People use centralized systems because they actually like the convenience that comes with it. And with that, comes the decentralized system changing in such a way that it changes to almost NEEDING centralization. The problem is that engineers and cybersecurity people all think that everyone else thinks like they do, when in actuality the complete opposite is true.
The biggest example is the internet itself - the internet is a completely decentralized network until it wasn't, with website certs becoming required. People use popular web hosting because it's easier and just better than what they could do. Email is completely decentralized, and it's very easy to set up your own web server - as long as you want every single spam system to immediately block all of your messages.
"Decentralized" systems will all go the exact same way. And it's because people don't want to spend time setting up their own shit, they are very happy to pay in either money or data to have someone else do it for them. Yeah, it's very easy to say "well just set up your own thing" but once you get to a critical mass of everyone using Gmail instead of their own server then the system becomes unusable without centralization.
Decentralization is a fantastic idea, and it works great in theory, but it fails to actually consider any of the practical problems that come with decentralization and doesn't consider what people who aren't programmers actually want to do with their time and money.
> A lot of Web3 platforms are in fact centralized. Your wallet (MetaMask), marketplaces (OpenSea), APIs (Alchemy) are all central platforms. Sure, they use a distributed database (blockchain), but before that it’s still a Go app on AWS, meaning its centralized.
> Your wallet (MetaMask)
Run your own node. This is lazy reporting to reach the end point about fawning over FreeBSD (its in the article, literally an article about having fun staying poor), when you can just as easily inspire and teach people how to use custom RPCs. There is an opportunity to inspire people with the tools to know what to look for, even if it's absurd to suggest people actually compile and run a node themselves. Tell them why the default behavior is a convenience and if they are interested in the decentralized parts then here is what to do.
> marketplaces (OpenSea)
Yep. It is a GUI ontop of their smart contracts (public access backend code). You don't have to use their GUI. You should inspect their smart contracts for centralized control, or at least look to see if anyone else has. There is an opportunity to inspire people with the tools to know what to look for, even if its absurd to suggest people actually do all the analysis themselves.
> APIs (Alchemy) are all central platforms
a fine example. don't use Alchemy or Infura as your RPC endpoints? Why not just make blog posts about that?
This kind of energy could just as easily be steered into "how to improve the concept of Web3" which lots of people are actually doing. It could just as easily be "This isn't decentralized! Let me fix that!"
It isn't practical for the majority of people to run their own node. Even Vitalik Buterin acknowledges[1] this isn't realistic for the current state of things.
Last year I was interested in running a sidechain node and I was shocked when I looked at minimum system requirements. I can't just run it in the background and I have a 5600X Ryzen. Plus my NVMe drive needed to be much bigger. It also can eat through SSDs, and HDDs are considered too slow.
Worse to me: It looks like another time consuming hobby. I spent a lot of time even just getting up to speed on the current ecosystem, the jargon, best practices, etc. It often seems like crypto is trying to take something less complicated and make it complicated.
It just seems like people are simply pushing a technology that isn't ready yet for what people in the scene think is currently possible.
My interest for running a node was for prediction market trading to attempt to counter frontrunning aka sandwich attacks. Another ridiculous problem that many people in the scene act like isn't a big deal.
When a product has a lot of negative externalities, and you also notice that it doesn't deliver on the promise that's meant to counterbalance those externalities, it's entirely reasonable and appropriate to conclude that the project should be rejected, rather than joining in to try to fix it. I don't know why anyone would want to build a "Web3" with people who use "have fun staying poor" as a catchphrase, or whose understanding of existing technology allows them to refer to "BSD linux". I don't want to empower or enrich those people. We already have enough of them.
You’re falling into the same trap as tech enthusiasts in web1.
Sure, you could scan blockchains and extract NFT data yourself, and sure you could run your own node for every blockchain that interests you (paying god only know how much for storage and bandwidth). Just like how in web1 you could run your own email server to handle email and have your own blog server to publish info and your own git server to host your code and your own domain name to put it all under…
But it turns out that exceptionally few users actually care about putting in the time/effort/money to do that. Hence the rise in web2 and platforms. The people who run their own infra now are all doing it more as a hobby than anything else.
Like it or not, recentralization is the future of web3 for the average consumer. You can be a crypto decentralization purist, but I hope you realize that you’ll be the minority in that, if crypto/web3 actually is to gain widespread adoption.
For the average consumer, convenience is the real feature, and true decentralization is inconvenient.
> literally an article about having fun staying poor
And here it is. When the technical merits of “web3” fail to illicit genuine change (networks effects are powerful and matter [0]), its advocates fall back on the “get in or stay out” mentality, which is frankly a red flag for a supposedly technical project.
