Most people don't want to run their own mail servers. That isn't the same thing as saying we need a single entity to be in charge of email. There are thousands of independent email providers. Your emails get marked as spam if you have two users, not if you have two thousand. And small providers getting marked as spam isn't because it's necessary to prevent spam, it's because large providers would rather kill them on purpose and force more people to use them. Which we could fix it if we wanted to.
Everything could work this way, and should. You don't run your own social network instance, but you can, and thousands of independent entities do, and you can take your pick of them and move between them.
And we can learn lessons from the past. Major one from email: Addresses should be portable, or at least have zero-cost permanent forwarding built into the protocol.
It seems like even if there are enough situations where the zero-trust nature proves to make sense to users, it would be silly for them to all use the same chains. Why deal with the overhead and transaction costs? Why wouldn't there be as many chains as their are email providers, and then most of them would only have value insomuch as the things running on them have value? So more like "new way of formalizing coalitions and joint ventures and partnerships where no single partner has full control" than "investment vehicle" or "foundational infrastructure for the whole world."
Email, by being a protocol vs a single implementation, has outlasted many email service providers and will probably outlast many more. Many of those service providers were killed by new entrants that could do it cheaper or better - so it seems crazy to expect otherwise-productive things to remain on these hideously expensive trendy chains of the moment.
Most of what people actually don't want to do is reliability engineering. You can host it off your phone, but then it goes down if you're out of range or the battery dies. You can host it in your basement, but now you need to buy hardware and it goes down if you lose power or internet. And you have to keep up to date with patches etc. So just pay someone <$100/year to do it for you.
But the design should make that thing the most commodified thing in the world. You should be able to switch to self-hosting and back or to another provider by just changing the host's address in your configuration. Everything should still point to you on the new host. Your own device should keep a copy of everything needed to switch even if the existing provider is unexpectedly incinerated by a meteor. They should not have the ability to prevent it and should be untrusted to the fullest extent possible.
You can get that with ordinary cryptography. The thing you can't get from ordinary cryptography is disintermediated payment processing. Which you do actually want, but that's something else.
Email providers can send email to each other, making them all as equally useful. Different blockchains wouldn't be compatible with each other by default, by definition, so it's more of a winner-takes-all situation.
Its possible in the future we will develop a mechanism that allows two completely unrelated & unconnected blockchains to transfer tokens between eachother. I assume there would have to be either an intermediate chain specific to this purpose or both chains would need to follow a similar implementation. So far we started with Proof Of Work, we now have Proof of Stake and Proof of History. There may be more mechanisms in the future.
Is a cryptocurrency exchange more like a bank or a currency?
Atomic swaps already exist.
I still have no idea what that has to do with the nonsensical metaphor "a blockchain is a bank"
I don’t know enough about blockchain tech to KNOW this is correct, but it’s something interesting that kinda falls out of the theory.
I don’t think anyone is proposing to use blockchain for email? (I’m prepared to be wrong here but it’s certainly not a common position to hold). They don’t eschew all the old protocols for every task.
I trying to figure out the problem you want to solve here and how blockchain is better - but it falls apart. For one, most people don’t buy things with crypto and there are also many different coins on top of that. So even if tie an email to a particular crypto address, it’s not likely the average person can prove they have economic activity.
Then the motives are wrong on both sides anyway - I don’t want services I use to have a copy of my spending history, and they want a way to deanonymize me to discourage abuse, or charge me for their services. Neither of which sounds like it is part of what you are suggesting.
Fun fact: bitcoin's pow algorithm was invented to prevent spam.
The major exception was high bandwidth communication, where it remains cost prohibitive to do without scale - video has come a long way, to be sure, but large image, audio, video processing have remained difficult to do at scale and right, at least without the correct hardware and supporting algorithms.
There are solutions, most of the ones I can think of involve paying money versus using some "free" service - this is why you don't see a lot of private fileshares with random videostreams between friends, not so much technical reasons.
