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What I find curious in that web3 scenario is this:
1. Today's internet is decentralized because people can't run their own web, smtp, nntp, xmpp, servers, WP blogs. Which is true, we can't expect people to run this the same way we can't expect every car owner to have a mechanic shop.
2. The proposals for "web3", to the best of my understanding, require people to run their own blockchain nodes, manage wallets, etc.
Based on our collective experience in (1), how does anyone believe that (2) is a reasonable proposal? Handling these over to someone else will just result in another new set of platforms that web3 proponents so desperately want to run away from.
Not to mention someone _still_ needs to actually run the servers, reintroducing the same complexity from (1).
Exactly! And, in addition to that complexity, there are scalability issues that are easier to solve with some amount of centralization. Would you rather build on a platform where you're paying a well known company or a platform comprised of a bunch of anonymous nodes trying to minimize operating costs?
That Filecoin thing is a great example. Yeah, I want to store my mission critical data on a bunch of EoL, consumer grade hard disks that someone is using to participate in the blockchain. /s
And no regulation isn't the utopia the crypto enthusiasts are selling. Don't completely unregulated systems typically end up dominated by the richest, most ruthless, least ethical participants?
It is not _some_ amount of centralization. Our experimental university work sees all startups cheat with servers. They still sell it as Web3. If you run the servers, you need to police the service! You simply become Web2 again. It should be self-organising and pure, like Bitcoin.
Scientifically Web3 consists of:
peer-to-peer technology (e.g. Bittorrent)
with a distributed ledger (e.g. Bitcoin) and
the social practice of sharing (e.g. Github).
This will take 10-15 years more to develop further. The startups are very noisy and are now discovering that doing real "distributed systems" is very hard. They consistently cheat by using central servers. Adversarial Byzantine attacks are unsolved (or require wasteful proof-of-work to yield no performance).
Some of this just requires the right wrappers/UX and greasing from hardware manufacturers.
There was another thread in the last day or two about someone asking where to get a dumb TV. In that discussion it became clear to me that there's already mesh networks all over the place without people realizing it, or if there's not, there could be. The only difference is it's being used by Amazon, Samsung et al to connect their devices and talk about you than to enable you to do something on a peer-to-peer service. I'm not saying it's easy, or that it could happen, but it seems like if peoples' routers or IoT hubs or whatever came with P2P stuff in the box with an easy UX it could move things along?
I generally think IoT/home security hubs/smarthome hubs etc are plagued by vendor lock-in, and I wouldn't be surprised if someday it got dropped in favor of something more standard. At that point I could see P2P maybe coming baked in? Not sure.
Twitter is basically RSS for the masses, cloud is just remote servers for the masses, I suspect decentralized/P2P for the masses is just a UX problem too.
Lots of things happen in steps too, from more hardcore tech crowds to the general population. Email was once the realm of college students and defense people only, and the web was a curiosity.
Others can run the nodes. The point is the network of nodes are distributed and no node is more important than any other. They are all just peers.
decentralization of mechanical infrastructure is irrelevant. decentralization of human control over said infrastructure is all that matters.
one does not correlate with the other.
if anything, the strongest incentive is to mask centralized ownership behind a screen of decentralized infrastructure.
a culture of anonymity helps discourage inconvenient questions about transparency and thwarts attempts to formally analyze the relationship between agents and principals in a blockchain network.
all cryptocurrencies are thus fundamentally based on deception, as the blockchain is designed to expose activity statistics that demonstrate 'decentralization' of agency, but anonymizes the linkage between agent and principal, making those statistics worse than meaningless.
You mean like e-mail? Sadly, most people use gmail now and there are whitelists so you don't get to write your own email server.
Similarly, basically everyone using Ethereum just uses Infura nodes [1]. Web3 is no more decentralized than anything it purports to improve upon.
[1]:
I feel email could really do with disruption.
Least of all: require escrow-held-micro-payment to send an email to some location. If the item is marked as spam, the sender loses their money (perhaps to the spam-filter maintainer).
You can make the same arguments but with servers instead of nodes. That's how things are today. But the web isn't decentralized.
No, today we have servers with some form of leader or centralised point of failure.
With a properly decentralised network any node can be taken down without taking down the entire network.
Not all public DLTs are born equal however. Leaderless networks which are not vulnerable to DDOS attacks are the dream.