> could just as easily be steered into "how to improve the concept of Web3"
If web3 cannot sustain itself due to its technical merits and if there clearly are centralized effects at work here, then every person brought in with the threat that they better help out or “stay poor” (a truly disgusting phrase) is just another brick in the pyramid, another dollar to VCs. Just admit you are trying to coerce free labor to prop up your own bags.
Many are not impressed by the so called merits of web3 for good reason.
> Run your own node
Literally, in Satoshi’s original white paper in 2008, he pointed out that running a node is prohibitive and could result in centralization over time, which is exactly why he coined SPV (simple payment verification) (aka light clients).
> [OpenSea] is a GUI ontop of their smart contracts (public access backend code)
Blatantly false. OpenSea can and has taken down various tokens minted on their platform for reasons ranging from copyright infringement to sanctions compliance (Iran is the only country I am familiar with at the time). You can mint an NFT without OpenSea but to say that you can just use OpenSea’s “backend code” without their consent is false.
> There is an opportunity to inspire people with the tools to…
This crypto grift talk is frustrating, dishonest, and hand-wave-y coming from the cypherpunks to what we have now. Cryptocurrency and the space around it was never about “inspiration,” but about liberation and action. We don’t need to be inspired, we need to be empowered.
[^0]: Coinbase complies with sanctions. OpenSea removes artwork. MetaMask uses Infura as an RPC so any NFT removed on OpenSea will not show up in MetaMask wallets (using default RPC). Bridge hacks result in many accounts losing their money unless saved by an injection of VC funding, completely defeating the “be your own bank” mentality. Centralized platforms extreme usage relative to the rest of the network (Uniswap, OpenSea, MetaMask) result in high gas prices for everyone else. Billionaires like Justin Sun Tron can take out massive loans to influence distributed governance like he did for the Compound vote on collateral rates.
> It could just as easily be "This isn't decentralized! Let me fix that!"
First I would like to be convinced that centralization is actually a problem.
Most things in our daily lives are centralized: Power Generation and Distribution, Water Distribution, the Logistics which put food in our stores, Infrastructure setup and maintenance, to name just a few.
Yes, even our financial systems work fine. I get my paycheck on my account, I can pay effortless with my credit card, security, maintenance, services, customer service is taken care of.
Yes, there are shitty centralized systems, and there are opressive authorities that abuse centralization. The solution to that however, is not "get rid of centralized systems".
I could also not do any of that and trust an authority to provide that service for me.
Society encourages specialization and most people will not start to self-host for some idealistic reasons that they might not even share. Unless self-hosting is more convenient and has better UX the majority will not adopt it.
Even if you as an individual want decentralization, you will still be affected by this creeping centralization. Tokens on platforms (like OpenSea) will have more value and liquidity than trying to trade directly. If your NFT gets blacklisted on OpenSea it will lose value. Even if you never intend to use OpenSea, if the majority uses it to verify "authenticity" it will become a central authority.
Just look at all the phished NFTs. The owners (not anymore) immediately rush to OpenSea trying to get the "stolen" NTF blacklisted.
> Yep. It is a GUI ontop of their smart contracts (public access backend code). You don't have to use their GUI. You should inspect their smart contracts for centralized control, or at least look to see if anyone else has. There is an opportunity to inspire people with the tools to know what to look for, even if its absurd to suggest people actually do all the analysis themselves.
On Polygon OpenSea took an open-access marketplace (0x V3) and gave only themselves the permission to interact with the mutable functions (e.g. filling orders). The very definition of centralized.
With 16% of Americans saying they have invested in cryptocurrency in some form, coupled with the classic adoption graph (https://www.ou.edu/deptcomm/dodjcc/groups/99A2/curve.JPG), crypto is begging for ways to burst into the mainstream early majority, and the way to do that is with the familiar. They want Coinbase, and OpenSea, and low friction experiences.
I'm not too experienced with this sector, but LooksRare is already a decentralized replacement for OpenSea. It has lower fees, too. Some of my friends got airdrops or invested directly in LooksRare and have talked about it quite a bit.
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.
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.
> 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.
The mortal sin is to consider artificial rarity a good thing. The internet is infinite, the appeal of the metaverse is exacty because you can be infinitely young, infinitely rich, have infinite partners, break ouf of the constraints of this world. Constrained virtual worlds are called games and have a different objective. If we are to build a zero sum world, we d better stick to the physical one.
Bitcoin is about sound money in the real world. Artificial rarity is a feature in that space. Proof of work is about grounding the system in the physical world.
This seems like the angry ramblings of someone who missed the boat.
I'm not invested in cryptocurrency or other tokens, but this seems very unfair to the ecosystems that power them. Sure, there are centralized wallets, marketplaces, APIs, but that's just not the point, not the problem they're trying to solve.
