[yrral]

The author is just defining "decentralized" based on what he can come up with arguments against. In doing so, he misses some very important properties of this decentralization (that he either doesn't realize or doesn't have arguments for).

To me, web3 is decentralized in that the user data is exposed and freely available to be composed upon.

For example, when someone makes a deposit (say of ERC20 USDC to earn interest, around 3.0% currently) on https://compound.finance, that data is freely available and the "receipt" becomes another token (the ERC20 USDC cToken). [1]

This token can now be used for other things, on any other protocol, without the involvement or permission of compound itself. For example, there is a "compound" pool on https://curve.fi that allows users to deposit cTokens so that they can earn interest on their stablecoins while also providing liquidity for stablecoin swaps and earning swap fees as well on top. [2] In fact, with this pool, the user can deposit/withdrawal just pure ERC20 USDC instead and curve will deposit/withdrawal that into/from compound on behalf of the user, again, with no involvement of compound at all. (other than interacting with its "immutable" smart contract)

> As a sidenote: Note that with web2, much of your data is locked away. Eg, twitter's closed api, gmail marking so many emails from self-hosted as spam, fb everything, American airlines not allowing scraping of a user's point wallet, cc points being non-transferrable, etc etc.

This deposit then gives the user back another ERC20 token "cCrv" that can then be used in other DeFi protocols without the involvement or authorization of curve.

At this point people are talking past each other because "centralization" can be used to refer to many things. The author's is just critiquing a tiny portion of the term decentralization (infrastructure), which I guess he most understands since his day job involves that.

[1] https://compound.finance/docs/ctokens

[2] https://curve.fi/compound

[ShamelessC]

Well that's a lot of jargon to digest. Seems to be a combination of speculative market with ability to vote on various DeFi projects? Anyway, I have serious concerns about how governance is actually implemented in DeFi compared to how it is presented to stakeholders. At best, this is a tool for gambling. At worst, a tool for ponzi schemes to compete with each other.