The early users of the internet were extremely technically capable in comparison, raised on microcomputers. Getting online was a hassle, but presented a fun challenge to these people.

Not only are today's platforms essentially closed, the average user has a lot of difficulty understanding all the layers required to do something like say, set up an email server. This is a major drain of effort and it's just one piece of the networked tech people take for granted.

However if there were simple alternatives which could be setup and used "effortlessly" people would use them.

Web3 is an unfulfilled promise, so far, and is in a phase where scams and bullshit are rife.

It's unlikely that people will perpetually be satisfied with the centralized services, especially as they continue to degrade in service and ethical quality. A process which may be part of the equation which leads to better decentralized systems which are also secure and simple to deploy & use.

I think the interest is there, the technology isn't yet of course.

>And it's because people don't want to spend time setting up their own shit, they are very happy to pay in either money or data to have someone else do it for them. Yeah, it's very easy to say "well just set up your own thing"

basically what happens here everytime youtube has some sort of drama and users recommend all these alternatives "that put the power back to you".

the vast majority of users (I even argue 99+% when you exclude the technical crowd) don't want the "power". They want to host their content, not deal with random It related issues, and maybe even make a small bit of monetization. not having videos taken down for mysterious (or not so mysterious, but asinine) reasons would have them jump ship to ANOTHER solution that offers the above factors, but they won't jump to open source like a developer may.

The problem is that self-hosting is pretty difficult. If one could just run a docker image, only setting up the absolutely needed personal info, it would become a lot more common. Not on the personal/everyday level, but for professional (money generating) settings, it can absolutely become mainstream.

The spam problem is also simply the decentralized system not working; it has no protections against unwanted incoming messages.

> A lot of Web3 platforms are in fact centralized. Your wallet (MetaMask), marketplaces (OpenSea), APIs (Alchemy) are all central platforms. Sure, they use a distributed database (blockchain), but before that it’s still a Go app on AWS, meaning its centralized.

> Your wallet (MetaMask)

Run your own node. This is lazy reporting to reach the end point about fawning over FreeBSD (its in the article, literally an article about having fun staying poor), when you can just as easily inspire and teach people how to use custom RPCs. There is an opportunity to inspire people with the tools to know what to look for, even if it's absurd to suggest people actually compile and run a node themselves. Tell them why the default behavior is a convenience and if they are interested in the decentralized parts then here is what to do.

> marketplaces (OpenSea)

Yep. It is a GUI ontop of their smart contracts (public access backend code). You don't have to use their GUI. You should inspect their smart contracts for centralized control, or at least look to see if anyone else has. There is an opportunity to inspire people with the tools to know what to look for, even if its absurd to suggest people actually do all the analysis themselves.

> APIs (Alchemy) are all central platforms

a fine example. don't use Alchemy or Infura as your RPC endpoints? Why not just make blog posts about that?

This kind of energy could just as easily be steered into "how to improve the concept of Web3" which lots of people are actually doing. It could just as easily be "This isn't decentralized! Let me fix that!"

When a product has a lot of negative externalities, and you also notice that it doesn't deliver on the promise that's meant to counterbalance those externalities, it's entirely reasonable and appropriate to conclude that the project should be rejected, rather than joining in to try to fix it. I don't know why anyone would want to build a "Web3" with people who use "have fun staying poor" as a catchphrase, or whose understanding of existing technology allows them to refer to "BSD linux". I don't want to empower or enrich those people. We already have enough of them.

*FreeBSD, BSD Desktop is what was used in the article

Many people join in to fix it, that's exactly what Alchemy, Infura, OpenSea are and were, many people that would be interested are first exposed to offputting characters that don't know anything but who believe every sales pitch. I mostly think the lack of standardized education on this is what creates these outcomes of the latter population. Since some of them would be useful to have in that space.

> Run your own node.

Which platforms are doing that? Any you can name offhand?

> You don't have to use their GUI.

Who's doing that?

> don't use Alchemy or Infura as your RPC endpoints?

Who's doing that?

> It could just as easily be "This isn't decentralized! Let me fix that!"

Write the post, then. I'd read it.

Things like otterscan that are a locally run instance of an etherscan like site are a step in the right direction, but there is still a lot to do in this regard for sure.

https://github.com/wmitsuda/otterscan

Woah! This is great! I’m glad I held space for this thread! I’ll absolutely be using this tool with Erigon

You’re falling into the same trap as tech enthusiasts in web1.

Sure, you could scan blockchains and extract NFT data yourself, and sure you could run your own node for every blockchain that interests you (paying god only know how much for storage and bandwidth). Just like how in web1 you could run your own email server to handle email and have your own blog server to publish info and your own git server to host your code and your own domain name to put it all under…

But it turns out that exceptionally few users actually care about putting in the time/effort/money to do that. Hence the rise in web2 and platforms. The people who run their own infra now are all doing it more as a hobby than anything else.

Like it or not, recentralization is the future of web3 for the average consumer. You can be a crypto decentralization purist, but I hope you realize that you’ll be the minority in that, if crypto/web3 actually is to gain widespread adoption.

For the average consumer, convenience is the real feature, and true decentralization is inconvenient.

But I don't care about that the impractical enthusiast stuff, I care about the bloggers that make these flippant dismissals instead of talking about the impractical things that are possible. I simultaneously observe that the impractical things can be made more practical.

For example, Metamask with a non-default RPC node is great compared to using crypto before Metamask. Phantom wallet on Solana is even further improved than Metamask in what a browser-extension wallet can do! Just keep pushing in that direction and wean people off of the default nodes!

Node software mostly sucks! There is great room for improvement there and it will keep happening. For example, for Ethereum Mainnet, a Go-Ethereum (Geth) archive node takes like 10 Terabytes and most people just accepted that absurdity, while someone else said "hm that data structure is not optimal" and made Erigon which can do the same in 1/3rd the time and around 1.8 Terabytes.

Node software still sucks! It can be improved! The people that like FreeBSD would like tinkering with that kind of stuff too (the author admits that, but chooses to adopt a different perspective unrelated to how they would actually be contributing to the space)

This sort of argument reminds me of the old doctrinaire Marxists, who insisted communism could work if only it could be done without authoritarianism.

Turns out Web3, in theory, sounds fine, but the implementations and uses of it all fall back to centralised networks and nefarious purposes.

I think it's time to recognise Web3 for what it is: a massive con fronted by people who sell a fantasy of open, decentralised computing designed to free everybody from the excesses of government, but are actually implementing something far worse than the system it's supposed to replace.

This is precisely correct. I am hugely sympathetic to the theoretical benefits of web3, but it clearly does not deliver on these promises. Rather than move on to something else which can deliver, its proponents are insisting the emperor is fully clothed because honestly most of them don’t care a single bit about the philosophical or political dimensions of the technology but only about the profit margins they can get by deluding others to join in.

Yeah. Tech (hell, humanity) already has a big enough problem with cults forming around bad or discredited ideas and defending them to the death, but the intrinsic characteristics of crypto make its adherents substantially more aggressive -- specifically the fact that crypto fans are not only emotionally and ideologically invested, but generally also quite heavily materially and financially invested, usually to the tune of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, if not more. The consequences if they're wrong are so much worse which necessitates a completely different level of self-deception and defensiveness.

Okay.

The disconnect here is what you think that I think web3 to be.

I recognize the decentralized capabilities and find it marginally interesting and optional when convenient.

I don't think it is a sales pitch. And therefore I dont think the whole concept is a con. I empathize with people that come to the space and products within the space for an inaccurate sales pitch.

I like the platforms. I would be fine with an optional EVM that was not censorship resistant, where I could deploy my existing products on simply because the code was compatible. I want the other censorship resistant ones to exist too. You are assuming I care about the sales pitch and am trying to sell that fantasy. I think people should be aware of how to use that part of the technology.

> I would be fine with an optional EVM that was not censorship resistant, where I could deploy my existing products on simply because the code was compatible.

This sounds sort of like AWS. Or if you want decentralization then something built on DHTs.

I mean this is neither here nor there, but "communism could work if only it could be done without authoritarianism" is not a Marxist take, doctrinaire or otherwise. If you're a bolshevik, you believe that having and defending a revolution requires a vanguard of devoted party members who run shit. If you're a democratic socialist, likewise you think there needs to be a centralized group in control during the revolution -- you just think that this centralized group should be selected by vote rather than self-appointed. If you're an anarchist (and anarchists are typically not marxist), then you're someone who thinks that managing a revolution without centralized control is possible.

And you might be thinking: why on earth would someone argue that putting the centralized party in control is a good idea? There's a simple reason for that: the Paris Commune.

Why does the Paris Commune matter? They tried to run a revolution on anarchist lines... and so, instead of immediately marching on Versailles to take down the extant government, they just sort of faffed around in committee meetings until a couple of months later the extant government's army came and killed them all. Leninism (the centralized, essentially authoritarian stuff) was a reaction to that. Because they observed how thoroughly fucked over the Commune was, specifically due to the lack of the sort of centralized control that would get people to take up arms and march on Versailles, the bolsheviks decided that they would do everything they possibly could to centralize the fuck out of everything.

And I mean, they lasted for longer than the commune did? At the very least, the bolshevik experiment had some measure of democracy until Stalin came along 7 years after the revolution.

So, yeah. people don't believe "communism could work if it could be done without authoritarianism." Instead there's an active debate (running for a century and a half now) about what type and level of centralized control is necessary to do a revolution without being immediately killed by the old government, and what level of centralized control is so hyper-centralized that it makes a Stalin happen.

Interesting - thanks for clearing that up.

> Node software still sucks! It can be improved!

Talk is cheap. Show me the code.

Not sure what you mean or expect, but pretending - I mean assuming - that is a question in good faith, then for EVMs, I would start with Erigon

https://github.com/ledgerwatch/erigon

Every time someone on a discussion forum identifies a fundamental problem with the web3 space, it's inevitable that someone will reply with a link to an essentially arbitrary project and claim that it solves that problem. I've never seen the same project linked twice in this way, it's always brand new, and usually from a group I've never heard of, either. Just wild.

A fundamental problem?? Somebody just said they don't like node implementations and asked for something else. The poster included a URL for an alternative node implementation... What were you expecting? In an open software world there can be many implementations for a given problem...

In a centralized system you cannot even ask this question. If someone said Banks implementation of SWIFT sucks, show me a better implementation what do you think the end result would be?

> that is a question in good faith

More of a statement on how cryptocurrency projects like to make a lot of promises and how their followers eat it up without having the necessary expertise to evaluate the claims. See e.g. "one more year" on proof-of-stake for ethereum for...how many years now?

I don't get this, it's a work being done by multiple teams.

> I simultaneously observe that the impractical things can be made more practical.

I'm not sure this is feasible.

Software tends towards complexity. How many people work on a system that hasn't grown tentacles and increased in complexity over time? And that's with a centralized organizational structure motivating change! Look at how much more complex the blockchain ecosystem has become over the last decade. Sure, individual pain points may become less painful. But I'd be stunned if the overall complexity of the systems didn't increase dramatically over the next decade.

> I care about the bloggers that make these flippant dismissals instead of talking about the impractical things that are possible. I simultaneously observe that the impractical things can be made more practical.

Why, though? What's the sell? What does a decentralized future get me, concretely, that I don't have now? Appeals to user privacy and data ownership aren't concrete things. Concrete things are faster loading times, or new features that are impossible or infeasible in other architectures. In these dimensions -- the only ones that matter -- I can't see how decentralization is anything other than an enormous step backwards?

Those fortunate to live in a place with somewhat stable currency, decent rule of law, and decent banking often don't see the advantages of holding assets without custodians.

My keys, my coins.

> Those fortunate to live in a place with somewhat stable currency, decent rule of law, and decent banking often don't see the advantages of holding assets without custodians.

This describes every place on Earth except -- arguably -- Venezuela and Somalia. And the solution to Venezuela and Somalia is to fix the government! Not to just sigh and assume their broken societies are somehow inevitable and to treat them as default.

---

> My keys, my coins.

When you lose your keys -- which, statistically, you absolutely will -- is it appropriate that you should also forfeit your wealth? (This is a rhetorical question.)

"Custodians" are not a bug. They are a feature.

> This describes every place on Earth except -- arguably -- Venezuela and Somalia.

That's just ignorance. Argentina, a G20 member, has had banks not allow it's citizens access their accounts in 2002. Currently they don't allow their citizens to buy dollars and have a black market for it. Banks change rules constantly trying to adapt to new laws. This is a similar thing occuring in many countries. Russia and Ukraine have also strong issues due to the current situation, and citizens are adopting crypto because of it.

Just because you don't know about it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

>And the solution to Venezuela and Somalia is to fix the government

Oh. So as a citizen I have to just fix my goverment! Thanks for the suggestion.

Argentina has a curious economic situation but inarguably the rule of law and a coherent banking system. Russia self-subverts their currency but is otherwise stable. Ukraine is under siege so many things are up in the air. None of these nations qualify under your rules.

And yes, you have to fix your government. That's how society works.

So if we cross out the decentralizaton part, which problem does web3 solve over web2? Why do we need it? Honest question.

Not having PayPal lock my funds based on some faulty algorithm and refusing to communicate with me for months.

> Yep. It is a GUI ontop of their smart contracts (public access backend code). You don't have to use their GUI.

So what happens if someone just copies the JPG and puts on their web host? Isn't that essentially what OpenSea is...a hosted service for the JPG.

You'd have to be conflating about half a dozen different concepts to write that sentence. I can't help you. If you want to learn, you can.

So then explain it instead of the personal attack. You guys seem fun.

> So what happens if someone just copies the JPG and puts on their web host? Isn't that essentially what OpenSea is...a hosted service for the JPG.

The question then is whose problem is that?

“What happens” to who?

There are about 6 or 7 distinct parties in the NFT market, so which person are you thinking about? Who would care and why? What does the rehoster get out of it?

That’s a good start

Random example I found on reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/MichaelReeves/comments/js1ib8/someo...

Now let's say instead of Reddit he posted it on OpenSea. The person that owns it OpenSea then lists the image on Redbubble for financial gain. Who then owns it? Clearly the person who owns it on OpenSea? How do we know the person that posted it on Redbubble isn't the true owner and bblaineC isn't the scammer?

Wait, did someone suggest to you that NFT's were a solution to this millennium old reality? Because they aren't. In both scenarios like on Reddit or your NFT version of the scenario, it is up to the consumer to discern (the person that buys a piece of work). These are consumer protection issues before NFTs and after NFTs. People buy non-original work, thats not an NFT problem. People might or might not be able to resell things they buy, whether it is an original or not, that's not an NFT problem. Its not news. Other people try to make it news when NFT's are in the same sentence, but its not clear why. Sometimes when people sell plagiarized work, they receive money, also not news. Its weird I have to even write that, but I guess I have seen people advertise NFTs as something they are not. So try not to be confused by that.

The NFT version of this scenario simply makes prior possession, price history of the prior possession, and royalties to the NFT creator, apparent and makes all of that persevere even after the unauthorized listing on the next site is "taken down" or removes it from their GUI due to reports (there is a scenario where the NFT is the plagiarized one, or a second NFT is created that is the plagiarized one. as opposed to just a raster image uploaded onto a pay-for-photos website). The NFT (both the first and second NFT) would still be tradable as there is no way to actually remove it (some implementations can modify the image shown by the NFT, the NFT itself will still exist because the NFT is just a wrapper, more akin to a picture frame). People like that. In the art world, prior possession required lawyers and courts to only partially ascertain and recreate consensus on, price history was also impossible to get with a whole crop of appraisers and insurers involved to recreate consensus on guesswork, and royalties are practically nonexistent except to the most luckiest and privileged content creators who still have to hope they don't need to bring a legal team to ensure payment. NFT's automate all of those things, and that's a massive tweak to a large market that I can see has been a very misunderstand large market. NFT's won't solve a copyright and license dispute.

In the scenario where both uploads are NFTs, you could check with the artist. Again because its up to the consumer or collector to figure out if the thing they want to buy/consume is authentic and NFT's aren't there to solve that.

NFT's help after consensus on provenance has been reached once. It helps that consensus persevere. Something the art world has lacked for several millennium.

> Its weird I have to even write that, but I guess I have seen people advertise NFTs as something they are not. So try not to be confused by that.

You just stumbled on the problem. NFTs are inherently confusing.

> you could check with the artist.

Ugh. How do I check with the artist when I don't know who the artist is?! That was precisely my point...in that reddit scenario I can only build consensus about ownership if I have ALL OF THE FACTS. But I don't.

> FT's automate all of those things, and that's a massive tweak to a large market that I can see has been a very misunderstand large market. NFT's won't solve a copyright and license dispute.

> NFT's help after consensus on provenance has been reached once. It helps that consensus persevere. Something the art world has lacked for several millennium.

Ok, so NFTs help with lineage and ownership of value but does nothing to determine who actually originated the art? In other words, NFTs don't care about origination, as long as there is a traceable consensus of monetary value and ownership, regardless of whether that ownership was derived unintentionally.

> Something the art world has lacked for several millennium.

So you solve one half of the equation (lineage and transfer of ownership) but not the other (origination ownership)? Why on earth would an artist want to pursue that model if both aren't true?

> Ugh. How do I check with the artist when I don't know who the artist is?!

If you have interacted in the NFT space, you'll see that consensus on who the artist is forms from the community. Many projects are posted in areas with the artist information there. These are GUI additions that the marketplaces and websites post. Linked Twitter accounts you name it. The NFT itself can also have metadata about the artist, and the image itself can also have metadata or EXIF data about the artist. The address on the blockchain which created the NFT code can also be linked to a particular person by that own person's admission at some point in the past or simultaneously. So all is possible, a centralized component, or a decentralized component but none of the semantics matter: it is possible to determine, unless it isn't, and if it isn't, maybe don't trade that piece of work? Really fascinating to me that this obligation has been shoved onto the technology instead of personal responsibility, I'm more so curious where other people talk about NFTs this way because I don't know where the confusion is coming from.

> So you solve one half of the equation (lineage and transfer of ownership) but not the other (origination ownership)?

The NFT standard does not prescribe these things, but for you it is possible to get these things, or to just simply ignore the ones that don't give you the assurances you hope for. It's a consumer issue, you have the choice of buying things that fit your criteria. Not an artist issue, not an NFT concept issue.

> Why on earth would an artist want to pursue that model if both aren't true?

Because the first half of the equation is light years ahead of the alternative already. The most attractive thing to artists is the royalties concept. This is also attractive to the communities of art purchasers, who want to support living artists but found it extremely hard to determine value and community beforehand or in the other art markets. Outside of NFTs, artists have to be celebrities or have hundreds of years of provenance to have a collective conscious on their value. It is extremely limiting and hard to maintain. Now it is very easy, so overnight things have changed.

It is useful to know that the ratified NFT standards do not have a way to send royalties after a trade, and the marketplaces themselves do that on the NFT's behalf (ie. when an NFT is traded within a marketplace, royalty information is read from the NFT metadata and funds are sent to the original creator. when an NFT is traded outside of a marketplace no royalties are sent. Some people are working on that.)

Also its quite simple: many artists are broke and have no other marketable skills. many other artists have developed other marketable skills but would rather be doing art, if they could exchange time for food and shelter doing it. NFTs are an opportunity for them so they'll take what it provides and let consumers inherit what it provides, and not waiting around for another millennium for origination of ownership to be solved with telepathy (but its also very easy to include who should be the creator of the art depicted and the NFT issued, so I really wonder about what you are experiencing to better understand why you think this is an issue with the NFT space or the NFT concept). Both parties need to be sure they are understanding what they are trading and what they aren't.

All the blockchain holds is that a certain address (0x12345678) owns a certain token ID (42) minted from a certain contract (0xDEADBEEF). That's all. It proves provenance. What the metadata contains, where it's hosted, etc. is irrelevant.

So while it's true that OS hosts the JPEG of your NFT, for example (it actually caches it), the point is about proving ownership of a specific token identifier, not just a pretty picture.

Ok so lets say the same JPG exists on two sets of blockchains. One is 0x12345678 and the other one is 99x12345678.

How do I prove that I own the JPG?

Which one did the creator use? That's the one that has legitimacy and value.

Legitimacy is basically a coordination game, where you get the best payoff by making the same choice as everyone else. To really dig into this, read this piece by Vitalik:

https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html

> Which one did the creator use? That's the one that has legitimacy and value.

This is exactly the crux. How do I prove who is the original creator? Vitalik's concept of legitimacy is based on EVERYONE participating. Which is simply not the case right now. To use his example:

> Elon selling Elon's tweet is the real thing, and Jeff doing the same is not. Once again, millions of dollars of value are being controlled and allocated, not by individuals or cryptographic keys, but by social conceptions of legitimacy.

> But they could also be a missed opportunity: there is little social value in helping Elon Musk earn yet another $1 million by selling his tweet when, as far as we can tell, the money is just going to himself (and, to his credit, he eventually decided not to sell). If NFTs simply become a casino that largely benefits already-wealthy celebrities, that would be a far less interesting outcome.

Of course. But what if all of the edgelords that love Elon (and happen to also have much of the control of share of wallets for ETH) decide he should make the $1M? Vitalik's view would be "well that's what the public decided". However it assumes that EVERYONE is an active participant with full knowledge of the situation.

And finally he admits himself:

> There are definitely more ideas, but this is an area that certainly deserves more active coordination and thought.

> But this goes far beyond just Ethereum itself. NFTs are one example of a large pool of capital that depends on concepts of legitimacy. The NFT industry could be a significant boon to artists, charities and other public goods providers far beyond our own virtual corner of the world, but this outcome is not predetermined; it depends on active coordination and support.

He's actually just regurgitating the ideas of a direct democracy vs a representative democracy. If the public is not fully engaged and fully informed, then this whole theory essentially breaks down.

> This is exactly the crux. How do I prove who is the original creator?

Consensus. We all agree that 0x123457890 is the "Bored Ape" contract, so everything spawned from it is a "real" Bored Ape. It's kind of how we all agree who the real "Picasso" is. This isn't really controversial or hard to grasp, and imo Vitalik's article just muddies the waters.

> This isn't really controversial or hard to grasp

It is. Who precisely is "We"? I personally never said 0x123457890 was the OG Bored Ape. What if I band together millions of people and determine that 99x12345678 which I own is actually the OG Bored Ape. How can you stop me? Isn't that what OpenSea is effectively doing...providing a centralized trust system to say "well of course everyone knows OpenSea is the source of truth because everyone knows it and the consensus is on the blockchain"

> What if I band together millions of people and determine that 99x12345678 which I own is actually the OG Bored Ape. How can you stop me?

I mean, that's exactly how decentralization works. I can't stop you by design. Simply put (and for better or worse), it's tyranny of the masses. If you can do that (get everyone to treat another contract as the real Bored Ape contract), then you've effectively "forked" -- this has happened a couple of times in BTC and ETH.

Got it - makes sense. Thanks for being civil.

NFTs are stupid and awful ideas, but I suggest actually reading up about how they work so you can more accurately shit on them instead of repeating things you read on twitter.

Or how about it was a genuine question and you don't have to be rude. No wonder crypto gets a bad rap.

It seems like the person you're responding to is raising a legitimate criticism of NFTs, or at least, criticism of the touted benefits of them: an NFT provides absolutely no value to its owner unless there's some kind of enforcement of the "property" rights it suggests. If I own an NFT of a JPEG, there's nothing to stop anyone else from simply right-click-downloading that JPEG and hosting it somewhere else. At that point, my NFT is just me shouting "dibs!" to a room full of people who don't care.

>unless there's some kind of enforcement of the "property" rights it suggests.

That's the entire point of a blockchain. It's valuable because other people agree that it is. Of course, the actual JPEG can be copied, but that doesn't mean your blockchain ownership of it does. You are kind of shouting dibs, but the difference is that a lot of people care. And as long as someone cares enough to pay you money for your dibs, then it has value.

> Run your own node. This is lazy reporting

It isn't practical for the majority of people to run their own node. Even Vitalik Buterin acknowledges[1] this isn't realistic for the current state of things.

Last year I was interested in running a sidechain node and I was shocked when I looked at minimum system requirements. I can't just run it in the background and I have a 5600X Ryzen. Plus my NVMe drive needed to be much bigger. It also can eat through SSDs, and HDDs are considered too slow.

Worse to me: It looks like another time consuming hobby. I spent a lot of time even just getting up to speed on the current ecosystem, the jargon, best practices, etc. It often seems like crypto is trying to take something less complicated and make it complicated.

It just seems like people are simply pushing a technology that isn't ready yet for what people in the scene think is currently possible.

My interest for running a node was for prediction market trading to attempt to counter frontrunning aka sandwich attacks. Another ridiculous problem that many people in the scene act like isn't a big deal.

1. https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/05/23/scaling.html

Regarding Ethereum you’re right, it’s centralized.

