Web3 Is Not Decentralization

by pcr910303 • 5 years ago

201 230 5 years ago

drenvuk• 5 years ago

nfts are just as bad as copyrights. both require unnatural systems in order to exist. both attempt to reduce freedom of speech and the proliferation of ideas. both need to be removed.

spinny• 5 years ago

not really sure what you mean by "unnatural systems", but nfts are just a way to represent a unique thing on a blockchain.

EIP721 defines the interface to this unique thing. It's nothing more than a set of functions that enable you to transfer it to another account and approve (and revoke) operators to manage it for you.

what makes nfts "good" or "bad" is how it is getting used. I'm implementing an order-book based dex. Every order is a unique thing, implementing ERC721 adds that extra bit of standardized functionality.

ohCh6zos• 5 years ago

The internet provides us with post-scarcity for some goods. NTFs are adding scarcity back into the system.

_jal• 5 years ago

It is an intentional scarcity, however. In the physical world, you build strategies around natural scarcities. Here, you build scarcities to support your strategies.

Still thinking about how I feel about that. Right now, people mainly seem to be using it as a sort of proxy for fine art-style exclusivities people already understand.

DarylZero11• 5 years ago

NFTs don't add scarcity. Anyone can create an NFT of anything. Any number of times.

An NFT isn't a copyright or anything else. It's just a token that has no inherent meaning. Just like any fiat currency. By convention, it embeds an image -- just like a dollar bill has a picture of George.

DennisP9• 5 years ago

NFTs only do that if people buy into the weird idea that just because there's an NFT, you can't just download the file anyway. If people just see it as a collectible with its own special legitimacy and provenance, they don't do any harm.

Gigachad2• 5 years ago

NFT promoters want to resolve that by having platforms build in integration so they can DRM their NFTs.

But why is this a world we want. What benefit did we create by making profile pictures paid for. NFTs represent the worst of capitalism imo.

meheleventyone9• 5 years ago

The thing I’d ask for both is how I get paid to make games if we abolished copyright. NFTs are obviously silly but there is scarcity involved in the production of digital things even though the marginal cost is effectively zero. It’s just effectively zero is doing a lot of work when no one is paying and you need to feed your family under a capitalist system for everything else. A system that time limits some scarcity in order that creative people can make a living under capitalism before returning things to their natural state is humane.

nostrademons• 5 years ago

I thought this would be about a bigger and more obvious problem with web3, namely that by default all traffic going through MetaMask runs through Infura and hence through Consensys's servers. If you think you're getting privacy or resilience because you're interacting with a DApp, think again. All your transactions are going through a single organization, which might have logs linking the IP, your ETH address, the smart contract address, and timestamp, and if it goes down web3 won't work for a significant number of users. [It is possible to configure MetaMask to use a different gateway, but how many users fiddle with the defaults or even know what a web3 gateway is?]

Ethereum as a whole and the raw smart contracts of most DApps actually are decentralized, but there are SPOFs in the UI, name service, and transaction gateway. If you aren't willing to run your own geth instance and understand Solidity/EVM, it's not really decentralized for you.

thr0wawayf004• 5 years ago

If you aren't willing to run your own geth instance and understand Solidity/EVM, it's not really decentralized for you.

This is how I feel about the exchanges generally, which wield an incredible amount of influence in the crypto markets, for better or worse. It's a complete tangent, but reading about Tether's shifting story around its capital reserves terrifies me.

I have yet to see a blockchain implementation that's easy enough to use on its own that it could achieve widespread adoption without a strong market desire to have someone else manage the complexity of it for you. People talk about decentralization all day long while completely ignoring the fact that we've just shifted the centralized authority from one entity to another.

agumonkey2• 5 years ago

That summarizes a lot.

The system is not simple at all.

The benefits are only potentially here (eth fees are wild).

The solution involves the opposite of religious principles the mob believes in.

kaczordon• 5 years ago

This is how I feel about the exchanges generally, which wield an incredible amount of influence in the crypto markets, for better or worse.

This isn’t really true as there’s a bunch of decentralized AMM’s(automated market maker) now: uniswap, sushiswap, pancakeswap

gruez• 5 years ago

I have yet to see a blockchain implementation that's easy enough to use on its own

Bitcoin core is pretty easy to run yourself, no technical skills required.

davidmurdoch2• 5 years ago

Eehhhhhhhh, maybe true 2-3 years ago, but things are getting more decentralized as time goes on. There are many competitors to Infura and MetaMask coming into the space now! There are even hardware companies creating nodes that work right off the shelf (I only know if a handful of devs in the space that have one though, as they're still a bit pricey).

michaelsbradley• 5 years ago

And there are active efforts to develop ultra-light clients for Ethereum together with the concept of “portal network”:

https://our.status.im/nimbus-fluffly/

PragmaticPulp2• 5 years ago

Can you name any of these alternative companies? I’d like to at least look into them.

