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Re:Web3 – A Vision for a Decentralized Web by jzm2k on Friday October 01, 2021 @10:22AM (#28718802)
While Bitcoin certainly has scalability issues, I think the point they are trying to make is that is there any other decentralized system that has been able to reach the scale of Bitcoin.
Re:Web3 – A Vision for a Decentralized Web by acdha on Friday October 01, 2021 @11:17AM (#28719581)
Email and DNS have been doing more transactions per second since the 1980s. The Web started later and passed it by the mid-90s.

All of those are truly decentralized with a wide range of implementations and operators, not to mention proven real-world robustness as opposed to Bitcoin's hard requirement on a massive amount of always-on hardware and network capacity.

Re:Web3 – A Vision for a Decentralized Web by jzm2k on Friday October 01, 2021 @11:35AM (#28719807)
It's not my argument really, I was trying to interpret what they meant with Bitcoin being the exception.

You're right that there may be better examples but how much of the world's email and DNS content is served by Google/Microsoft, I wonder. People are also complaining in other threads that Cloudflare is actually making the internet more centralized.

Re:Web3 – A Vision for a Decentralized Web by rchaud on Friday October 01, 2021 @10:30AM (#28718893)
What about torrents? Those have been around forever, and I just downloaded Gimp over one instead of using their server's bandwidth.

Maybe they're talking purely about dollar value, but I'd say more useful information has been passed back and forth with torrents.

Re:Web3 – A Vision for a Decentralized Web by magila on Friday October 01, 2021 @11:01AM (#28719340)
Yes, bittorrent is a much better example of a scalable decentralized system. The problem with bittorrent is that no one has come up with a good way to monetize it. What makes bitcoin exceptional among decentralized systems is not its scalability, but rather its ability to make people rich.
Re:Web3 – A Vision for a Decentralized Web by dicethrowaway1 on Friday October 01, 2021 @12:05PM (#28720204)
>The problem with bittorrent is that no one has come up with a good way to monetize it.

That decentralized software aligns much easier with commons than with markets is something that I would consider a feature, not a bug.

Re:Web3 – A Vision for a Decentralized Web by whywhywhywhy on Friday October 01, 2021 @10:41AM (#28719037)
Imagine if the database of what.cd has been distributed as well.

We’d definitely have the most comprehensive and accurate catalogue of the musical output of humanity ever created.

Instead now we have Spotify and Apple Music. We’ve only scratched the surface of the good that torrent technology can do.

Re:Web3 – A Vision for a Decentralized Web by JustFinishedBSG on Friday October 01, 2021 @11:22AM (#28719640)
> is there any other decentralized system that has been able to reach the scale of Bitcoin.

You're litterally sending this message accross a decentralized system that outscaled bitcoin by many many orders of magnitudes in a fraction of the time.

I don't think cryptobros and the rest of the world have the same definition of "decentralized" because clearly we don't understand each other

Re:Web3 – A Vision for a Decentralized Web by acdha on Friday October 01, 2021 @11:39AM (#28719856)
> I don't think cryptobros and the rest of the world have the same definition of "decentralized" because clearly we don't understand each other

This is true of most of the common sales points: for example, you'll see people claim blockchains are censorship resistant or anonymous, beneficial to the global unbanked, etc. with little ability to explain how that's actually true in practice.

Re:Web3 – A Vision for a Decentralized Web by erk__ on Friday October 01, 2021 @10:37AM (#28718998)
Could you not see e-mail as decentralized as well?