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Comment by silisili | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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