One of the weirdest trends I’ve seen in Web3 discussions is the insistence that better alternatives exist, but for some reason nobody is using them, talking about them, or even naming them in discussions.

littlestymaar2• 5 years ago

maybe true 2-3 years ago, but things are getting more decentralized as time goes on

That's a good indication that it is not decentralized ;).

DennisP9• 5 years ago

The name service is a smart contract. Even if one entity is hosting UI for it, anyone else can do the same. It's probably a good idea to build direct support for it into clients.

miracle2k• 5 years ago

If you aren't willing to run your own geth instance and understand Solidity/EVM, it's not really decentralized for you.

That's just overly reductive. You certainly benefit from all kinds of vectors of decentralisation regardless of you using MetaMask, or possibly having connectively problems if a popular nodes goes down.

You can test this very simply, because regardless of the common node you are using, are still exposed to all the downsides and responsibilities that decentralisation brings, such as the possibility of losing your private key and being unable to recover your funds. So the decentralisation is still clearly there.

vmception6• 5 years ago

2017 called

Now there are lots of rpc providers and it is much easier to spin up your own node

Check out erigon client it is an archive node with much lower resource requirements than geth archival nodes, about 1/10th the requirements and that gulf will likely expand

pruned geth is still much lower than that though, but at least erigon gets rid of some of the state-storage centralization arguments (and lets inquisitive people browse prior chain states and simulate environments)

anybody that wants their own privacy has much better ways to get it

But Tails + TorBrowser + Metamask extension is also good enough if you want to hide info from Infura, analytics packages etc

Animats2• 5 years ago

How do you know the RPC provider's node isn't logging your transactions or even executing a man-in-the-middle attack?

rauljordan20202• 5 years ago

Disclaimer: I work on Ethereum core development. One of the coolest things happening that will be available to everyone over the coming year is something called a light client, which is essentially a very light, validating node that tracks the head of the chain with certainty, and can be used as an alternative to services such as Unfura. In the future, Metamask will probably be a light client that actually tracks the head of the chain and can validate proofs of user account state. Source: https://github.com/ethereum/consensus-specs/blob/dev/specs/a...

littlestymaar2• 5 years ago

light client, which is essentially a very light, validating node that tracks the head of the chain with certainty

How does that work?

toddh• 5 years ago

And whomever owns the interpreter owns everything.

serverholic9• 5 years ago

As a crypto and web3 fan I actually agree with the article but not with the title.

To me decentralization is a value. It's a goal, and yes, a goal that almost every web3 project falls short of in some way. But I think values are important. Values play a huge part in guiding human behavior. And the human side of web3 is MASSIVELY underrated in my opinion.

I don't think people realize that we can shape web3 by building up the right culture around it. By teaching people what things they should look out for. Because without that, they'll just be drawn in by blind profits and screwed over because we didn't tell them how to think about web3.

To a certain extent web3 critics are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. They are simultaneously criticizing web3 for valuing decentralization while also criticizing web3 for not being decentralized enough. It creates apathy around decentralization and other web3 ideas.

I think web3 critics would serve people better not by criticizing web3 but instead criticizing projects for not being web3 enough. What I don't think people on HN or Twitter understand is that right now web3 is a foundation. We can build technology and culture around it to help people.

thr0wawayf004• 5 years ago

To me decentralization is a value. It's a goal, and yes, a goal that almost every web3 project falls short of in some way.

But the whole point of building these systems is to get away from the entrenched interests of centralized authority, and if these systems can't actually deliver on that, then what's the point of adopting them? At least my bank accounts are insured if the bank fails and transactions have to clear ACH. If my credit card gets stolen, I call Visa and they make it go away in a matter of minutes. If someone gets access to my private key, that's it, there's nothing I can do to get my crypto back. I don't want "kinda decentralized", I want "definitely decentralized". This attitude represents a major goalpost shift for this kind of movement.

But I think values are important. Values play a huge part in guiding human behavior.