With Bitcoin I run my node and check the incoming transactions with it whenever I make a big money transfer (for outgoing transactions a full node is not really needed, as I don’t care if the network doesn’t accept it as long as my counterparty does).

Running a Bitcoin node is practical (less than a day of running in the background on the first run) if the amount of money is significant.

If we limit ourselves to Bitcoin then we're at a sliver of the web3 ecosystem everyone is casting their hopes upon. And Bitcoin in its current state still seems more like a blockchain working prototype and isn't 'feature-ful' enough to replace centralized finance.

But proof-of-work's energy consumption is what kills Bitcoin for me.

For what it's worth, I consider myself crypto agnostic. If a tech delivers something better then great.

Bitcoin has nothing to do with Web3, they are two different things (web3 is a new term, Bitcoin is a system from 2008)

Bitcoin has a scripting system which gives it some limited smart contract capabilities. If web 3 is about programmable money and ownership I would argue BTC is very much relevant to Web 3.

You can use Bitcoin as a collateral on web3.

Cryptocurrency agnostic — thank you. I'm going to borrow.

I don't necessarily like all of the community, current "leaders" etc — I just know a sticky concept when I see it.

Ethereum is only centralized if you dont run your own node. It is as practical to do that as it is a bitcoin node (but not for what the person you replied to was trying to do). This is an absurd distinction, and even if it wasnt absurd or wasnt practical then it is a fixable issue. Because it already has been fixed. Geth has a pruned fast sync client that has everything necessary for consensus, it takes about the amount of space and resources as a bitcoin one.

I run an Ethereum node at home just fine. There’s nothing centralized about Ethereum.

The majority of people in the world? No, that's correct. The majority of people who use Ethereum today, or hang out on HN and would be inclined to do so? Absolutely feasible. I was recently set straight on this[0]. Things have been improving a lot even since that blog post by vb, and ongoing efforts are still progressing. And note that in the linked thread, I was pushing for full archive nodes. While it's desirable that this is feasible to have a healthy network, most people have their needs served by having pruned full nodes, which requires a fraction of the storage space. Also, several clients (at least geth and erigon) allows for split storage, where you have recent/hot state on faster storage like nvme, and historical archive on a larger drive.

If you are up for it, you may want to give it another shot. My 3400G now handles this fine, alongside other workloads.

I have not tried myself yet, but it does seem realistic to run a full node on an rpi4b with usb3 storage now, if you don't need to run heavy RPC queries on it.

It seems to be common practice to do the initial sync on a beefier machine with more RAM and IO, and then migrate over to a more lightweight instance for the ongoing.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30584184

' My interest for running a node was ... to attempt to counter frontrunning aka sandwich attacks. '

You may have misunderstood the eth tech stack. Running your own node is not a means to prevent sandwich attacks.

Can you not you "see" more transactions, faster...?

The block producer chooses transaction ordering. They control who gets sandwiched. Running your own node won't change anything.

The trading site's performance is quite high latency, and uses a 3rd party endpoint (I forget which one) that doesn't emphasize performance. You reduce the latency of your orders, acquire real-time price information, notification of liquidity changes faster, etc.

If you think it's to prevent attacks in some absolute sense, that isn't the goal. Your goal is to make life more difficult for them and/or decrease profit incentives.

You only need to remove some of the profit to make it not worth someone's time to maintain, and at least you're bleeding less money if they do continue. You get to be more strategic in how you place orders and make it really annoying for a botter or force the botter to blacklist your trades from your attacks (something that has happened before). You can also identify flaws in the bot and exploit them to make it bleed money(this has been demonstrated as possible many times).

I specifically said "counter" not "prevent". I explained in another post.

Running your own node neither counters nor prevents front running your transactions. If you send tx to standard mempool, the tx can be seen and front run.

There are existing solutions for the narrow use case you seem to have - flashbots and a few others. And they have cost savings to you of not running your tx (saving eth gas fees) if your tx submission does not win.

I explained in my other comment, but I see no mention any of those aspects of countering a sandwich botter.

Front run + back run is sandwich. Front running has also been called miner extractable value. This is now called maximal extractable value.

You may want to look a little further, or not.

https://github.com/flashbots/pm

'... mitigating the negative externalities of Maximal Extractable Value ...'

I agree with you that crypto often makes things unecessairly complicated sometimes. Every heard of hypercore protocol? They're a force against that. Ethereum should take note there.

> It looks like another time consuming hobby.

So did BBS message boards.

Better shut this whole, inefficient pile of gack and hacks down!

SSDs are fine, you absolutely don't need an NVMe. A mid shelf 2TB SSD is way more than enough. Processor requirements aren't that high either, but yes it is a noticeable amount of resource usage, so running in the background isn't practical.

> It often seems like crypto is trying to take something less complicated and make it complicated.

That could be intentional. The more complex it is, the harder it is to “prove” the whole thing is nothing more than a twist on classic pyramid schemes and Ponzi schemes. The more complicated it sounds the easier it is to bamboozle people into handing over their hard earned fiat to earlier generations of holders.

Lol have you tried running own Ethereum node?

> literally an article about having fun staying poor

And here it is. When the technical merits of “web3” fail to illicit genuine change (networks effects are powerful and matter [0]), its advocates fall back on the “get in or stay out” mentality, which is frankly a red flag for a supposedly technical project.

> could just as easily be steered into "how to improve the concept of Web3"

If web3 cannot sustain itself due to its technical merits and if there clearly are centralized effects at work here, then every person brought in with the threat that they better help out or “stay poor” (a truly disgusting phrase) is just another brick in the pyramid, another dollar to VCs. Just admit you are trying to coerce free labor to prop up your own bags.

Many are not impressed by the so called merits of web3 for good reason.

> Run your own node

Literally, in Satoshi’s original white paper in 2008, he pointed out that running a node is prohibitive and could result in centralization over time, which is exactly why he coined SPV (simple payment verification) (aka light clients).

> [OpenSea] is a GUI ontop of their smart contracts (public access backend code)

Blatantly false. OpenSea can and has taken down various tokens minted on their platform for reasons ranging from copyright infringement to sanctions compliance (Iran is the only country I am familiar with at the time). You can mint an NFT without OpenSea but to say that you can just use OpenSea’s “backend code” without their consent is false.

> There is an opportunity to inspire people with the tools to…

This crypto grift talk is frustrating, dishonest, and hand-wave-y coming from the cypherpunks to what we have now. Cryptocurrency and the space around it was never about “inspiration,” but about liberation and action. We don’t need to be inspired, we need to be empowered.

[^0]: Coinbase complies with sanctions. OpenSea removes artwork. MetaMask uses Infura as an RPC so any NFT removed on OpenSea will not show up in MetaMask wallets (using default RPC). Bridge hacks result in many accounts losing their money unless saved by an injection of VC funding, completely defeating the “be your own bank” mentality. Centralized platforms extreme usage relative to the rest of the network (Uniswap, OpenSea, MetaMask) result in high gas prices for everyone else. Billionaires like Justin Sun Tron can take out massive loans to influence distributed governance like he did for the Compound vote on collateral rates.

> And here it is. When the technical merits of “web3” fail to illicit genuine change (networks effects are powerful and matter [0]), its advocates fall back on the “get in or stay out” mentality, which is frankly a red flag for a supposedly technical project.

Interesting thing to focus on over and over, OPs article had the non sequiturs about having fun not getting rich. The irony being that it’s a meme in crypto and they chose to be a caricature of that meme, personified. I feel like you didn't read the article. What you responded to is for people that read the article.

Opensea is 2 products. One is a storefront for technophobes to try and configure their art on the opensea platform before turning it into an NFT. The other is an NFT reader for NFTs made by people that know what theyre doing. Only the latter is relevant because thats the whole NFT economy, but the former is the thing more people try their hand at so I can see how that is distracting to conversation. The latter NFTs cannot be taken down by OpenSea they can be hidden from their GUI. They would not be hidden by your GUI.

> Coinbase complies with sanctions. OpenSea removes artwork.

Complying with sanctions is a good thing; removing stolen artwork is a good thing. You... know this, right?

I believe his point is that these good things wouldn't be possible if it were decentralized

A torrent indexer removes a porn torrent therefor BitTorrent is centralized. The argument makes no sense.

Oh, if so I totally misread and apologize.

With 16% of Americans saying they have invested in cryptocurrency in some form, coupled with the classic adoption graph (https://www.ou.edu/deptcomm/dodjcc/groups/99A2/curve.JPG), crypto is begging for ways to burst into the mainstream early majority, and the way to do that is with the familiar. They want Coinbase, and OpenSea, and low friction experiences.

> Run your own node

Until ISPs block you like they did with DNS.

That’s what really should change; ISPs should be required to let anyone run services, bill for consumption.

But then the internet would be truly decentralized.

Most people just want messaging, calendar, and maps anyway. The rest of these apps serve first world tech bros who didn’t want a real job.

>That’s what really should change; ISPs should be required to let anyone run services, bill for consumption.

Check Yggdrasil.

> suggest people actually compile and run a node themselves

yeah just buy an 86TB drive every year and run the node 24/7 to avoid penalties

>You should inspect their smart contracts

how many people are actually able to do this

I'm not against crypto and i'm not sure yet about web3 but if it requires buying some kind of token to participate then i am skeptical.

> yeah just buy an 86TB drive every year and run the node 24/7 to avoid penalties

This is healthy skepticism, these are things the crypto community would write in jest, on twitter. For the most part this is a massive exaggeration lol.

> how many people are actually able to do this

Not many, but a rapidly growing number of people are. Its more of a consumer protection problem and people are getting better at it.

> I'm not against crypto and i'm not sure yet about web3 but if it requires buying some kind of token to participate then i am skeptical.

There are certainly node based projects like that. Some are interesting, some should be avoided, some use tokens as a prerequisite for access, some don't, some are articulately explained and have free testnets you can simulate things on. Its up to the individual or team that created the project.

I don't know where you got 86TB but the current storage required for an Ethereum full node is about 600GB.

https://etherscan.io/chartsync/chaindefault

There's a difference between a full node and an archive node. A full node has all the data required to verify the chain from genesis up to the current state. An archive node also has all the state of all previous blocks. An archive node can be derived from a full node, and the only purpose of an archive node is to run historical queries.

You can run a full node without staking ETH, in which case there are no penalties for going offline. (And if you are staking, you can be offline up to a third of the time and still be profitable.)

There are efforts underway to shrink storage requirements, including very secure light clients, state expiration, and statelessness. But right now that stuff is mostly on the back burner while they focus on the proof-of-stake migration.

> yeah just buy an 86TB drive every year and run the node 24/7 to avoid penalties

Lazy, low effort, inaccurate comment. A validator node is <$500 of hardware. A 2TB SSD will be enough for years.

> how many people are actually able to do this

How many people are able to inspect the code running on their machine? I don't really buy this line of argument. Humans are social animals. Information about what software (on or offchain) is safe tends to propagate naturally.

> It could just as easily be "This isn't decentralized! Let me fix that!"

First I would like to be convinced that centralization is actually a problem.

Most things in our daily lives are centralized: Power Generation and Distribution, Water Distribution, the Logistics which put food in our stores, Infrastructure setup and maintenance, to name just a few.

Yes, even our financial systems work fine. I get my paycheck on my account, I can pay effortless with my credit card, security, maintenance, services, customer service is taken care of.

Yes, there are shitty centralized systems, and there are opressive authorities that abuse centralization. The solution to that however, is not "get rid of centralized systems".

that will probably never happen. There is always an ongoing fight between decentralization (enduser, humanistic approach) and centralization (efficient, dictorship, monopolization approach). Centralization will almost always be more efficient but has "security" flaws in the form of bad faith actors while also acting as the central authority. Basically see any form of dictatorship over multiple generations. Ofcourse they can accomplish good, working systems. They can even be efficient as long as all orders are done exactly without fighting back.

decentralization is taking back some of the control back from central authorities. The problem is people often do not want to be 100% responsible for their own well being. This in turn leads to re-centralization at some point. We have governments because people often do not believe they can easily live together with complete trust. We have laws in order to make it easier for humans to live together. Essentially offloading a cognitive function of threat detection by relying on a trusted entity (government) to create a safe environment. In a dictatorship its possible for that trusted entity to transform into a bad faith actor and no longer work towards its original purpose. We introduce democracy/republicanism (a form of decentralization) in order to protect against this flaw. This form of government itself often re-centralizes in some form or another (government parties).

What I'm trying to get at is that while centralization is efficient and many things head to centralization we should still try to make the backbone decentralized whenever possible. It is a form protection against a central authority transitioning to a bad faith actor. Almost all central authorities will eventually transition to bad faith (from the end users perspective). With as much of the backbone being decentralized as possible we can at least more easily finger point and hold those central authorities responsible for their actions.

> Centralization will almost always be more efficient but has "security" flaws in the form of bad faith actors while also acting as the central authority.

And de-centralization has security flaws in the form of more difficult or impossible oversight, which can allow bad-faith actors to pursue their goals with impunity.

Neither paradigm is perfect, each has its flaws. Knowing that a system is de- or centralized, tells us exactly nothing about the morals of the people using it.

My place is on well and septic. I like the setup, and the yard space for this creates limits to residential density. I'm possibly not typical.

In the abstract, centralization bad, decentralization good.

There is no deeper thought going on here than the above. These are barely thought out, quasi religious beliefs as moral justifications for get rich quick schemes and frauds.

The same conversation about nothing, ad nauseam.

I could also not do any of that and trust an authority to provide that service for me.

Society encourages specialization and most people will not start to self-host for some idealistic reasons that they might not even share. Unless self-hosting is more convenient and has better UX the majority will not adopt it.

Even if you as an individual want decentralization, you will still be affected by this creeping centralization. Tokens on platforms (like OpenSea) will have more value and liquidity than trying to trade directly. If your NFT gets blacklisted on OpenSea it will lose value. Even if you never intend to use OpenSea, if the majority uses it to verify "authenticity" it will become a central authority.

Just look at all the phished NFTs. The owners (not anymore) immediately rush to OpenSea trying to get the "stolen" NTF blacklisted.

“Have fun staying poor”

It’s so obnoxious to assert that poverty is a choice, or falsely claim that anyone can get rich by investing in crypto.

It’s from the article you should read it and take it up with the author

> Sure, I would have been much richer if I chose Bitcoin instead of FreeBSD. But I probably would have become a worse person, not having had to work hard since I’d have 10 million dollars right now

I'm not too experienced with this sector, but LooksRare is already a decentralized replacement for OpenSea. It has lower fees, too. Some of my friends got airdrops or invested directly in LooksRare and have talked about it quite a bit.

> Yep. It is a GUI ontop of their smart contracts (public access backend code). You don't have to use their GUI. You should inspect their smart contracts for centralized control, or at least look to see if anyone else has. There is an opportunity to inspire people with the tools to know what to look for, even if its absurd to suggest people actually do all the analysis themselves.

On Polygon OpenSea took an open-access marketplace (0x V3) and gave only themselves the permission to interact with the mutable functions (e.g. filling orders). The very definition of centralized.

Some platforms like Ethereum are completely decentralized. You forfeit some of this decentralization bit by bit when using MetaMask, OpenSea or Alchemy, but the platform itself is still decentralized. The Web is completely decentralized, by you forfeit some of this decentralization bit by bit when using Paypal, Facebook, or AWS. The trend in technology has always been to trade control for convenience. This doesn't stop you from writing your own browser and pushing packets out of your own HTTP server.

The (now infamous) Andre Cronje had a whimsical tweet reminiscing on his days as a lawyer: "The contracts aren't for when everything is going right. They're for when everything is going wrong." Some network wide catastrophe is seemingly inevitable for any sufficiently large system. When these occur it will be the decentralized blockchains like Ethereum with failsafes in place to survive, and it's the centralized blockchains like Binance that will implode.

> When these occur it will be the decentralized blockchains like Ethereum with failsafes in place to survive, and it's the centralized blockchains like Binance that will implode.

Didn't Ethereum recently disclose a major settlement vulnerability discovered by a researcher that could've forced a hard fork had this person chosen to exploit it? He got a multi-million dollar bounty for it I believe.

This kind of certain optimism that nothing will go wrong with a piece of software reminds me of all the people back in 2007 that said the housing market could never collapse because it never had before. Folks buy into the idea so much that they forget at the end of the day, it's computers running code and shit happens all the time.

EDIT: I believe this was the story I was referring to, he received $2M[0]. There have been multiple major vulnerabilities discovered in the last couple of years.

[0] https://www.benzinga.com/markets/cryptocurrency/22/02/255731...

This is like saying Heartbleed is proof the Web will never work. You can't even guarantee secure connections! What will happen when the spy agencies start using these?! Decentralization isn't proof a system has no bugs, it's proof the system works without an authoritative governance, which I will remind you is the topic at hand in this particular comment section. Is crypto a scam? Maybe, maybe not. If you think so, just don't use it!

Heartbleed didn't cause tens of thousands of financial transactions totalling billions of dollars to be retroactively reverted with a technically guaranteed lack of recourse to the people whose accounts were drained as a result.

And neither did the DAO fork, which did not roll back the chain.

No. This is more like saying Heartbleed is proof the web will never be secure. Which it won't.

That was a bug in Optimism not Ethereum. No funds on Ethereum were at risk.

Optimism is a separate project which runs a separate layer 2 network that helps run blockchain transactions faster. It uses Ethereum as its data store but is separate in most other ways.

Isn't that the point? Web technology is decentralized, but as an economic and cultural force it's dominated by a small number of corporations. Web3 has the exact same problems with economic centralization, and "rolling your own" requires all of the same investments and sacrifices as doing so on the existing web, plus more.

The general consensus seems to be that while both crypto and the Web share this problem, the Web is ultimately redeemable while crypto should be nuked from orbit. It's an interesting contradiction in public opinion, probably stemming from all of the money involved.

All of the cryptocurrency and "web3" marketing (including the proponents up and downthread!) seem to be interested only in the money, and not how it can actually help people any better than the existing products they're replacing. The web, for all of its faults, actually does help people with things. It's also very feasible and reasonable, for instance, for a pizza place to run their own website! This is a thing that has been done! If they can't do it themselves, it's easy to set one up! Very affordably! And all of the cryptocurrency and blockchain stuff seems to firmly go in the opposite direction, with the complexity seemingly the point and the resources required for even the simplest thing multiplying endlessly.

The Web is here, useful, has much lower barriers of entry, and although it's wasteful of energy in a lot of ways it isn't as aggressively and intentionally wasteful as cryptocurrency. I will happily stop using this argument against the crypto ecosystem as soon as it is not true.

> It's an interesting contradiction in public opinion, probably stemming from all of the money involved.

It's not the fact money is involved. It's the way money is involved.

If I want to participate in web3 I have to take real money and buy cryptocurrency funny money. Every aspect of loading a simple web page (web3 page?) charges me some amount of funny money. The amount charged can't be meaningfully predicted. A service might charge me a funny penny for a transaction but today that funny penny is worth a real penny while tomorrow the funny penny is worth a real dollar. Every web3 transaction ends up being like the guy that bought a pizza with a Bitcoin.

All the extra rent extraction of web3 is on top of me paying for my ISP, cell provider, and all my devices. Even with the money I have to pay over the top for web3 participation I end up with a slower and shittier experience than the traditional web. If I decide I'm done with web3 I may not ever be able to cash out the funny money I had to buy.

So the fact web3's design is built entirely around generating greater fools for cryptocurrency Ponzi schemes makes it a stupid and undesirable system.

The difference is that 'centralized' parts are a commodity. Infura itself is centralized, but if it creates problems, it can be replaced with any other rpc, including your own node. Therefore, those services have zero power over the user.

The difference is that you can create a service which is controlled by nobody. The "servers" are run by the entire network. Nobody has special permissions on the software, yet this software can accept money, pay money, deploy new contracts (prewritten obviously) etc.

This is one extreme obviously, and applications exist on a spectrum from that to something fully centralized (for example USDT where they have full money printing controls).

The point is that web3 enables building apps anywhere on that spectrum.

As decentralized as in “someone stole my funds, let’s roll back the whole chain”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum_Classic

I know you're being a bit snarky, but the miners voted on that decision and decided, collectively, to fork. It's decentralized in the sense that there's no central mandate, and everyone needs to agree with a decision or that decision will ultimately fizzle.

Yeah, and then nearly half of the miners kept going with the old fork anyway. On Ethereum Classic, the theives who scammed $400 million worth of 2016 ETH from the founders, valued at who knows what now, still have that money, and they have spent it, and it's still considered good on the ETH Classic chain.

ETH Classic's current price is $47 (compared to ETH at about $3000). The DAO hacker got 3.6 million ETH, so its current value on the Classic chain is $169 million.

That's not how "decentralization" should work.

How should it work? No one gets to make a choice which fork they run?

People cast votes (digitally mind you, which is always great and unproblematic and very secure also) and then a very tiny minority executed what is, by every standard imposed by cryptoheads, illegitimate behavior. That's more or less the definition of a referendum, which makes the ETH foundation and a top percentage of miners an executive government.

This is a distorted retelling of history. Mining pools ultimately did settle on voting in favor of the hard fork, but did so through collusion and lack of transparency. Most notably, ethermine miners voted against the hard fork, but the pool operators contributed the entire pools votes in favor of the fork any way. There were similar situations with other mining pools, and in general the actual miners were left in the dark. The Ethereum Foundation was communicating with mining pool operators and exchange operators in private chats the entire time all of this was playing out.

Was the hard fork the right move in a pragmatic sense? Probably. But it was not at all the exemplar of decentralized consensus that people seems to remember these days. It was messy and ugly.

Yeah but collusion and lack of transparency is what you get with a decentralized network! With no rules to enforce, the powerful can do whatever they want, including acting badly.

how does that differ from a centralized network. Let me copy/paste your comment

  Yeah but collusion and lack of transparency is what you get with a decentralized network! With no rules to enforce, the powerful can do whatever they want, including acting badly.

into

  Yeah but collusion and lack of transparency is what you get with a CENTRALIZED network! With no rules to enforce, the powerful can do whatever they want, including acting badly.

I see no difference.

You should see a difference, because a centralized network can be governed (by the central entity!). A decentralized network necessarily cannot, because there is no controlling... centralized... mechanism.

Miners are never in control of the chain. Node operators are.

What's more decentralized than being able to fork an open source blockchain solely on the basis of majority consensus? The hullabaloo over the DAO fork arises because decentralization is conflated with fairness. Was the fork fair? Maybe, maybe not. It's irrelevant to the question of whether Ethereum is decentralized. Ethereum prevailed over Ethereum Classic precisely because the majority of users switched to the fork! This would not have been possible if Ethereum wasn't decentralized. A centralized system would have left Ethereum users in the dust and the DAO hacker with all the loot.

The whole idea of the blockchain is to prevent the double spending problem.

You realize that hacker sends funds to his own wallet -> ETH Foundation decides to roll back and contacts their miner bros, who had ZERO problems performing a 51% attack -> ETH Foundation can send the same funds again is essentially a double spend? And that the network is centralized and tightly controlled by $CEO_OF_BLOCKCHAIN_ENTITY?

Also, it’s not just their transactions who get rolled back, but everyone’s! People who sent goods after seeing 20 confirmations on the blockchain already dispatched them and lost both: the funds AND the goods.

How is this fair?

The DAO fork only directly rolled back that single transaction, right?

Everything you wrote is incorrect.

>You realize that hacker sends funds to his own wallet -> ETH Foundation decides to roll back and contacts their miner bros, who had ZERO problems performing a 51% attack -> ETH Foundation can send the same funds again is essentially a double spend?

This is how a rollback happened in bitcoin two times: during the value overflow bug and during the database incompatibility bug (2013). The bitcoin blockchain was rolled back via a coordinated 51% attack. In the second case at least one double spend happened. Ethereum never had a rollback, the change was a hard fork that changed ownership of eth previously owned by the dao hacker.

I remember Satoshi rolling back the chain.

The mortal sin is to consider artificial rarity a good thing. The internet is infinite, the appeal of the metaverse is exacty because you can be infinitely young, infinitely rich, have infinite partners, break ouf of the constraints of this world. Constrained virtual worlds are called games and have a different objective. If we are to build a zero sum world, we d better stick to the physical one.

EDIT: nvm

I think that was his one of his points.

What about the inverse? How fun would it be if on the internet you could only order an arbitrary number of a digital product, like an ebook? For example "only 1000 people can order this [infinitely copyable, but digitally restricted] book".

Bitcoin is about sound money in the real world. Artificial rarity is a feature in that space. Proof of work is about grounding the system in the physical world.