If Google deletes your account, that's it. If OpenSea deletes your account, another app will happily connect to your wallet and let you continue where you left off.
Continue where you left off, except without access to OpenSea (or whatever other vendor), in an economy where the value of the contents of your wallet is increasingly dependent on the availability and visibility of your "digital assets" on vendor services.
But you're right. Decentralization is not the problem that the crypto community is trying to solve, because they don't actually care about a decentralized "Web3". They care about the parts of the system that make them rich. The "decentralization" cant is just social-good camouflage, no different from Facebook's claims about making lives better through the "metaverse".
> The cost of storing information on the Blockchain is referred to as GAS and at the time of writting costs roughly $2 USD per 1kb of data. To put this into perspective, a high resolution photograph can be upwards of 4000kb, or $8,000.
Even if this estimate is three orders of magnitude off, this idea is DOA.
Blockchains aren't a replacement for cloud storage. Storing a yacht in a mailbox would probably get expensive too.
That readme file has little original content, and is riddled with speculation, errors and typos. I think there are more substantive criticisms of Web3 available, this is possibly one of the worst I've seen.
Why would you put a photograph on the blockchain directly? The chain is for transaction processing, stuff like proof of ownership. Want decentralized storage? Toss it on IPFS.
What's amazing to me is that if you want to find any of these decentralized systems, you have to trust some centralized entity identifying them as the true system. For example, want to download MetaMask? How will you find it? Google MetaMask and trust that Google will have filtered out all the fake MetaMask wallets set up to steal your money. Want to lend money on a DeFi platform like Anchor? Again, Google and hope to God their fake counterpart didn't figure out how to fake its way to the top of the SER page. People have lost tons of money this way.
If only there was a trustless, decentralized, immutable, database of sorts that could be used as the source of truth... thegraph.com supposedly wants to do this, but it wants me to connect my wallet and again I'm not sure I'm on the "right" website...
Proof of Work is the source of truth [0]. That is why Proof of Stake cannot work. You are describing one of the biggest of the problems with PoS perfectly.
> What's amazing to me is that if you want to find any of these decentralized systems, you have to trust some centralized entity identifying them as the true system. For example, want to download MetaMask? How will you find it? Google MetaMask and trust that Google
Or I go directly to my friend's website that has a link to MetaMask's because I trust him.
There's a blockchain prediction market that relies on thegraph for some functionality in an attempt to make every aspect DeFi, but the performance is just garbage to the point where it should be unacceptable for real money trading.
I don't think your typical YC startup would find delivering a product in this state for public use as acceptable, but the startup behind it was flush with VC cash.
How would you ever be able to trust such a trustless, decentralized database? Wouldn't all the same problems that you addressed with Google appear again?
With google, the most notable difference seems to be that it is big enough (due its single entry point nature) that people invest in gaming it.
The issue is that crypto-rooters took the term "Web3" and inevitable tied it to crypto. There are other decentralized approaches that could become a decentralized successor to todays web, (CCNs, IPFS) but are not blockchain/crypto related. So please don't buy into the "only crypto/blockchain" is the future of the decentralized web narrative.
This article is realy lazy. If you want an actually valid argument against web3, here is Tim O'Reilly's take. He is the creator of the term web2.0 and created much of what we know as open source: https://www.oreilly.com/radar/why-its-too-early-to-get-excit...
I don't understand how these types of articles can reach the front page of hackernews. A hadoop system could provide a replacement? That's like arguing a multi-threaded pc will be a replacement.
Blockchain does have a lot of hype, we can all agree there. But there's decent technology being built too. He is right in that many things are centralized, and many tools have to still be decentralized (like infura).
The thing is, things are being built to solve certain issues and we are at early stages. Wwhat serious teams want to achieve is not "decentralization", but "sufficient-decentralization". As in, you can expect for a protocol to enforce solving conflicts of interest accounting for what the majority in the protocol want. Governance is important here, and it's being dealt with. DiD will potentially allow more democracy (instead of capitalisti) decision of the rules. You have energy sector investing heavily on energy conflict resolution. There's many topics that are solved by certain features.
> Your wallet (MetaMask), marketplaces (OpenSea), APIs (Alchemy) are all central platforms.
The whole point of the blockchain as a decentralized database idea is that people are free (in the "you don't need permission" sense) to build on it.
Just because OpenSea is a popular interface for trading NFTs it doesn't mean you can't also trade those same NFTs elsewhere.
And your wallet isn't "centralized" at all. Just because MetaMask happens to be implememented using a server doesn't mean you can't export your seed phrase and import it into (eg) TrustWallet and use that instead or as well.
> And if Web3 is “decentralized”, then why can OpenSea take away your NFTs?
Now the Moxie piece[1] on the other hand (which was linked here) is a _great_ criticism by someone who actually bothered to understand what he was doing.