This seems to be a bit romantic to me. The community can talk about values all they want, but it doesn't change the fact that shitcoins are everywhere. We can all agree murder is bad, but that isn't going to stop murders from happening.

serverholic9• 5 years ago

There is still a lot of value in "kinda decentralized". For example, you can download smart-contract bytecode and verify it. Go ahead and call up visa and ask for their source code.

Another example is the immutability of smart contracts. If someone updates a contract and you don't like it then you can keep using the old one. Go ask robinhood if you can use an old version of their app.

As far as private keys, I really don't know what to tell you. People lose their passwords all the time. Also smart wallets will help you recover you crypto wallet. UX is moving in the right direction here.

This seems to be a bit romantic to me. The community can talk about values all they want, but it doesn't change the fact that shitcoins are everywhere. We can all agree murder is bad, but that isn't going to stop murders from happening.

So should we stop using email because of phishing? Or stop using phones because of spam calls?

We educate people on phishing. We educate people on scam calls. We educate people on the dangers of investing in penny stocks. We educate people on the dangers of options trading.

Why can't we educate people on shitcoins and decentralization? That's my point, crypto is a wild place but we can absolutely create a culture that moves things in the right direction.

Nursie• 5 years ago

To me decentralization is a fetish, a thing which provides little utility in itself but which people are willing to spend a lot of time, effort and money to pay lip service to.

goodpoint• 5 years ago

Decentralization is a very meaningful concept but it's being watered down by grifters.

preseinger24• 5 years ago

Decentralization is not self-evidently valuable. It's a property of a system that has pros and cons, and the cons are significant.

serverholic9• 5 years ago

The cons of centralization are significant. The decentralization narrative spawned because the world has become increasingly centralized. It's a balancing force.

PikachuEXE• 5 years ago

Agree

I look at decentralization as a direction for some values.

I have some idea what those values are but still exploring. Could be "separate of risk compared to current centralization". Could be "take back control and responsibility of xxx management". But "web3" or decentralization provides me a great opportunity to think, rethink, and ACT based on thinking results.

We will have limitations, bugs, issues on probably every product made for "web3/decentralization". It's fine to criticize those flaws.

But I think we should separate "criticize product flaws" from "criticize value/direction". Mixing both together makes conversation harder to continue for me.

pjc506• 5 years ago

The problem with web3, and the reason so many people actively hate it, is that "grift" is the primary value. web1 was "decentralize by making everything free". web3 is "let a thousand scams bloom". You get kudos in cryptoland by making the number go up - when converted to dollars.

ccamrobertson• 5 years ago

Confounding DAOs as web3 is a little odd. They may use web3 tooling...but obviously most are "DOs" (distributed organizations) today and they don't really comprise web3.

IPFS is a great example the author points to as to what I understand web3 infrastructure to be; it seems to be a very strong example of decentralization.

gizmo385• 5 years ago

Except many Web3 proponents consider DAOs to be a part of Web3. A bit of a "no true scotsman"

DennisP9• 5 years ago

I've been kicking around the Ethereum community since the early days, and what people were calling "web3" back then is not what we have now. The original idea was for everything to be hosted on IPFS or Swarm[1]. The latter was to be an Ethereum-native protocol similar to IPFS; it turned out to be harder than expected and hasn't gotten traction so far but it's still an active project. One of its goals was to enable payments for keeping files available.

Still, decentralized naming and digital signatures go a long way towards turning p2p filesharing into something more. I think it'll all come together eventually.

[1] https://www.ethswarm.org/

gfodor3• 5 years ago

Exactly. It’s been weird seeing so many people who have lived through several technology curves failing to imagine where these current trends are pointing.

kody3• 5 years ago

So, the next wave of DRM

throw_nbvc1234• 5 years ago

What proportion of people who had the perspective/foresight to predict "several technology curves" (and potentially profit off of them) will waste their time fighting battles in the comments of hacker news threads about the potential next one?

preseinger24• 5 years ago

What are some decentralized naming initiatives?

NetOpWibby2• 5 years ago

Handshake is the one I’m most interested/invested in.

- https://handshake.org

DennisP9• 5 years ago

ENS has gotten a lot of traction on Ethereum .

https://ens.domains/

Animats2• 5 years ago

When you look for services that offer commercial IPFS, it turns out they're mostly reselling AWS with a markup. A big markup, like US $500/year for 400GB.

terafo2• 5 years ago

Wow. And that's in the world where you can get storage for 1.50$/TB/Month if you rent baremetal servers.

nyuszika7h• 5 years ago

Just what we need. As if AWS itself wasn't already expensive enough.

riffic2• 5 years ago

I can't stand anything about a "Web3" that is not inclusive of existing ecosystems using actual, working, standardized protocols like those adopted by the IndieWeb and Fediverse communities.

