In practice none of this is happening. All the major wallets query OpenSea to determine what NFTs an account has (according to the article). anyone can access the data but that doesn't change what the wallets query. I can start my own wallet that directly calculates who owns what using the blockchain, but that sounds computationally expensive and there's no guarantee that anyone would use it.

"In theory" the data is open. but I believe that the point of the article is that unless I'm running my own node, data visibility is limited to what someone else tells me. and here, in reality, OpenSea has decided to delist the author's NFT and they have no recourse.

Problem is who cares if you run your own servers when everyone you know is viewing NFTs through servers which are manipulating the data like Opensea is.

That's true, but if the NFTs show up on some places and not on others then you could start a "resistance" against the existing market places. Outside of DMCAs and other such legal requirements, an exchange needs to be impartial about the stuff being sold and published on there to remain credible.

The cryptocurrency crowd is usually drawn to the decentralised, unregulated market, and OpenSea has turned out to be the exact thing blockchains are trying to overthrow.

Except that OpenSea is successful.

So it shows that people don't really care about (a) decentralisation or (b) manipulation of the true blockchain output.

>Except that OpenSea is successful.

thanks to VC money looking to centralize the web3 economy.

But that's the point. So many people hyping web3 like it's going to be fundamentally different which is why it's worth all these resources (both people and energy), when it appears already heading down the same path as web2. Consolidated companies growing very large and getting a bunch of already known VCs even richer.

It's like a populist movement whose goal is to enrich the existing rich.

In theory you should be able to build a new NFT marketplace and airdrop the shit out of it to replace OpenSea.

And in theory I can build a social network and become bigger than Facebook.

The reality however is that market dynamics, acquisition costs, network effects etc prevent this from happening. And these aren't things that crypto can really solve.

No you can't - the social graph is private.

Why would that stop you?

The social graph is 90% of the value of a social network and the hardest resource to build. Without it an exact copy of Facebook built by someone else is useless.

It's only useless if your goal is to have an archival copy of the entire social network. That isn't the goal for most social networks. The build around communities and grow/evolve over time.

This is the premise [1] of $SOS token - though I haven't seen anything substantial, just what's on their website and in a few articles [2].

[1] https://www.theopendao.com/ [2] https://decrypt.co/89325/sos-token-aidrop-opendao-opensea-wh...

It is costly, but not inefficient. This is what we do at my company and our products monetize our blockchain indexing operations. We are doing it all open source and are in the process of decentralizing our operations, so that:

1. anyone who operates a node can contribute time on their node for a share of our revenue

2. anyone can host one of our blockchain crawlers for a share of our revenue

3. anyone can contribute storage to our platform for a share of our revenue

We currently support Ethereum and Polygon, and are expanding to more chains.

I found this an excellent article, but the HN discussion (not calling out your comment specifically) seems to miss the fact that, as programmers, it is fully within OUR power to create the world we want to operate in.

Edit: To clarify - we run our own nodes. Currently on AWS but we are running out of credits soon so soon in our offices and living rooms, and eventually in data centers.