And if you actually _read_ the piece you'll notice that the NFT wasn't taken away at all: it was delisted on OpenSea, and their API stopped returning it.
Moxie's criticisms of the dependency on APIs for performance are well balanced and completely valid here.
But the original piece too away all the subtle of Moxie's piece and turned it into just another boring Web3 hit piece.
> And your wallet isn't "centralized" at all. Just because MetaMask happens to be implememented using a server doesn't mean you can't export your seed phrase and import it into (eg) TrustWallet and use that instead or as well.
It's not even that. Metamask defaults to using a particular server, but you can set it to anything you want to in Settings.
The original post is just wrong. Aside from the default set for convenience, Metamask isagnostic to whether you want to plug it into a centralized or decentralized API service.
If you choose to run a local Ethereum node, Metamask even has a default already set in the Networks dropdown list.
This feels like yet another article trying to paint broad ideological strokes about Web3 without grasping any nuance.
Agree 100%. Web3 is useless. The whole web3 thing is an extension to get more people and more real money to get into the crypto ecosystem and provide liquidity to the early adopters and insiders.
I haven't found one legitimate use case for blockchain. The only thing it is useful for it speculative gambling.
This is one of the weakest criticisms to web3 I've seen. Shocked that this is on the front page of HN. Literally every point here has already been talked about and debunked.
> Web3 Platforms are Centralized
The blockchain itself is decentralized, and you don't have to use centralized platforms.
> Mining is Centralized
Sure mining is not as decentralized as we'd like it to be, but it is unquestionably less centralized than the alternative.
> Environmental concerns
Look into "Proof of Stake"
> Blockchain Sucks, Period
Blockchain works very well for its intended applications actually. For example, Ukraine just raised $54 million through crypto. The article doesn't even attempt to construct an argument, so there's nothing to address.
> Blockchain is not the way to decentralization. We need a hyper-efficient system that takes minimal computing resources to scale to a whole planet of users, while making it easy for newcomers to join the network.
Looking forward to your whitepaper on your superior alternative to a blockchain. Until then, we'll stick to blockchains for their intended use cases.
Honestly this article and the comments section is an embarrassment. You guys should actually research what you're criticizing. HN has been anti-crypto since crypto was invented, at this point over a decade later maybe it's time to have some humility and admit that you guys were wrong, and that maybe this thing is actually worth attempting to understand lest you want to continue to be on the wrong side of history
> Look at email, while the protocol is technically “decentralized”, but look at how big Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 is. Sure, you can easily set up an email server on a $5 VPS, I do it with my domain, but most people just leave it to big providers. Web3 is no different.
This is an interesting argument to make but I wouldn't say having large subsets belonging to single entities equates to it being "not decentralized."
Absolutely content-free article that brings no new or useful criticisms (of which there are plenty) to the table.
If anyone is looking for useful criticisms of "web3", here are a couple:
* there is no meaningful privacy on most popular chains; everybody can see your transaction history
* it's difficult for new nodes to join and check the history, making decentralization difficult, and also leading to some of the centralization issues mentioned in the article
* the popular chains have low transaction throughput and latency due to reliance on outdated consensus mechanisms (BTC, Ethereum) and/or due to the need to enable weaker computers to check history (but see previous point).
* losing your funds is easy if you lose your key
There's tons of research being done to resolve these issues, ranging from improved cryptographic proof mechanisms such as zkSNARKs and interactive fault proofs, to better consensus and sybil-resistance mechanisms, but this stuff takes time, and is literally the cutting-edge of these fields, so impact is delayed.
It is hard to advocate for the value of decentralized systems without sounding like a hand-waving conspiracy theorist.
The benefits of decentralization do come at a cost of efficiency and throughput and they are often harder to quantify or justify unless one takes a harder look at the fully loaded cost of centralization.
As an example, consider the fact that MacDonald’s is by far the most prolific restaurant in the world or that GMO crops undoubtedly yield more productivity per acre than heirloom crops. In both cases centralization and standardization of the process has led to huge productivity gains, but at what expense? What have we lost in the process?
I would argue that monoculture and food homogenization engineered to maximize calories out per $ in have come at the cost of diversity.
Diversity of ideas, strategies, goals, ownership and agency all result in a society that, while productive, is less resilient.
Look at the various fungal plagues that have blighted banana production over the years. Monoculture brought huge yields but at the expense of resilience as a single fungus nearly wiped out the original Gros Michel variety and now a new fungus threatens the same for the Cavendish.
Similarly, Bitcoin is an inefficient network for transmitting fiat compared to Visa when measured against the criteria payment networks are usually measured on. Ethereum takes huge resources to run the equivalent of a Raspberry Pi as a global state machine.