What is this single point of failure? You can take any server down on the internet and it will be fine. The DNS may be a more vulnerable point, but still, lots of different organisations have DNS servers on lots of different places.
>What is this single point of failure? You can take any server down on the internet and it will be fine. The DNS may be a more vulnerable point, but still, lots of different organisations have DNS servers on lots of different places.
Not _single_ points of failure, but a few major (AWS, GCP, Azure, Cloudflare) points of failure.
Take any one or more of these down and there are major disruptions in commerce, connectivity and communications.
Sure, there are other hosting providers, but there's far too much centralization of Internet resources on those four platforms.
Any _real_ decentralization solution will require ubiquitous (multi-)gigabit _symmetric_ links to/from the Internet on commercial _and_ consumer connections.
Because if you don't have enough bandwidth, you'll need to host your content/resources in "the cloud" (read: someone else's servers). And that locks all of us into centralized platforms.
tl;dr: If you want _real_ decentralization, you need to provide the resources to do so at all levels of the networking/application stack.
Edit: Fixed usage: Symmetric vs. synchronous.
According to wikipedia:
> A single point of failure (SPOF) is a part of a system that, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working.
Internet doesn't have a single point of failure. People that depends on X with X being the major clouds may be considered a point of failure for your specific application, but that's just your application, not the internet itself. Internet is already decentralized by nature.
> Sure, there are other hosting providers, but there's far too much centralization of Internet resources on those four platforms.
Because it's convenient. Decentralization has a constant cost. Centralization benefits from economics of scale.
> Because if you don't have enough bandwidth, you'll need to host your content/resources in "the cloud" (read: someone else's servers). And that locks all of us into centralized platforms.
Peer-to-peer solutions work fine, and you don't need multi gigabit synchronous links for that.
What Web3 seems to be trying to do is to have the convinience of centralization with the resilience of decentralization. For example, distributed authentity and payments. That's a great and noble goal! But I wish people would come forward about that and the tradeoffs involved instead of just talking about decentralization. Internet is decentralized by nature.
Note that I said:
Not single points of failure, but a few major
(AWS, GCP, Azure, Cloudflare) points of failure.
And I most certainly didn't say or imply that such failures would "take down the internet." Rather, I said:
Take any one or more of these down and there are
major disruptions in commerce, connectivity and
communications.
That's _very_ different from what you _appear_ to think I said.
>Because it's convenient. Decentralization has a constant cost. Centralization benefits from economics of scale.
But there are costs to that centralization too. Not measured in dollars, but in freedom, creativity and choice.
>Peer-to-peer solutions work fine, and you don't need multi gigabit synchronous links for that.
Do they? If that were the case, we wouldn't have these behemoth tech corporations.
Decentralized solutions exist, but aren't _currently_ viable for a variety of reasons. I chose to pick on _asymmetric_ network links (the _asymmetric_ part is the important bit, not necessarily total bandwidth, although that's important too) as a blocker to decentralization.
Feel free to disagree, but decentralization needs to be about more than just distributed block chains and services hosted on _centralized_ server plantations.
Edit: Fixed usage: Asymmetric, not asynchronous. Sorry, still drinking coffee here.
> Based on our collective experience in (1), how does anyone believe that (2) is a reasonable proposal?
The people who are invested in crypto and think it's the future. They do the same reasoning all the time: crypto can be used for X, so X will be done now! Thinking about why X wasn't done before is not something they do.
> The proposals for "web3", to the best of my understanding, require people to run their own blockchain nodes, manage wallets, etc.
AFAIK, the proposal is to use federation, i.e., only those who can/want run servers, whereas normal users use those federated servers.
It doesn't change things. There were federated alternatives to most centralized sites you see today. I remember Mastodon for Twitter, I'm sure there are more. The point is that web3 is not adding anything new here. We could always have gone to federated environments, but turns out it's more complicated than it seems and people don't care too much about what's inside as long as it works.
Did you read the article?
