The difference is that you can create a service which is controlled by nobody. The "servers" are run by the entire network. Nobody has special permissions on the software, yet this software can accept money, pay money, deploy new contracts (prewritten obviously) etc.

This is one extreme obviously, and applications exist on a spectrum from that to something fully centralized (for example USDT where they have full money printing controls).

The point is that web3 enables building apps anywhere on that spectrum.

The difference is that 'centralized' parts are a commodity. Infura itself is centralized, but if it creates problems, it can be replaced with any other rpc, including your own node. Therefore, those services have zero power over the user.

The general consensus seems to be that while both crypto and the Web share this problem, the Web is ultimately redeemable while crypto should be nuked from orbit. It's an interesting contradiction in public opinion, probably stemming from all of the money involved.

All of the cryptocurrency and "web3" marketing (including the proponents up and downthread!) seem to be interested only in the money, and not how it can actually help people any better than the existing products they're replacing. The web, for all of its faults, actually does help people with things. It's also very feasible and reasonable, for instance, for a pizza place to run their own website! This is a thing that has been done! If they can't do it themselves, it's easy to set one up! Very affordably! And all of the cryptocurrency and blockchain stuff seems to firmly go in the opposite direction, with the complexity seemingly the point and the resources required for even the simplest thing multiplying endlessly.

The Web is here, useful, has much lower barriers of entry, and although it's wasteful of energy in a lot of ways it isn't as aggressively and intentionally wasteful as cryptocurrency. I will happily stop using this argument against the crypto ecosystem as soon as it is not true.

> It's an interesting contradiction in public opinion, probably stemming from all of the money involved.

It's not the fact money is involved. It's the way money is involved.

If I want to participate in web3 I have to take real money and buy cryptocurrency funny money. Every aspect of loading a simple web page (web3 page?) charges me some amount of funny money. The amount charged can't be meaningfully predicted. A service might charge me a funny penny for a transaction but today that funny penny is worth a real penny while tomorrow the funny penny is worth a real dollar. Every web3 transaction ends up being like the guy that bought a pizza with a Bitcoin.

All the extra rent extraction of web3 is on top of me paying for my ISP, cell provider, and all my devices. Even with the money I have to pay over the top for web3 participation I end up with a slower and shittier experience than the traditional web. If I decide I'm done with web3 I may not ever be able to cash out the funny money I had to buy.

So the fact web3's design is built entirely around generating greater fools for cryptocurrency Ponzi schemes makes it a stupid and undesirable system.