My article on why Web3 isn't actually decentralized and just sells a false promise

[MalwareTech]

https://escapingtech.com/tech/opinions/why-web3-doesnt-exist.html

[fivesam]

Nice write up.

From my POV another of the main problems that prevents its adoption is that people don't actually care. And I'm talking about my personal experience here. I don't know if it is a general pattern or is just in my environment or my country or what.

I feel that society see people like us, who understand this kind of things and the potential they have, as some dreamers high on smth. They see it as stupid things, as utopies, they don't take it seriously. They are not even interested in understanding it. They are too deep on the system, happy with their monotonous jobs, controlled by their banks and governments. They don't seem to care about the heavy controlling systems and habits our governments have imposed us.

I can count with one single hand the people I know that actually understands the goal of it. The rest are just interested in hodl to make fiat and don't understand or don't trust the technology itself.

Edited November 28, 2022 by fivesam

[Reincarnate]

As you allude to in the article, web 3.0 is just another example of human nature but at warp speed.

 

• Smart/imaginative people invent thing for good purposes
• People use it for bad purpose to make money
• Repeat

[NeonPayload]

Quote

There is a reason a decentralized network of Bulletin Board Systems turned into Twitter & Facebook. Almost none of us are paid to be there, and these platforms are detrimental to our mental health, but we go because that’s where the people go.

This is the best quote right here. The hardest reason getting any new forum/posting site off the ground on the internet.

[kazukidevnull]

46 minutes ago, NeonPayload said:

This is the best quote right here. The hardest reason getting any new forum/posting site off the ground on the internet.

This is true for everything and is why many use something despite it being less then good and why it's so hard getting people to change to something else even when it's better.

Everyone else is using something, so i also use it cause that is where/what everyone is/use. many things fail not cause their product or service are bad, heck, it may even be superior, but if no-one is using it, then it's going to fail.

This is also where the right type of marketing is important and provide a way for people to easily transition which many fail to do.

[hyperreality]

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With bitcoin being seen as an asset to trade, it is susceptible to constant fluctuations in demand as holders buy and sell in an attempt to one up each other. Eventually, stablecoins were invented, but by then seeing cryptocurrency as a speculative asset was already the norm.

Your argument doesn't address coins that are designed to be inherently inflationary like Grin, Zcash, or Monero. Why haven't we seen more use cases for these than speculative assets since there's less incentive to just hold them and more incentive to spend them. Monero at least has seen commerical use-cases but not necessarily legal ones.

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But most people weren’t buying art to enjoy. They were buying an asset in which their only belief was their ability to sell it to a greater fool for more.

Couldn't you cynically say that's actually the point of much art? A lot of super rich are buying these mega-expensive paintings as a store of wealth, to demonstrate their riches, or for shadier reasons. Is someone really getting $300m of enjoyment out of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_(de_Kooning)

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The entire crypto-economy simply just mimicked the early stages of a free market. Then we got to watch in warp speed as everything centralized around a few major players.

This is largely true, however on the other hand you have to admit that Bitcoin has been remarkably resilient. Despite the centralization of mining in China, we haven't seen protocol level attacks against it. A lot of people were saying Bitcoin would have been shut down by governments long ago. A number of huge exchanges have fallen recently and although the price has dropped, there hasn't been any collapse of the Bitcoin network itself.

I agree with your point a lot more when refers more to NFTs and lesser known Web3 tokens. Many cryptocurrencies have never been decentralized, they have run on guardrails as the creators know they would be vulnerable to double-spend attacks otherwise. It would have been good to see more concrete examples of centralization. Like Moxie Marlinspike's points about OpenSea at: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

Quote

Decentralization requires fighting both financial and social incentives. Even in lieu of the capitalist goal to accumulating resources, humans will naturally centralize. We hear about new ideas and places from our peers, and we go where they go.

This is a really strong point.

 

[humbleproblems]

Great write up.  I would love to see what y'all would call the movement towards a decentralized internet, since web3 is forever a crypto-bro term.  I mean we are already seeing the adoption of mastodon and matrix. Should tech stacks like IPFS take off and replace traditional http/s, that web would look very different from todays, and closer to the days of BBS and IRC.

I think Marcus hit the nail on the head:  the problems with web3 are human problems, not technical problems.  However, I would posit that the tools to decentralize the internet are required to exist before the migration to said new internet.  Look at mastodon, it was released in 2016, and is just now seeing a true increase in usership as the flaws of the the centralized alternative have become clear with a man-child taking full control if it.  Even then, most users are joining the existing instances, as the technical skill and money involved in running their own is prohibitive to most.  That doesn't negate the benefit of that being possible: my hackerspace is considering running an instance of mastodon right now, mostly because we can.

Its important to remember that many (maybe most) people aren't seriously committed to a single platform.  My parents are just as likely to use a nextcloud instance I control as they are google docs, just as likely to join any social media platform they think their kids and siblings are on, and just as likely to adopt a new messaging app if it means their friends are more likely to respond on it.  All it takes is a small, but significant, minority to make the transition, and the rest will gradually change over as it becomes apart of their social groups.