While protocols may exist that "work fine", it seems clear that for "chat, video conferencing, file sharing" (as well as social media), proprietary networks are more much much more popular than standardized protocols.
Email being a notable still-popular exception, when it comes to internet communications.
> proprietary network
> it seems clear that for "chat, video conferencing, file sharing" (as well as social media), proprietary networks [protocols] are more much much more popular than standardized protocols.
HTTP is used for communication and social media. So is HTTPS. Want to use an SSD for your operating system to load programs off-of for your games and communication? That requires SATA or NVMe. Want to play games that require non-trivial graphics? That requires PCIe.
Want to use Discord or Zoom or Slack Huddle or your own in-browser (or "desktop" [really a browser] app variant of those)? That's WebRTC which uses TLS and SCTP.
Where is the proprietary here? Where are you pulling this information from?
I can't say for sure what vishnugupta meant, but what I thought when I read their comment are:
* Most people's chat goes over things like Slack or MS Teams -- proprietary protocols. Not the open protocols that do exist like IRC.
* Most people's "instant messaging" goes over things like Signal, Whatsapp, or Facebook Messenger, all proprietary protocols. Even if open protocols like XMPP exist, they are less popular.
* Most people's video conferencing goes over things like Zoom, MS Teams, Apple Facetime -- proprietary protocols.
* I am not familiar with the "file sharing" protocols popular, but I assume the same.
HOWEVER, most people's email goes over open protocols. It's an outlier when it comes to these higher-level interpersonal communications.
(Do you disagree? I'm not sure if you do, or if you're just talking about something else!)
But yes, of course, there are other open protocols that are still very much in use. Including things like TCP/IP and UDP (which almost all of the protocols we are talking about function on top of) and HTTP (which some may as well). Most of these popular infrastructural protocols are also older, where vishnugupta suggested "since then", new protocols that become popular tend to be proprietary. An example of a newer network protocol that was open and standardized and also had a lot of uptake would be good to hear!
You are proposing an explanation for why most of these things run on proprietary protocols, an explanation I agree is a component of what's going on, I didn't say anythign to the contrary -- I'm still stuck on trying to demonstrate that proprietary protocols for these things are more popular than open standard ones -- which is being disputed -- before we can even get to talking about what explains this state of affairs!
FTP is the closest file sharing protocol I could think of when I wrote my comment above.
Moxie touched on this topic in his article about web3, where he compared and contrasted protocols Vs platform. He explains why he believes platforms, once they gain a big enough distribution, are inherently at an advantage because they can change and adopt fast.
HTTPS, HTTP, TCP, UDP, ICMP, ACME, DNS, NVMe, PCIe, SATA, WS.
WebRTC (used for communication) uses SCTP and TLS. SMTP (email) came out in 1981. SCTP in 2000. There are _many_ _many_ _many_ more examples, but that beats your statement by a solid 19 years.
I could keep going but I think you get the picture.
You need centralization for that. And in fact, you can already do it.
Just register a domain name and use it for your email address. Most registrars offer a mail redirection service. And if you don't like your registrar, there is an official procedure to transfer your domain name, and therefore you email address. There are also official procedures regarding getting back a stolen domain name, and ways to avoid losing it by accident (grace periods, etc...), made possible because it is centralized.
> Who owns the ENS rootnode? What powers does that grant them?
> The root node is presently owned by a multisig contract, with keys held by trustworthy individuals in the Ethereum community...
I didn't look it up too much but it looks like a key difference is that once you register a domain, it is yours for as long as you have paid for and no one can change that (or maybe it isn't, in this case, it is exactly like DNS). It is a good and a bad thing. It is good against censorship, but it also means that if someone registers a domain under your company name (or personal name) and point it to child porn, there is nothing you or anyone else can do.
Yet these centralized providers come and go, but the web remains.