And now we have 90000 Bitcoin clones with only slight differences. Every dollar invested into these shitcoins is a dollar not invested into Bitcoin. So much for rarity

If I sell you fools gold or silver, does that change the rarity of gold?

bitcoin is not about creating artificial rarity, it's a different kind of system that creates real rarity, and can defend itself. Artificial rarity is when copiable or physical items are being considerer rare by fiat of a smart contract that cannot enforce itself, is not fundamentally tied to the item, and ultimately depends on the kindness of strangers to keep functioning.

This seems like the angry ramblings of someone who missed the boat.

I'm not invested in cryptocurrency or other tokens, but this seems very unfair to the ecosystems that power them. Sure, there are centralized wallets, marketplaces, APIs, but that's just not the point, not the problem they're trying to solve.

If Google deletes your account, that's it. If OpenSea deletes your account, another app will happily connect to your wallet and let you continue where you left off.

> If OpenSea deletes your account, another app will happily connect to your wallet and let you continue where you left off.

Or not, because they all use the OpenSea API instead of bothering with the blockchain.

Maybe OpenSea is a bad example (NFTs are something I really don't understand) ;)

A better example might be a DEX like Uniswap. Uniswap goes-down/bans-you/whatever? Use PancakeSwap or 1Inch or Futureswap or some other equally-ridiculously-named service. They all connect to the wallet that you own and cant be taken away from you.

If the Uniswap website goes down, you don't even have to switch services. You can just pick a different frontend for the Uniswap contract. In fact, 1Inch uses the Uniswap contract to fulfill some of its trades.

The trick is that the Uniswap API/service itself, the smart contract, cannot go down unless the entire Ethereum network itself is down.

Alchemy has a NFT indexer api as well. I also know of at least two other offerings that will launch very soon. Additionally, you can interact w the Opensea contracts without a UI.

This is a good example of a problem that's common to most web technology: the people using the tech have absolutely no clue how it works and have no way to confirm any of it.

It's like when I give my credit card info to PayPal. There's a picture of a lock on the bottom of the page, so probably safe, right? I'm on OpenSea and it says the NFTs are "decentralized" and that I have absolute ownership if I buy one. So how come people can still right-click-save-as when I post the image on Twitter?

The tech is solid. There really are NFTs and they cannot be stolen etc etc (barring bugs and phishing of course!). It's just that there's no way for a layperson to confirm any of that. People are just as likely to use some random Django+Postgres app than they are a real blockchain system because they're indistinguishable as long as everything's going smoothly.

Continue where you left off, except without access to OpenSea (or whatever other vendor), in an economy where the value of the contents of your wallet is increasingly dependent on the availability and visibility of your "digital assets" on vendor services.

But you're right. Decentralization is not the problem that the crypto community is trying to solve, because they don't actually care about a decentralized "Web3". They care about the parts of the system that make them rich. The "decentralization" cant is just social-good camouflage, no different from Facebook's claims about making lives better through the "metaverse".

I don't see it quite as pessimistically. Of course people are going to try to make as much money as possible being early to something they consider the next big thing. Of course there were going to be ridiculous dogecoins and shibcoins and peepeepoopoo coins that make people rich just because people are having fun and being reckless in this new wild west of online currency.

That doesn't make legitimate projects null and void, or devalue the problems they're trying to solve.

If you get banned from OpenSea but still want to sell your Bored Ape, you definitely still can, and almost certainly for whatever the market rate on OpenSea is.

What if the NFT itself gets banned from OpenSea?

There's a few more NFT market places you can sell it on? You can try selling it P2P? Opensea is reliant on the NFT marketplace/culture, not the other way around.

OpenSea is a DAO, so if they: a) voted an NFT out: well, people against it would move to an other platform and still have access to their NFT. b) somoeone on the front-end deleted access to an NFT: they would probably move the front-end somewhere else.

Then you sell it on LooksRare, which many ape holders apparently already use due to the lower fees.

If we “missed the boat” for Web3, does that imply that it isn’t going to bring its benefits to all of us?

I was speaking from an investment perspective there, not a utility one.

Is it overvalued at this point? Will reach its end of growth soon and stay niche?

You can’t be truly bullish about something and tell me at the same time that I missed the boat.

I can, actually.

Those who invested two years ago have likely already made more money than anyone investing now can.

Bitcoin was $20 like… 10 years ago? What price would BTC have to reach for you to get the same level of return if you invested now compared to back then?

That's pretty easy math to do.

Frankly, a world where Bitcoin doesn't eventually see a 2100 times increase in value is also probably a world where it doesn't become a generally-used global currency. If the argument is that Bitcoin's valuation is going to slow down from this point on, then in my mind that is basically a concession that it's not going to revolutionize the world the way that its proponents claim.

I don't think people completely understand how incredibly niche cryptocurrency still is and how much it would have to grow before it overtook fiat currencies.

Of course, the question is whether BTC's utility actually is going to increase the way its proponents claim (which I am skeptical of). But if it did increase, it's hard to imagine an increasingly limited deflationary asset that's going up in utility value wouldn't also see proportional price increases.

The utility is late investors paying early investors high prices to get on the boat, and to rescue the early investors from the boat.

To me the most damning thing said about web3 etc. to date is:

https://github.com/cryptog0/welcome2web3#social-media-on-web...

> The cost of storing information on the Blockchain is referred to as GAS and at the time of writting costs roughly $2 USD per 1kb of data. To put this into perspective, a high resolution photograph can be upwards of 4000kb, or $8,000.

Even if this estimate is three orders of magnitude off, this idea is DOA.

Why would you put a photograph on the blockchain directly? The chain is for transaction processing, stuff like proof of ownership. Want decentralized storage? Toss it on IPFS.

To flip your own comment back on you:

Why would you toss it up on IPFS? IPFS isn't a decentralized storage network, it's a data routing/transmission protocol with a DHT.

Depends what you're trying to achieve. Blockchain isn't meant as a decentralized storage network either,

If my goal was to keep a photograph in perpetuity, I wouldn't necessarily even want to put it on a decentralized system -- I'd put it on archive.org, or amazon glacier.

You just join IPFS with things like https://crust.network/ and that's 'sufficiently decentralized'. People confuse decentralized with sufficiently decentralized which is what most Dapps are focusing.

I was disappointed by this piece. It's very short-sighted.

Tech that's currently on testnets solves all the "problems" mentioned. It doesn't mention any of these solutions.

Also, use the right tool for the job. Storing a 4MB file on the ETH chain is probably not the right tool for the job.

Blockchains aren't a replacement for cloud storage. Storing a yacht in a mailbox would probably get expensive too.

That readme file has little original content, and is riddled with speculation, errors and typos. I think there are more substantive criticisms of Web3 available, this is possibly one of the worst I've seen.

What's amazing to me is that if you want to find any of these decentralized systems, you have to trust some centralized entity identifying them as the true system. For example, want to download MetaMask? How will you find it? Google MetaMask and trust that Google will have filtered out all the fake MetaMask wallets set up to steal your money. Want to lend money on a DeFi platform like Anchor? Again, Google and hope to God their fake counterpart didn't figure out how to fake its way to the top of the SER page. People have lost tons of money this way.

If only there was a trustless, decentralized, immutable, database of sorts that could be used as the source of truth... thegraph.com supposedly wants to do this, but it wants me to connect my wallet and again I'm not sure I'm on the "right" website...

How would you ever be able to trust such a trustless, decentralized database? Wouldn't all the same problems that you addressed with Google appear again?

With google, the most notable difference seems to be that it is big enough (due its single entry point nature) that people invest in gaming it.

Anecdata about thegraph:

There's a blockchain prediction market that relies on thegraph for some functionality in an attempt to make every aspect DeFi, but the performance is just garbage to the point where it should be unacceptable for real money trading.

I don't think your typical YC startup would find delivering a product in this state for public use as acceptable, but the startup behind it was flush with VC cash.

Proof of Work is the source of truth [0]. That is why Proof of Stake cannot work. You are describing one of the biggest of the problems with PoS perfectly.

[0] https://dergigi.com/2021/01/14/bitcoin-is-time/

The source of truth is the website you trust to vend you unadulterated node software; the source of truth is not Proof of Work itself. Once you define the trust problem to include the initial software download, the trust assumptions are not so different at all, as explained by Vitalik:

> Essentially, the first time a node comes online, and any subsequent time a node comes online after being offline for a very long duration (ie. multiple months), that node must find some third-party source to determine the correct head of the chain. This could be their friend, it could be exchanges and block explorer sites, the client developers themselves, or many other actors. PoW does not have this requirement.

> However, arguably this is a very weak requirement; in fact, users need to trust client developers and/or "the community" to about this extent already. At the very least, users need to trust someone (usually client developers) to tell them what the protocol is and what any updates to the protocol have been. This is unavoidable in any software application. Hence, the marginal additional trust requirement that PoS imposes is still quite low.

https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html

> What's amazing to me is that if you want to find any of these decentralized systems, you have to trust some centralized entity identifying them as the true system. For example, want to download MetaMask? How will you find it? Google MetaMask and trust that Google

Or I go directly to my friend's website that has a link to MetaMask's because I trust him.

The issue is that crypto-rooters took the term "Web3" and inevitable tied it to crypto. There are other decentralized approaches that could become a decentralized successor to todays web, (CCNs, IPFS) but are not blockchain/crypto related. So please don't buy into the "only crypto/blockchain" is the future of the decentralized web narrative.

Having been interested in decentralization for many years, I never heard the term 'Web3' before 'Crypto'. Maybe it existed but certainty hear it about 1000x more now.

But the web is not a decentralized place. You put content on servers, and everybody downloads that content from there. There a copies or caches, yes (CDNs but also old-school http proxy caches). But if I remove content from my server (or a tweet), its no longer accessible by standard means. We build a whole set of technologies to not have a single-point-of-failure (i.e. load balanced servers + replication) but for example in CCN/IPFS you can publish content a single time from a very slow dialup line, and in theory it could be accessed by millions of users (which in todays world is only possible if you put it on a CDN or run your own datacenter to satisfy requests at that scale).

> but for example in CCN/IPFS

That is why I a fan of those. Not sure what you are arguing. My you misunderstood my initial comment.

There are hundreds of companies providing managed object storage and likely tens of thousands with file storage.

And you are free to create your own. It IS decentralised just at a different granularity to IPFS.

This is too nuanced a take for most people, the kind who want to engaged in polarized 'discussions', to care about. Or use-case specific coins that solve a particular problem (Filecoin <-> IPFS relationship). Web3, crypto, blockchain have all become poisoned topics that are mostly divorced from the technological characteristics underneath them.

This combined with the idea that if those technologies don't solve a problem for "me" then they're not useful technologies just makes these discussions worthless. I'm sure there are many more Ukrainians and Russians who will permanently think differently about "crypto" in a way that most USA resident will (hopefully) never need to. Some will use it for good, some for evil, but underneath that morality is just a technology.

The thing is that no one has the authority to decide what "Web3" even is. It kind of implies a succession to the established Web 2.0 term. But Web 2.0 is also no clearly defined term, and it was also not established a-priori. I.e. the term Web 2.0 was somehow coined as a reference to a broad set of technologies in the Web sphere that were supposed to change the web. It is mostly associated with the evolution from the "Web 1.0" desinged for news-paper/static content style of content, to a web of rich, dynamic applications. The technologies often associated were the (then upcoming) HTML5 standard, plus advances in JavaScript and browser technology (stuff like AJAX but which existed in all major browsers when the term was coined). But these technologies were all on the horizon/in development when the term was coined.

Now, with the term "Web3", crypto enthusiasts try to establish it a-priori. That is, nobody knows exactly what kind of technologies/changes will be in "Web3" and even the problem it solves are not considered problems that need fixing by others. And it doesn't matter, because whether "Web3" will be a thing that changes the web as we know it will not be decided by evangelists, it will be decided when it has been adapted by the broad majority - and my personal take is that what currently is proclaimed as Web3 will not see broad adaption (by users, enterprises, network operators etc.).

Nobody has the right but there are obvious ways to differentiate them. You pool a set of majority features together that did not exist in a previous iteration. Really its hard to do before the implementation is complete. basically its hard to define web3 before there is a web3. What is happening is that there are parties who are actively trying to make major changes to how majority of the internet is used, that new version is therefore web3.

Its like how we different between epochs or periods of time. They are just abstractions of ideas/things/beings put into a bucket.

Web1.0 was essentially a static web with static pages. Its just how the internet was mostly used during that time period. Web2.0 essentially transformed HTTP + javascript to the standard OS used to run programs. No more installing software locally... well guess what in web1.0 days people still had dynamic websites (php, cgi, flash, java applet) and in the web2.0 days I still have to install video games from steam. They are just general buckets to help our brains more easily categorize time periods and the major differences between them.

This article is realy lazy. If you want an actually valid argument against web3, here is Tim O'Reilly's take. He is the creator of the term web2.0 and created much of what we know as open source: https://www.oreilly.com/radar/why-its-too-early-to-get-excit...

I don't understand how these types of articles can reach the front page of hackernews. A hadoop system could provide a replacement? That's like arguing a multi-threaded pc will be a replacement.

Blockchain does have a lot of hype, we can all agree there. But there's decent technology being built too. He is right in that many things are centralized, and many tools have to still be decentralized (like infura).

The thing is, things are being built to solve certain issues and we are at early stages. Wwhat serious teams want to achieve is not "decentralization", but "sufficient-decentralization". As in, you can expect for a protocol to enforce solving conflicts of interest accounting for what the majority in the protocol want. Governance is important here, and it's being dealt with. DiD will potentially allow more democracy (instead of capitalisti) decision of the rules. You have energy sector investing heavily on energy conflict resolution. There's many topics that are solved by certain features.

At least this critic in [0] knows that it is too early to get excited and he is not ignoring the technologies that are still useful that came out of many cryptocurrencies like Stellar, XRP and others.

> For example, are Ripple and Stellar more successful platforms for cross-border remittances than bank transfers, credit cards, or PayPal, in the same way that Google Maps was better than Rand McNally or first-generation GPS pioneers like Garmin? There’s some evidence that crypto is becoming a meaningful player in this market, though regulatory hurdles are slowing adoption.

That use case is still alive and valid here.

[0] https://www.oreilly.com/radar/why-its-too-early-to-get-excit...

The article may be lazy but this is not a very useful critique, either. "Many topics that are solved by certain features", what does that even mean?

I provided a link to a very thoughtful critique and pointed out how it's lazy. I commented on that, I wasn't expecting on having to give a lecture on the specifics. As for the quoted part on specific, for instance a blockchain style of consensus allows for personal data to be forgotten but validated by pre-decided metrics. This allows for DiD applications. There's a lot of research and there are also non-blockchain ideas being disputed. For energy sector I'd suggest this discussion given yesterday: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/web3talk-energy

This is a pretty weak piece.

> Your wallet (MetaMask), marketplaces (OpenSea), APIs (Alchemy) are all central platforms.

The whole point of the blockchain as a decentralized database idea is that people are free (in the "you don't need permission" sense) to build on it.

Just because OpenSea is a popular interface for trading NFTs it doesn't mean you can't also trade those same NFTs elsewhere.

And your wallet isn't "centralized" at all. Just because MetaMask happens to be implememented using a server doesn't mean you can't export your seed phrase and import it into (eg) TrustWallet and use that instead or as well.

> And if Web3 is “decentralized”, then why can OpenSea take away your NFTs?

Now the Moxie piece[1] on the other hand (which was linked here) is a _great_ criticism by someone who actually bothered to understand what he was doing.

And if you actually _read_ the piece you'll notice that the NFT wasn't taken away at all: it was delisted on OpenSea, and their API stopped returning it.

Moxie's criticisms of the dependency on APIs for performance are well balanced and completely valid here.

But the original piece too away all the subtle of Moxie's piece and turned it into just another boring Web3 hit piece.

[1] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

> And your wallet isn't "centralized" at all. Just because MetaMask happens to be implememented using a server doesn't mean you can't export your seed phrase and import it into (eg) TrustWallet and use that instead or as well.

It's not even that. Metamask defaults to using a particular server, but you can set it to anything you want to in Settings.

The original post is just wrong. Aside from the default set for convenience, Metamask isagnostic to whether you want to plug it into a centralized or decentralized API service.

If you choose to run a local Ethereum node, Metamask even has a default already set in the Networks dropdown list.

This feels like yet another article trying to paint broad ideological strokes about Web3 without grasping any nuance.

> The original post is just wrong. Aside from the default set for convenience, Metamask isagnostic to whether you want to plug it into a centralized or decentralized API service.

This is all true!

But I think Metamask only uses the OpenSea API for displaying NFTs (at least I haven't been able to find a setting for it). That was raised in the Moxie piece, which explained a lot more about the design decisions that went into this:

"What I found most interesting, though, is that after OpenSea removed my NFT, it also no longer appeared in any crypto wallet on my device.... MetaMask accomplishes this by making API calls... what other option do they have?"

I think this is a valid criticism because it is balanced and nuanced.

But you are right that the linked article missed all this.

Agree 100%. Web3 is useless. The whole web3 thing is an extension to get more people and more real money to get into the crypto ecosystem and provide liquidity to the early adopters and insiders.

I haven't found one legitimate use case for blockchain. The only thing it is useful for it speculative gambling.

I wrote about it some time ago and and shared here on HN https://yash.info/blog/what-is-web3/

I know exactly one legitimate use case for blockchain: a public ledger like bitcoin.

The thing is that you don’t need more than this one online currency though, right? It’s also the safest in terms of PoW [1]. I don’t see any reason for all other altcoins to exist other than charting and trading on exchanges (which is certainly fun, but does not provide value).

[1] https://howmanyconfs.com/

Coins have different attributes and use cases. Who is to say who can make what. The best of the niche needed will win out, just like every other sector of all industries.

Ethereum has it's EVM. Monero has it's RandomX algo to prevent ASICs, and it's Ring signatures to prevent tracing.

Some coins are pure Proof of Stake and try to solve scaling differently, see Algorand and Cardano.

There are altcoins that are just clones, referred to generally as shitcoins.

Just because you can’t buy an ASIC Ant miner doesn’t mean that they have not developed one internally and are running a monopoly. (Spoiler: Bitmain already developed several ASIC miners for Cryptonight in the past)

A public ledger is not inherently valuable.

A trusted ledger is valuable, but a ledger doesn't have to be public to be trusted. When I swipe my card at the grocery store, I'm not shaking in my boots with my fingers crossed, doubting whether the transaction will be recorded as transmitted or not.

If for some looney toons secret agent reason you need a transaction to be public, you can tweet a picture of the receipt. Or, even better, you can mail it to yourself, the postmark is legally binding.

Bitcoin uses almost as much energy as the entire global banking system, with its associated costs in capital, emissions, and e-waste, to process less than 0.001% the transaction volume of Visa alone, while providing no additional benefit.

Blockchains can be public or private, the key is they are distributed ledgers.

A distributed ledger is also not inherently valuable.

A trusted ledger is valuable, but a ledger does not need to be distributed to be trusted. See above.

If, for some looney toons secret agent reason you need a transaction to be in a lot of places, you can ship out usb sticks, put copies of it on different data centers.

Or, just use a regular-ass bank. They already have distributed ledger systems for redundancy and responsiveness. What, you think that out of all of Chase's data centers there's only one server that has any transaction data on it?

Blockchain adds nothing that existing database and data transfer solutions don't have, but it always comes with cost and immutability (which is not the same as correctness- the >1 billion dollars stolen out of people's crypto wallets per year since 2018 is testament to that).

Private blockchains are entirely useless. If you already have a permissioned system, there is not point in using a trustless and permission less database

A private blockchain is pointless.

When I use $payment_processor/card_network then I need to trust a corporation again. I don’t want to do that due to bad experiences.

Yes, unfortunately mining is too profitable with the current prices, we need it to go back to a much lower price. Probably won’t happen for a long time (bubbles can exist for decades). Bitcoin can in theory transact more volume than VISA while using the same energy as it is now since the block time is always 10 minutes.

The payment processor is the party to the transaction whose trust is least dangerous.

You swipe at the grocery store, what's Visa gonna do, not record your transaction? Why is that the only part of the exchange that you're worried about?

Why is it them you want to stop trusting, and not the POS terminal manufacturer who could be lying about the total on the screen?

Or the grocery store you're buying from who could be selling you poison, or who could refuse to carry out a delivery you ordered after taking your money, or who could mischarge you for the items you bought?

And how is your situation improved by switching away from the payment processor with legal responsibilities and administrative controls, to an immutable system that will never, ever, ever let you get the money back in the event of any of the other parties to the transaction turning out to be untrustworthy, even if a court orders it?

Immutability is not correctness. In fact it is the opposite, because in any system that takes input from the real world, errors are guaranteed, whether malicious or accidental. Eliminating the possibility of error correction from the system decreases it's trustworthiness.

> Bitcoin can in theory transact more volume than VISA while using the same energy as it is now since the block time is always 10 minutes.

No it can't. The bitcoin block size is fixed at 10mb, and they've been full for years.

It is theoretically possible for consumption to go down as people exit the network, but that won't ever happen, because the POW system is inherently a power-consumption arms race. There is not, nor can there ever be, a disincentive from buying more hardware and consuming more power. If you crunch more than the other guys you're going to win more blocks and be financially rewarded. The protocol guarantees that the ROI is always positive.

I hope you and your machete of common sense are not allowed into any meetings to ruin any big deals! billions are being raised right now to do web3 things, which we dont know what they are. who are you to ruin this ecstasy of grift?

what scares me is that I dont really have any idea of what the really good useful investable things are underlying all this bullshit, because I trained up in computer programming and time series analysis and trading and machine learning not crypto. so while I can squint and see that like in authentication maybe, or maybe tokenizing assets, or maybe that distributed name service, some of it is interesting, but why are we putting billions into all this crap instead of electrolysis or better fission reactors, or biotech to create chemicals without oil, or ammonia, we are investing in this behavioral social tech which feeds off of, and amplifies, our worst social traits?

it doesn't even help us with our number one collective behavioral shortcoming which is how to reach consensus about externalized problems. it just encourages more externalization so that VCs can make money. I love money but I dont like society choosing only to solve the easy problems while neglecting everything else.

I dont think we can live in crypto fantasy land for example while all the new supply chain problems create real new challenges which require trillions of investment to fix. "how I pay for things" kind of pales in comparison to "why cant we manufacture electronics"

Maybe I am wrong

No, the BTC protocol is limited to an upper limit determined by the maximum blocksize. Last I checked that put the limit of BTC at something in the region of 7 transactions/second without increasing the block size.

To match Visa alone you'd need to increase that by a factor of 250 - you could reduce block time, increase block size, whatever. But that would also by necessity increase the storage requirements of each node by a similar factor.

You don’t need to settle every transaction instantly on the blockchain. http://lightning.network/lightning-network.pdf

Ah, yes, a system where you can steal an unlimited amount of money from somebody else without any possibility of recourse by just saying that they agreed and hoping that nobody notices, clearly this is better than a trusted processor with strict legal obligations and easy reversibility in the event of error.

That isn't how it works at all.

The whole reason that Bitcoin has smart contracting is to enable this kind of scalability without compromising the security. After all, all that fancy decentralized stuff wouldn't be useful if you had to go use a centralized server (or abandon security) to make use of it.

Imagine you, me, and some of the other posters here decide we'd like to transact efficiently amongst ourselves without the resource expenditure of telling others about our transactions but we don't trust each other, so we establish a set of rules about the records we need to keep when doing so. If there is never a dispute great! But if there is a dispute, we take our agreement and our transaction records and head off to court to settle the dispute.

To apply that to Bitcoin: the rules and records get made machine interpretable. Transact as you like, and if there is a dispute you take the relevant records to the blockchain and it enforces according to them. Because the enforcement is automatic and untamperable there isn't any reason to cause a dispute in the first place (which creates some challenges for software Q/A)... so then when channels are used globally broadcast transactions are only needed to enroll or unenrole coins in a scheme (or in the event of a dispute or a software fault).

You could, of course, instead have some insecure trust based way of exchanging coins-- that is, after all, how all legacy banking technology works. But with Bitcoin you don't have to. The system offers a spectrum of different ways to transact, each with their own costs and benefits.

> Transact as you like, and if there is a dispute you take the relevant records to the blockchain and it enforces according to them.

This whole idea falls down once you realize that the blockchain knows nothing about what was actually transacted. Say I give you a piece of bread in exchange for 1 Satoshi, but never receive that Satoshi. A court of law can, in principle, coerce you to pay what you owe me, but the blockchain can do no such thing. Similarly, if you do pay me that Satoshi but I never give you the bread, you'll also never be able to convince the blockchain to reverse the transaction or make me give you the bread.

The ancestor post was about not needing to place every transaction directly into the blockchain, to which someone replied assuming that doing so would eliminate the security, to which I explained it did not eliminate the security. My apologies for using broad language which could be read as implying that any possible dispute could be settled that way-- that wasn't the point I was trying to make.