"A resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory" as the adage goes coined by Elinor Ostrom (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom#Ostrom's_law).

You don't need blockchains to be decentralized. Continuing to dunk on "web3" over here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Web3Skepticism/

Gigachad2• 5 years ago

What sours me to the whole concept is how everything crypto touches becomes a hive of scammers and salesmen, and hype all focused on making a dollar rather than creating valuable technology. The whole NFT thing has been a net negative on the world and now crypto promoters are pushing for companies to integrate with it to take what was once free and put a price tag on it. For what benefit?

rapnie2• 5 years ago

Indeed. They even start to push it on the free software community with stuff like GitNFT [0] and DAO's + NFT as a sustainable FOSS biz model [1].

[0] https://gitnft.quine.sh/

[1] https://nebairevelations.substack.com/p/a-successful-busines...

Ambolia2• 5 years ago

Yeah, I don't think in the internet anybody cares about "ownership", but about authorship. But because of the incentives of crypto all of the energy of NFTs gets poured into "ownership" which provides zero value to anybody using the technology except as an investment.

I would be more interested on the web3 as an end-user if there was zero change of it being used as an investment.

rapnie2• 5 years ago

Web3 has been co-opted to such extent by cryptocurrencies and blockchain tech that it may be better to come up with a different name for sane open-standards based decentralized technologies. The whole Web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 has never been a good fit anyway and used quite arbitrarily. How long has the 3.0 versioning been in use already?

genezeta• 5 years ago

The whole Web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 has never been a good fit anyway and used quite arbitrarily

The actual problem is that there's a fundamental distinction between the "2.0" -and "1.0"- tag and the "3.0" tag.

"Web 2.0" was a term coined to describe something which had already occurred, at least to a substantial extent. This is made obvious by the fact that it was coined in conjunction with "Web 1.0". It was defined on some -more or less defined- characteristics that were there already and were used to point out a change that had already happened. It was "Ok, this has happened; let's call it 2.0 (and, for contrast, let's call 1.0 what existed previously)". People generally agreed on the name and that was it.

"Web 3.0" was never anything like that. It has always been co-opted to promote someone's ideas/hopes/vision/technologies. It is always "Ok, I/we want to go in that direction; I/we will call that "3.0" and hope the world shares my view and allows me to use that name for my vision". As a fairly old example:

The Semantic Web (sometimes known as Web 3.0) ... [0]

But, of course, being something which isn't there just yet, a lot of groups want to own the term for their thing.

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

Ambolia2• 5 years ago

The fediverse still has many issues:

- You don't own your content unless you run your own node

- You don't own your username, unless you run your own node

- From the previous 2, you can't easily move your stuff to a different node. If the node dies it's an issue.

- Nodes decide who they federate with, so you depende on your node to build your social network relations

riffic2• 5 years ago

running your own node isn't that much of a barrier to entry.

Get a wordpress up on a shared host and install the ActivityPub plugin for the minimum viable fedi presence.

I'm not trying to discount the issues you bring up.

brandonmenc2• 5 years ago

Yeah, but you can’t extract a payment from every micro interaction with those dusty old protocols.

Imagine if you were earning money every time someone read that comment you posted!

__MatrixMan__19• 5 years ago

A lot of the reason why I detest NFTs in particular is because I detest the concept of artificial scarcity, something that has been plauging the digital world long before the invention of NFTs

I agree with this, artificial scarcity is a lousy way to get anything done. The end-game of economics ought to be to eliminate scarcity, artificial or otherwise. But if the alternative to NFT's is the status quo, then you're choosing between a system where only the privileged get to set up artificial scarcity games (usually there are lawyers...) versus one where anyone can do so. It still sucks, but it sucks less.

Naturally, the exploitation of natural resources and absurd energy demands solely to enforce the value of made up internet items would be the endgame [of NFTs].

I think that the endgame is to exchange NFTs as proofs of contribution to the public good. I minted this NFT by sequestering a kilogram of carbon, by filling this pothole, by serving in a jury, that sort of thing. As it stands it's not really clear why I should accept a dollar from a stranger--for all I know, they made that dollar by making the world worse. Why should I participate in a scheme that enables them to continue doing so? But with NFT's I can look at the circumstances of its minting and decide for myself whether that's the kind of thing I want to see more of.