Decentralization isn't about doing things yourself, it's about having constant choice. To flee sinking ships, to bet on rising stars.
The web is fine. Web3 will pass like myspace, and the web will remain.
BitTorrent and other peer to peer apps are decentralized, but are they really when the data flows through the pipes of a few Telco's?
I think web3 means there isn't a central authority for conducting transactions with other people, but I have a nagging feeling that this could be accomplished without a blockchain and proof of work waste.
Proof of Work is one implementation but not the only one, there are many more efficient versions now. You might as well complain about Dial-up saying internet is a waste and will never amount to anything because the phone line is always tied up....
Facebook will bury us both.
The point about how “people want centralized systems” reminds me of the initial response to Apple’s privacy strategy. At the time, it was met with skepticism, to say the least. Privacy wasn’t something that normal people obsessed over, and it came at the expense of wonderful features that were only possible through centralized archival of personal information.
Since then, a steady drumbeat of surveillance scandals, security incidents, and technological innovations have turned data retention into more of a liability than an asset.
>surveillance scandals, security incidents, and technological innovations have turned data retention into more of a liability than an asset
LOL! I actually cannot believe that you seriously think this. Yes, Apple is very big on privacy. It is not the reason that people buy Apple products outside of a very small portion of users. And data retention, collection, tracking, etc. is such a gigantic business and is so central to the very function of tech giants that you are actually completely deluded if you think that "data collection is a liability". Almost nobody cares about their data. They are happy to give it up for free in exchange for being able to use websites and services. And why wouldn't they? I don't care how much you think that you are private, how much you think you've bested the giant tech companies with entire teams of the smartest engineers on the planet figuring out how to optimally harvest more data, how much you think you've been able to seclude yourself from the 99% of rational people. You have lost. You have no privacy, period. Privacy as a concept has been dead for years, so the only people who even value it anymore are people like you who think they can somehow best this system.
Now a crowd of people are suggesting something very different: that people wouldn't care about giving up the conveniences of today's centralized systems. But we do have experience with a less centralized web, and it wasn't a lack of "web3" tech that resulted in the centralized systems gaining their current position. It was open competition with the less-centralized old status quo. The centralized systems that won are very different than the older centralized systems that had lost - AOL tried to force everything inside of its wall; Facebook and Twitter merely extend their reach so that they can touch everything, and won out as aggregators vs doing in-house content production.
So why would the desire to have such convenient, one-stop-shop, minimal-setup centralized aggregator services go away?
Furthermore, just like in the offline world, "open competition" doesn't consider externalities, like the loss of privacy, and the massive social and political influence that these behemoths have gained.
There are people who, if they had their way, would probably ban or highly regulate CCTV cameras.
And somehow, after all these years, right to encrypt and right to use anonymity routing is still under attack at times.
The previous approach to internet privacy assumed it was a public place. The current assumptions are totally unprecedented, they are basically trying to make every interaction not only private but as confidential as a therapists office.
And, even beyond that, they want to eliminate things that even possibly could be used to violate privacy, removing features rather than allowing opt-in, only allowing a weak revokable consent to data processing, etc.
I would much rather they apply a targeted approach of ensuring privacy is always available to those who want it, without trying to eliminate public digital spaces as a category.
What is built ontop of it can be pseudo-centralized and/or regulated if needed but there is always the technical ability to re-decentralize if needed. My main concern is that I want the creation to outlast the creators/controllers. What happens if an important company gets bought and its IP split up? What if the new owners simple disable the product or put it behind a paywall. Look at bittorrent, the new owners completely screwed it up but the protocol + previous implementations could continue to be used. Look at Facebook's double standard of how they censor content.
I personally think anything that is popular + important enough to be used by much of the world should always have an open backbone should things go wrong with the current company+implementation. Open source is a form of decentralization. I also think decentralization of networks (backbones) is important to prevent one organization from achieving a "network affect" that makes them the central authority on a given resource (facebook, twitter, etc...)