HOWEVER, you're not entirely correct for two reasons:

(1) There is a much wider class of transactions that can be made cheat proof than you might expect. If, for example, I were purchasing machine validable information from you that could be made resolvable https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/02/26/zero-knowledge-conting...

(2) Even when that's not possible-- when you transact you can use excrow transactions to specify that any monotone function of additional key holders can release the funds. In the simpliest form, the transfer requires you me and an arbitrator. So you could make it so that if there is a dispute one or more other parties have to approve the outcome-- which could be a court or a private arbitrator (or some quorum of arbitrators, if you like). There the third party isn't eliminated, but it's made very flexible.

As an aside, in US legal tradition civil courts do not usually award specific performance -- I might get my money back and damages, but they won't make you give me bread you promised to give me. (2) is similarly limited, but (1) isn't if applies and you don't choose for it to be.

Lightning network is not bitcoin, and has none of Bitcoin's security guarantees. It is, by design, easy to abuse either to steal money (if a node goes down) or to do DoS to a node.

Lightning seems explicitly worse than any non crypto-adjacent payment system, as in addition to having to trust people, there's also no ability to reverse a transaction, and no ability to identify who defrauded you.

> A trusted ledger is valuable, but a ledger doesn't have to be public to be trusted. When I swipe my card at the grocery store, I'm not shaking in my boots with my fingers crossed, doubting whether the transaction will be recorded as transmitted or not.

Of course, because as the customer nothing bad happens to you if it’s not. Worst case scenario, the merchant doesn’t accept your payment and you either have to pay with cash or not buy anything.

The worst case scenario for the merchant is substantially worse. If the payment doesn’t go through, they lose money. This could happen days or weeks later if the customer decides to chargeback the merchant. There are countless stories of payment processors siding with customers, placing holds on a business’s funds for extended periods of time while conducting investigations, etc.

I would actually take the opposite stance. Unless a ledger is public and independently verifiable, there is no reason to trust it at all. Nearly every instance of financial fraud has relied on people trusting a private ledger.

How does the ledger being public fix the scenario you’re talking about, here?

First of all, being public does nothing to change that scenario.

Second of all, abusing chargebacks when a vendor upheld their side of an agreement is a crime, and if you can prove that you delivered the goods as the consumer requested, the chargeback can be reversed. This is not a problem with the system.

The way that blockchain "solves" this non-problem is by making the transaction record immutable, so that no transaction can ever be undone, no longer how fraudulent or illegal. That's why the main users of blockchain technology these days, aside from speculators, is scammers and theives, because once you have somebody's crypto money, it is technologically impossible to ever return it to its rightful owner, even with a court order.

Theft on the blockchain has already surpassed all other financial theft in the world pre-2016. Getting access to people's keys, or tricking them into authorizing a transaction, or writing malware into smart contracts has enabled a golden age of theft that cannot be undone.

Immutability does not imply correctness.

> Unless a ledger is public and independently verifiable

You say this as if those things are connected. They are not. Your credit card transaction ledger is already independently verifiable, with the magical future technologies known as "receipts" and "bank statements".

You say that like speculative gambling isn’t legitimate!

Walmart Canada has used blockchain [1] to better their supply chains systems. I suspect when you say you "haven't found one legitimate use case for blockchain" you're referring to the consumer space based on current offerings. I would argue that "blockchain" just as an idea and technology has plenty of use cases.

[1] https://hbr.org/2022/01/how-walmart-canada-uses-blockchain-t...

so would a database, or a linked list, or literally any data structure...

again, a solution looking for a problem.

Hammer in search of a nail.

I just don't see how that use case couldn't have been more easily served with a boring old centralized database. Why do you need a trustless system where all the users are either in-house or contractually obligated to not screw each other over?

Probably in logistics where many nodes of many companies need to record offline quite often.

Trucks, warehouses, resellers, manufacturers, all with their own systems and problems can record to the same ledger reliably.

And they can't on a Walmart owned database based system? You know the good old boring web application? HN is one example. Hundreds of people are using it, upvoting and commenting at at any given second. Works just fine.

Federated database systems are totally a thing also! It's not even that hard to set up a pub-sub system, service bus, or whatever. There's entire ecosystems of vendors that have turnkey or SaaS solutions in this space also.

People just forgot that these things can be done with boring old technology in the excitement of doing something hip and cool.

It is a Walmart owned database. It's a distributed p2p database via a private blockchain.

Lots of end clients that go offline often and need to resync.

Here’s a whitepaper on it https://uark.app.box.com/s/f7v6rk7xnwkjaetws7e1yaodomg883fi .

The merkle tree part of blockchains is absolutely valuable here… but that’s kind of where it ends. There’s no real consensus mechanism when there are 'merge conflicts', it needs manual overrides.

It’s more like git than bitcoin – and it helps them for similar reasons to why git helps us even when there’s a canonical source. People go offline and can’t sync immediately to the master store; people want to write events down now and deal with discrepancies later; disagreements are reified and can be formally reviewed, etc.

As best I can tell, it seems other aspects of blockchains just came along for the ride. The best open source code for their use case included it, and using it was better than building from scratch. The decentralisation is all but coded out – the central authority is the only one that can authorise transactions or resolve a 'merge conflict'.

Blockchain does not help supply chains. It doesn’t guarantee that things have been tampered with. It doesn’t solve any problems.

I remember a project when I was consulting that was floated, a few years ago. It was a blockchain-backed ledger for tracking fuel charges across a truck fleet - effectively, when the truckies filled up with fuel, they'd record it in the ledger. It can't be modified or altered, nobody can defraud the company because it's an immutable record!, shouted the sales team.

I mean, the truckie could always put the wrong value in when he entered it.

Also if the company just created a simple web/mobile app for truckers to enter data that doesn't have edit and delete functionality it is immutable. Non programmers think immutability is inherent in a system and not something controlled by code. Even if I use a blockchain and cryptography to timestamp it, if I am the one controlling the node, who in the world can prevent me from going in and changing it and time stamping it again with the same old timestamp? And if I create the UI, what stops me from showing whatever I want on the UI?

It would still remove plausible deniability. The trucker would not be able to blame anyone else for entering the wrong data in the system.

Another advantage is that you immediately see if an entry in the ledger has been dropped due to a network or other technical error, which can be a problem if you’re running a complex state machine on the data. I once helped a company build an IoT product where that was a problem. I pitched the idea but got absolutely no traction. I think the mistake I made was not calling it a blockchain, but just said I wanted to include hashes in the messages, so it didn’t sound sexy enough. I don’t like blockchain hype either, I didn’t care about being public, distributed, having proof of work or consensus, I just wanted to know if and when a message had been dropped, which is apparently too much to ask.

Also I think the vendor of the actual device didn’t understand what message authentication was, so they wouldn’t have been able to make it happen on their end. Their idea of security was just encrypting the data, but making no effort to ensure who it came from. I also think they wanted to use DES, which had already been broken for a few years at that point.

An immutable database guarantees that the "paper trail" has not been tampered with.

In supply chains, there's a lot to be said for having a paper trail even if (or especially if) some of the papers are fraudulently written.

How does block chain guarentee that something going from A to C via B is not tampered with in anyway?

It doesn't guarantee that. As I said, it guarantees that paper trails are permanent and cannot be fudged after the fact.

So you have a permanent paper trail that cannot be changed, what problem has it solved?

The problem of paper trails being changed. When something goes wrong, if you can't trust your paper trail, you can't attribute fault with certainty.

Without an immutable shared database standard, it's difficult for processes like that to cross company lines. And supply chain is a fancy phrase for processes that cross many company lines.

It doesn't ensure that the data is correct, valid, hasn't been tampered with, or even entered.

A supply chain involves 3rd parties who have nothing to gain from this. If the issue is the middle man between A and C, blockchain isn't solving any problem. The distrust is with B, having a blockchained backed paper trail doesn't provide anything a database gives you right now.

You're asking for a single source of truth between A B and C. And saying you cannot trust A B or C, so you want blockchain to solve it, which needs to be created by someone, so you introduce D and now you have a central governing body who dictates everything for A B and C. Or you are A and you say 'hey B and C, you need to use this system we created cos we don't trust you!'.

Blockchain solves nothing in the supply chain.

It ensures that data hasn't been tampered with after initial entry. And that a uniquely attributable digital signature gets recorded at the point of entry, along with a timestamp.

Auditing is a core feature of most modern RDBMS systems.

Anyways the reason why it's immutable is that it's public so everyone knows every transaction. You can just have a normal db and maker it public. Blockchain is overkill in this case.

Also this is a much more niche problem than "supply chains"

No it doesn’t. Private blockchains aren’t immutable. Whoever controls all the nodes can just edit the blockchain however they want.

There's no reason for one actor to control all the nodes.

If I own every single node it doesn’t guarantee that.

If you are the sole person keeping records for a large company in your personal desk drawer, it also doesn't guarantee that.

But nobody designs a process like that.

By “I”, I mean a single company.

Multiple companies could run nodes.

You don't need a blockchain for that, though; just hash chaining or similar.

What distinction are you making between a blockchain and a hash chain? They seem similar.

what establishes its effect as "better"

Can you please connect me with someone in the tech team at Walmart Canada who was part of this implementation? I am really curious to know exactly what it is that they store in blockchain. What kind of chain it is public or private. What is the consensus mechanism?

A public truly distributed PoW blockchain is slow and inefficient by design. It's a feature not a bug. A private, permissioned, controlled blockchain is pointless. So I really want to know what are these companies doing when they use blockchain for supposed benefits.

Blockchain in supply chain is often the most publicized use case. It somehow assumes that since blockchain is immutable (actually it isn't) whatever you add to it is authentic. Using it for supply chain assumes that a supplier won't lie about the origin or if they employed child labor. Using a blockchain doesn't automatically guarantee any of these.

I do not see anything in this that would not be resolved by a trivial database, and if you read the article that is what they have created: It is a private "blockchain" that only allows trusted participants, so doesn't require all the negative externalities of "blockchain".

The only thing "blockchain" about what Walmart has done is riding the absurd investor hype for anything with blockchain in the title.

The article is co-authored by two co-founders of a supply chain management solution company called DLT Labs that uses blockchain somewhere. I checked out their solution on their website.

The product looks like any other web app. Is it really using a blockchain somewhere at the backend to store something? May be. It is certainly using some standard RDBMS to store the structured data. There's no way you can store all of that you see in the screenshots on a blockchain.

So what it is that is actually being stored on a blockchain? Not clear.

Is it possible that they use the word blockchain to get free PR? May be. I don't want to judge.

The product page doesn't have the word blockchain anywhere. https://www.dltlabs.com/platforms/asset-track

DL Freight, the product used by Walmart Canada also doesn't mention the word blockchain anywhere. There is just one mention of a shared ledger. https://www.dltlabs.com/platforms/asset-track/dl-freight

Did find blockchain on this page https://www.dltlabs.com/platforms/ecosystem

But immediately you see this

"And because its built using distributed ledger technology, every transaction is 100% auditable, immutable, and visible only to permissioned users – helping to create a genuine layer of trust between the parties that transact on the platform." It refers to permissioned users, so it's not a blockchain. Which is supposed to be permissionless. They aren't even claiming. They are calling it a distributed ledger.

In fact I have noticed this even with R3 Corda. The enterprise blockchain provider. They use the term distributed ledger to describe their offering, not blockchain. But all the marketing material and PR pieces always tout blockchain in the headline.

If something is permissioned, trustful and centralised, is it even a blockchain?

I believe in a decentralized web, but one that you don't need a data center to participate in; nor, a buy in to participate.

As at the end if the day, that's what the web was back in the day. And still is if you ignore the main stays.

It's silly really, but it's more of a question as to what is possible with access to a boundless tape of computers. How do you organize and for what purpose.

The "original" web3 before the cryptocurrency scammers claimed the term was all about the decentralized web with protocols like IPFS backing them. With IPFS, someone needs to host the data (either yourself or some service you pay) but the more popular your data is, the more hosts will have it cached and the quicker and cheaper the content loads.

Even now, after the surge of cryptocurrency gambling, products like NFTs often leverage IPFS to store data, since the blockchains themselves are absolutely useless for actually storing information and nobody wants their decentralized system to rely on someone else's server.

What about international transfers without a middle man dictating what, when and how? If not for blockchain I would probably be working on a completely different field. Just because you don't find it useful does not mean that it's the same for everyone else

Turns out most people wanting to do international transfers without a middleman are criminals. Regular people are for the most part fine with international transfers going through banks, likely via SWIFT.

Turns out that's no longer the case since banks started to adopt cancel culture too, as seen in Canada. Overbearing governments have created legitimate use cases for crypto money transfers.

Except if you live in Russia, of course. Or are you saying every Russian is a criminal?

If your jurisdiction has imposed sanctions on Russia but you then help a Russian national bypass sanctions then you are the criminal.

If you are a Russian, and you want to bypass sanctions imposed on you by others, are you then a criminal, too?

If it's illegal for me to send $200 back home to help my family pay for food to be able to eat, call me a criminal I guess.

I don't know if you've actually tried to send an international wire transfer, but it requires more paperwork/effort, is more expensive, and is less reliable than signing a crypto transaction.

Many smaller banks require you to physically drive to the branch and wait in line to send one. They usually cost upwards of $40 and that's before currency conversion, which is done at a rate that may or may not be favorable.

Making a blockchain payment has pros and cons, but it has enough pros that the "only useful for criminals" argument is tired.

> I don't know if you've actually tried to send an international wire transfer, but it requires more paperwork/effort, is more expensive, and is less reliable than signing a crypto transaction.

Don't platforms such as https://wise.com/ solve international wire transfer problems? I have experience with only a few currencies, but as long as you can do transfers in your home currency online you should be able to do the rest via Wise online as well.

In terms of costs, you'd have to go into details to really compare (e.g. some platforms claiming "no fees" are just subsidizing them unsustainably), but if you're converting from and to fiat currencies via something other than a stablecoin you might already lose more because of volatility.

I haven't experienced or heard of reliability problems with bank transfers, is that a thing?

Depending on the country, it can truly be. Some of my relatives have money stuck in Lebanon and there is currently not really any way of getting the money out of the country.

The problem here is that I'm tied to "Wise", and they can single handedly change how the service works. They decide to which accounts I can send money, not me. They decide what data I must share, not me. They decide the fees, not me. It's just another middle man, like Payoneer, Paysera, Paypal, Revoult, Bankera, Western Union, etc. (yes, I tried them all).

Your parent never mentioned wires. I send 43 euros from the US to Germany every month with Wise and it costs about a dollar.

I dare you to send me a SWIFT transfer. Not only is very expensive, but most likely I will get my account frozen because international transfers are pretty much not allowed.

It's always the same: entitled people from first world countries where the banking system actually works.

I don't understand this hatred for middlemen amongst the crypto crowd. Middlemen provide trust. You want to replace middlemen as trust providers with code? The trustless solutions like Proof of work are slow and inefficient and cost much more than middlemen do.

And despite all of that the cryptoverse still has middlemen and centralised platforms. Because not everyone has to run their own node. Be your own banks is not feasible for majority of human population.

crypto VCs just want to shuffle the chairs and create chaos which encourages the rise of new middlemen who they want to finance. its really simple

Have you used several middlemen? I have, because I have no other option if I want to actually get paid. I've used Wise, Payoneer, Paypal, Paysera, Western Union, Revoult, Bankera, among others that I'm probably forgetting.

They all suck. They decide what I can or can't do with my money. They can freeze my accounts, stop transfers, force me to share details and I can't do anything about it. I rather use crypto than any of those awful services.

Actually I have. I have also rambled against PayPal right here on HN. I would still deal with a middleman like that than trust a Ponzi scam to handle my money.

You would need to deal with 2 middlemen: exchange A and exchange B. And exchanges are worse than banks in every way

Not at all. I buy crypto through P2P, and I decide with whom.

This is not the experience of the vast majority of crypto owners right? How can it be a defense of anything if only very few people even use it like that.

Also, you haven't solved the question of middlemen. Now instead of mostly trustworthy Binance you would have to deal with the guy in the dark alley who pinky promises not to run away with your cash.

Not in Argentina. The P2P market is big enough that you don't need to worry about finding buyers/sellers. Also, "dark alley", here? Not even close. We've been doing this for several years now (used to be only USD), it's a well oiled machine.

You haven't looked very hard if you think it's 100% useless. Some top of mind things:

- Transferring funds overseas

- Trading/speculation on public exchanges

- Selling art online

There's a lot of sensationalist articles about how these things are all ponzis or as you say "providing liquidity to early adopters", but you don't have to buy and hodl major coins to use Web3/decentralization. Many of the above use cases are much easier on the blockchain than using traditional brokers. Not to mention there's a lot of friction in the form of providing personal info when you sign up (which may end up hacked/leaked) and chance of being subject to random discrimination.

There are some use cases for blockhains, namely cryptocurrencies and their unregulated nature. There have been plenty of times that I didn't want to hand over my name and address for an online purchase, but the traditional payment systems aren't set up for privacy.

Payment providers also discriminate against certain aspects of society, such as sex work. The fees an adult content provider needs to pay are astronomical if they can even get a contract with any payment provider at all. Furthermore, the USA has a severe problem that stems from companies like Equifax deciding what you can and cannot afford with no way to protest their decisions.

I suppose the only useful use case for blockchain is close to money laundering, but there are definitely legitimate use cases for it. It's the closest thing we have to cash in the online world.

While I'm all for regulating shitcoins and the gambling ("speculation") that accompanies them, it's an alternative that will need to exist as long as the normal payment system continues to force their own arbitrary, corrupt ideologies on everyone.

Just ban crypto advertising. That way people who actually need crypto for whatever reason can use it, and Matt Damon can't convince your aunt to throw away her inheritance into some shitcoin

At the very least, crypto advertising should be regulated like gambling ads, not like finacial investment ads.

> There have been plenty of times that I didn't want to hand over my name and address for an online purchase, but the traditional payment systems aren't set up for privacy.

Private payments can easily solved without a blockchain. For private payments you don't need a completely trust-less system. Taler[1] solves this quite elegantly: they provide completetly anonymous payments for the customer but still require the merchant to be 'on-record' to make money laundering harder/impossible. For that they rely on a regulated and trusted party as you would with a regular payment provider or bank. No proof of work needed, no value volatility, just an online representation of cash with accountability for the merchant built-in.

Of course, this also means that your second point is still valid for Taler: The involved trusted parties could collectively decide that they want to discriminate against certain merchants, in the same way the current payment providers did.

[1]: https://taler.net/en/

Cryptocurrencies are terrible at privacy, too. Any time you try to use cryptocurrency to buy physical goods (or fiat currency), whoever you're transacting with can know every transaction you've ever made.

Don't generalise. Monero can do that just fine.

> Payment providers also discriminate against certain aspects of society, such as sex work. The fees an adult content provider needs to pay are astronomical if they can even get a contract with any payment provider at all. Furthermore, the USA has a severe problem that stems from companies like Equifax deciding what you can and cannot afford with no way to protest their decisions.

This is not a technology problem, this is a legal problem. To change it, we need to change the laws, not the technology. Sure, they can use crypto now to skirt those regulations, but clearly crypto payments will be regulated exactly as fiat payments very soon. Then, you're back at square one but have burned the planet and enabled ransomware and scammers along the way.

If crypto's main use case is to skirt common agreed upon societal rules that might be debatable, imagine it can be used extensively for all causes that are not up for debate - for ex financing terrorism

It's hardly a legal problem, there are plenty of countries and US states where many kinds of sex work are perfectly legal, and having your life ruled by credit agencies is far from universal.

I understand that with decent regulation illegal goods can't just fly under the radar anymore, I'm just saying that in the current ecosystem there is a use case for this fake money where real money simply cannot be exchanged reliably. In an ideal world we wouldn't need fake underground value transfers but the world is far from ideal.

> It's hardly a legal problem, there are plenty of countries and US states where many kinds of sex work are perfectly legal

How is it not a legal problem, when it's apparently possible to solve it entirely by having a different legislation?

Generally you need to change legislation in a country that you do not have citizenship in.

This is applying technical solutions to social issues. Nothing technically prevents credit card or other online payment means from being anonymous, there are implemented that way for social reasons.

This is also where I see the cryptocurrencies going: regulatory bodies putting more and more resources and restrictions to align them with other monetary systems, to a point where them being based on blockchain will just be an implementation detail.

Here are just some of the use cases

1. 100x cheaper, faster cross-border transfers

2. Immutable, digital, accessible, secure ownership of music, video, real-estate, cars, gaming assets, health data

3. Instant access to nearly all possible financial products (loans, lending, startup investments etc.) without a middle man

There are many, many more use cases. Crypto drastically increases accountability, transparency, accessibility, trustworthiness for every kind of use case.

It seems like you are creating a lot of straw men to not see that, for example an impossible standard such as saying not all of crypto is 100% decentralized, so it's centralized, which just makes no sense and is a very strong logical fallacy.

1. Transfers of what? The recipient has to convert to fiat to do anything useful.

Cheaper and faster don't seem to be happening either, at the moment.

2. You can never digitally own a physical object. Your ownership is centralized in the real-world legal system.

You say "secure" as though people are going around stealing houses from each other by snatching their deeds. Ownership of all of those things is already secure enough.

3. In the US at least, none of this is true. Users still have to go through KYC and there is almost always a middleman involved. Crypto has escaped neither institutionalization nor regulations in developed countries.

I agree that the whole NFT whatever crap is 99.99% bull, but XKCD386 compels me:

> You say "secure" as though people are going around stealing houses from each other by snatching their deeds.

https://whyy.org/articles/philadelphia-man-charged-with-stea...

(not that blockchain woo would add much or any value to this problem, but title fraud is an actual thing)

1. Nope. Still need to convert it to real money for buying something. Gas fees > transfer fees.

2. Nope. It doesn't grant any ownership. It's a just a pointer to a file on third party server. Ownership is enforced by a central authority. Code is not law.

3. Nope. Without an underlying economic activity it's all a ponzi scheme. There is no finance in DeFi. Just scammers running pump and dump schemes and rugpulling starry eyed idiots who think centuries old financial principals are useless and want to make a quick buck without doing anything.

Trust me when I say this, I did a lot of research and reading in earnest. I really hoped there was something of substance in it. I really wanted to embrace web3 and its promise of an open distributed web. I am a programmer. I am always open to learning about and adopting new technologies. I tried hard. I started by reading the original Bitcoin whitepaper by Satoshi. I looked at the web3.js framework. I read as many whitepapers as I could. I looked at many of the projects. Things just don't add up.

Couldn't have said it better myself!

>3. Nope. Without an underlying economic activity it's all a ponzi scheme. There is no finance in DeFi. Just scammers running pump and dump schemes and rugpulling starry eyed idiots who think centuries old financial principals are useless and want to make a quick buck without doing anything.

There's plenty of projcts ran by people who are clearly not trying to scam anyone. Time will tell whether they will actually be successful but you are clearly biased again and not even attempting to be objective.

There is a lack of balance here. Yashg is not wrong in his assertions, and nor are you, that time will tell if the non-scammers are successful or not. I was laughing at the concept of bitcoin when it was mere cents to the coin and some pizza was bought. I'm not laughing now, but I'm also well aware that if you need to explain why something is NOT a Ponzi scheme, it's a Ponzi scheme. I've done a fair bit of work in the NFT space, and saw myself how riddled with fraud it is - not the operation itself, but the punters trying to scam the platform for a free token. I also saw how brittle the concept really is. In many cases, the smart contract is simply saying address X owns the number 4. That later gets translated to some URL which is not guaranteed to be there in 10 years time. Storing the actual asset on the chain would have been preferable but is not practical. So where does that leave us? How does one's ownership of the number 4 translates to them owning a deed to a building or a picture of a monkey, in the sense that you could explain it to your grandma? I'm on the fence here. I want this to work, but I also understand how it works and know that it's not a simple task.

If it helps you understand, there's blockchains being built with close to none tokenomic concept to it. Meaning, there's no value on investing on their token but on using the platform. In some cases it's posible, in others it's not since you need to leverage costs/incentives in some way (but they still manage for it to remain low price through inflation, etc).

There are too many blockchains being developed. Which one are you referring to? (also help me understand what part?)

> Nope. Still need to convert it to real money for buying something. Gas fees > transfer fees.

Sure, if you choose an expensive (congested) blockchain to make the transaction. Otherwise the fees are about comparable or in some cases even less (below 1% for a round-trip from "real money" to crypto and back).

> Without an underlying economic activity it's all a ponzi scheme.

What do you mean by "underlying economic activity", and what kind of such activity does for example a bank or fintech possess that distributed ledger tech does not?

1) would be just as expensive if taxed properly, so not cheaper just illegal

2) immutable is a pretty shitty property for some of those assets, also its a pretty negative turn of society to go and try and make fungible products like music listening into private non fungible ownable assets

3) The middle man is usually there for a number of reasons. Same way exchanges showed up almost immidietly after crypto, you would also have crypto banks to handle loans etc. Add the financial constraints the goverment needs, for lawful contracts to be enforceable and now you just have a more expensive, volatile and environmentally destructive banking system.