_The lesson is that when you compare centralized and decentralized systems you need to consider them dynamically, as processes, instead of statically, as rigid products. Centralized systems often start out fully baked, but only get better at the rate at which employees at the sponsoring company improve them._
_Centralized platforms often come bundled at launch with compelling apps: Facebook had its core socializing features and the iPhone had a number of key apps. Decentralized platforms, by contrast, often launch half-baked and without clear use cases. As a result, they need to go through two phases of product-market fit: 1) product-market fit between the platform and the developers/entrepreneurs who will finish the platform and build out the ecosystem, and 2) product-market fit between the platform/ecosystem and end users. This two-stage process is what causes many people — including sophisticated technologists — to consistently underestimate the potential of decentralized platforms._
I do not agree too much with that part. The fact that there are compelling use cases at launch is independent of centralized/decentralized only depends on who's launching. Google Wave was a centralized platform and the use cases were a mess, and blogs with RSS were a decentralized platform with a pretty clear use case. I don't think the percentage of half-baked use cases is too different between centralized/distributed. It also conveniently forgets several issues:
- Building a decentralized platform is technically more complex than a centralized one. So it requires more developer resources for a feature that users don't care too much about. It's also harder to iterate, because you're spending much more time in building a design consensus for new features instead of just rolling it.
- Centralized platforms also have to work out the product-market fit between platform and developers. Mobile? Twitter apps (the Twitter API was a big reason that drove adoption at the beginning)? WP blogs?
- Decentralized platforms will have technical limitations and hurdles that will probably hurt user experience. For example, harder discovery, diverging features, delays, data consistency...
So when he says "The question of whether decentralized or centralized systems will win the next era of the internet reduces to who will build the most compelling products", that's true, but avoids mentioning the fact that, resources being equal, compelling decentralized systems will be considerably harder and slower to build. And this is not new, which is the point I made in my comment. Nothing about crypto changes these facts.
the new generation of middlemen surrounding this have already been funded by VCs and have started putting themselves in the midst of all crypto stuff, it already happened
people running their own X is a solution (or means) to a problem, not the problem (or ends) itself. The issue is control.
The problem is lock in. Running proprietary software still has the problem, even on your own hardware. The idea is to have everything run to spec/protocol, with mechanisms preventing customised behaviour - the issue is similar to the problems within bit-torrent wrt custom clients not behaving correct i.e. not maintaining ratio, which meant there needed to be a decentralised mechanism for managing this across-network.
The idea is it doesn't matter so much who runs the software or what they run - the network protocol maintains the peace.
Decentralization is good, but there's no need to bring cryptojunk into the discussion since that's far from decentralized. IMHO.
Bring back the use of open protocols, add IPv6 support throughout and add a sprinkling of peer-to-peer.
Why is everyone talking about decentralized. Current internet is decentralized. People seem to be clamoring for distributed.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58727b5a9de4bb...
The Internet is decentralized, but its main services (social networks, video hosting) aren't.
Exactly.
If payments / incentives are required, then Bitcoin can be used. For example, there's decentralized Sphinx Chat which runs on the Bitcoin lightning network:
I haven't seen any of the 'cryptojunk' tokens implement an actual service like the Sphinx chat, which is quite telling in my opinion.
No. It cannot. Bitcoin cannot be used, because the rate of transactions is much to low for such an application. Currently its only use is gambling and burning the planet.
Last time I checked, in El Salvador you could buy beer from a machine with a cell phone using Bitcoin.
People aren't actually making transactions within the Bitcoin chain there. It wouldn't work out, the on-chain fees are outrageous.
No, you in El Salvador you can buy beer from a machine with a cell phone using Chivo, which is a local payment scheme with a centralized ledger that's just denominated in BTC.
You can send money to/from Chivo using Bitcoin; but the settlement of that beer purchase would not involve Bitcoin network at all.
Burning the planet is the primary effect. The beer is a side effect :)
Under 10 transactions per second globally is why Bitcoin isn’t used in retail.
Micropayments and nanopayments require thousands and tens of thousands TPS. There are newer generations of crypto that can do that and with none of the energy consumption problems of Bitcoin and other Proof of Work systems.
Sphinx chat payments work exclusively on Lightning and so is the El Salvador Chico wallet. Why do people keep using the same uninformed arguments every time bitcoin is mentioned?
Sounds like recentralization to me.
IMHO, if we’re gonna do cryptocurrency, we should try to make as many transactions as possible on layer 1.
You can run Sphinx on your own hardware. You can pay bills on El Salvador with any LN wallet connected to any node.
I think summm's comment was mocking anti-bitcoiners, but some people probably took it seriously.
That is just a PR stunt, just like the Bitcoin city that "is going to be built"
He said on the lightning network.
Haha. It almost sounds like you're serious.
The points about centralized power make sense, but why http, smtp, and social media became centralized in the first place wasn’t grappled with at all.