PragmaticPulp2• 5 years ago

But if the alternative to NFT's is the status quo, then you're choosing between a system where only the privileged get to set up artificial scarcity games (usually there are lawyers...) versus one where anyone can do so. It still sucks, but it sucks less.

This doesn’t really follow. Why would NFTs be the only way to generate artificial scarcity when people have been doing it forever with one-off art, private experiences and concerts, and limited edition runs?

NFTs seem like a step in the wrong direction: You still don’t have the original art or thing that the NFT supposedly represents. You just have a new blockchain entry that says “This NFT represents <thing>“

As it stands it's not really clear why I should accept a dollar from a stranger--for all I know, they made that dollar by making the world worse. Why should I participate in a scheme that enables them to continue doing so? But with NFT's I can look at the circumstances of its minting and decide for myself whether that's the kind of thing I want to see more of.

This doesn’t make any sense either. Why do you implicitly trust what people tell you about an NFT but not a dollar?

There’s nothing magical about NFTs that solves the social problems you’re describing. An NFT is just a blockchain entry with associated cryptographic procedures for changing said blockchain entry. It doesn’t give you insight into the circumstances around it. You still have to take whatever people say at face value, just as you would with the dollar example.

But with the NFT you have to pay a lot of money just to accept it. Money which goes to miners who are burning energy at a furious pace just to keep the NFT existing, in a system that becomes ever less efficient as more miners join. That’s probably not what people had in mind when it comes to making the world a better place.

__MatrixMan__19• 5 years ago

Without the ability to sue people who break the rules that create the artificial scarcity, how do you keep it scarce?

And yeah, when it comes to NFT's for some random jpeg... That's pretty useless. But that's all that can be done with them right now because there's infrastructure available to connect the NFT with whatever supposedly valuable side-effect it's supposed to go with. That'll take time. But when it's ready, the side effects won't be some random jpeg, they'll be things that you can touch. It'll be obvious that continuing to support the people who do whatever-the-thing-is is a good idea, and that's why we'll value the associated token.

It doesn’t give you insight into the circumstances around it. You still have to take whatever people say at face value,

That's the missing supporting infrastructure I'm talking about. If a bridge washes out because of a storm, and somebody repairs it and mints an NFT of the before/after photos, that's just an image. But with a supporting web of trust, complete with verifiers who inspect the bridge afterward and put "yeah that's a good job, and this is the only NFT for it" on the blockchain... now you've got something more.

preseinger24• 5 years ago

I agree with this, artificial scarcity is a lousy way to get anything done. The end-game of economics ought to be to eliminate scarcity

How do you have an economy without scarcity? What are the substantial differences between artificial and natural scarcity?

__MatrixMan__19• 5 years ago

Once you've done away with scarcity, you don't need an economy. After that it's gay luxury space communism for all.

And I'd say scarcity is artificial if making more of it requires you to break somebody's rules.

adrianN3• 5 years ago

What do you need an economy for once you've managed to get rid of all scarcity? Th economy is imho just a tool for allocating scarce resources.

ItsMonkk3• 5 years ago

I think we can use Vickrey Auctions for this problem. Vickrey Auctions are able to give not only price discovery, but also value discovery. Vickrey auctions incentivize bidders to bid their true value. If instead of using price discovery, we use value discovery, the price can stay at 0, so long as a certain (limited) amount of people are faced with a choice that would have them go without.

So for example perhaps we sample 50,000 people and say 75% of people keep access, say when they vote. If you bid in the top 75%, you keep access for the period, and you pay the value that the bottom person that kept access bid. That money is then not used to pay for the IP, some other tax will fund the IP or Open Source Software or Meme, that 25% will then go to all the voters for providing their values. So the average bidder will pay nothing, the below average bidder will lose something they value low, but gain, and the highest bidders will fund that. We then take some other collection and sample another 50,000 people, until we find out the value of all of these digital items to people.

If you do the subsidization process correctly, I think the idea of IP owners holding their supply back would go away, as releasing it to all would always provide more value than holding it back. I think at the very least this would be an obvious answer to Open Source Software, and this would easily fund things like Linux and Firefox. I think this would stretch further to research, and colleges would now be funded through this mechanism, and the professors who currently waste enormous amounts of time doing grant writing would be able to be productive. Thus the whole issue of journals goes away. Even things like ads, people would bid on their service less because of them, so there would be no fundamental reason to include them as it would reduce the subsidy.

NoGravitas3• 5 years ago

How do you have an economy without scarcity?