Like it seems most of the ideas of things "crypto works for" is just what banks used to do before regulation was added. And the regulation is there for a reason, for every extra fee you pay to do cross border money transfer, some money is not being laundered. For every notary you pay to get a deed in a house or doctor to check your health data, some will or some medical anomaly gets corrected. For every fee you pay in a loan someone elses gets secured and has no extortionate shark loan fees.

With crypto right now you lose all that protection in exchange for a slow, expensive gas fees, environmentally destructive proofs of work and absolutely no legal protection if you get scammed in the end. Its an extremely silly proposition and I am not surprised it is being peddled by the likes of Jordan Belfort because he seems to like to do old medieval scams on new targets.

> immutable is a pretty shitty property for some of those assets

Because smart contract chains allow for turing complete code, mutability can be programmed in to particular tokens at the smart contract level.

> regulation is there for a reason, for every extra fee you pay to do cross border money transfer, some money is not being laundered.

It shouldn't be my personal financial responsibility to pay for a corporation to double check my own assertion that I am not breaking any law.

> With crypto right now you lose all that protection in exchange for a slow, expensive gas fees, environmentally destructive proofs of work and absolutely no legal protection if you get scammed in the end.

I'm breaking this down.

> slow

Taking Ethereum as an example, payments generally go through within 15 seconds, compared to several hours for a same-day wire transfer or several days for an ACH payment.

> expensive gas fees

Gas fees are expensive because too many people are using it. Ethereum processes over a million transactions daily, not including Layer 2 and side chains which have increased that capacity and lowered gas fees in practice.

> environmentally destructive proofs of work

Proof of Stake reduces energy consumption by over 99%, and most blockchains currently use it.

> absolutely no legal protection if you get scammed in the end

The standard way to send money abroad, international wire transfer, also gives you next to no legal protection if you get scammed.

> mutability can be programmed in to particular tokens at the smart contract level.

Yeah but contingencies not predicted in the original contract cannot be added, hence they are immutable from the original design. Something legally not really enforceable as laws change making previously written contracts or clauses void.

> It shouldn't be my personal financial responsibility to pay for a corporation to double check my own assertion that I am not breaking any law.

Someone has to double check the financial and legal frameworks are being abided by in transactions of money, specially cross country. If you do not want to pay it directly in your transfer, then whatever alternative you propose would mean either tax payers or other bank users end up paying more than their fair share if they do not do as many transactions as you.

> Taking Ethereum as an example, payments generally go through within 15 seconds, compared to several hours for a same-day wire transfer or several days for an ACH payment.

This is a false equivalence. The transaction in ethereum takes however long you wanna pay a gas fee for, the 15 second thing is an average not a median, and certainly not a general use case for smaller transactions.

Secondly, the money in an ACH payment goes through in miliseconds, the 2 day wait is a legal escrow for legal purposes not technological ones. One that crypto should also abide if it had any real use.

> Gas fees are expensive because too many people are using it.

Gas fees are expensive because you can pay to jump the queue, and considering the number of fraudulent transactions, scams etc people are incentivized to over pay to make their quick buck after a rug pull.

> Proof of Stake reduces energy consumption by over 99%,

It also reduces security, increses centralisation and increases fees. Certainly a cure-all for a problem created by crypto in the first place.

> The standard way to send money abroad, international wire transfer, also gives you next to no legal protection if you get scammed.

The 2 day to send allows plenty of time to report a transaction, for the goverment to intervene if flags are raised etc. It certainly offers tons of legal protection.

What it doesn't protect is against Nigerian Prince scams but thats not a failure of the wire transfer, and it certainly is even worse thanks to crypto...

> Yeah but contingencies not predicted in the original contract cannot be added, hence they are immutable from the original design. Something legally not really enforceable as laws change making previously written contracts or clauses void.

This could be a feature or a bug, depending on use case.

> Someone has to double check the financial and legal frameworks are being abided by in transactions of money, specially cross country.

Not really. I think money transfer, especially in the United States, is way over-regulated. But our opinions don't really matter, because crypto is a cat out of the bag.

Maybe you would want to make it illegal to make a peer to peer crypto transaction without a middleman checking it for legality first. I believe that's impossible without outlawing crypto altogether, which is a political nonstarter (though they might be successful at outlawing proof of work only).

> The transaction in ethereum takes however long you wanna pay a gas fee for, the 15 second thing is an average not a median, and certainly not a general use case for smaller transactions.

Since the EIP-1559 fee market change in August 2021 introducing flexible block sizes, the 15 second transaction time is very much a median. Not sure what you mean by "not a general use case for smaller transactions."

> Gas fees are expensive because you can pay to jump the queue, and considering the number of fraudulent transactions, scams etc people are incentivized to over pay to make their quick buck after a rug pull.

No more overpaying in the general case since EIP-1559, since block sizes are flexible now. Blocks can double in size, so as long as the network demand doesn't double within a 15-second period, you can include a fee at the market rate and your transaction will be processed in a timely manner.

Ethereum fees are an open auction market where anyone can bid. If scams can afford to outprice legitimate transactions, then that says something about society, not about the network. The network is impartial, providing service to whoever bids high enough.

> It also reduces security, increses centralisation and increases fees. Certainly a cure-all for a problem created by crypto in the first place.

Proof of Stake increases security, decreases centralization, and reduces fees. It would take a long comment to describe why this is the case with sources, so tell me if you want me to write it up.

Here's the short answer though:

https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html

> The 2 day to send allows plenty of time to report a transaction, for the goverment to intervene if flags are raised etc. It certainly offers tons of legal protection.

From my understanding, international wire transfers can only typically be cancelled within the first 30 minutes or so, if you're lucky. The payment method offers exactly zero legal protection - it's as if you've handed the recipient cash and they walked away with it. If you send money to the wrong account, or if the recipient does not provide you with the services you purchased, your only recourse is to hire an international lawyer and sue the recipient in whatever country they are in. You can look on your wire transfer form and see disclaimers to this effect.

Wow, what a brain wash. Are you Matt Damon?

> Sure, I work at Microsoft 365, because I had to. It was join Microsoft, or be dependent on my dad for money.

That's a false dichotomy if I've ever seen one! And out of the blue.. the author seems ashamed but trying to justify why they shouldn't be.

> But hey, working at Redmond beats taking Miami and Houston underwater just to make a few white crypto bros happy.

yikes.. ok.

A lot of anti-crypto technical people are also very interested in a subculture I like to call "ethical computing" and part of that subculture is constantly talking about how ethical you are, how much FOSS you use, and how evil tech $TECH is destroying the world (where you can substitute "ads", "blockchain", "GUI interfaces", or "Golang" in depending on what you want to cast as unethical/what you dislike). There's usually (though not always) a grain of truth to these positions, but I personally find the movement to be facile and adherents are usually zealous in their ideology.

This is one of the weakest criticisms to web3 I've seen. Shocked that this is on the front page of HN. Literally every point here has already been talked about and debunked.

> Web3 Platforms are Centralized

The blockchain itself is decentralized, and you don't have to use centralized platforms.

> Mining is Centralized

Sure mining is not as decentralized as we'd like it to be, but it is unquestionably less centralized than the alternative.

> Environmental concerns

Look into "Proof of Stake"

> Blockchain Sucks, Period

Blockchain works very well for its intended applications actually. For example, Ukraine just raised $54 million through crypto. The article doesn't even attempt to construct an argument, so there's nothing to address.

> Blockchain is not the way to decentralization. We need a hyper-efficient system that takes minimal computing resources to scale to a whole planet of users, while making it easy for newcomers to join the network.

Looking forward to your whitepaper on your superior alternative to a blockchain. Until then, we'll stick to blockchains for their intended use cases.

Honestly this article and the comments section is an embarrassment. You guys should actually research what you're criticizing. HN has been anti-crypto since crypto was invented, at this point over a decade later maybe it's time to have some humility and admit that you guys were wrong, and that maybe this thing is actually worth attempting to understand lest you want to continue to be on the wrong side of history

> and you don't have to use centralized platforms.

Sure, but you'd be missing out on the benefits of the blockchain. Who will buy your paint monkey image certificate of authenticity - let alone pay a small fortune for it - if you put it up for sale on your own website instead of the big exchange where all the whales scout for their next target to over-inflate? You're right in theory, but market forces push towards centralization.

> but it is unquestionably less centralized than the alternative.

This is true, but the alternative has (literal) checks and balances, fallbacks, and legal forces in place to ensure supply and stability of the currency.

> For example, Ukraine just raised $54 million through crypto. The article doesn't even attempt to construct an argument, so there's nothing to address.

And billions in international foreign and military aid through non-crypto means; it's pocket change pushed by cryptobros that want to promote their money-making scheme.

> Looking forward to your whitepaper on your superior alternative to a blockchain.

Traditional banking. Traditional banking and fiat money is good. I mean nobody actually pays anything with crypto because of inconvenience, transfer costs, speed and value instability; it's an asset used to convert from / to fiat money, it's an investment product, it's a ledger of certificates for poorly drawn or generated jpegs.

And it's argumentative comments like this that make me resent it more and more. The only success stories and practical applications for crypto and blockchain technology I've heard is people getting rich off it. The libertarian dream; the freedom to weasel money out of easily hyped people without having to pay taxes over it.

And you know I'm salty because like everybody else, "I should've bought bitcoin ten years ago".

> And billions in international foreign and military aid through non-crypto means

That doesn't invalidate crypto

> Traditional banking and fiat money is good

With flaws that crypto solves

> nobody actually pays anything with crypto because of inconvenience, transfer costs, speed and value instability

False, there are merchants that accept payments in crypto and stablecoins. Though it is true that asset transfers are currently the more prominent use case for crypto than everyday transactions.

> it's an asset used to convert from / to fiat money, it's an investment product, it's a ledger of certificates for poorly drawn or generated jpegs.

Ok, and what's the problem? There are many other applications for crypto you didn't address that could be found in any "intro to web3" article. Also dismissing NFTs as just "a ledger of certificates for poorly drawn or generated jpegs" shows you've done literally zero research on NFTs. There's more to NFTs than pictures of monkeys.

> The only success stories and practical applications for crypto and blockchain technology I've heard is people getting rich off it

That's because you haven't done any research on what you're dismissing.

If you have to do so much of your own research to finally find a useful use case for crypto or grasp the genius concept behind NFT. If no one can understand why it is so revolutionary. Is it maybe that there is nothing to be found behind the artificial complexity? Something so revolutionary should be easy to understand. The concept of Internet was easy to understand (fast communication, availability of information,...) the complexity lay in understanding the scale and the pace at which the problem would be technically solved.

> The concept of Internet was easy to understand (fast communication, availability of information,...)

Not really - I think you're introducing hindsight bias. This famous David Letterman clip with Bill Gates is pretty representative of the population's poor understanding of the benefits of the Internet. This clip was from just over a decade after the Internet was invented, so roughly the same amount of time that we are right now since the concept of distributed ledger technology was invented.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gipL_CEw-fk

> Look at email, while the protocol is technically “decentralized”, but look at how big Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 is. Sure, you can easily set up an email server on a $5 VPS, I do it with my domain, but most people just leave it to big providers. Web3 is no different.

This is an interesting argument to make but I wouldn't say having large subsets belonging to single entities equates to it being "not decentralized."

Also, those services are much more than email, so the analogy that the author is trying to build to bolster their argument doesn't really work.

Absolutely content-free article that brings no new or useful criticisms (of which there are plenty) to the table.

If anyone is looking for useful criticisms of "web3", here are a couple:

* there is no meaningful privacy on most popular chains; everybody can see your transaction history

* it's difficult for new nodes to join and check the history, making decentralization difficult, and also leading to some of the centralization issues mentioned in the article

* the popular chains have low transaction throughput and latency due to reliance on outdated consensus mechanisms (BTC, Ethereum) and/or due to the need to enable weaker computers to check history (but see previous point).

* losing your funds is easy if you lose your key

There's tons of research being done to resolve these issues, ranging from improved cryptographic proof mechanisms such as zkSNARKs and interactive fault proofs, to better consensus and sybil-resistance mechanisms, but this stuff takes time, and is literally the cutting-edge of these fields, so impact is delayed.

It is hard to advocate for the value of decentralized systems without sounding like a hand-waving conspiracy theorist.

The benefits of decentralization do come at a cost of efficiency and throughput and they are often harder to quantify or justify unless one takes a harder look at the fully loaded cost of centralization.

As an example, consider the fact that MacDonald’s is by far the most prolific restaurant in the world or that GMO crops undoubtedly yield more productivity per acre than heirloom crops. In both cases centralization and standardization of the process has led to huge productivity gains, but at what expense? What have we lost in the process?

I would argue that monoculture and food homogenization engineered to maximize calories out per $ in have come at the cost of diversity.

Diversity of ideas, strategies, goals, ownership and agency all result in a society that, while productive, is less resilient.

Look at the various fungal plagues that have blighted banana production over the years. Monoculture brought huge yields but at the expense of resilience as a single fungus nearly wiped out the original Gros Michel variety and now a new fungus threatens the same for the Cavendish.

Similarly, Bitcoin is an inefficient network for transmitting fiat compared to Visa when measured against the criteria payment networks are usually measured on. Ethereum takes huge resources to run the equivalent of a Raspberry Pi as a global state machine.

Measuring decentralized systems vs centralized purely on efficiency and throughput kind of misses the forest for the trees. Decentralized systems have value that isn’t always obvious to a superficial analysis such as this one. That doesn’t mean they should be ignored. Often the largest paradigm shifts look like toys to start. (See Clayton Christianson and disruptive innovation.)

There's plenty of solid, non-conspiracy-theory-based argument in favor of decentralized systems...for many things. I don't think currency/banking will ever be one of them.

The Canadian truckers and their supporters would like to have a word with you.

As would the citizens of Cyprus and Sri Lanka who will have or have had funds from their Bank accounts taken because the powers that be decided that the customers money was better off in the banksters hands.

> I would argue that monoculture and food homogenization engineered to maximize calories out per $ in have come at the cost of diversity.

I think the problem with this isn't that you come across as hand-waving. The problem with this line of argument is that there's no developed case for why anyone should care or value this particular presupposed diversity being lost.

One could argue that a profuse diversity was lost when screws, nuts, and bolts converged on a set of broadly standardized sizes. Yet few seem to lament this. Why is this different in important ways from bananas? Which is bitcoin more like?

It is arguable whether or not Bitcoin counts as part of Web3. I would argue it is the original Web3 technology (blockchain) and so it is an essential component of web3. Also, I understand Bitcoin the best so can make a stronger case for it than NFTs or other Web3 concepts.

I would argue that one of the core reasons why Bitcoin was invented was to separate money from state and create a new form of quasi-money quasi-digital gold that could prevent powerful central actors from arbitrarily manipulating it’s supply based on their whims and desires. Bitcoin was born out of the ashes of the great financial crisis.

The Bitcoin genesis block famously contains a quote from the Times of London which reads as follows: “Chancellor on the brink of second bailout for banks.”

You may not personally see that as a problem, but I do as do many others. Bitcoin does introduce it’s own problems but I would argue that it does an excellent job of fixing the problem of allowing for a money free from government control, with censorship resistant peer-to-peer payments (remember the Canadian truckers?), no counter-party risk, and predictable inflation policy for the next 100 years.

Yes it is slow and inefficient and it uses a lot of energy and it is also volatile, but it also allows for things that were never possible before it existed.

There is no effing web3... People are desperately trying to spam this nothing into existence!!

The author has no credibility on this subject at all. BTC is not mined with GPUs. They then make statements with no actual backing that are just opinions. Anyone can mine, yes it is profitable. Stop spreading false narratives. Then there's the laughable environment statements everywhere. Do some actual research on a topic instead of talking about "white crypto bros". This article is insulting and uninformed.

This article doesn't even explain how web3 is centralized (it is in many ways). All I see is some stupid non-technical blog trying to orient blockchain as part of the enemy along with "wh*te", "0.1%", and "bro". The irony is that this is a techbro-tier article.

There's a few examples on how it is centralized, not sure what you were looking for?

A tangile explanation.

Metamask is centralized. That part is true. Metamask should be removed along with anything else that remotely resembles a web browser, especially stuff that relies on a web browser which is the complete antithesis of centralization (but oops, I covered too much already 150% more than what the article goes into).

Saying mining is centralized is like saying natural resources are centralized, which may or may not be true, and is not covered in the article.

The article hand waves about efficiency but seems to only be referring to the inefficiency of bitcoin and no other blockchain.

An explanation on why proof of stake is centralized is also missing. From what I understand, it all relies on a bootstrapped list of validators to get the right chain. And after that, it relies on some subset of those validators to not collude.

> The design of blockchain, is that as more coins are mined, you need more computing power just to get smaller amounts of blockchain.

I find this article a little tough to take because of sentences like this one. I think it could have used a bit more proof reading.

If you store your webapp on IPFS, and connect to the blockchain. Then its truly decentralized. We need browsers to support IPFS... Even when blockchain fails, IPFS will be a big. Especially if we are going to be a multi-planetary species.

Brave supports IPFS natively: https://www.zdnet.com/article/brave-becomes-first-browser-to...

Actually browsers don't need any new features. All you need is a proxy that can decide to fetch resources on www vs. ipfs. I did a small PoC with mitmproxy where if the subdomain is ipfs I fetch the resource from ipfs instead of the web. worked great, also worked without the proxy because I hosted it on the www as well.

I also did a youtube-dl proxy: First time it goes to youtube and in the background I fire up youtube-dl and cache the content. on subsequent requests I serveup a minimal html site with the local video downloaded.

The only thing about mitmproxy is it can be a bit slow.

You mean a local proxy? That makes sense. Should be part of the OS then ;-)

NFTs are not semi-centralized because Web3 or blockchain. They are like this because our current notions of 'ownership' are intrinsically centralized. Social reality beats tech, so the tech will end up either emulating it regardless of underlying 'decentralized' technology, or the tech ends up withering away due to non-use.

Do a random sketch on your computer. Now put it on some Web0 site. What does 'ownership' mean? You still have the sketch after all, no matter what people do with the sketch. Inasmuch as you 'own' it, you may want attribution (people giving you credit), copyright (both limits on copying and copyright fees), warranty protection (if someone looks at the sketch and gets an epileptic attack, it's not your fault), ability to transfer ownership, etc. In short, the current notion of 'ownership' mostly related to relations with other humans*.

All these are provided by the law, and can only be provided by the law. 'Code is law' simply changes the entities making decisions, it's still law. If a single chain is a law, than it must have only one record for 'owned' stuff. If you had multiple chains, this strongly affects the value of ownership. Imagine multiple records of ownership - does one pay copyright fees to all the different records? Split them? Recognize only one? Any solution ends up devaluing or centralizing.

This is a poor match for NFT tech, since nothing really stops you from forking (a cryptocurrency fork has serious roadblocks. A NFT fork has a much easier time fighting the regular NFT using the NFT's own assets), but to have value one needs to approach a single source. So NFT will either fork to nothingness or end up de facto centralized.

* In a physical asset, there are a range of decisions regarding the physical asset, but again the question of who makes these decisions is a question of relations between humans, and inherently pushes towards centralization.

I still can't get over that NFT's are just a URL pointing to the data. They don't even have an on-chain hash of the digital asset. It's like selling a sign pointing to houses for the price of the house, and claiming you own the house, hoping that the sign will increase in value the way the house does, and bragging about it.

For reference: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

I too struggle with the concept. But I imagine the supporters of NFTs would say the value is in being the only person who can put that sign. It seems like an extremely bizarre form of conspicuous consumption, but there we go.

> But I imagine the supporters of NFTs would say the value is in being the only person who can put that sign

If only that were true

>being the only person who can put that sign And even that is not true. There is nothing preventing literally anyone from creating as many signs they want and point it to any house they want.

as the other poster there is no uniqueness , drm or any restrictions on copying in chain or outside of it.

There is only value because many people think there is value.

Most people are only paying some x for an NFT because they think it is possible to flip it at y >x.

El oh el. If this is not ripe for a rugpull. I do not know what is.

Good NFTs do use a hash, but it's a shame that marketplaces don't mandate even this simple thing.

In the world of digital art, there are actually people developing NFTs that are purely generated on-chain. It's still a relatively small school, but you can check some of them out here https://www.0xchain.art/

It is about 9% on ETH. yournfts.org

Almost all of these are just graphic doodles with an arty name, or low res avatars. They’re art in the sense of being made and appreciated by someone, but they’re certainly not worthy of being called ‘fine art’, or unique.

Yeah well, let's not open that pandora's box

Gatekeeping what defines art.... Not a great look even if I understand where you're coming from. But check out Cyber Brokers which is super detailed and entirely on-chain.

I think of them as digital digital picture frames.

A market for digital, digital picture frames currently exists and it has high margins. That is the extent of my thought on the what people are buying.

They aren't advertised that way though and the transaction receipt of purchasing the digital, digital picture frame can be a valuable asset.

Regarding where the images being viewed are stored, many are not following best practices and should be scrutinized for that, but that is separate from the concept of digital digital picture frames, as many do leverage the sales pitch of the technology pretty well and store the entire image onchain or pin them on another censorship resistant storage system.

But I think people overthink it. Who cares that people are buying digital digital picture frames? Just sell digital digital picture frames!

I read moxie’s write up earlier in the year, but didn’t pick up on the lack of hashing. Incredible.

> I think of them as digital digital picture frames.

I don't understand this analogy. A digital picture frame lets me look at pictures. What on earth is a digital digital picture frame?

Perhaps it's a digital frame for a digital picture?

(As opposed to a physical frame for a digital picture?)

Again, how is an NFT a picture frame? Is a URL a picture frame?

Maybe? Not sure how the original commenter meant their metaphor.

A digital picture frame is a physical device that lets you look at preconfigured digital pictures. There is typically a mechanism for changing them, you purchased the device though.

A digital digital picture frame is a set of classes that lets you look at preconfigured digital pictures. There is typically a mechanism for changing the image, you purchased the set of classes, typically following one of the NFT standards.

Those are the ways at which they are similar.

But an NFT doesn't let me look at a picture. It doesn't have a display for one. The whole point of a digital picture frame is that it has a display. Is a browser a digital digital picture frame?

I have as much need for a specialised digital digital picture frame as I have for a digital paperweight.

well, this was fun, past tense. analogies compare the ways dissimilar things are similar, not the ways they aren't.

this is a thread about selling them and not asking why people are willing to pay for them. so what you or I need isn't relevant, if you don't want to buy one then don't buy one. if you want to make money, sell one. unless there was some point you were trying to make, in which case there are plenty of sister threads to make that point in.

You came up with an analogy that doesn't make sense.

the similarity is that they store images for viewing

neuro-typical people got it

Except for the fact that they don't store images and can't display them, sure.

I'm probably too thick to understand it. But please keep repeating your bullshit analogy.

can't have it both ways, they either don't [ever] store, or you're too thick

NFTs can in-fact store complete binary data and complete vector data. There are some examples and some production projects doing both of those things. But more commonly they typically load a URL to an image, and people prefer that instead of a URL that its on an IPFS URI, but people accept an IPFS proxy URL.

In all scenarios, a separate technology/viewer/website is used to access the standard method which returns the data to be interpreted. Which is where things are dissimilar. Analogies don't compare aspects that are dissimilar [0]. Any one similarity satisfies the criteria for an analogy.

[0] - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/analogy

The frame isn't _for_ you, it's for everybody else, and that frame shows (with proof) that _you_ own the picture.

That's why the mona lisa framed in the museum is worth more than a replica picture. It's not even the frame, it's the fact that there's a public broadcast of a form of ownership.

So, it's not like a digital photo frame?

> That's why the mona lisa framed in the museum is worth more than a replica picture.

The Mona Lisa in the Louvre is worth more than a replica because the Louvre owns it? That's an original take, I'll give you that.

Is that is the case, why does the Louvre own the original and not a replica?

> why does the Louvre own the original and not a replica?

so if somebody claimed that they owned the original mona lisa, and that the louvre actually has a replica, would you consider that replica to be more valuable?

Who's to say what is the replica then? Suppose the replica was perfect?

It sounds weird, but the fact that the Louvre is displaying the mona lisa is what makes it valuable. The fact that most people is unable to know (nor care tbh) whether what they see in that glass box is actually the original or a really good replica.

So what makes NFT any different in this sense? It's not a technological thing, but a social thing.

Sound like "pointer" to me.

To be specific, an NFT can be anything - even a Turing complete program - but common ones are simply containing a string of a URL.

