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Comment by ipnon | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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