Measuring decentralized systems vs centralized purely on efficiency and throughput kind of misses the forest for the trees. Decentralized systems have value that isn’t always obvious to a superficial analysis such as this one. That doesn’t mean they should be ignored. Often the largest paradigm shifts look like toys to start. (See Clayton Christianson and disruptive innovation.)
The author has no credibility on this subject at all. BTC is not mined with GPUs. They then make statements with no actual backing that are just opinions. Anyone can mine, yes it is profitable. Stop spreading false narratives. Then there's the laughable environment statements everywhere. Do some actual research on a topic instead of talking about "white crypto bros". This article is insulting and uninformed.
This article doesn't even explain how web3 is centralized (it is in many ways). All I see is some stupid non-technical blog trying to orient blockchain as part of the enemy along with "wh*te", "0.1%", and "bro". The irony is that this is a techbro-tier article.
[+] [-] alexb_|4 years ago|reply
The biggest example is the internet itself - the internet is a completely decentralized network until it wasn't, with website certs becoming required. People use popular web hosting because it's easier and just better than what they could do. Email is completely decentralized, and it's very easy to set up your own web server - as long as you want every single spam system to immediately block all of your messages.
"Decentralized" systems will all go the exact same way. And it's because people don't want to spend time setting up their own shit, they are very happy to pay in either money or data to have someone else do it for them. Yeah, it's very easy to say "well just set up your own thing" but once you get to a critical mass of everyone using Gmail instead of their own server then the system becomes unusable without centralization.
Decentralization is a fantastic idea, and it works great in theory, but it fails to actually consider any of the practical problems that come with decentralization and doesn't consider what people who aren't programmers actually want to do with their time and money.
[+] [-] vmception|4 years ago|reply
> Your wallet (MetaMask)
Run your own node. This is lazy reporting to reach the end point about fawning over FreeBSD (its in the article, literally an article about having fun staying poor), when you can just as easily inspire and teach people how to use custom RPCs. There is an opportunity to inspire people with the tools to know what to look for, even if it's absurd to suggest people actually compile and run a node themselves. Tell them why the default behavior is a convenience and if they are interested in the decentralized parts then here is what to do.
> marketplaces (OpenSea)
Yep. It is a GUI ontop of their smart contracts (public access backend code). You don't have to use their GUI. You should inspect their smart contracts for centralized control, or at least look to see if anyone else has. There is an opportunity to inspire people with the tools to know what to look for, even if its absurd to suggest people actually do all the analysis themselves.
> APIs (Alchemy) are all central platforms
a fine example. don't use Alchemy or Infura as your RPC endpoints? Why not just make blog posts about that?
This kind of energy could just as easily be steered into "how to improve the concept of Web3" which lots of people are actually doing. It could just as easily be "This isn't decentralized! Let me fix that!"
[+] [-] TheCowboy|4 years ago|reply
It isn't practical for the majority of people to run their own node. Even Vitalik Buterin acknowledges[1] this isn't realistic for the current state of things.
Last year I was interested in running a sidechain node and I was shocked when I looked at minimum system requirements. I can't just run it in the background and I have a 5600X Ryzen. Plus my NVMe drive needed to be much bigger. It also can eat through SSDs, and HDDs are considered too slow.
Worse to me: It looks like another time consuming hobby. I spent a lot of time even just getting up to speed on the current ecosystem, the jargon, best practices, etc. It often seems like crypto is trying to take something less complicated and make it complicated.
It just seems like people are simply pushing a technology that isn't ready yet for what people in the scene think is currently possible.
My interest for running a node was for prediction market trading to attempt to counter frontrunning aka sandwich attacks. Another ridiculous problem that many people in the scene act like isn't a big deal.
1. https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/05/23/scaling.html
[+] [-] djur|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taywrobel|4 years ago|reply
Sure, you could scan blockchains and extract NFT data yourself, and sure you could run your own node for every blockchain that interests you (paying god only know how much for storage and bandwidth). Just like how in web1 you could run your own email server to handle email and have your own blog server to publish info and your own git server to host your code and your own domain name to put it all under…
But it turns out that exceptionally few users actually care about putting in the time/effort/money to do that. Hence the rise in web2 and platforms. The people who run their own infra now are all doing it more as a hobby than anything else.
Like it or not, recentralization is the future of web3 for the average consumer. You can be a crypto decentralization purist, but I hope you realize that you’ll be the minority in that, if crypto/web3 actually is to gain widespread adoption.
For the average consumer, convenience is the real feature, and true decentralization is inconvenient.
[+] [-] uncomputation|4 years ago|reply
And here it is. When the technical merits of “web3” fail to illicit genuine change (networks effects are powerful and matter [0]), its advocates fall back on the “get in or stay out” mentality, which is frankly a red flag for a supposedly technical project.