Edit: I was loosely involved in some of the conversation around smart contract and token implementation on a top 10 chain and there’s actually a lot of interesting issues with on chain data, such as if child pornography is added suddenly in some countries hosting a node can be seen as distributing CP (so only allowing URLs and then having filters to remove that at a community level is an easy solution).

I currently only like NFTs as representations of digital licenses or tickets etc anyway, so simple hashes work for me.

Digital licenses and tickets are useless if the central authority doesn't honor them. There's absolutely no benefit to making NFTs out of them.

For example, if I buy an NFT ticket to a concert and the venue doesn't let me in, what was the point of the decentralization?

That's not why making an NFT out of the ticket is interesting.

It's interesting because I can, for example, resell my Woodstock ticket on an open market.

"It's interesting because I can hoard tickets and resell at profit".

Why is that interesting, exactly?

Edit All that is marked as "interesting" in crypto is inevitably "how can I profit/get rich quick off something".

Usually the whole point of NFT tickets is to _stop_ you reselling on an open market (aka StubHub/Ticketmaster) and instead force you to either resell back to the venue, or to resell at face value only

Yikes. Not to mention there’s a public record of every ticket you’ve ever purchased. In many ways a blockchain is adtech done worst.

I honestly tried to come up with ideas for crypto / blockchain but every time someone pointed out how my solution could be done easier / better without blockchain. Blockchain is a problem looking for a solution to make more money.

In a proper market, it is impossible to resell because the sales price is the production price. So if the free-market price of the ticket is higher than the sales price, people should be producing additional Woodstocks until the prices match. At which point there is no point in being a scalper anymore.

Scalping is only an issue if the sales price of products is artificially depressed.

Ah yes. The magical "click my fingers and there's a new Woodstock every time someone raises a price" free-market.

I didn't realize it was that easy to produce another Woodstock, or that the only purpose of music and festivals was profit maximization/economic equilibrium.

Silly me.

The whole point of capitalism is that economic equilibrium is also value equilibrium. So if you think it's good to have a Woodstock, unless you like artificial scarcity, you should think that having two Woodstocks is approximately twice as good. Now maybe you cannot produce another Woodstock, like there's some inherently limited resource like management effort or willingness or space or licenses, but that's the idea.

(I don't think that the capitalist ideal matches reality. But you should at least get the idea if you're gonna disagree.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30776666

Free market as imagined by libertarians can only exist in the presence of unlimited resources and magic.

You have it backwards.

Markets exist because of scarcity, not because of abundance. If something is available in unlimited abundance, there's no need of a market for it.

I don't think I got it backwards. This is the original statement: "In a proper market, it is impossible to resell because the sales price is the production price. So if the free-market price of the ticket is higher than the sales price, people should be producing additional Woodstocks until the prices match".

The only free market where this is possible is a magical place where there are unlimited resources and ability to create new Woodstocks at the snap of a finger.

So you extrapolate from one HN comment to all libertarians?

You are interpreting the original comment as uncharitably as possible.

"Additional Woodstocks" can be easily interpreted as "additional concerts similar to Woodstock" without changing the meaning of the comment.

Also, you don't need unlimited resources to create new concerts, and you don't need the "snap of a finger", you simply need people who are motivated to do so by virtue of the profit motive (as well as their love for music and live shows) incentivized through the price mechanism.

> So you extrapolate from one HN comment to all libertarians?

Yes. Because all of their notions of "one true free market" require unlimited resources and ability to immediately create anything from scratch.

> can be easily interpreted as "additional concerts similar to Woodstock"

Same thing, different attempt to argue semantics.

> Also, you don't need unlimited resources to create new concerts, and you don't need the "snap of a finger", you simply need people who are motivated to do so by virtue of the profit motive

I'll repeat this again for the fourth-fifth time in this thread. Literally thousands of concerts exist, "simply" driven by "people who are motivated to do so by virtue of the profit motive". And yet, Woodstock is Woodstock. And Sziget is Sziget etc. I wonder why.

The existence of the Ford fiesta model won't necessarily make a Lamborghini cheaper, but it does make the category "car" more affordable and provides an option for people on a budget.

The same applies to concerts.

Woodstock, due to various factors is able to charge a premium, but that doesn't mean you can't go to other concerts.

As more and more concerts are held, the premium that Woodstock can command is held in check, because people have other options.

> The same applies to concerts.

The analogy is incorrect when what was claimed was: "So if the free-market price of the ticket is higher than the sales price, people should be producing additional Woodstocks until the prices match"

> As more and more concerts are held, the premium that Woodstock can command is held in check, because people have other options.

- 6-day festival pass to Sziget is 315 EUR (~$346).

- Glastonbury (5 days) tickets are ~$365.

So, in check, according to you. And then...

- Coachella $449 and up

- Burning Man (which is not even a concert per se) is $525 and up (some tickets are sold at $2500)

And then...

- Justin Bieber can easily ask for 1000 dollars per ticket and more.

And so on.

Even though, according to you and @FeepingCreature, it's enough to just create another Sziget/Glastonbury/Coachella/Bieber for the prices to go down to an equilibrium.

Oh and there will be no scalpers.

Even though already, now, no one is stopping you from creating thousands of concerts.... and yet the price for those discussed doesn't go down, and scalpers exist.

Same for any sporting events etc.

No, grandparent is absolutely correct. It's not magic, if they charged what tickets are actually worth, there would be no scalpers. That is not a libertarian fantasy or anything close to it, in fact it's not even controversial.

> if they charged what tickets are actually worth, there would be no scalpers

Scalpers' motive is to gain profit off of a limited resource. It doesn't matter if the tickets cost even less than the concert costs to produce.

By the way, who determines the "actual worth" of tickets?

> That is not a libertarian fantasy or anything close to it

That is not what I was responding to.

The price people are willing to pay is who determines the actual worth of the ticket. Doesn't matter if its from the ticket booth or the scalper.Do people sell tickets for less than the concert costs to produce where you live? Thats a very flawed business model. Could it be instead that the pricing model for tickets doesn't adequately reflect what people are willing to pay?

If ticket booths charged exactly what scalpers charge would that change anything for you?

> The price people are willing to pay is who determines the actual worth of the ticket.

Indeed

> Do people sell tickets for less than the concert costs to produce where you live?

No, they don't, at it's not what I said.

> If ticket booths charged exactly what scalpers charge would that change anything for you?

Ni idea why you're asking me this question

Uhh what? So the price people are willing to pay dictates the worth, what exactly is your point here then? That scalpers are bad people because they make a profit?

> Scalping is only an issue if the sales price of products is artificially depressed.

No offense, but you do not understand art.

Yes, there are a lot of bands that could sell higher priced tickets but don't because they want to be accessable to everyone, not just people with money to burn.

If they sold higher priced tickets, more bands would have incentive to tour. This would make live music more accessible, not less.

Right now they're not accessible to everyone, they're accessible to rich people and a lottery of poor people.

How would higher priced tickets be more accessible to poor people?

Pricing is the way in which information about supply and demand is conveyed in a decentralized manner in a free market.

When prices of a good or service goes up, it incentivises other manufacturers or service providers to produce more of that good or service, which increases supply and puts downward pressure on prices.

So to answer your question, higher priced tickets increases supply, which causes lower priced tickets, which benefits poor people.

Eventually prices reach a level where supply and demand match and (for example) concerts are as cheap as they can be given their cost and the demand in the market for them (including the demand from poor people).

This EconTalk episode on price gouging during a natural disaster was very interesting, and somewhat related to this topic: https://www.econtalk.org/munger-on-price-gouging/

There are literally thousands of concerts, and sporting events, and any other events that people buy tickets to.

Guess why people still go to Sziget or Woodstock.

Also guess why it's impossible to just click your fingers and pull an unlimited number of Woodstocks out of thin air.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

The fact that there is a limited number of Woodstocks is irrelevant.

There are other organizers and bands who can also offer concerts, and at a reduced price compared to the premium that something like Woodstock would demand. That's competition, and it puts downward pressure on concert prices in general, thereby helping people on a tight budget.

There are already thousands of concerts doing that. And yet Woodstock is still there with their prices.

Why do you think that is?

Blockchain solves none of this.

As I said, I do not think you understand art.

Hundreds of shitty ape pictures that anyone has access to view has not changed the price of entry to the Louvre.

You do not reduce the price for one form of art by having other artists available. They are all different, and people will want to see one and not another.

But Woodstock, or any other tickets are a limited resource by definition, the venue can cope with X amount of people there, where X is at max some area dependent value and can be limited further by safety measurements and/or law.

So your "proper market" criteria doesn't really exist for anything but digital or virtual goods.

What's the incentive for the ticket seller to enable that?

Royalties. The ticket seller can set that and every time the ticket is resold, they will get % of that sale. For an artist that would mean they can sell a ticket with % royalty set and then profit from future sales on an ongoing basis.

So... A method for scalping scalpers?

Pretty much. 1000 true fans is essentially the backbone of the NFT argument which basically revolves around artists and their fans parting ways with cash for collectable items. With NFT tickets, the artist always gets paid no matter who is selling the ticket and how many times it get sold. I would say that this is a win for the artist.

Well.. yes that would be a win for the artist. As would a sales tax that goes to artists, or a new law that legalizes pickpocketing for artists. Why is that a good thing? Why should an artist be compensated beyond the first transaction? If this concept took off, how long do you think it would take before Walmart begins taking a cut of every resale? They have just as much right to it as an artist.

Well you could argue that it wouldn't be Walmart that does it, it would be the producer so Samsung, Apple, LG, Asus, Acer etc would sell their products with a digital twin (NFT) which provides sales from future purchases.

That being said, it could reduce the need for new products/versions being created every other week. However, there would need to be a somewhat centralized 'marketplace' that facilities the second hand sales which is where Walmart could step in with some perks for selling with them.

So we want to create incentives for event organizers themselves to encourage scalping/resale of tickets. Can't see anything wrong happening there.

Why not auction the tickets off in the first place?

They can do both. They get royalties on all resales.

If you don't tax resales, first auction will go for a higher price.

(Just like houses that come with less ongoing taxes or other burdens go for more money.)

So ticket scalping. This was never desirable to anyone except the reseller in the first place. Concert goers hate scalpers, arrangers hate scalpers and the reseller adds no value to their service. I don't see how it's the least bit interesting.

It's interesting because it could be _my_ profit!

Nevermind the society or the environment. If money can be made, money shall be made, no matter how shady a business /s

'Scalping' ticket is actually useful for society, to be honest.

But yeah, everyone involved likes to say that they hate scalpers. So no one will do anything to help them.

I'm not talking about scalping.

Woodstock was a legendary event.

The tickets would now be considered collectors items.

In that sense you can already resell your Woodstock tickets on an open market. NFTs don't really add anything to this market in particular, so I don't get your point.

Only if the ticket seller wants you to be able to do that.

Remember, it's trivially easy to follow transactions on the block chain. So the ticket seller can see whether an NFT has been resold, and can just refuse to honour it. Or only honour the first wallet it was in, regardless of whether it is still there or not.

I think the idea may be to resell it as memorabilia - which might work for some rare or legendary performance, but, I think, in the typical case will be meaningless.

And even that works way better in physical form. For concerts I still order hardcopy tickets, because I collect them to go through them and remember what bands I have seen live and relive that memory. A digital NFT wouldn't give this justice enough for me.

I'm talking about it as a collectors item.

That is somewhat interesting. But see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30776567

You can resell your paper, or email ticket already.

How does blockchain make it interesting?

No need to expose yourself, possible anonimity and most important one, the absolute lack of need of a third party which is the thing that most find intresting about blockchains usecases.

Except the most common way to do blockchain transactions are broker services which do require user information. This, combined with the fact that the blockchain is an immutable public ledger (meaning any transaction can be traced back indefinitely), and there goes anonymity.

By brokers you mean Centralised Exchanges ? If yes I agree it's an aberation as we've with recently with Russia's problems people getting banned from it because these exchanges are bounded to obey country's laws. Everyone should leave CEXs to get on DEXs and learn about DeFi but as cool as it can be it's everything but userfriendly and as it is it'll never make it to public adoption. About tracing transactions as long as you don't dox yourself everything people can have about a wallet being yours is suspicions and there's always services to make it shady like tornadocash or anonimity oriented blockchains

> Everyone should leave CEXs to get on DEXs and learn about DeFi

That is not going to happen, for the same reasons why most people don't dig their own wells, learn carpentry to make their own furniture, or weave their own cloth and learn how to tailor clothes.

Every complex enough system will always have centralized points, aka. gatekeepers. That is how human society self-organises.

any society constrained by time and physical limits will tend towards this I think.

> That is not going to happen IT's actually being worked on, it's something sometimes refered as a "layer 3" even if it's not realy one when you look at what are layers 1 and 2 but the goal of this logical "layer" is to make abstraction of everything, make crosschain needs and moves absolutely transparent. It's one big point for mass adoption and great thinkers and workers know that and are already working on that.

>Every complex enough system will always have centralized points, aka. gatekeepers. That's where the problem is. 3rd partys have been introduced for security reasons but are nowadays far from it and that's what some people are actually fighting for. An autonomous system where the only pseudo 3rd party is an impartial public registry

> it's something sometimes refered as a "layer 3"

Again: Most people will not use a more complex solution when a simpler one exists, regardless of whether the simpler solution requires a central authority. Example: People used to use IRC, which is a really easy to use system. Then along came chatrooms, and then centralized messenger systems. Sure, some people still use IRC, but they are not the majority.

> That's where the problem is. 3rd partys have been introduced for security reasons but are nowadays far from it and that's what some people are actually fighting for.

Which systems are "far from it"? The financial system? I get my paycheck every month, all payment processes work fine. The government systems? Elections in my country work flawlessly, tallied and protected by central authorities. The power grid? I haven't had an outage in 4 years, and the last one lasted all of 10 minutes. Public Transport in my country is affordable, well maintained and usually on time.

So it seems to me that centralized systems work just fine in the vast majority of cases.

> No need to expose yourself, possible anonimity and most important one

That is an advantage if you're going to engage in behavior any reasonable person would despise you for.

> the absolute lack of need of a third party

If you're scalping tickets, you are the third party.

Anonimity and privacy on internet are a right and you don't need to do shady stuff to enjoy them and outside of the immediate risk caused by doxing oneself when having a heavily valued crypto/nft portfolio I agree that it's not always needed. It still should be an option though as when selling valuable stuff p2p some protection is always appreciated.

I don't really get the part on how selling something you own p2p makes you a third party and I don't care about the 2nd hand tickets market, I'm only intrested in a safe decentralized p2p market

I'm obviously not making a point against anonymity in general, so spare me the spiel.

> I don't really get the part on how selling something you own p2p makes you a third party and I don't care about the 2nd hand tickets market, I'm only intrested in a safe decentralized p2p market

The peers in this transaction are the event organizer and the person who ends up with a ticket. The ticket scalper is third party that "facilitates" the transaction at a cost. Essentially a broker that no one asked for.

Let’s you know the ticket is authentic because you can see it is part of the set of tickets the band/venue initially created, because of atomic transactions I can guarantee if I send you money I’ll get a ticket in return (NFTs are just another form of currency at the end of a day), because they’re unique I know no one else can own it even though it’s all public so I won’t have issues at the door, because they allow metadata the venue can confirm if they’re resellable or not on the NFT itself, a venue can get a % of resale value back allowing more second-hand markets to exist, among various other possibilities.

Only if the authority recognizing the ticket allows it.

If they don't, then the name of the original buyer is likely part of the hashed information, and anyone else trying to use the ticket is out of luck.

NFTs still require recognition by the authority actually controlling the goods/services in question.

Crypto peddlers rarely have an idea of how the world works. When it comes to tickets, this always comes up with NFTs and it's amazing how little they know (or care).

I had this conversation not too long ago, see my comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29282931

A bunch of people that probably haven’t bought a scalped ticket in their lives trying to explain how NFTs will revolutionise ticket sales is definitely peak crypto charlatan.

Tickets to a concert in the NFT world if you want so are a step back on what we had.

Back in my days, a Ticket was just a piece of paper. Without any name on it. The only information it had for what concert it was and what seat you had if there was the option. I could give it to anybody and he/she could go to the concert without any extra fee or a middleman.

Sounds like an immutable global record isn’t such a panacea after all…

How do you avoid anyone else putting CP on a blockchain because they can. And so a node runner always has this problem regardless of what say OpenSea does for example.

> I currently only like NFTs as representations of digital licenses or tickets etc anyway, so simple hashes work for me.

But we don't need NFTs & Blorkchains for that. Just a simple digital signature is enough. Take all the info of the ticket, hash it, sign it with your private key, put the result into a Matrix Code for convenience and done.

Very often the tokenURI is on IPFS meaning that the URI is in fact a hash of the digital asset. The digital asset can't change because that would result in a different IPFS uri.

Fyi, about 36% of NFTs use IPFS on eth and another 9% are entirely on chain. See yournfts.org

> They don't even have an on-chain hash of the digital asset

Yea... 45% of NFTs have their hash on chain https://yournfts.org/#stats. It isn't great but it isn't none.

Interesting point from the same source:

> For example, OpenSea serves most of the NFTs they mint over HTTP. If the OpenSea ever collapses, ~8% of NFTs vanish.

The NFTs will still exist and be tradeable outside of OpenSea even if OpenSea itself disappears because they live within a smart contract.

They will point to nothing and hence (hopefully) be worthless

Yep, exactly. Opensea hosts most of their minted NFTs on HTTP.

Open seas contract code is not open AFAIK (binary is obviously available but I have not seen source other than decompile) Many contracts can be updated by leveraging proxy contracts. They can delete your nft if you mint with their contact.

Legally owning a house is literally just having your name and the address of your house in a book.

EDIT: The actual power does not reside in the book. It resides in the mindshare this specific book has. Anyone can put anything in a book but only some people control the book that people pay attention to. Similar it is with fiat, cryptos and nfts. The power is not in the technology itself but in the mindshare they occupy. It is more about social engineering than software engineering.

I physically live in that house and nobody can trivially and completely legally take it down for good.

You can physically live in a house that you don't legally own. Those are two different concepts.

Not really the ability to physically occupy the house is one of the rights owning it gives you. There are other ways to gain that right but there is conceptual overlap there.

In some legal systems, physically occupying the house gives you ownership rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession

My tenant in the UK does not own the flat they occupy; my landlord in Berlin does own the flat I occupy. There are rules to say that landlords can’t just enter on a whim, and rent is a very common way to occupy a property.

Yes exactly, ownership gives you the right to occupy the property and you can also trade that right for rent as well as reaquire it. Hence conceptual overlap.

squatters.

eminent domain.

Yes, but the book has a legal authority backing it up saying that its entries are property rights to the listed address.

Buying an NFT just to have an NFT is like paying for an entry in a book with no further meaning. You just get to say that’s your entry.

Oh and the entry is an http url, so there’s a good chance it’ll 404 eventually (if you even get a status code back)

And where does legal authority come from? Social consensus - it's the same thing.

The legal edifice maintaining property rights also requires maintenance.

Sure, most things are 'just' social constructs if you reduce them to that, but notice how the state will literally kill you if you break some laws in some ways. Essentially, legal authority comes from a perceived violence monopoly.

The army and the police force. "Legal authority" is not a constraint on you, its what constraints the state's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence

This is true, but the flaw in your reasoning, and in the raison d'etre of NFT's in general, is that social consensus is the be all, end all.

There isn't really the problem of acquiring a 100% perfect copy of an asset in the real world. You can approximate an item, but you can't literally get the same exact thing down to the molecular composition. On the internet, this is absolutely possible (replace molecules with bytecode), and is I'd argue, one of the defining features of it.

The true secret sauce behind modern property rights is the enforcement through legal authority. In the event of a dispute, courts have potentially a few hundred years' worth of precedence. Following that, there are proven legal procedures to remove a person from unlawful possession of another's property, which hold penalties ranging from monetary fines to loss of freedom.

And the driving force behind that is social consensus, but on a case by case basis. There will be no such thing with NFT's. It's simply impossible to build it in.

The NFT is the property. Social consensus is why people want to own it. The blockchain enables the creation of an ownable digital record. Our legal system continue to function and will still arrest you if you steal an NFT.

Most people don’t understands existing IP laws (see what results you get when searching YouTube for “no copyright intended”); adding a new one isn’t likely to improve the situation, so I don’t accept that there is (nor that there is likely to be) a real social consensus in favour of NFTs.

> The legal edifice maintaining property rights also requires maintenance.

Hey, just want to point something out here. The quoted sentence is really important. Civil society doesn't just happen, we all (or at least most of us) have a vested interest in maintaining the legal edifice.

So tomorrow, be nice to someone in traffic. And show good grace and community when faced with one of the social frictions (like waiting in line).

Yes, but the legal system could back specific NFTs instead of specific books. That would give those NFTs meaning and value. Right now I just don't see why any government would want to do that.

The book is just a register, the power is in the legal system that defends that register and will settle disputes. Plus legally owning a house grants far more rights than merely having an entry in the register saying you do.

Not minshare only. It resides in the arrangements between organizations to enforce whatever rules areon the books regarding property rights. Smart contracts just put those rules into code on a blockchain. What is missing is the “enforcement” element.

But that may be a good thing to libertarians. NFT may be an early attempt to move past more violence-enabled business models for “intellectual property”, including the mode dominated by VCs for startups, and Music and Movie studios for artists

The stipulations of the book are enforceable by law. If you have the "mindshare" of the governing body and their means to create and enforce laws you are generally better off.

It's not the book/register or the mindshare. It's a central authority (sovereign government) and it's legal system that grants and enforces the ownership rights. Remove that authority and what do you have? Anarchy. There's a reason why central authority based systems have evolved. It reduces violence.

Similarly, the value of the NFT is not in the token but in the community (artist, other NFT holders) honoring it and sometimes enforcing certain rights.

But you can't verify that the content behind this URL was the same all the time. How can you enforce rights in a court if you can't prove that the content was the same.

If you have a hash of the content in the NFT verifying what it pointed at is trivial.

The sign analogy works. The person owning the sign can't change the house, like painting the walls. That's only for the person owning the house.

If you own an NFT you can't print the image on a t-shirt and sell it, because the artist has the copyright, not you.

Does it matter for the 99% who will never look at the on chain transaction or smart contract?

Sometimes knowing the technical layer and low level implementation details too well impedes in understanding / utilization of the actual abstracted task imo

> They don't even have an on-chain hash of the digital asset. It's like selling a sign pointing to houses for the price of the house, and claiming you own the house, hoping that the sign will increase in value the way the house does, and bragging about it.

If your metaphor is correct, it remains correct even with a hash being stored on-chain. Frankly, most NFT critiques seem just as thinly thought through as yours.

The NFT is a ledger entry that says you own an edition of a piece of digital art. People coalesce around this believe, because the edition was released by whoever owns the actual copyright (ideally the artist).

The link is conceptually irrelevant. Cryptopunks never had one. As long as the community of collectors remembers and agrees on what each ledger entry represents, there is no problem. A hash can help with this, which is why almost all high-value fine art NFTs have one (in their IPFS-url). No, moxie could not be more wrong when he thinks IPFS should be enforced; the NFT never represents a set of bytes, it always represents an idea. The NFT may link to a 4K render of the artist's 3D scene, but it also represents the 8K render.

The first tweet will always be the first tweet, in the same way as the first transatlantic flight has no physical presence. If Jack sells the first tweet as an NFT, it is no requirement that Twitter stay online for ever. It is merely strongly preferred that someone will archive it so it doesn't disappear from our collective memory, but that need not be the job of the NFT. The job of the NFT is simply to record your ownership of the concept. And you need a blockchain for this, to give it the credible neutrality needed for it to be considered something equivalent to real ownership; you can't have it be at the mercy of a single entity.

If you think paying money for database entries is stupid now, imagine how stupdi it would be if they were in Google Art, a product that will shut down in 3 years, and where Google will delete all your art when your country attacks a neighbour.

The problem is that NFTs aren't legally binding (and they really should never be, I'll start the campaign to assinate anybody who tries that).

It's all well and good to say you are selling some deed, but that doesn't provide you ownership in any meaningful way. Any of these knock off websites making bank off of "NFT" assets would be better served by dropping the NFT nonsense and just straight up selling links to your logged in account.

Congrats, you have rediscovered online token stores. We already paid too much money for world of warcraft gold, now we get to kill trees doing it.

Honestly, the idiots these days...

> And you need a blockchain for this, to give it the credible neutrality needed for it to be considered something equivalent to real ownership; you can't have it be at the mercy of a single entity.

No, you don't, and yes, you can. And in fact, you yourself say that this is still the case just a few paragraphs earlier:

> People coalesce around this believe, because the edition was released by whoever owns the actual copyright (ideally the artist).

You are right, you can, and people have, for example: seditionart.com

I certainly encourage you to buy NFTs on on those centralized websites. Nevertheless, paying for ledger entries representing art didn't really gain popularity before blockchains, so there is that.