It's easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.

gfodor3• 5 years ago

Creative effort is scarce, so the argument is about how to securitize it. It’s not artificial scarcity, it may just be a poor proxy method around the actual scarce resource.

kody3• 5 years ago

Therein lies the insanity; a person can create {art, music, game asset} and nothing stops others from consuming that thing. Web3/crypto does not solve that -- it only 'proves' that one person 'owns' the created thing. Abstractly, that's cool. Concretely, who the hell cares? I got to see the jpeg and listen to the album exactly as the 'owner' of the digital asset was able to.

PeterisP• 5 years ago

I'd argue that for most types of content the modern problem is the abundance of creative effort (orders of magnitude more good content being created globally than anyone can consume) because of the global scaling so the major social problems for arts are the curation and discovery of the abundant creative effort, not securitization of some actually scarce resource. A particular piece of art or a particular author's work becomes scarce only due to social factors e.g. their work becoming "hot" among the uncountable other equally good works which aren't noticed or cared about for random reasons, not because such work is inherently scarce.

udbhavs• 5 years ago

There are some use cases like concert or event tickets where the scarcity is not artificial

meheleventyone9• 5 years ago

Right but those cases are already solved in a cheaper and less complex way and have been for an extraordinarily long time.

pornel2• 5 years ago

Concert tickets are an absolutely pointless application of a blockchain.

The concert venue is an unavoidable central authority. You don't need to melt the arctic for a fully decentralized trust-nobody system that merely manages a database of a single ultimate authority that can't be removed from the equation.

This problem can be solved with a REST API and it will have the exact same amount of (de)centralization and trust.

pjc506• 5 years ago

I minted this NFT by sequestering a kilogram of carbon

.. while emitting another ten.

for all I know, they made that dollar by making the world worse ... with NFT's I can look at the circumstances of its minting

Ah, so the opposite of financial privacy, you get to inspect how someone made their money before you accept it?

__MatrixMan__19• 5 years ago

Well no, I'd only value NFT's for sequestered carbon that were a net negative. The energy overhead need not be Bitcoin-sized.

And also, I'm not proposing that we make the entire pathway auditable. You don't get to know what each user spent it on before it reached your hands, you just get to know that somewhere, at the end of the line, is the guy who minted it. And whether you value it should come down to whether you want to live in a world with more of whatever he's doing.

YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo• 5 years ago

It's Beanie Babies for crypto bros.

Acrobatic_Road• 5 years ago

Is there any point in writing a real response when this guy puts IRC and IPFS in the same category? How is IPFS not web3?

threeseed2• 5 years ago

How is IPFS not web3?

It is. Web3 is whatever you want it to be at this point.

kody3• 5 years ago

Nope, but a whole lot of ancap bros are going to get very rich from this fad. More power to them I guess.

boxmonster2• 5 years ago

Can someone explain to me how something with a single source of truth (the blockchain database) can be considered decentralized?

seibelj• 5 years ago

The blockchain database doesn't have an owner. Users (public keys) can only modify very specific things related to them, and no node can arbitrarily modify it.

chroem-2• 5 years ago

I will answer your question with another question: would a more traditional DHT with a built-in p2p consensus mechanism stop being decentralized because it has said consensus mechanism?

boxmonster2• 5 years ago

I use the BitTorrent DHT all the time but I don't expect it to be consistent, not even eventually. With money you need something that is 100% accurate 100% of the time. Miners compete to calculate the one true blockchain. That smacks of centralization to me.

meheleventyone9• 5 years ago

Because like trustlessness and claims to remove middlemen they’re true but only in a very specific context. Every time you see a grandiose crypto claim that doesn’t make sense just add “for a technicality” to the end.

ultra_nick• 5 years ago

Blockchain is like scientific research. Anyone can announce anything, but only verifiable findings are trusted.

jacobjjacob• 5 years ago

Interesting at the beginning, but then the author rants a lot about their personal opinions. This goes on for many paragraphs.

jimjimjim• 5 years ago

if we ever invent Star Trek replicators a whole bunch of grifters would demand artificial scarcity for Picard's earl grey!

d--b• 5 years ago

Would people please stop with that web3 non-sense. It doesn't even exist.

aaaaaaaaaaab• 5 years ago

The scammers are trying to meme it into existence.

Quindecillion• 5 years ago

It's a marketing term used to sell products/services

Like "superfoods"

almostkorean2• 5 years ago

web3 has existed since 2015, see here: https://github.com/ChainSafe/web3.js/releases?page=14

How does it not exist to you?

remram2• 5 years ago

The fact that somebody published a package named "web3" doesn't mean that "web3", the movement/revolution/direction, exists.