> could just as easily be steered into "how to improve the concept of Web3"
If web3 cannot sustain itself due to its technical merits and if there clearly are centralized effects at work here, then every person brought in with the threat that they better help out or “stay poor” (a truly disgusting phrase) is just another brick in the pyramid, another dollar to VCs. Just admit you are trying to coerce free labor to prop up your own bags.
Many are not impressed by the so called merits of web3 for good reason.
> Run your own node
Literally, in Satoshi’s original white paper in 2008, he pointed out that running a node is prohibitive and could result in centralization over time, which is exactly why he coined SPV (simple payment verification) (aka light clients).
> [OpenSea] is a GUI ontop of their smart contracts (public access backend code)
Blatantly false. OpenSea can and has taken down various tokens minted on their platform for reasons ranging from copyright infringement to sanctions compliance (Iran is the only country I am familiar with at the time). You can mint an NFT without OpenSea but to say that you can just use OpenSea’s “backend code” without their consent is false.
> There is an opportunity to inspire people with the tools to…
This crypto grift talk is frustrating, dishonest, and hand-wave-y coming from the cypherpunks to what we have now. Cryptocurrency and the space around it was never about “inspiration,” but about liberation and action. We don’t need to be inspired, we need to be empowered.
[^0]: Coinbase complies with sanctions. OpenSea removes artwork. MetaMask uses Infura as an RPC so any NFT removed on OpenSea will not show up in MetaMask wallets (using default RPC). Bridge hacks result in many accounts losing their money unless saved by an injection of VC funding, completely defeating the “be your own bank” mentality. Centralized platforms extreme usage relative to the rest of the network (Uniswap, OpenSea, MetaMask) result in high gas prices for everyone else. Billionaires like Justin Sun Tron can take out massive loans to influence distributed governance like he did for the Compound vote on collateral rates.
[+] [-] wrl|4 years ago|reply
Which platforms are doing that? Any you can name offhand?
> You don't have to use their GUI.
Who's doing that?
> don't use Alchemy or Infura as your RPC endpoints?
Who's doing that?
> It could just as easily be "This isn't decentralized! Let me fix that!"
Write the post, then. I'd read it.
[+] [-] usrbinbash|4 years ago|reply
First I would like to be convinced that centralization is actually a problem.
Most things in our daily lives are centralized: Power Generation and Distribution, Water Distribution, the Logistics which put food in our stores, Infrastructure setup and maintenance, to name just a few.
Yes, even our financial systems work fine. I get my paycheck on my account, I can pay effortless with my credit card, security, maintenance, services, customer service is taken care of.
Yes, there are shitty centralized systems, and there are opressive authorities that abuse centralization. The solution to that however, is not "get rid of centralized systems".
[+] [-] topranks|4 years ago|reply
It’s so obnoxious to assert that poverty is a choice, or falsely claim that anyone can get rich by investing in crypto.
[+] [-] Dagonfly|4 years ago|reply
Society encourages specialization and most people will not start to self-host for some idealistic reasons that they might not even share. Unless self-hosting is more convenient and has better UX the majority will not adopt it.
Even if you as an individual want decentralization, you will still be affected by this creeping centralization. Tokens on platforms (like OpenSea) will have more value and liquidity than trying to trade directly. If your NFT gets blacklisted on OpenSea it will lose value. Even if you never intend to use OpenSea, if the majority uses it to verify "authenticity" it will become a central authority.
Just look at all the phished NFTs. The owners (not anymore) immediately rush to OpenSea trying to get the "stolen" NTF blacklisted.
[+] [-] yahn00|4 years ago|reply
Until ISPs block you like they did with DNS.
That’s what really should change; ISPs should be required to let anyone run services, bill for consumption.
But then the internet would be truly decentralized.
Most people just want messaging, calendar, and maps anyway. The rest of these apps serve first world tech bros who didn’t want a real job.
[+] [-] mouzogu|4 years ago|reply
yeah just buy an 86TB drive every year and run the node 24/7 to avoid penalties
>You should inspect their smart contracts
how many people are actually able to do this
I'm not against crypto and i'm not sure yet about web3 but if it requires buying some kind of token to participate then i am skeptical.
[+] [-] beaugunderson|4 years ago|reply
On Polygon OpenSea took an open-access marketplace (0x V3) and gave only themselves the permission to interact with the mutable functions (e.g. filling orders). The very definition of centralized.
[+] [-] grensley|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlchemistCamp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbesto|4 years ago|reply
So what happens if someone just copies the JPG and puts on their web host? Isn't that essentially what OpenSea is...a hosted service for the JPG.