It hasn't "gained popularity", it's a bullshit hype fuelled entirely by scams.

NFTs have zero value and are yet another non-example for the usefulness of blockchains.

What would the image being on the chain change? You're buying a signature.

you would be, if the reference at least contained a content hash. as is, you literally just buy a link

The content hash would prove nothing. What you're buying is "this NFT was minted by this artist, as confirmed by their Twitter or verified OpenSea account or whatever". The value is totally dependent on the social contract. Some random person minting the same NFT with the same hash would be worthless, unless they impersonate the artist.

Fair point. Indeed content hash and signature from the artist would have to be on-chain, and somehow the signing party needs to be established as the real one as well. So... it's even worse that none of that is happening. With NFTs, to me it really just looks like BS all the way down.

I also think it's BS but not because of what the NFT contains or not. The signature is already intrinsically part of the NFT since you can see what wallet minted it on the blockchain. When you mint an NFT you sign the transaction on the blockchain with your wallet.

As you say what actually matters is proof that the signing party is the real one. And this is where the social contract matters. What gives it value is that artist X says they own wallet Y and that you can see that NFT Z was minted by wallet Y. It's just a fugazi but it can't be fixed by adding stuff to the NFT object.

What you're literally buying is just a uint256 number + the address of the minting wallet, not even a URL or link. The URL comes from feeding that number into a function of the smart contract, but you don't "own" that smart contract. You just "own" the number.

See the spec as it were: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721

> The pair (contract address, uint256 tokenId) will then be a globally unique and fully-qualified identifier for a specific asset on an Ethereum chain.

And while the code of that smart contract is immutable, it's still code and the outputs of any given function can change even when given the same inputs. The code can of course poison itself by observing other state or even delegating to other contracts, allowing forms of mutability of the contract itself.

Which, reminder, you don't own in an NFT. So hope you really really like the uint256 you bought. Also hope you have a good grasp of solidarity & really did an analysis of that smart contract first. That's a totally reasonable thing to expect people to do, right?

I could write on a piece of paper that I grant you exclusive rights to something I created for $x and then you give me $x and we both sign the piece of paper. A court would consider that piece of paper valid which makes the contract real. Replace the piece of paper with a text file with cryptographic signatures and a court may consider that valid as well.

Isn't an NFT basically such a text file embedded into a decentralized marketplace? It's real if you can find a court that says it's real.

I could write on a piece of paper that I grant you exclusive rights to the piece of paper and sell it to you for $x.

The piece of paper is real, but it doesn’t matter if there is the address of a house written on it or whatever - the only think you own is the piece of paper.

That seems a better description of most NFTs which have no contract meaning at all.

Absolutely not. We can't have NFT land deeds (for example) because the legal system has the power to takeover your land (e.g. if you fail to pay taxes), but the legal system doesn't have the capacity to force you to transfer your NFT, especially if you delete your private key, in which case nobody can ever transfer it again.

If the legal system says you don't own the land, but the NFT says you do, the legal system wins.

The NFT appears useful only when it happens to do exactly what the legal system would already do, and is useless when it disagrees with the legal system. As a result, minting and transferring was a giant waste of electricity; you should have just registered your deed at the county recorder's office, the old fashioned way.

But that is all solved with signing and verifying in cryptography. Why does it need to be on the blockchain? I think you are asking the same thing somewhat. In many countries (at least in the EU) the gov now has mobile apps (and horrible desktop versions but the idea is the same) which generates a key pair on your device, sends the public key to the gov where it is connected to your tax number and that is it. This involved a bunch of security steps like your bank. Works very well but unfortunately it is not useable yet by any company; once it is, signing by pen is in the past. It is efficient and blockchain is not needed. But I guess the blockchain fans will argue that if your gov suddenly turns Russia, this centralised version is now not trusted anymore. And they would be right, but like you say; neither are the courts so it falls apart anyway? What’s the solution that is solved by the chain?

The main point of it is to take out thridparties to fight against anything they could enforce. Blockchains are public registries where you cryptographically sign everything you do to ensure it happened. NFTs are digital assets, be it code, music or pictures. You can prove their unicity through the blockchain and if you were to trade an asset you'd have the proof it happened too. Now you could sell your house on a safe p2p market without the need to involve banks for example. It's really the main goal behind the crypto ecosystem, to provide a safe way to stop relying on often abusive thirdparties.

But you are not answering the question of my parent and myself; you can sell your house or land or whatever on the p2p market, but if the government doesn't allow you to sell your house or land, then that's that. You got money, the new owner got some digital snippet of something they now not own. Which makes it centralised; no different than it is now but with far more risks (abused smart contracts stealing the money for your house) and no recourse. So the problem is; what is exactly the decentralised advantage of this when you still need the same courts etc. Sure, no banks IFF the seller takes crypto and if the country in question is crypto friendly etc, but AML laws will kick in anyway. So I see the theory for having a house NFT and everyone singing and dancing the decentral dance, but in reality, this won't work or it will be exactly the same as any house deed transfer. I rather would see a gov that has my certified public key and I can sign from my mobile app to sell my house with one click and a notary handling it all without any parties having to rock up to some office etc. Blockchain fixes that , but no differently in UX (I think and I don't hear anything different) but far more inefficiently (and risky as there is no rollback) than what we can do with some cryptography and a php crud app?

Edit: in short, I would love to talk to a proponent of blockchain who has a more compelling story than 'transfer value'. I mean; I see the case for transferring money to and from warzones etc; if your gov does not allow you to use your money or doesn't allow you to buy a more stable currency than your country has, then this is a means, if kept on chain, for you to have liquidity.

It's not the signing that OP criticizes. It's that the "something" is defined by an URL whose destination can change, and otherwise none of the "something"'s content (like, for example a hash) is in the contract.

I doubt a court would consider such a vague definition of content as "real".

> Isn't an NFT basically such a text file embedded into a decentralized marketplace?

Well, without the cryptographic hash, sure, and without any particular rights either...

What also is amazing is that people are now buying art for huge amounts of money, not because it's good art or it has any value, but because it's NFT art.

So it's even worse than you say, they are selling a sign pointing to a very cheap house, but not for the price of the house but by overvaluing the sign's value.

Because of the speculation and the “hidden” drive to make money (it’s basically a 21th century goldrush) makes it that it will never be what proponents usually advocate (decentralized, everyone benefits, open)

2002-2008 internet (before Facebook) was more Web3 in spirit probably then this Web3 bamboozle.

My sense is that a lot of people who are zealotic about "web3" are people who never got to experience pre-FB, and want to do something about it.

I wish them all the best, but I'm not optimistic yet.

... and then the NFT art itself is pixelated - its not vector based - it doesn't scale. So really you've bought art that only looks right at a specific resolution.

Your house analogy is not really correct, since in a digital space, you can have an infinite number of the same house, and an infinite number of people living in that house.

I consider it more like a certificate. Some cool architect made an incredible house. Lots of people live in that exact same house. But there is one who can say he bought the certificate straight from the architect himself. It doesn't give him anything extra legally.

You can indeed argue what extra value this 'certificate' really has, except for some bragging rights. But I think that is the point of it: bragging rights.

Exactly. NFTs are digital trading cards. I don't know why people can't wrap their heads around the simple concept.

Oh they can, but that's just the public appearance; they get excited over them because they see them as potentially high return investments. But of course, the big fish already got their money (and added it to the pile they earned from a couple of scam coins, artificially inflated crypto, etc).

Nobody is under any illusions here. Except the media and their gullible audience; the media is in on it and the people behind it have a financial interest in it, and the gullible audience is easily impressed with techno-jargon, the potential of getting rich overnight, and FOMO.

So Shaquille O’Neal bought this Bored Ape NFT: https://opensea.io/assets/0x60e4d786628fea6478f785a6d7e70477...

Are you claiming that this NFT, which everybody knows passed the hands of Shaq, will be worthless in the future?

Bored Ape is kind of like the art of Andy Warhol. Yes, the creators of bored ape made a lot of money, but so did Andy Warhol. Is there anything wrong with that?

If you want to call that all a scam, that's fine. But somehow calling Bored Ape a scam and Warhol art not, is weird. Warhol also had plenty of critics.

If you don't like NFT's that fine, no problem with that. But maybe you could at least try to understand why some people want to spend money on that. And not "because they are a gullible audience".

> Are you claiming that this NFT, which everybody knows passed the hands of Shaq, will be worthless in the future?

That's very likely, yes. It's just some digital trading card that he once owned. It's nothing in comparison to an artifact like a shirt from a game or even an autograph. And what are those worth? Much much less than what this URL was passed around for between rich crypto wash pumping bros.

> Are you claiming that this NFT, which everybody knows passed the hands of Shaq, will be worthless in the future?

In this case, absolutely. https://checkmynft.com/?address=0x60e4d786628fea6478f785a6d7... ("Asset Strength: Poor")

The NFT is a simple link to an URL hosted at boredapeyachtclub.com. Even if the owner backs up the image on IPFS, the NFT won't point to the IPFS backup; the NFT will always immutably point to BAYC's website.

Inevitably, BAYC will go down, and when it does, the NFT will be a receipt pointing to nothing.

("But it's a receipt to nothing that Shaq once held!" … yeahhh, sure.)

Worthless but beautiful?

Well, they’re digital receipts. Because the thing that it’s representing could still disappear or go away. Maybe that has heaps of value, maybe once the server ther points to the thing you’re meant to own goes down or the asset at the url changes it becomes worth 2 parts of sweet f all

> Because the thing that it’s representing could still disappear or go away.

Not if you, the owner, or someone else, stores a copy. Even if the URL associated with the URL is broken, it doesn't change the fact that it still represents the thing people want it to represent.

NFTs are not a backup system for your data.

But then the receipt is even less representative of the underlying thing you’ve gone and bought in opensea or whatever. Like, it’s not even pointing to the same bits on the same platter somewhere that’s meant to be so special.

Don’t get me wrong, I get that it’s not meant to be a data backup and it can be totally disassociated from the ‘thing’ - but setting that concept up and just being a bit more aware of what you are actually getting might make some people a bit more hesitant to buy a digital receipt with a url that may or may not 404 in the future. Great, you’ve got a receipt - for something that potentially millions of people also have a copy of. What makes your receipt at that point, if/when the underlying disappears, worth anything?

And how do you want to prove that the copy you made had the same content that was stored behind the URL? What if the host changes the content behind that URL to something completely different. No one can prove that it's actually the thing you copied that was behind this NFT. It's really worthless in my eyes.

A hash of the bytes is really is really useful for this kind of authentication. But for actively traded and popular NFTs that isn't strictly necessary. The community knows what they represent.

They are not cards, they don't store any meaningful data unless you could make the resource immutable.

They are more like "Digital trading links-to-assets-you-have-no-control-over"?

Your mistake is thinking that it matters where the data is stored. But storing your trading card image file in the Github Arctic Code Vault just makes it more permanent, it does not change the nature of your NFT at all; neither does storing it on the blockchain.

The thing is, that the NFT is just worthless data as long as you don't know what's behind it. And if the people that currently do no longer believe in NFTs the nodes will disappear and your data stored on the blockchain is gone as well. In the end the blockchain is just a decentralised transactional database, I really don't get the fuzz about it. With proof of stake it even looses a big chunk of that decentralisation.

Doesn't the nature of the NFT have anything to do on the content to be found under that link?

NFTs are promoted with those images, and if that's unimportant, then what's the difference between an NFT and some random coin transaction?

Of course, but that content can still exist if the link is broken.

In fact, the file is itself only one if many representation of thr artwork. Reencode the jpeg, you get a different file, but we still think it and the NFT are linked.

That's what they want you to believe. The truth is, to keep the influx of money into the crypto-sphere flowing, you need more people to invest money. This gets harder though, because most people who really care about crypto already invested.

There are only so many monkeys you can attract.

NFT is a solution to this problem: You promise a high return of investment for additional monkeys to invest.

This keeps on going until the whole thing crashes down burning. Those who invested first and really care already pulled out their share. The monkeys will suffer though.

Thanks for calling me a monkey. Also thanks for calling me smart of taking profits (I can't lose in crypto anymore).

I used some of my profits to send Ukraine some ETH, so did many other people I see.

So monkeys invest in crypto. What do you call those that keep fiat? Fiat like the Turkish lira or Ruble.

What about a Russian who bought some stablecoins right before the war, is that also a monkey?

There's some "lots-of-money-involved-therefore-valuable" fallacy going on here. The thinking goes:

* NFTs are explained, they sound kind of pointless

* but there is so much money involved!

* so much money involved brings lots of smart folks

* there are lots of smart folks working in NFTs space, they cannot all be wrong

* hence, there must be a there there, and we're are not smart enough to understand it

intense post-truth world vibes here

If they were just trading cards, then they'd be bad, a Ponzi scheme where everybody's trying to convince everybody that their trading cards will be worth more in the future.

(One way the scammers promote the Ponzi scheme is by saying "these trading cards are so much more than trading cards," in deliberately confusing ways. That's why "people can't wrap their heads around the simple concept." The scammers are trying to conceal it.)

But NFTs are way worse than trading cards, because every time you transfer one, it wastes more electricity than an ordinary person uses in a year. So this Ponzi scheme is damaging the planet, too.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8 "Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2°C"

Buying assets low and selling high cannot be a ponzi scheme, no matter how you try to position said asset.

This is not entirely correct. NFTs can and do exist entirely on-chain.

For reference: https://skerritt.blog/response-to-moxie/

> > Looking at many of the NFTs on popular marketplaces being sold for tens, hundreds, or millions of dollars, that URL often just points to some VPS running Apache somewhere.

> This is a lie.

Whenever somebody writes this, I immediately stop reading.

A lie is a statement of fact which is incorrect and the one stating it knew that it's incorrect. Claiming that a statement is a lie is an extraordinary claim that needs strong evidence, i.e., that the statement is indeed incorrect and that the author of it was aware of that at the time of writing. Neither is such evidence provided nor is it even attempted.

Incorrect. Cyber Brokers, Chain Runners and umpteen others going back years are 100% on-chain. But the majority are either on a centralized cloud provider at worst and IPFS at best, yes.

"People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will".

Moxie Marlinspike

https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

It’s called choice. There are a panoply of email providers yet only one Twitter. And you don’t need to add any DKIM nonsense to get the blockchain to accept transactions broadcast from your own node.

> It’s called choice.

Fair enough.

But Moxie's point is that such choice has consequences and implications. Centralization is the most obvious of them.

Those "I spent 1 hour looking at crypto and here's my opinion" takes on HN are starting to get tiring, because debunking them takes way more energy than writing the article. And then a next mutation gets posted sometime later with exact same theses, again and again.

The only critique from people that really understand how it works basically boils down to: the vision of a smart contract based economy has potential, but I don't believe the transition from the mostly-ponzi phase to the real economy phase can happen because of [reasons, usually legal].

>Your wallet (MetaMask)[..] it’s still a Go app on AWS

>And if Web3 is “decentralized”, then why can OpenSea take away your NFTs?

it can't

do a bare minimum of research

Crypto IMHO -> We are changing the wheels on the bus while it is moving. To do so, we have to use the old wheels until we have all the wheels in place to take off the old wheels.

You can't replace an entire infrastructure, this large, overnight.

I'm curious, Are there any web 3 sites worth visiting? Can someone point to something that I should try out to access web 3?

Maybe lens.dev or poap.xyz for social uses

hmm those both look like B2B things of one kind or another (Social media building block and NFTs for social events). Is there something I might like as a consumer? could be literally anything that I could try. I'm just curious about the user experience.

Poap.xyz is a fun user focused project

Is IPFS “Web3”? Seems like it should be. I have used IPFS a number of times and am a fan, but keeping up with buzzwords is a lot.

Yawn. Once again. Another boring and weak article with no new arguments.

Not all NFTs are JPEGs and there are those that have utility like ENS [0] which anyone can register a domain and it cannot be seized. That concept works well for identities in general and here is a use case of this [1][2].

Lets address all of this:

> Web3 Platforms are Centralized

It's true for OpenSea, Alchemy and MetaMask (Owned by Infura) but that is the point of platforms. They are not hiding that fact and they know it. However, OpenSea is not Ethereum and the blockchain is the one that is claiming to be 'decentralized'.

Not everyone is using MetaMask? Maybe they are using Trust Wallet, Portis, WalletConnect or Dapper or even Ledger as their wallet.

Am I forced to use a centralized wallet like MetaMask?

> Mining is Centralized

Yeah, PoW is garbage and getting centralized due to the mining pools, but not all of Web3 cryptocurrencies are using PoW (or even PoS) are they.

> Blockchain Sucks, Period

> We need a hyper-efficient system that takes minimal computing resources to scale to a whole planet of users, while making it easy for newcomers to join the network.

Algorand? Solana?, Terra?, Stellar?, Avalanche?, Nano?

Efficient alternatives already exist and the author's arguments have been refuted to death.

Just ignore cryptocurrencies and the hype of Web3 if you don't like it then, but once again they (and others) are even incapable of simply doing that, no matter how many years they keep watching it and writing the same articles.

Until the next time we complain about Web3 on HN, I am begging anyone that knows it's doomed downfall to just ignore it and let it die. Can you do just that?

[0] https://ens.domains/

[1] https://www.skiff.org/

[2] https://www.skiff.org/updates/skiff-ens

I liked this post till the bullshit paragraph on mining which is wrong on many sides. Bitcoin makes 0.1% rich richer? That’s it? What the heck man, Bitcoin is a gift to humanity and it’s truly decentralised compared to others. Bitcoin mining isn’t centralised, there’s a decent percentage of solo mining which it’s increasing over time. But I get your point. Also what’s wrong this kind of centralisations on mining pools? They’re just coordinators and there are many. Unfortunately I see biased information on that part.

The author is just defining "decentralized" based on what he can come up with arguments against. In doing so, he misses some very important properties of this decentralization (that he either doesn't realize or doesn't have arguments for).

To me, web3 is decentralized in that the user data is exposed and freely available to be composed upon.

For example, when someone makes a deposit (say of ERC20 USDC to earn interest, around 3.0% currently) on https://compound.finance, that data is freely available and the "receipt" becomes another token (the ERC20 USDC cToken). [1]

This token can now be used for other things, on any other protocol, without the involvement or permission of compound itself. For example, there is a "compound" pool on https://curve.fi that allows users to deposit cTokens so that they can earn interest on their stablecoins while also providing liquidity for stablecoin swaps and earning swap fees as well on top. [2] In fact, with this pool, the user can deposit/withdrawal just pure ERC20 USDC instead and curve will deposit/withdrawal that into/from compound on behalf of the user, again, with no involvement of compound at all. (other than interacting with its "immutable" smart contract)

> As a sidenote: Note that with web2, much of your data is locked away. Eg, twitter's closed api, gmail marking so many emails from self-hosted as spam, fb everything, American airlines not allowing scraping of a user's point wallet, cc points being non-transferrable, etc etc.

This deposit then gives the user back another ERC20 token "cCrv" that can then be used in other DeFi protocols without the involvement or authorization of curve.

At this point people are talking past each other because "centralization" can be used to refer to many things. The author's is just critiquing a tiny portion of the term decentralization (infrastructure), which I guess he most understands since his day job involves that.

[1] https://compound.finance/docs/ctokens

[2] https://curve.fi/compound

Well that's a lot of jargon to digest. Seems to be a combination of speculative market with ability to vote on various DeFi projects? Anyway, I have serious concerns about how governance is actually implemented in DeFi compared to how it is presented to stakeholders. At best, this is a tool for gambling. At worst, a tool for ponzi schemes to compete with each other.

Web2 is also centralized, just to be clear. And what’s more, Web2 and Web3 have been horribly derailed by the profit motive:

Web2 by VC investment (private ponzi schemes)

Web3 by meme tokens and NFTs (public ponzi schemes)

Here is my response to Moxie Marlinspike’s excellent criticism a month ago, explaining why decentralization IS vitally important and what we can do to rescue Web3 from itself:

https://community.intercoin.org/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram...

We need a “web4” that actually implementa utility and gets mainstream adoption. I wrote extensively about how to get there.

The PDF version: https://intercoin.org/proposal.pdf

Examples of applications already built and tested to achieve this: https://intercoin.org/applications

The massive pace of blockchain technology, applications of math, innovation, and open experimentation is great to see.

Don't try to stifle innovation because users are finding ways to interact that are simple, or you think its not decentralized enough. There is great work being done beneath the surface applications you are complaining about - by respected researchers.

Cheers

> massive pace of blockchain technology

What massive pace of what technology? It's a ledger (1600s technology) protected by a digital signature (30 year old technology). What exactly is the 'innovation' work being done by 'respected researchers'?

Some projects I know where innovation is being done.

Monero [1]: Completely annonymous yet secure currency

Truebit [2]: Decentralized verifiable computation

Oasis [3]: Decentralized, fast and cheap transactions with annonymous smart contracts

Marlin [4]: Infraestructure to speed up any blockchain

[1] https://www.getmonero.org [2] https://truebit.io [3] https://oasisprotocol.org [4] https://www.marlin.org/

Once more we're reminded what a niche property, almost a non-issue, trustlessness is. People and organizations would choose trusty, and accountable, individuals and/or systems over trustless machinery any other day.

Crypto is about finance: trading, speculation, banking the unbanked ...

Technology is an enabler that allows "regulatory arbitrage" beyond that it does not matter at all.

If I want to create a bank; hook into my national central bank, join the swift network, buy and sell securities for my clients. Is that a technical problem? Sure it is hard and silly from a tech side but that is all just a question of hiring some specialists.

The real problem is that I would be under tight regulation, right down to the central bank deciding on who I hire as CEO.

With crypto, I can just hook myself in.

That is the difference.

,, But for me to go into crypto, the ship has sailed a long time ago’’

I have heared this over and over from people since when Bitcoin was $200.

Bitcoin mining is sadly somewhat centralized, but people fleeing Ukraine and Russia sometimes don’t have much choice of how they move all their net worth through the borders.

A CEO of an American company with Russian employees said that Bitcoin practically saved their lives and the CEO could help them escape the totalitarian regime.

I think the blog post of Moxie Marlinspike is related to this. It was also discussed some weeks ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29845208

https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

The NFT thing has a serious pricing problem. It has the central control of centralization, and the pricing of an inefficient blockchain. Putting content on Decentraland is expensive. There's a US $500 "curation fee" per item. And it seems to cost at least $18 to sell something through OpenSea.

Such transaction costs knock out most of the applications that are not "Make Money Fast".

What are some interesting p2p or otherwise decentralized content platforms today that could be next to gain critical mass in users and content?

I know webrtc lets you do things like peertube, webtorrent, and p2p videoconferencing, then we have mastodon and some other social platforms, and various relatively unpopular IM platforms.

And good old email of course, maybe that could even incrementally bootstrap some new usage model eg in IM.

Loved this line in the article:

> It’s also sad to see my dad hyping up Web3 in his LinkedIn.

Conjures up images of a domesticated, pipe-smoking, squarely dressed old chap sitting at his Windows 95 computer saying "This world wide web three-point-O with blockchains is the latest thing dontchyknow" and kid is rolling his eyes and saying "Sure dad. Sure."

> When Miami and Houston go underwater, a16z will be partly responsible.

Not a climate change denier, but do people seriously believe these events will happen soon? Even if these models are right on ocean levels raising, you have to believe that humans would find a way to engineer a solution to keep these cities afloat so to speak.

"I didn’t really want to work on Windows or .NET for a living, and developing on Windows is still a struggle for me, but I had to." That will probably not help him on his next evaluation for a bonus or promotion...

Gif of drying tears with cash

I think the way I've started to think about Blockchain/Bitcoin is that it's just pure regulatory arbitrage. First Bitcoin was about being able to conduct illegal transactions, now it's about being able to scam people and conduct market manipulation. So that's a bearish sign right? I don't think so, if you look at the history of silicon valley companies that pursue regulatory arbitrage models like Uber initially grow because it allows them to outcompete the incumbent, but as the regulations catch up, they are now the incumbent already and so the re-imposition of regulations doesn't destroy them, it just holds them in place, having already got to a strong position. Uber isn't worthless, but it's worth about as much as if you'd just added up all the taxi businesses they had replaced.

Web3 feels a lot more like marketing BS done by people who are late to the game.

I am developing a decentralised identification system using wearable's Hopefully people will realise the benefit of not having centralised security control. I also realise that people are not rational.

Am I wrong in my assumption that centralizing increases efficiency while decentralizing increases costs/inefficiencies but provides security gains. Very broadly speaking

Title seems to be counterintuitive.

Thats the point. Web3 is worst of both worlds. Its centralized yet still very inefficient at its goal

While this forum has lots of people who are into tech and finance inexplicably getting their panties in a bunch over crypto, YCombinator keeps incubating crypto startups and making big money...