I can create a package right now, call it "web4", and return an empty web page. Inferring the future of the web from it would be foolish. The web is used daily by billions of people who use the word to mean something specific, and a few cryptocurrency enthusiasts don't get to decide what it should now be.

randomsearch• 5 years ago

As a rule, every decentralised system in computing eventually becomes centralised. This is usually because it is more efficient to employ a hierarchical structure when implementing some functions.

Crypto is just like every other system - ostensibly distributed but centralised in practice.

The great exception to this seems to be BitTorrent. It remains decentralised and I wonder - what is so special about BitTorrent that means it hasn’t been replaced by a hierarchical system? Is it just “piracy” or is there something deeper we can learn from it?

pjc506• 5 years ago

what is so special about BitTorrent that means it hasn’t been replaced by a hierarchical system?

Every time a top of hierarchy node pops up too high it gets whacked by copyright enforcement. This is an effective pressure against centralisation. Otherwise every decentralised system tends to converge into central systems, like planets forming out of an accretion disk.

Surprisingly the copyright industry is far more effective at driving global law enforcement to do its bidding than the financial regulators are.

marderfarker22• 5 years ago

There isn’t a “top of the hierarchy node” in BitTorrent. Everyone gets treated the same less some tit for tat rules which usually don’t apply because a swarm usually has that 1 or 2 altruistic seeders.

astoor• 5 years ago

Given the blockchain trilemma (decentralised, scalable, secure - pick 2), the majority of users will prefer scalable + secure and drop decentralised. We've seen it over and over again - users want the least friction, and decentralised solutions typically add more friction. So we'll end up with centralised solutions again.

What the proponents really mean when they use the whole "web3 is the solution to Big Tech monopolies" pretext, is that they want to introduce new monopolies, and in the process get rich quick. Given the background of many of the figures at the top of these schemes, e.g. serial fraudsters, convicted criminals, pathological liars, etc., the new monopolies will almost certainly be significantly worse than the existing Big Tech monopolies. Normally I wouldn't be so concerned, because I have faith that better technologies will win, but with cryptocurrencies I am genuinely concerned for the future, because the noisy zealots (with their high paid lobbyists[0]) are drowning out all the quiet thoughtful rational ones.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29481889

VoodooJuJu• 5 years ago

You're probably right, but you're too late. "Decentralized" already made its way into the minds of the players. And decentralized is associated with "something good" and "something to throw money at because maybe it will make me rich". And those players will all lose while those at the top of the pyramids will all win and then you can say "I told you so" to all those greater fools, but they'll still say you were wrong, that you're not even a player, and so you know nothing. I wish I could convince them otherwise too, but it's too late for that.

A fool and his money.... At this point, I'd rather just make them my fools - better mine than someone else's. Take their money first, then say "I told you so". Then they might start listening to you.

api• 5 years ago

I hate how cryptocurrency sucked all the air out of the room with decentralization to the point that the term is now hopelessly linked to it.

vmception6• 5 years ago

I can relate to the frustration with that, whenever I had "algorithmic" in a pitch for a trading service or fund, literally everyone derailed the conversation to high frequency trading in all of their interest or rebuttals. Because HFT was hopelessly linked to algorithmic.

kapsteur• 5 years ago

"Amazon's Server Outage Took Down a 'Decentralized' Crypto Exchange" => https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxdnxy/amazons-server-outage...

vmception6• 5 years ago

It's just a platform to build and offer financial services without having to ask anyone, or have ongoing overhead costs.

Some are calling it OpenFinance to step over the optional decentralization.

"Check out my OF" penetrates a much broader audience than "DeFi service"

taytus• 5 years ago

your OnlyFans?

vmception6• 5 years ago

OpenFinance

Sevii• 5 years ago

Web3 is about having your own private keys. It's not about decentralization, it's about having control over your digital identity. If I log into HN and make comments here, HN owns my identity. If I log into a web3 site and make comments there, I own the identity on that site.

Moving authentication to the user removes the need for 3rd party websites to store passwords. It eliminates the need to sign up for websites. You just give websites access to your identity. Decentralization is a feature of cryptocurrency.

