The promise here seems to be "blockchains and crypto and NFC will allow us to finally build a decentralized Internet!", and I keep thinking: we have one already. It is called "The Internet." If the Internet today has become too corporate and centralized, it's not due to the underlying technologies -- which implies that switching out the underlying technologies isn't likely to solve the problem.

Bingo. I'm eager to hear counterarguments from "Web3" proponents

It is because Web3 changes the business model and economic incentives. I would suggest reading this:

https://onezero.medium.com/why-decentralization-matters-5e3f...

Dixon is a good writer and a good advocate for this, but this explanation shares the issues that I consistently see in such defenses: it doesn't actually explain how the vision of "economic incentives…in the form of tokens" prevents centralization, because it seems to misunderstand what drives centralization in the first place.

Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc., are hugely centralized platforms because they successfully attracted hundreds of millions—in Facebook's case, billions—of users. Users are incentivized to be on those platforms because they like what those platforms offer. The internet has massive centralized platforms because users like those platforms.

A cryptonetwork-based challenger to Facebook isn't going to win by just adding tokens; any challenger, regardless of technology, needs to be a better Facebook than Facebook is, and it needs to be a lot better. But that's also the Catch-22 here: if our hypothetical "CryptoFacebook" finds a way to succeed economically, there's nothing intrinsic to the cryptonetwork that keeps CryptoFacebook from being a huge centralized platform. Big companies can use tokens, too!

In fact, I actually think the linked article casts some doubt on whether Dixon really understands "decentralization," as he compares Encarto to Wikipedia and sees Wikipedia as a decentralization success story. It's a "cathedral vs. bazaar" success story, to be sure, but Wikipedia is not a decentralized platform! It's a big monolithic system that one organization has massive control over. At the end of the day, the Wikimedia Foundation gets to set the rules for what happens at the wikipedia.org domain. If the community doesn't like it, they can try and fork it and create a replacement, sure. But that's a huge challenge—and it's also not really relevant to decentralization. It's more like LibreOffice supplanting OpenOffice as "premiere open source alternative to Microsoft Office"; the "center" moved from one project to the other.

So, TL;DR: I appreciate the link, and it's a good read. But it just doesn't make a convincing case that "build it on the blockchain" improves on what we have in material ways.

I'll do you one better: People who are disinterested in this web3 because of all the money in it.

What made the early web great was all the weird stuff people did for fun and self-expression and what made it worse was when lots and lots of money got involved.

I don't see how getting more monetization involved would make anything better.

> despite all the money in it?

I wonder about this, because an awful lot of post-2008ish technology simply seems to be "like before, but different enough that we think we can be the first movers of the Next Big Thing, and therefore make a killing."

When you really get down to it, a lot of the popular technology isn't all that different from IRC, Usenet, etc., just app-ified and Web-ified (and emoji-ified, of course). I'm not sure moving to a "Web3" paradigm is going to be all that different, just with a new set of Very Important People driving it.

The problem with "traditional" federated networks is the lack of fungibility. The network effects around nodes is too great, which encourages centralization over time. Cryptocurrencies allow formalizing and automating the incentives involved in running decentralized networks, which can make them actually scalable.

I have no doubt the future successful decentralized networks will use or evolve from cryptocurrencies, but not being inspired by the current crypto landscape is completely understandable. The Ponzis drown everything out these days, they cloud the judgment of too many, making the public discourse around this field unpalatable. In percentage terms, almost nobody in crypto today care about what they're actually building or what for. It's all about raising money, or pushing a Ponzi in which they are invested.

Maybe I'm too idealistic, but what irks me most is that the whole crypto tech seems to be based on "proof of capital".

Doesn't matter if it's PoW, PoS, PoWhatever - fundamentally, crypto is about ensuring that there is a certain group of participants (miners) that can alter the shared state, while everyone who does not belong to this group cannot.

Furthermore, the group must become ever more entrenched over time because security relies on the fact that getting into this group is hard - so supposedly, those who are in the group have no interest in acting harmfully to the network. (Which is a big assumption by itself, btw)

I find it a bit weird that blockchain tech has pretty much captured the term "decentralisation" for itself, as it has some fundamental drive to centralisation built into its core.

Yes, it's decentralised in the sense that in theory everyone can become a miner. Except this is not true: If everyone could become a miner, so could adversaries and the append-only property would be gone.

This and the specific assumptions how a monetary system and an economy should work, which are also deeply baked into the tech.

You seem to think Proof of Work miners can do everything they want with the chain. Assuming the network isn't 51% attacked, that's not true.

When a miner finds a block, they can put transactions in it and submit it to the other miners, in order to acquire the transaction fees and the block reward for themselves.

These transactions are signed, miners can't impersonate participants. They are also incentivized to include actual transactions instead of their own thanks to the miner fee. If they try to censor a transaction, the next miner to find a block could include the transaction in the chain anyway, so they have little incentive to withhold transactions for non-economical reasons.

They can't rewrite the history, they can only push one block on top of it.

If I understand you correctly, the "centralization" you're talking about is the whole point of a consensus protocol: to get 'decentralized' participants to agree on a single 'centralized' state.

>"I really can't see a desirable vision of the future with a web based on artificial scarcity, intentional resource waste and anarchocapitalism."

You've got my vote on that one.