Web3's opportunity is crypto trading. I'm working on automating it, with an MVP due soon: https://tradecast.one

Every single day, the exact same article, with the exact same points, repeated the exact same way, and every time they are wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. (But of course it reached the top of HN with hundreds of upvotes.)

Just for one glaringly obvious example, look at

> And if Web3 is “decentralized”, then why can OpenSea take away your NFTs?

No, they cannot take away your NFTs, they can hide your listing, at best, but bonus points for linking to another crypto smear article that completely misunderstands how crypto and web3 work as well.

You people don't even try to understand what you're criticizing, you're just parroting disinformation because you're mad at crypto.

For those who want to know what is a NFT: Imagine you get the hacker news logo (or any other digital asset, like an image,video,song etc). Then I take that image and apply to it a hash funtion to generate an id, a number that later I put into any blockchain (usually ethereum). As the blockchain is ordered the first one who does this process stores in the blockchain the asset... and so its property. Later someone else can take the same logo, apply the same hash to get the same id, but as I said The first who did it has the property because the blocks (chain) are ordered.

This document describes the smart contract for an NFT: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721

The base contract does not contain any info about the asset the NFT applies to and the metadata extension only allows you to store a name and a URI (which hopefully still works and still points to the object in the future). There is no object hash as far as I can tell.

Afaik there can be several NFTs for the same object (URI) and none of them is inherently more legitimate than the other. You'd need some kind of endorsement by tha artist to know which NFT is the "real" one. But I'm not an expert so please correct my if I'm wrong.

> Afaik there can be several NFTs for the same object (URI) and none of them is inherently more legitimate than the other. You'd need some kind of endorsement by tha artist to know which NFT is the "real" one. But I'm not an expert so please correct my if I'm wrong.

You are correct. Note that there can be multiple different URLs pointing to the same file. And note that multiple files (unique sequences of bytes) can represent the same object, say, a JPEG with slightly different compression ratio.

The point then is that neither the the url nor the hash matters. What matters is that the artist says "this NFT represents this work of mine". Everything else is just extra.

Please avoid to comment if you are not an expert, thanks

Such non-constructive comments are not appreciated here.

Giving priority to the first guy is just a convention, isn't it?

I wonder why in HN you usually find comments of excepcional quality except when it comes to crypto. A NFT doesn't enforce property, humans do. A NFT it's only a token that can have an arbitrary meaning, but with the warranty that all transactions done with that token are legitimate. So no, you can't steal a digital asset merely being the first to mint its NFT, because if no one recognizes your property no one is going to buy it from you.

This seems to be beating a dead horse.

Who actually gives attention to this knows this already. People that want to gamble still throw money at it anyway. Eh whatever.

So much useless and false information. These types of know it all posts that just spread ignorance aren’t helping anyone at anything at all…

> It’s also sad to see my dad hyping up Web3 in his LinkedIn.

My father is impervious to subtweets because he won't read anything I write LOL

>a few white crypto bros happy.

I agree with most of the arguments within this write up but the racism in the final line is not very cool.

The parameter being optimized for in crypto is cash inflow, not actual functionality/efficiency/decentralization.

Is it just me or did no one (at the time) call the mobile revolution "Web2" ?

First car slower than horse.

Can someone explain what Web3 is in 50 words or less to a layman?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3

These are the first 56 words of the article:

> "Web3 is an idea for a new iteration of the World Wide Web based on blockchain technology, which incorporate concepts such as decentralization and token-based economics. Some technologists and journalists have contrasted it with Web 2.0, wherein they say data and content are centralized in a small group of companies sometimes referred to as 'Big Tech'."

The first sentence is vague. The existing Web also incorporates concepts such as decentralization and token-based economics.

The second sentence is a social/political characteristic, not a technical one. There is no reason the Web must be an oligopoly.

Similarly, there's no reason "web3" must not be one.

So we're still left without a 50-word description of web3. The above is a vague statement followed by an aspirational (rather than descriptive) statement.

No.

or ever a 1000 words!

Mostly decentralization I think. Instead of going to Cloudflare for CDN, AWS for file storage, everything is hosted on other people's computers for a fee.

It's a bit of a misnomer. Web2 was supposed to be a utopian version of the open Web where all data was available via API, and the noble task was to connect all this data with programs until all information was available to the world. Web3 is really the same utopia wrapped up in the blockchain, perhaps with money replacing data and blockchains replacing APIs.

65 words, but still ...

Web3 is hosting content on a blockchain.

web 1 = read

web 2 = write

web 3 = own

I prefer

Web 1 = amateur

Web 2 = commercialized

Web 3 = financialized

> web 3 = own

1. How would this work for me as a user? Are web 3 "websites" (or whatever constitutes a service or company) not able to retain a copy of my data? Or phrased in another way, what prevents websites from also /owning/ my data?

2. How would this work for me as a service? Aside from my service's domain and internet address which are annoyingly hard to "own", what else is there to own that I don't already own?

I don't share hn's irrational hatred towards crypto so I'm not against joining whatever web3 is supposed to be (in principle) but I've yet to be shown a single benefit in doing so.

Give me a single clear benefit to using or offering a web3 service.

Imagine there is a social media site with a friends list feature. Instead of the site owning the friends social graph there are a few transactions on chain the say who are friends with. The site looks at that data to automatically populate your friends list when you use your web wallet to sign in with them. No username/password logins needed in this world.

The user can update their own social graph completely separate from the site with them having no control over who are are/aren't friends with. Now parts of the site are still centralized meaning that they could ignore whatever is on chain, but in that case its a lot easier for a competitor to start up, the users go over there with their web wallet sign on and boom the social graph is fully imported for them. Can even have parts of their profile/nft profile picture and ENS name come over as well.

I hope that gets the gist of it, and it is still a long way from fully being realized but there are already beginnings with ENS profiles and avatars easily used between sites and lens protocol trying to make the social graph aspect. https://lens.dev/

I'll quote Ubik at you in 100 words.

===

The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please." He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. Again it remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you."

"I think otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt."

...he found the contract. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.

"You discover I'm right," the door said. It sounded smug.

===

An attempt to stay relevant by piggybacking on the historical success of the web 2.0 brand, pushed by those personally invested in crypto, but who are totally not pushing this for their own profit.

Or, less sarcastically, it's a collection of technologies that attempt to link the blockchain with the "real world", supposedly bringing back decentralization to the web in the process. I'd like to elaborate but there's really nothing more to elaborate on, the entire thing is a vague collection of ideas (such as "maybe users could use blockchain-based microtransactions to pay for the sites they use instead of being served adverts") that nobody's actually figured out what to do with. Why exactly blockchain is required for these ideas, or exactly what ideas constitute "web 3.0" is still an unanswered question...

Web1 was read only (ex. blog)

Web2 is Read+Write (all interactive apps - email travel booking, stock trading etc. However, the content of these are owned by mega or small corp)

Web3 is Read+Write &'Own' your data. By virtue of blockchain tech you can take your data/content and use some other service. You have your NFTs, you have your Bitcoins, you can use any service to manage those.

So if “web1” was supposedly read only and the example of that is a blog, who wrote the blogs?

I agree, i had a bigger tirade written about versioning the web, into such 'cleanly' delineated markings, but I know it'd upset the hive mind.

Defining web versions is a jerk move.

I know its 'unsocial' and 'nasty' , it has to be said, we should feeding the jerks.

Forums were read/write applications that should be part of "web 2.0", and they existed in the early 2000s. Then Gmail came along, which was the first "web 2.0" application, and eventually HTML5 came around the corner, which truly meant "web 2.0" was now ubiquitous. The mega corps took over the internet but in my experience that didn't happen until there were at least three popular "web2" definitions.

These terms are meaningless and arbitrary. I've never heard of popularized "read only" websites, even in the late 90s websites had things like guest books where you could leave a comment.

I'm also not sure about the legal ownership one might derive from the blockchain. Going by legal standards, I don't think you own anything unless you sign a sales agreement that says the cryptocurrency exchange means something related to ownership.

Web1: run a server, people (clients) post content, and you save it on your server.

Web2: pay someone else to run a server "in the cloud". They save the content.

Web3: run a server with all your own content. Other people run clients that index and let you search other peoples' content.

Concisely: Web3 is the same as Web1, but with client-server the other way around.

Except that "smart contracts" etc. are very much paying someone else to run a server in the cloud.

Is freenet web3?

Someone created a JS library to interact with the Ethereum blockchain and named it web3. Making it appear like it was future of the web. In reality it was just one more attempt to make blockchain look authentic and useful.

Blockchain has only one real use - storing tokens. Someone needs to pay real money for the tokens for the token creators to cash out. So they keep cooking up new ways to attract unsuspecting common people into the cryptoverse. Web3 is that.

web1 - read from centralized servers, send 1:1

web2 - read/write/contribute to centralized servers, who moderate ownership

web3 - anyone can read, write, host. Consume for free(termed gasless), but contribution costs. Trustless, so self attesting of ownership.

Content in web2 was free because of an ad supported model.

I think it's important to note that content is free in the web3 world. Which means that anything can bubble up. And when it does - ownership is important.

Proving ownership needs gas but doesn't need anyone. Contribution needs gas.

Time will tell if contributing to blockchains will remain gas-supported or if consumers will be willing to settle for X, to contribute for free. X could be be rev share or loss of control via some centralization or custody.

There always will and rightly should always continue to exist - opportunities to bring mass adoption via better UX. This may lead to a centralized service who identifies and fixes this gap eg- metamask. Good for them to identify and execute something that people wanted. It's all about finding opportunities in a market eventually.

>centralized servers

The internet was not designed to be centralized. It become centralized because everybody realized centralization was a way easier way to do everything.

Crypto is a scam that is approaching bezzle, and the early entrants need one last big round of rubes so that they can cash out, web3 is the latest of a long series of meaningless buzzwords to draw in the last suckers.

"but we are just to make a few white rich crypto bros richer than ever before"

I was about to be with you until you unnecessarily brought race into this. Do you have reliable statistics on the race of the major miners and does it even matter?

And by taking a single inflammatory and ultimately inconsequential soundbite from the article, you now risk derailing the entire discussion into a flamewar.

Assuming, of course, that wasn't your original intent to begin with.

You see, point taken.

But I do wonder if your comment would be the same and the soundbite still be inconsequential had the targeted race been a certain other one... allow me to just state that. Am observing interesting change in societal norms

Yet another article from a person who missed out on Bitcoin.

well for Web3 is simple just ask the question, does your web3.0 project involve crypto currency model, if it does it's not web3.0

How many times do we have to have the same misinformation shoved down our throats lol

https://skerritt.blog/response-to-moxie/

As long as there are still some idiots calling it "misinformation" because they want to believe so very hard in all the crypto bullshit.

The response is full of handwavy "it's being worked on" and "this is true, but..." and the full-on admission (without apparently realizing) that it's all a completely meaningless game since the real word in the form of the legal system simpyl overrides whatever your blockchain says.

> just to make a few white crypto bros happy.

Causal racism

This post is poorly written by someone severely misinformed or deliberately dishonest and at best seriously naive about how technoology is adopted and evolves. Sad that people would give it any attention.

Yes: Tor is "somewhat decentralized" in that there are 9 servers run by people to maintain the directory instead of 1, and Roger Dingledine--one of the main people behind Tor--claims to have met in person only like 2/3rds of the participants; but is it as centralized as Etheteum? No. Most "web3" tech (god I hate that term as someone actively in this space :/), BTW, literally are based at least some way--if not extremely literally--on DHTs... including Ethereum, whose nodes self-organize using the Kademlia DHT model. The problem is that you have to figure out some way to deal with sybil and eclipse attacks--which I2P (referenced as somehow good in this article) was so bad at dealing with that it was essentially destroyed by the UCSB security lab, the principal investigator of whom, if you now talk to him years later, stopped bothering to research I2P as they never bothered to really address previous complaints--is that you need to figure out some way to make it hard to join the network (without throwing up your hands in defeat and simply assuming that 9 hobbyists are going to be sufficient to police a network like Tor, which we know is precarious as people keep finding new large, dominating entities to report about every few years), and that's exactly what all the work on cryptocurrencies is about: figuring out the incentive structure for how to avoid these attacks we have been studying since well before Bitcoin pioneered Nakamoto probalistic consensus (I was doing distributed systems research in like 2003 and we had been talking about these attacks for years earlier even then) and then how to protect and come to consensus on that incentive system itself (as you rapidly end up figuring out you need some kind of tradable and storable reputation system... aka money). The reality is that cryptocurrencies are the most recent culmination of distributed systems research, and the extent to which they are inefficient sadly is largely because humans simply have not yet figured out how to do it better (and if you really think you can, please do instead of calling the people actually doing this work somehow stupid for not doing the "obvious" thing of attaching a DHT up to a branch and bound or map-reduce computation system, as that was the work people at UCSB were trying to do back in early 2000s and you know what the professor who was in charge of that lab is now super excited about? cryptocurrencies, as he knows they solve real problems he ran into trying to build a decentralized computation platform). (And to be clear: do I think Ethereum or even Avalanche has solved all the issues yet? Hell no. But they are going in the correct direction... if--and this is where the reasonable arguments about cryptocurrencies tend to be--you believe decentralized systems are actually important to achieve or should ever be used instead of a centralized one: some people seem to disagree with this--which I certainly disagree with, but I don't think is entirely crazy--and that leads them to constantly want to replace cryptocurrencies with centralized systems, but you can't point at older decentralized systems and somehow claim they are better than what we are building today without first analyzing why they never really went anywhere and asking how and where--and then why--cryptocurrencies and their distributed blockchain tech are actually even that different.)

Now you have me digging through the stacks at seclab.cs.ucsb.edu. I recognize the webdesign and some of the titles.

Is this the UCSB I2P takedown you refer to? I'm curious who you might mean, but there are only 3 UCSB authors listed. I'll do some more digging.

https://sites.cs.ucsb.edu/~chris/research/doc/raid13_i2p.pdf

Only found a very little bit about their work on cryptocurrencies.

https://sites.cs.ucsb.edu/~chris/research/doc/ccs18_mineswee...

You have any choice links?

The seclab people are not the same professor I was taking about who worked on decentralized systems (and didn't work on security): you are mixing up two stories I told about people in two different subfields.

That's my mistake. Care to clarify whose work you're referring to?

doh: "but is it as centralized as Etheteum" -> "but is it as DEcentralized as Ethereum" :/ (the pain of quickly typing a message on your phone that you purposefully don't want to spend much time working on or caring about ;P)

web3 is the new ipv5

In all seriousness, the quality of this article is abysmal.

It's just a stream of rants about centralized vs decentralized without a single argument or explanation that stands on its legs. There are also a lot of asumptions and wishful thinking about the prospects of decentralization in finance and banking that clearly show the cluelessness of the author.

> I’m not the first person to tell you this, and certainly not the last, but Web3 is in fact centralized, just as Web2 was. Web3 is just a worse version of Web2.

Hum okay, dare to clarify? Nope, there's just not a single place in the article where some argument to back this claim is made. Yet this is repeated over and over. This is just argumenting by repetition.

What does that even mean? I fear the author has no idea what he's talking about, and does not really understand how a Web3 app work. For those that wonder, here is what it typically looks like:

- You put the logic of your Web3 app in a smart contract, that's the essence of why it's called a distributed application.

You will most likely want some kind of graphical interface so that your users can interact with it. It wouldn't be very convenient if your app was just an API to call your smart contract on a blockchain.

- This GUI often takes the form of an SPA, which indeed you need to somehow serve to the users. You can serve in a distributed fashion, using IPFS for instance, but since the adoption is not that high, often there is also a traditional webserver somewhere to deliver the SPA (e.g. AWS Cloudfront or any other CDN). This is one of the potential point of centralization, but it gets better everyday with adoption of IPFS and such.

Now you have 1) the logic of your app in a smart contract on the blockchain and 2) a graphical interface that was somehow served to the client. You now need to let the GUI interact with the smart contract. There is mainly two possibilities to do that:

- Require the client to use a browser extension that offers an API for the webapp to pilot the user's wallet. That's what MetaMask does. It exposes an API that is usable from javascript webapps, and perform wallet operations accordingly. It's a bit annoying to use though, for two reasons: 1) MetaMask is a specific extension, with a specific API. If your webapp needs MetaMask to interact with the blockchain, you are somehow restricting the user to a single possible software, which is not really ideal (note that users could still directly call the smart contract, but we're talking about the average user here, not programmers) 2) MetaMask is not _just_ a bridge between a webapp and the blockchain, it's also a wallet, in that it wants to hold and manage your private keys for you (though there have been some developments to use hardware wallets with MetaMask). Note that MetaMask in itself is not _really_ centralized, it's just a software that you need to have installed. MetaMask communicate with the blockchain using traditional JSON RPC, so you need to configure MetaMask with the address of a node on this blockchain that accepts JSON RPC. Could be your own self-hosted node, but for simplicity MetaMask defaults to a mutual hosting blockchain node provider: "Infura".

Overall, if your graphical interface only support the MetaMask API to interact with the blockchain, it defeats a bit the purpose, which is why new solutions (and standards) are emerging.

- One promising alternative which is starting to be implemented in a lot of Web3 apps is "Wallet Connect". It's a protocol for bridging a webapp and a wallet. There's a lot of advantages to this model: 1) the webapp is now agnostic of the wallet it talks to. Any wallet application can support the "Wallet Connect" protocol and thus be used with any Web3 app. 2) There is no need for the wallet and the Web3 app to communicate locally (e.g. with a browser extension). You can use a Web3 app on your computer and pair it with a wallet on your phone or hardware wallet.

> Once upon a time, it was easy to mine Bitcoin. But Bitcoin took off, and it’s now absurdly hard to mine Bitcoin. You need farms of GPU mining just to get tiny amounts of bitcoin.

Hum, yeah right, I agree with the author on this one, but what's the link between the energy consumption of Bitcoin's PoW, and the centralization of Web3 apps?!

> The design of blockchain, is that as more coins are mined, you need more computing power just to get smaller amounts of blockchain.

Hu, no, that's the design of "Bitcoin", not "blockchain".

> And even if the environmental concerns were nonexistent, if it’s so hard to mine Bitcoin, it favors established miners over newcomers. Is that really what you call a “decentralized” platform?

Indeed, which is why the overwhelming majority of blockchains are now "proof of something-that-is-not-work" (typically proof of stake).

But proof of stake does not solve the whole problem of the divide between "regular users" and "miners". Most people "staking" on blockchains use some kind of proxy or service to do so, because, well, it's not like everyone wants to host a block validating node even if it doesn't use much electricity.

Which leads me to modern blockchains that have WebAssembly SDKs, so you could perfectly imagine that you would be able to contribute to the blockchain during your browsing of the website, this eliminating the need for node hosting and staking services altogether.

> Expecting the financial industry to run on blockchain is like expecting AT&T to run their backbone on a Amazon warehouse sized place full of 56k dial-up modems.

Clearly, clearly, you have no idea of how the financial and banking systems are solving asset settlement and reconciliation today, because blockchain solves _exactly_ that problem, and in a very efficient and secure manner. Not only that, but even the slowest of the worst blockchain out there is infinitely more efficient and fast at settling transactions than any existing custodian, back office, clearing house, or broker.

Lots of people assume that when they see a transaction incoming on their bank account, then it's "done". Similarly, people assume that they can "buy a share of Apple and sell it to buy a share of Microsoft" in the same day. That's a horribly wrong understanding of how it works, trust me, I've been working in finance for 15 years now.

The reality is much, much more complicated than that. Most financial settlements are _at the very least_ 1 (or 2, or 3) days. The whole finance and banking industry is built around huge settlement/unwind systems that give you the impression that things are instantaneous, while you're just seeing "optimistic states in case of no settlement errors".

See https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/trading-investing/t... for an introduction of brokerage settlement, then realize this is just the tip of the iceberg.

> Sure, I work at Microsoft 365, because I had to. It was join Microsoft, or be dependent on my dad for money.

That sure escalated quickly.

Depending on how you view the world and whether you think nation states and government-backed fiat is a good or bad thing, probably defines your stance on blockchain and cryptocurrencies IMO. I still contend that blockchain has its use cases - journalism, games which wish to institute a real economy instead of a virtual one, voting, etc...

Blockchain has been maturing and bitcoin has been around for a minute, but ethereum and the whole smart contract bit is newer and POS is around the corner if you believe those working on the project.

I view bitcoin and blockchain as a big FU to fiat and I'm okay with that, because IMHO hierarchical power structures are inherently a bad thing.

Blockchains are hierarchical power structures. They're democracies, in fact, but instead of "one person, one vote" you get a share of votes based on how much electricity you waste.

As the article explains, mining capacity is centralized, and therefore, so is Web3.

Blockchains are no better than any other democratic institution; substantially worse, in fact, because they're wasting electricity to do it. Web3 pretends to be a big FU to hierarchical power structures, but if you believe that, you're being scammed.

I never claimed they were not - I said they were a big FU to nation state fiat. I don't work on web3 or own crypto. Nation State fiat is a scam too - I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make to me... Am I trading one hierarchical power structure for another? Maybe? Does that mean blockchains hold no promise? No. With POS an eth node will supposedly be able to run on a rasp pi - is that too much electricity?

Doesn't diminish my point that it is trying to disrupt nation state fiat and I am all for that - doesn't mean I have to sign on to whatever the replacement is - I can be against that as well.

If we assume that you're trading one hierarchical power structure for another, then can we agree that proof-of-work blockchain is worse, just for the electricity waste?

What's the point of an electricity-guzzling PoW blockchain if it's just a new hierarchical power structure, the same as the old boss?

"Proof of stake" (POS) is really the same as the old boss. There's no way to build a decentralized POS network, because in POS, the more stake you have, the more you earn. Centralization follows immediately. POS is literally no better than using the banking network.

The point is, there is promise in the utility of blockchain. If your only gripe with blockchain is that it is energy-inefficient and that it is centralized (but still less so than the current web we have) - as blockchain technology improves and becomes more energy efficient, doesn't your gripe go out the window?

Just because AH and other VC's have dumped money into the space, and because of the nature of blockchain and the fact that it is not regulated in any manner and is ripe for exploration currently, doesn't make the technology worthless. Your stance would have one believe so.

I'm not going to sit here and dive into the details of blockchain technology because I don't know them as well as others, but afaik, levers exist where if a token becomes too centralized, action can be taken by the stakers. Blockchain is basically just digital fiat without nation state backing - so I don't understand how you can sit here and shill for one and condemn the other. It's pretty hypocritical in my mind, even if one is the status quo.

It is inevitable that certain chains and dapps will be "centralized", in that most of the computation and storage will move to a few big datacenters.

What the people like the author have not understood is that running blockchain ans dapps on Azure is NOT THE SAME as running Postgres and a go app on a VM in Azure in a VERY IMPORTANT way... and that is Microsoft taking the servers down does not make the app or the data go away.

This is THE selling point of blockchain and dapps.

Let's talk again when the banks cancel his accounts because he refuses to get vaccinated, or some other nonsense.

Most Web3 stuff is shit, that much is true, but that also goes for a lot of other things.

destructive greed, aka capitalism

Remember this: <https://media.wired.com/photos/593230395c4fbd732b5511e3/mast...>

History is repeating itself, old thinking + new technology is never going to create innovation, it's just going to end like a blazing trail of a shooting star, a tale to tell. We are pretty much heading in the same direction with blockchain.

Decentralization is smexy but it comes with a price, it disrupts everything, starting from the way we build it.

I agreed entirely that VCs are building monopolies and that money are pouring into the space for no obvious practical reason but it is inevitable until we find a better model of building. And those who are trying to build a web2 version of something in web3 will most likely fail because web3 isn't a replacement or better alternative to web2. Hence it is pointless to compare what we are have, i.e. a decentralized email server.

Decentralization, in my humble opinion, is putting the decisions/ownership back to the users but it is never going to liberate the users from a centralized entity. The things we choose to use/consume will inevitably be owned by a centralized entity, the key difference is whether or not we can seamlessly migrate to another platform of choice. And instead of one big entity controlling everything, we get multiple smaller space that makes their own rule providing the same service.

NFTs marketplace is an example of this, you own the NFT, you can take it and move it to another platform and you can even access directly via your own node without any platform. The problem with NFT however, is the usefulness itself, not the nature of NFT.

Imagine having multiple social networks that you can join with a wallet address, each with their own rules and networks. Instead of a Metaverse, think Multiverse.

Imagine having multiple ads platform that you can choose to integrate with your daily browsing and earn tokens to use in a certain way while doing so. Think Brave but instead of just Brave, you get different ads agencies with different collection of ads.

The main problem here is that our old business model doesn't work here, we are most likely going to end up broke running something that is ideally "decentralized". The fallback plan? Sit and write about how centralized web3 is OR experiment by building on top of blockchain technology, fail miserably as a joke, make some noise and motivate someone to "think different".

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