Running your own servers is attractive for some, but they aren’t the majority and never will be unless it requires something as simple as buying a $35 box and plugging it in at home with no additional setup. Social media is hard to accomplish without a centralized discovery server. See Torrents before they figured out a mechanism or Matrix.
The author didn’t address these forces driving web content to centralized platforms, and web3 isn’t likely to avoid the same incentive structure from what I can tell. Bitcoin and Ethereum both have significant centralization problems for how people use them. More wallets are in Coinbase and other central providers than are run privately. Mining power is centralized among a small population as well. Even current crypto is driving toward centralization to get new people onto the technology, so how do you prevent it in web3?
Wikipedia was mentioned in the article and it provides a great example of a product that was built in a decentralized way. Ironically, the author doesn't appreciate that Wikipedia's success had nothing to do with Web3 or crypto. The success of large companies isn't because of a lack of technology, it is due to human nature and economies of scale and network effects. Anti-trust is the way you fix this. Break youtube out of Google, Instagram out of FB, etc...
Also, Wikipedia has shown that centralization is necessary sometimes. For example, political pages are frequently locked because people with the most extreme and inaccurate viewpoints are the most vocal.
But the page locking is a result of a democratic decision, not a single admin.
Exactly, and share holders vote for the leadership of public companies. Web3 isn't a new paradigm of governance.
It's not working well with Facebook and Youtube, because actual users cannot vote.
> The author didn’t address these forces driving web content to centralized platforms, and web3 isn’t likely to avoid the same incentive structure from what I can tell.
A decentralized system driving to centralization is much better than centralized overlords having a full control over users in a walled garden reinforced by network effects. As TFA says, "_Decentralized networks aren’t a silver bullet that will fix all the problems on the internet. But they offer a much better approach than centralized systems._"
> Running your own servers is attractive for some, but they aren’t the majority and never will be
And it's not necessary as the existing servers federate between each other and allow the users to register normally.
But that's how we got to the current situation with something like email: A bunch of people ran their own servers because they were tech saavy early adopters. Then, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, etc. started offering poor email service which most people adopted. Then Google came along and had an offer that was very impressive to consumers and everyone switched to gmail over the years. Sure, a competitor CAN exist, but it doesn't because Google's product was good enough and captured a large enough market share to become the default. We even have people trying to come up with them (see Hey!)
Why wouldn't this happen with web3 servers?
Why doesn't HTTP count as decentralized? Anyone can put a server on the network by buying an IP and domain name. And how does crypto help at all with these basic network effect problems that are the reason previous decentralized systems centralized?
> Why wouldn't this happen with web3 servers?
It can happen with them, and it does happen with Bitcoin to a degree. However, it's much better than full monopoly of Facebook and Youtube. By the way, there are still many alternative paid email providers which work fine for those who do not want to run their own server.
>Why doesn't HTTP count as decentralized?
To me it does. But we need more: we need decentralized services on top of it, like PeerTube.
I don't understand why the message ends up "let's go crypto" and not "make protocols, not startups".
He started by talking about the good old days. He clearly identifies the issues of crypto and that there was nothing wrong with open protocols besides speed to market (which is easier to fix than the snafu of crypto)
He identified Wikipedia vs Encarta and Wikipedia is a success but has nothing to do with crypto.
There are so many issues with blockchains compared to publishing RFCs and pushing an opensource client as a scout... it boggles my mind.
existing protocols were not built around identity, but the new ones do, and in order to avoid the centralization that is inherent to identity, they have rely on blockchains or something equivalent (which doesnt exist), hence the crypto connection. It doesnt have to involve money, but the solutions are equivalent. E.g. metamask can be a wallet or an authentication mechanism.
nah, I don't buy this. Education matters. Let the folks educate on how to spin up their own website on a VPS. Let folks educate how to subscribe via rss or websub and get notifications. Let folks educate how to add "donate me" button on their website.
Instead, people are educated on how to use useless NFT's and how to burn their time trading air on binance. Web3.0 is the definition of vanity.
All of the tools required for freedom are there. You just need to have the honesty and willingness to use them. Instead everybody waits for some web3.0 magic, which will make everybody rich.
Edit: typos
You cannot fight human nature. If you offered everyone the choice between a $1 lottery ticket or helping them go through a tutorial for building their own self hosting websites, 90%+ would choose the lottery ticket.