Web3 is about owning your identity, which is enabled by people having their own keys.

gitfan864• 5 years ago

You are describing "Login with Google" HN could easily support that, but one of the features of HN is that anonymity is optional.

k__3• 5 years ago

pseudalopex• 5 years ago

How will it catch on where client certificates and OpenID didn't?

gatorcode• 5 years ago

I’ve always been interested but confused by these concepts mostly trying to understand people’s intent. On many websites with logins we create our identity, but have to “validate” it against an email one time token. Me claiming I’m someone famous on most websites is, mostly innocent, and mostly not trusted. However, how do we verify real world identity to key pair? By some centralized authority we have trusted to “validate” said identity, aka public key infrastructure.

So, at best case we have some proof that our key is created/controlled by “me” via a trusted channel but not a centralized authority. Do I upload a video of me showing my public key to the world and upload to some hosting site? Could a deep fake me do that too? Then of course the gpg web of trust model comes to mind, if we attend key signing parties and sign each other’s keys we can verify through associative trust vs centralized trust.

Or is really the point to not have a real world to key identity linkage at all, for “privacy reasons,” and we just all do our business online with full anonymity?

DarylZero11• 5 years ago

Keysigning parties still rely on centralized trust -- physical IDs issued by governments.

kwertyoowiyop• 5 years ago

This sounds like “single sign-on.” The web site would still own whatever I post or contribute, wouldn’t it?

acdha9• 5 years ago

Moving authentication to the user removes the need for 3rd party websites to store passwords. It eliminates the need to sign up for websites. You just give websites access to your identity. Decentralization is a feature of cryptocurrency.

How is this different than the single-signon systems which people have been using for decades? In particular, why should we expect this to be more successful than, say, Mozilla's Persona was?

It would be especially useful if the marketing materials covered the requirements for a serious system like recovering from a compromised or lost key, or how it would avoid the privacy impacts of the same key being used in many places including for purchases? It would be especially important to think about how this would work for normal people — it's not decentralization if you're simply saying that instead of everyone using Google/Facebook/Apple for SSO you're switching to e.g. MetaMask, so a key question would be how reasonable and safe it is for a normal person to operate independently.

cblconfederate4• 5 years ago

It should be obvious how it is different. Google can block your email, while if eth wants to block you it will have to fork the Blockchain. Fair to say that is an enormously higher bar

'normal persons' will have to change habits. In the physical world, you can lose a coin , irreversibly. Same goes for the virtual. There are no ready made solutions. Lets not assume people are stupid and inflexible, they can adapt to new realities provided the benefits outweigh the drawbacks

pornel2• 5 years ago

We've had that with OpenID. It was a fully decentralized protocol, and you were able to authenticate yourself with a private key (or any other method you wanted).

The problem was that approximately zero users cared, and sites had no incentive to support a login method that didn't have a good solution for account recovery in the inevitable cases of users losing their access.

We've also had TLS client certs with straight up private keys. We have SSH keys too. We have U2F/Webauthn. Using private keys for auth is the easy part. Key management (i.e. people being careless and losing/leaking keys) is the hard unsolved part.

Also, you don't need a blockchain system to have a private key. It's literally just a random number. Blockchains only happen to use them as one of their components. It's like cars have radios, and car wonks saying "cars are about having your own music player. You should put a car in your bedroom to listen to music".

lousyd• 5 years ago

I think of web3 in a different way than I see it commonly talked about. I think the idea behind the changes in the Internet that people identified as "Web 2.0" was that the Internet was opening up to more people with the creation of sites that allowed user participation. It was a recognition that although the early public Internet allowed anyone to participate, in reality the cost, effort, and know-how involved in setting up a website was a hurdle most people couldn't overcome. So with Web 2.0 the internet was opening up to more people. We now know that this led to a perverse centralization of power. Yes, more people could now participate, but mostly on a few corporate-controlled platforms.

Web 3.0 is supposed to be a continuation of the trend of making the Internet "of the people". Web 1.0 was open to anyone. Web 2.0 was more open. Web 3.0 will be even more open. (In theory.) Web 3.0 isn't about Reddit or the other sites this person mentions. It's about all the new technologies people are coming up with to enable participation on the Internet free from the control of a few centralized corporate platforms. Blockchain is a big part of that, and cryptocurrencies. But so is tildeverse and Mastodon and Gemini and all that stuff.

Also, it's not the case that ARPANET was designed to stay up "if the Soviets took down important cities or strategic datacenters". Bob Taylor, the man who literally made the decision to authorize and fund the ARPANET, has said so himself. "The creation of the ARPAnet was not motivated by considerations of war."

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK• 5 years ago

Isn't decentralization just a definition of Web3? After web2 has been hijacked by a handful of companies, with associated surveillance, censorship and manipulation, people just want some freedom.

Web3 Is Not Decentralization

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