[+] [-] shp0ngle|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ipnon|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] djur|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mccorrinall|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum_Classic
[+] [-] thr0wawayf00|4 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] jdrc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitcoin_anon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TobyTheDog123|4 years ago|reply
I'm not invested in cryptocurrency or other tokens, but this seems very unfair to the ecosystems that power them. Sure, there are centralized wallets, marketplaces, APIs, but that's just not the point, not the problem they're trying to solve.
If Google deletes your account, that's it. If OpenSea deletes your account, another app will happily connect to your wallet and let you continue where you left off.
[+] [-] mccorrinall|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nursie|4 years ago|reply
Or not, because they all use the OpenSea API instead of bothering with the blockchain.
[+] [-] djur|4 years ago|reply
But you're right. Decentralization is not the problem that the crypto community is trying to solve, because they don't actually care about a decentralized "Web3". They care about the parts of the system that make them rich. The "decentralization" cant is just social-good camouflage, no different from Facebook's claims about making lives better through the "metaverse".
[+] [-] Tade0|4 years ago|reply
https://github.com/cryptog0/welcome2web3#social-media-on-web...
> The cost of storing information on the Blockchain is referred to as GAS and at the time of writting costs roughly $2 USD per 1kb of data. To put this into perspective, a high resolution photograph can be upwards of 4000kb, or $8,000.
Even if this estimate is three orders of magnitude off, this idea is DOA.
[+] [-] TAKEMYMONEY|4 years ago|reply
That readme file has little original content, and is riddled with speculation, errors and typos. I think there are more substantive criticisms of Web3 available, this is possibly one of the worst I've seen.
[+] [-] Nav_Panel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SparkyMcUnicorn|4 years ago|reply
Tech that's currently on testnets solves all the "problems" mentioned. It doesn't mention any of these solutions.
Also, use the right tool for the job. Storing a 4MB file on the ETH chain is probably not the right tool for the job.
[+] [-] v_p_n_p_v|4 years ago|reply
If only there was a trustless, decentralized, immutable, database of sorts that could be used as the source of truth... thegraph.com supposedly wants to do this, but it wants me to connect my wallet and again I'm not sure I'm on the "right" website...
[+] [-] rax0m|4 years ago|reply
[0] https://dergigi.com/2021/01/14/bitcoin-is-time/
[+] [-] AlchemistCamp|4 years ago|reply
Or I go directly to my friend's website that has a link to MetaMask's because I trust him.
[+] [-] TheCowboy|4 years ago|reply
There's a blockchain prediction market that relies on thegraph for some functionality in an attempt to make every aspect DeFi, but the performance is just garbage to the point where it should be unacceptable for real money trading.
I don't think your typical YC startup would find delivering a product in this state for public use as acceptable, but the startup behind it was flush with VC cash.
[+] [-] Fannon|4 years ago|reply
With google, the most notable difference seems to be that it is big enough (due its single entry point nature) that people invest in gaming it.
[+] [-] littlecranky67|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] genge|4 years ago|reply
I don't understand how these types of articles can reach the front page of hackernews. A hadoop system could provide a replacement? That's like arguing a multi-threaded pc will be a replacement.
Blockchain does have a lot of hype, we can all agree there. But there's decent technology being built too. He is right in that many things are centralized, and many tools have to still be decentralized (like infura).
The thing is, things are being built to solve certain issues and we are at early stages. Wwhat serious teams want to achieve is not "decentralization", but "sufficient-decentralization". As in, you can expect for a protocol to enforce solving conflicts of interest accounting for what the majority in the protocol want. Governance is important here, and it's being dealt with. DiD will potentially allow more democracy (instead of capitalisti) decision of the rules. You have energy sector investing heavily on energy conflict resolution. There's many topics that are solved by certain features.
[+] [-] nl|4 years ago|reply
> Your wallet (MetaMask), marketplaces (OpenSea), APIs (Alchemy) are all central platforms.
The whole point of the blockchain as a decentralized database idea is that people are free (in the "you don't need permission" sense) to build on it.
Just because OpenSea is a popular interface for trading NFTs it doesn't mean you can't also trade those same NFTs elsewhere.
And your wallet isn't "centralized" at all. Just because MetaMask happens to be implememented using a server doesn't mean you can't export your seed phrase and import it into (eg) TrustWallet and use that instead or as well.
> And if Web3 is “decentralized”, then why can OpenSea take away your NFTs?
Now the Moxie piece[1] on the other hand (which was linked here) is a _great_ criticism by someone who actually bothered to understand what he was doing.
And if you actually _read_ the piece you'll notice that the NFT wasn't taken away at all: it was delisted on OpenSea, and their API stopped returning it.
Moxie's criticisms of the dependency on APIs for performance are well balanced and completely valid here.
But the original piece too away all the subtle of Moxie's piece and turned it into just another boring Web3 hit piece.