Edit: Most people who find themselves on this forum are probably already familiar with these technologies, but if thats not the case, here are some cool projects to look at:
- https://matrix.org is a peer-to-peer communication (alt: discord)
- https://joinmastodon.org is a federated micro-blogging platform (alt: twitter)
- https://nextcloud.com is an opensource cloud filesharing platform, that supports opt-in-only federated sharing (alt: gdrive, dropbox)
- https://joinpeertube.org is a federated torrent-based video sharing platform (alt: youtube)
- https://ipfs.tech is a decentralized hypermedia protocol (alt: http/s)
- https://www.opennic.org is a democratically controlled alternative DNS root (alt: ICANN)

Edited November 29, 2022 by humbleproblems
Added some fun links

[jubjub]

I disagree with NFT's not being a bad idea. You don't need to use a blockchain to achieve the same functionality any useful NFT would have. Tickets as an NFT are just a tradable item and having them be irrevocable limits your options instead of extending them. Even if you need distributed information you can do that without a full ledger. It's a sledge hammer when outside of very niche use cases (like currency) what you really needed was a mallet.

[JustTryingtoHelp]

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Why would people use my payment processor when visa and mastercard are so fast and cheap.

I don't really think most people appreciate that it's decentralized enough that it offers those with little to no banking institutions in some places an alternative to paying absorbent fees if they find any institution where they are to work with our own. It's not all about changing the banking systems of the first world, in fact it's likely that we'll be the last to transition into anything like that seeing how long it would take to transition everything that is, and would take a significant toll on economies and the markets around the world. It's the developing nations around the world that are considered the "unbanked" that crypto should aim for, not the other way around. 

Edited November 30, 2022 by JustTryingtoHelp

[kazukidevnull]

1 hour ago, JustTryingtoHelp said:

I don't really think most people appreciate that it's decentralized enough that it offers those with little to no banking institutions in some places an alternative to paying absorbent fees if they find any institution where they are to work with our own. It's not all about changing the banking systems of the first world, in fact it's likely that we'll be the last to transition into anything like that seeing how long it would take to transition everything that is, and would take a significant toll on economies and the markets around the world. It's the developing nations around the world that are considered the "unbanked" that crypto should aim for, not the other way around. 

tbh, i think the ones who would benefit the most from crypto currency such as btc or eth are people who engages in legal activities but which centralized financial institutions such as visa/mastercard/paypal and so forth don't like and may randomly suspend or withhold for some arbitrary reason which they are known to do a lot.

althought i can see issues with this as well which may make it less attractive, the fact is still that if i found someone did something i liked and wanted to support them with $20 or something, i would have to go trough all the extra work providing additional personal information and trust the service to store my information securely and privately which i don't do and don't want to do, so i may decide it's too much bother, so i opt out from doing it.

while with btc i can just simple go "input the wallet address or scan this QR and you are done" which can in some cases be a lot better. it also are unaffected by distance, country, subjective opinions and so forth.

i mean, it are affected by policies and laws ofc, but generally it's A writes address to B and the value to send and you are done. which are a nice thing.

Edited November 30, 2022 by kazukidevnull

[michel_cryptadamus]

I agree with all the points made in the article w/r/t cryptocurrencies, NFTS, etc. I have a whole lot more points I won't bother making here about things like Gresham's Law Of Money and so on but the deflationary nature of crypto is basically the home run of crypto skeptical arguments. No one is ever going to buy a pizza with something they expect to be worth $1,000,000 in a few years. For all the other good arguments watch Dan Olson's epic 2 hour video essay "Line Goes Up" if you haven't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g

@MalwareTech I think the my first encounter w/yr web presence was a YouTube video where you made a separate really important point you for some reason didn't reiterate here which is the security argument: decentralization means you have to keep your server/browser/chat client/whatever patched. That's hard enough for legit experts and straight up never going to happen for the average internet user. Also an insoluble human problem but made more insoluble by the very nature of "decentralization".

On 11/29/2022 at 10:58 AM, humbleproblems said:

I mean we are already seeing the adoption of mastodon and matrix.

I was kind of surprised to see that Matrix advertises itself as "Web3". I mean it actually makes perfect sense if "Web3" means "decentralized internet" but at this point I am so deeply sketched out by anything labeled with that particular alphanumeric string that I made a 🧵 here asking for people's security assessment despite the fact that I am theoretically an expert and everything seemed to checkout when I vetted the team/tech stack/history/etc.

here is one eternal paradox I have encountered though: I would like to tip my Mastodon server admin but I definitely am not going to deanonymize myself with a credit card. crypto (esp. monero) would at least provide me enough pseudonymity that I would totally use it for this purpose... but you can't tip an admin in monero because it's a huge pain in the ass to turn back into so-called "fiat". no one is going to bother with all that noise for a $5 tip.

 

Edited December 2, 2022 by michel_cryptadamus