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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

Web3 is the decentralized web. Not more, not less.

But the Web already is decentralised.

I just launched a web server on my computer (python -m SimpleHTTPServer) which anyone in the world can connect to. If I wanted to I could build an unmoderated Twitter or Reddit and foster a community maybe one day being the biggest in the world.

And if my current government decided to regulate me then I could move to a country that didn't.

Web3 seems to be much more about decentralised payments. Which is not really a problem many people are demanding a highly complex solution for.

If you know how to run that kind of infrastructure, sure.

The rest of the world has to wait for other means of decentralization.

I can put that website in a container and run it on AWS Fargate.

End to end about an hour. And it would be capable of supporting effectively infinite traffic.

Anyone could build such applications that they might hope become the biggest in the world, but there is still a conglomeration effect. You have centralization, but anyone can become the center. This is displayed by your "biggest in the world" winner takes all perspective. For decentralization, the graph of connectivity has to not have these large communities. There would be no single Twitter (unmoderated or otherwise) that is the biggest by far.

But Web3 does not prevent or impede centralisation.

Look at OpenSea. They take the blockchain data and augment it with their proprietary data.

> Web3 seems to be much more about decentralised payments. Which is not really a problem many people are demanding a highly complex solution for.

Stripe being a $100B company contradicts this.

Payments and especially finance is a gigantic industry that is still mostly centralized but doesn't need to be. If we can make wealth flow as easy as data does today without any gatekeepers or middlemen that is a huge upgrade for the internet.

"Decentralized" doesn't mean "large companies don't exist."

There are hundreds of thousands of banks, but hundreds of crypto exchanges. Imagining crypto to be less centralized than traditional finance is deeply, deeply incorrect.

Having centralized aspects does not diminish the decentralized aspects. People spend over $10M/day in fees to use decentralized platforms and they had $250B in wealth in them.

It's only a matter of time before decentralized rails become the primary form of wealth transfer on the internet, because they are much more efficient and composable than current systems.

> Having centralized aspects does not diminish the decentralized aspects.

There aren't any. "Decentralized" is just an in-group smurf word with no legitimate technical meaning, and which is not in any way a meaningful goal.

> It's only a matter of time before decentralized rails become the primary form of wealth transfer on the internet

We're 14 years in and it hasn't gotten anywhere close

You keep holding your breath, though. (You'll have to, with all the pollution being created.)

Note: "wealth transfer" is just a fancy way to say "online casino."

I literally work in decentralized finance, and so do now 20,000+ developers. Many of my financial transactions already happen in DeFi, and it's only a 2 year old industry.

Being confidently ignorant doesn't make you correct, it just makes you miss out on the future.

The web is the decentralized web.

A server that you can keep at home that you can plug in to make it part of this huge network of machines located all around the world that communicate with each other - this is the decentralized web.

"You" can do it, yes.

Most people can't.

That has nothing to do with centralization, and everything to do with the fact that it's hard to run a website with 0 computer skills, which crypto doesn't improve on in any way.

It has all to do with centralization and crypto certainly helps by providing a way of decentralization that doesn't require everyone to run infra in their home.

In the decentralized web you don’t have to run your infra either, you can use one of thousands of hosting companies that will run it for you.

Crypto today is dominated by a few central players (wallets, trading) with strict access requirements, including unambiguous government-issued ID. Even mining is dominated by people with much more capital than you have access to, so that it is never worth it to run a miner as a private individual. Everything "web3" has been co-opted by corporatized interests trying to invent fresh new ways to get in on the scam before regulators make it unprofitable.

Access is difficult for private individuals for more reasons than just "technology is complicated".

Web3 is centralized because the source of money causing it to appear to be a thing is coming from one place (a16z). It’s just a way for them to do securities fraud.

Although the entire crypto ecosystem valuation is based on another source of fictional money (Tether).

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