This seems like a really long-winded, single perspective (and perhaps even revisionist) way of justifying one possible use-case, in which the author has an oblivious conflict of interest. Maybe he's got some ideas of what a possible future could look like, but it's hard to square this with it conveniently running through the technologies where he's invested, and there's no explanation of how the NFT exchange he was earlier trumpeting is critical to this future. I've read his posts for years and they've evolved into Andreessen Horowitz-style PR masquerading as deep & critical thought pieces.
For venture capitalists like the article author, the primary objective isn't fixing problems or making things better, it is about making money. He even makes this explicit in the article: "cryptonetworks align network participants to work together toward a common goal — the growth of the network and the appreciation of the token", i.e. the common goal is to not to provide useful new functionality or to improve upon things in some way, it is quite simply to get new members to join their cryptocurrency schemes and in doing so make existing members of the schemes more money.
BTW, original discussion on this article from 2018:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16410478
Three years ago, I had written this as a response.
https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/03/change-my-mind-abo...
I don't see any better arguments, development put forth since then
Wikipedia improved at a much faster rate, because it had an active community of volunteer contributors who were attracted to its decentralized, community-governed ethos.
Does being open contribution warrant the use of the word "decentralised"? as far as I can tell it's still a huge success story from a centralisation perspective.
(2018)
Meanwhile, PeerTube v4 release candidate is out:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29390312
.
The author says "democracy isn't perfect but it's better than the alternative," then overlooks the obvious corollary with regard to "GAFA" and other powerful corporations: we should have democratic control over our economy. Crypto and web3 are an attempt to solve a political problem with a technological tool; a cop-out to avoid a political fight. We're not going to make a better, more just or more democratic world by putting everything on a blockchain.
What does "democratic control over our economy" mean? Does it mean surrendering control to ostensibly democratic state monopolies that respond with violence to any attempt at competing with them?
I prefer 'consensual' to 'democratic'. Most blockchain-based systems are consensual in that they operate based on rules that enjoy the unanimous consent of everyone they apply to. If I and everyone I want to interact with via a blockchain agrees to change the rules, we can freely do so, but if someone doesn't agree, we either have to stop interacting or come to an agreement.
I strongly believe political fights should be avoided whenever possible because they are (at best) win-lose. Political fights are about who should get to control everyone or what everyone should be forced to do. Technological solutions can sometimes allow everyone to get what they want without imposing their vision and preferences on others.
It means worker-owned and -run companies and _actually_ democratic government to regulate them. You're absolutely right about political fights, and it's clear that centralized authorities (e.g. FB, Google, the US Gov't, others) have won/are winning the political fight against you and me. A technological solution realized under their authority will not be allowed to succeed unless it can be bent to their own purposes. I don't wholly disagree with the goals of crypto/web3, but I fear that pursued alone, i.e. without a political movement to back it, those ideals will be corrupted by our existing power structures.
"During the first era of the internet — from the 1980s through the early 2000s — internet services were built on open protocols that were controlled by the internet community." <-- is this no longer the case? Did something happen to HTTP and HTTPS or the underlying IP protocol suite ? Isn't everyone still free to purchase a domain name and plug a computer to their network and serve a website?
The premise that the first era of the Internet was the 80's through 00's is flawed. The modern web? Maybe, but web !== internet. The protocols he touts where firmly established by the early 70's
And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And people forgot how the internet works, and reinvented the _decentralized internet_. Behold, the engineers of now give you… Web3!
"Decentralized" is woo
https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/decentralized-woo.html
Web3 is not Decentralisation
https://medium.com/@rossstalker_5939/web3-is-not-decentralis...
> But the hardware-based networks of the past are fundamentally different than the internet, a software-based network.
This struck a nerve. The internet is most certainly hardware based. While distributed databases are great, there is an extraordinary system of hardware that will always need to be produced, maintained, and powered to keep such databases operational.
He conflates the benefits of decentralization, with crypto/blockchain.
You don't need blockchain for decentralized services, just look at peertube, mastadon, etc. NFT identity etc might be a useful addition, but decentralized services don't need to be 'built on' so-called 'web 3.0'.
It never ceases to amaze me just how incredibly naive even the tippy-top biggest thought-leaders in crypto are. He clearly doesn’t understand why centralization happened on the web and why “web3” is wholly insufficient to solve that. He’s got major blinders on, I suspect in part because he’s deeply financially invested in this supposed solution.