[1] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
[+] [-] everfree|4 years ago|reply
It's not even that. Metamask defaults to using a particular server, but you can set it to anything you want to in Settings.
The original post is just wrong. Aside from the default set for convenience, Metamask isagnostic to whether you want to plug it into a centralized or decentralized API service.
If you choose to run a local Ethereum node, Metamask even has a default already set in the Networks dropdown list.
This feels like yet another article trying to paint broad ideological strokes about Web3 without grasping any nuance.
[+] [-] yashg|4 years ago|reply
I haven't found one legitimate use case for blockchain. The only thing it is useful for it speculative gambling.
I wrote about it some time ago and and shared here on HN https://yash.info/blog/what-is-web3/
[+] [-] wnolens|4 years ago|reply
That's a false dichotomy if I've ever seen one! And out of the blue.. the author seems ashamed but trying to justify why they shouldn't be.
> But hey, working at Redmond beats taking Miami and Houston underwater just to make a few white crypto bros happy.
yikes.. ok.
[+] [-] JSavageOne|4 years ago|reply
> Web3 Platforms are Centralized
The blockchain itself is decentralized, and you don't have to use centralized platforms.
> Mining is Centralized
Sure mining is not as decentralized as we'd like it to be, but it is unquestionably less centralized than the alternative.
> Environmental concerns
Look into "Proof of Stake"
> Blockchain Sucks, Period
Blockchain works very well for its intended applications actually. For example, Ukraine just raised $54 million through crypto. The article doesn't even attempt to construct an argument, so there's nothing to address.
> Blockchain is not the way to decentralization. We need a hyper-efficient system that takes minimal computing resources to scale to a whole planet of users, while making it easy for newcomers to join the network.
Looking forward to your whitepaper on your superior alternative to a blockchain. Until then, we'll stick to blockchains for their intended use cases.
Honestly this article and the comments section is an embarrassment. You guys should actually research what you're criticizing. HN has been anti-crypto since crypto was invented, at this point over a decade later maybe it's time to have some humility and admit that you guys were wrong, and that maybe this thing is actually worth attempting to understand lest you want to continue to be on the wrong side of history
[+] [-] adamkochanowicz|4 years ago|reply
This is an interesting argument to make but I wouldn't say having large subsets belonging to single entities equates to it being "not decentralized."
[+] [-] Ar-Curunir|4 years ago|reply
If anyone is looking for useful criticisms of "web3", here are a couple:
* there is no meaningful privacy on most popular chains; everybody can see your transaction history
* it's difficult for new nodes to join and check the history, making decentralization difficult, and also leading to some of the centralization issues mentioned in the article
* the popular chains have low transaction throughput and latency due to reliance on outdated consensus mechanisms (BTC, Ethereum) and/or due to the need to enable weaker computers to check history (but see previous point).
* losing your funds is easy if you lose your key
There's tons of research being done to resolve these issues, ranging from improved cryptographic proof mechanisms such as zkSNARKs and interactive fault proofs, to better consensus and sybil-resistance mechanisms, but this stuff takes time, and is literally the cutting-edge of these fields, so impact is delayed.
[+] [-] OrlandoHakim|4 years ago|reply
The benefits of decentralization do come at a cost of efficiency and throughput and they are often harder to quantify or justify unless one takes a harder look at the fully loaded cost of centralization.
As an example, consider the fact that MacDonald’s is by far the most prolific restaurant in the world or that GMO crops undoubtedly yield more productivity per acre than heirloom crops. In both cases centralization and standardization of the process has led to huge productivity gains, but at what expense? What have we lost in the process?
I would argue that monoculture and food homogenization engineered to maximize calories out per $ in have come at the cost of diversity.
Diversity of ideas, strategies, goals, ownership and agency all result in a society that, while productive, is less resilient.
Look at the various fungal plagues that have blighted banana production over the years. Monoculture brought huge yields but at the expense of resilience as a single fungus nearly wiped out the original Gros Michel variety and now a new fungus threatens the same for the Cavendish.
Similarly, Bitcoin is an inefficient network for transmitting fiat compared to Visa when measured against the criteria payment networks are usually measured on. Ethereum takes huge resources to run the equivalent of a Raspberry Pi as a global state machine.
Measuring decentralized systems vs centralized purely on efficiency and throughput kind of misses the forest for the trees. Decentralized systems have value that isn’t always obvious to a superficial analysis such as this one. That doesn’t mean they should be ignored. Often the largest paradigm shifts look like toys to start. (See Clayton Christianson and disruptive innovation.)
[+] [-] Lamad123|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cdnsteve|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unixbane|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zaskoda|4 years ago|reply
I find this article a little tough to take because of sentences like this one. I think it could have used a bit more proof reading.