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Comment by throwaway0asd | Hacker News Reader

> Celsius's collapse exemplified what one commentator called a "pervasive problem in the crypto industry, where financial services that claim to be decentralized ... are actually centralized entities, with the power to control the flow of crypto assets."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsius_Network

I would like people to keep this in mind when they somehow confuse Web3 (distribution via crypto ledger) and the term decentralization. Those concepts are not related in any way.

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Though people will use these terms anyway however they want, also to promote their scam(mish) products/services. It doesn't help to know the definitions if people aren't honouring them anyway.

We already had decentralization. It's called the BitTorrent protocol which is more decentralized than most Web 3 projects.

Google doesn't auto-compete for Bitchute.

Yes and no. BitTorrent uses two protocols. One of those protocols is highly centralized and advertises users and their requested data packets as well as their available data packets to a centralized registry. A second protocol is used to transfer available data packets between users.

The appeal of BitTorrent is not that it is decentralized but that it, in a narrow legal context, doesn’t violate the law as copy protected materials are passed between users on a secondary protocol without touching the centralized system advertising data availability.

>One of those protocols is highly centralized and advertises users and their requested data packets as well as their available data packets to a centralized registry.

This hasn't been true for almost two decades. DHT exists so trackers are not required [0]. So now both protocols are decentralized.

[0] https://github.com/webtorrent/bittorrent-dht

DHT is distributed hash table. Distributed is not decentralized. This is the same mistake as the subject matter with crypto.

It seems the inability to differentiate those two words is a scam worth more than 4 billion.

>Distributed is not decentralized.

No one said otherwise.

>This is the same mistake as the subject matter with crypto.

This is where you're wrong. You misunderstood these concepts as if they were mutually exclusive. Torrent DHT is absolutely distributed and decentralized [0]. QED.

>It seems the inability to differentiate those two words is a scam worth more than 4 billion.

The scams in crypto are older than modern computers themselves. Ponzi schemes and straight up securities fraud, just wrapped in NewHotThingTM. Has nothing to do with decentralization or distributed systems.

[0] https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrents-dht-turns-10-years-old-...

We’re in agreement here that Celsius was never, nor had any business pretending to be, decentralized, correct?

Web3 is an imaginary place that you pitch to investors, who cares what people confuse it with.

The real fact of the matter is that decentralization does not work in human society.

There are countless examples of decentralization working across human societies. Neighborhoods, cities, counties, states, countries. In America for example forks are individually managed and not shared, and we eat very well without a central utensil management agency.

It might surprise you to know that in fact kitchen utensils and what they're made out of is regulated in the USA - and I assume most other industrialized countries.

https://www.compliancegate.com/plastic-kitchen-products-regu...

The issue is decentralization != no regulation, and lots of crypto folks seem to think that they should build systems that cannot be regulated and expect that to be compatible with modern society.

In a way, crypto is a sophisticated way to enforce (self)regulation. Rules are set to enforce certain behavior (no token can be spent twice, tokens can only be minted in specific circumstances and amounts, etc.) and give everyone easy ways to validate that the rules are enforced.

Some think that all rules you ever need can be encoded in the network, removing the need for "external" regulation. Of course that's not entirely realistic.

The definition of a fork is centrally regulated, yes, but using forks is decentralized. There is no central authority saying "We will make N forks this month" or "You will use a fork at 2pm for exactly 10 bites".

Cash is similarly decentralized in that its definition and creation is centrally regulated, but nobody says (or even can say) how and when you can use it. Cash transactions between people happen without any central authority. There's not even a central authority definiting the price/value of goods! You can just agree on a number with some rando, exchange cash for things/services, and nobody will ever know it even happened, let alone be able to tell you how and when to do it.

> Neighborhoods, cities, counties, states, countries.

How are those examples decentralized? You just listed a literal hierarchy with oodles of centralized laws and regulations at every tier.

And mentioning forks doesn't make any sense. Decentralization refers to organizational entities, not objects.

> decentralization does not work in human society

The American payment system is decentralised. It’s just lazily evaluated, e.g. when a transaction occurs or audit is done. Crypto’s pitch is that it’s centralised on an eagerly-evaluated blockchain. Every account’s state is known by all, all the time, full stop.

Of course it doesn't, that's why I have to send a self-addressed stamped envelope to the Widget Commission to request the resources to have widgets manufactured.

Imagine the alternative!

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