As for full-fat clients on normal mobile devices, the main issue is the data requirements. Running a full node can take hundreds of gigabytes. It is possible on light hardware. People are running Beacon chain nodes on Raspberry Pis. But you do need the storage and that tends to be scarce on mobile.
Meanwhile, the Ethereum core devs are aware of this issue and are actively working towards it. They shipped the Altair hard fork this year that has adds sync committees which make it possible to do without needing the whole chain history (using merkle trees): https://github.com/ethereum/annotated-spec/blob/master/altai...
The light clients to follow from those improvements are forthcoming but here is one in progress: https://our.status.im/nimbus-fluffly/
Facebook stores data with replication. I’m not sure which scenario involves FB being wiped off the face of the earth, while retaining blockchains.
Regardless, your comparison makes no sense. It’s like comparing a recursive and authoritative DNS server.
Lots of developers including myself have had things break when Twitter decided to abandon its liberal approach to APIs. There was no alternative endpoint I could just point my app at.
For clarity, you are now arguing a tangential point.
> Twitter decided to abandon its liberal approach to APIs
I just don’t understand the comparison between Twitter/FB to a blockchain.
Are crypto maximalists arguing that social networks are only about the database itself and access to it?
> There was no alternative endpoint I could just point my app at.
The article already has a great example about this not working as intended - opensea removing his NFT from their API despite it existing on-chain. And every NFT viewer using the opensea view of things than the chain’s view.
I don’t think I am; all these fall under GP’s first sentence; I took “goes down” in the next sentence as one example, WLOG.
> Are crypto maximalists arguing that social networks are only about the database itself and access to it?
I can’t speak for crypto maximalists (I’m probably as skeptical of this stuff as you are), but I think the best argument is that the existence of a viable off-ramp forces the centralized player to be a good actor. Similar to how many open source projects are very centralized, but the possibility of a fork (like mariadb) is enough of an incentive that it’s rare for a project to screw up so badly that a fork can gain steam.
I haven't heard anyone articulate this as their vision lol. I would think they distribute the systems somewhere between trading monkey JPEGs and actually moving the global financial system onto it.
As to why start with it centralized, it's easier to get a POC working with the systems and conventions we have in place today than alongside rethinking all of the infrastructure at the same time. Work on the UI, trade some stupid goods that finance the development of these distributed systems, etc. I just don't understand the argument that this whole thing will or should be binary. Huge migrations like that fall over all the time. Gradual rollouts take longer but are generally safer and in this case probably the only option.
"Okay."
"But our prototype has four wheels, as a temporary prototype to test out the technology."
"That doesn't seem like it tests the technology very well."
"I don't see why you're quibbling about the details. We've sold thousands of ThreeWheels to people who are very enthusiastic about living in a three wheeled future!"
"You've sold four wheeled cars to people who want three wheeled cars?"
"They then resell them for tens of thousands of dollars more than they paid! They're ecstatically happy! Nobody is bigger fans of the three wheel car future than our customers."
"Even though these cars, the cars they purchased, have four wheels."
"Well, they could remove one wheel later, if they wanted."
"Would that work?"
"Oh no, absolutely not. You couldn't drive it at all, then. It would be much worse than a regular car. A lot of work remains to be done to gradually transition current ThreeWheels to a three wheeled form. We plan to send robots to each customer's garage to cut sections from the frame and re-weld them together. Then we need to swap out the steering rack, re-route the driveshaft, change suspension components, brakes..."
"That sounds hard."
"Yes, we think it will take hundreds of changes over years to move current generation ThreeWheels to a three wheeled mode."
"Instead of just building three wheeled cars today?"
"Wow John Cena bought a ThreeWheel and posted it on his instragram! My collection of ThreeWheels is going to explode in value! I love my job!"
99.999% of internet software is built iteratively. Even programming languages and operating systems have versions. This argument about needing everything to be decentralized from the beginning is exposing bias because it's not a logical conclusion unless you're bent on antagonizing web3.
Even most DAOs start out centralized and slowly become decentralized. This is expected. You don't want to go full decentralized until everything is stable.
This is also how democratic governance works. A core group of “trusted” leaders makes decisions that are ratified by elected representatives. It is then disseminated through the various layers of governance and implemented in a distributed fashion.
I agree there are many scams but we really are in more of a research period with regards to the tech. The research will continue through the hype cycles.
Is there any evidence that this is actually happening? It seems rather backwards! Is the maximalist argument here that these companies are going to build out all this infrastructure, move the global financial system onto it, and then rip it apart and rewrite it to be entirely distributed afterwards? Why? If the point is to be distributed, wouldn't they want it to be distributed first?
Where are the blockchains with full-fat clients that can actually run on normal mobile devices? And if they actually exist, does anybody use them? Like, for normal, actual uses, not "shilling this app makes my portfolio go up 300% before I dump it on some clueless bagholder, to the moon rocket emoji rocket emoji".