Federation is the other problem. It's decentralized without real end user benefits other that a bit of censorship resistance, within the limits of the hosting company. It doesn't add reliability or offline communications on the LAN.
But we're talking web3 here, not money, so whether it's good or bad at handling money is irrelevant?
We'll probably have to agree to disagree there. I could send you $5 in Bitcoin right now no matter what country you're in, what bank you use, and without knowing who you are. It would cost like a $1 which is high for a $5 transaction, but that price wouldn't go up for a more significant amount of money.
> But we're talking web3 here, not money, so whether it's good or bad at handling money is irrelevant?
I think you have a misunderstanding of what exactly web3 is. All the apps with any traffic (loans, gambling, NFTs, insurance, derivatives) are using the money transfer capabilities of blockchain. It's the whole point.
That transaction fee is itself highly variable & dependent on load, though. The more people that actually try to use bitcoin to transfer money, the more expensive it gets. It actively resists using it to transfer money.
That, combined with the long transaction times, make it completely useless as a general purpose currency. You can use it as a variant on a wire transfer, where you only use it for rare, large transactions. And even then only one where you're ok waiting load spikes out (which can last for months as was the case in the first half of 2021). But then you're still spending extra time & money on each side of that transaction moving back out of bitcoin and into something usable for "normal" transactions.
> I think you have a misunderstanding of what exactly web3 is. All the apps with any traffic (loans, gambling, NFTs, insurance, derivatives) are using the money transfer capabilities of blockchain. It's the whole point.
But that's not what web3 proponents claim it is. Yes right now all the "web3 dApps" are money-related (or less charitably but more accurately, pyramid schemes), I don't disagree with you on that at all. But the claims are that it can be a decentralized replacement for web2. And web2 does a whole lot more than just shuffle money around.
That's why it's billing itself as "web3" and not, idk, "visa2".
I'm not sure what specific claims you're arguing against, but most people in the space aren't making them. It's a straw man. It sounds like you mainly take issue with the name web3, which I don't disagree with.
Blockchain provides incentives, those incentives can be transformed into cash for the end user. Web2 basically focused on 2 aspects. Transforming the browser into a OS that can run on any computer, using advertising for the generation of money for stakeholders. In regards to advertisement the reason why this was use d was because it worked in the past. Printing press --> newspaper --> advertisements, Radio --> audio advertisements, Movies --> pre-movie advertisements, tv --> commercials. This mechanism has worked before and worked for web2.0. The problem now is that so many companies are involved in data collection on individuals that it has become quiet scary, this was not possible with previous mediums (not to the same degree). Game companies have tried to transition to micro-transactions, psudo-gambling, upgrades as a payment form. Web3 offers a different incentive model that if successful can replace these arguably more scary methods.
Web3 kind of IS just blockchain at this point. Some are even calling for a Web4, as a non blockchain more performant version of web3 not focused on financial features.
I suspect if any P2P tech gets big without a token, people won't actually call it web3.
If it’s credit cards..we’ll now you’ve created a massive centralized link in your “p2p” system.
I am perfectly fine using centralised finance to buy things that are mostly already inherently centralized, which is pretty much all common purchases for most people, since buying anything that can be made cheaply by an individual is rare for most.
A huge number of things can be done purely P2P with no payments, with almost no infrastructure. That should be the core feature of Web4.
Even more things can be done semi-decentralized as in BitTorrent+a seedbox, and that works just fine.
Some of those things can even be donation supported in a profitable way and don't need payment from most users in any way that actually connects to the service. They can just put a PayPal and bitcoin link and people can donate however they want.
In Wikipedia can do it, Facebook and maybe even Youtube can, with appropriate P2P load balancing.
This is almost essential because the competing centralized services are totally free(via you-are-the-product models).
An email service or something that costs money and requires linking your bank to some coin payment service is going to have a hard time competing with gmail for the general public.
If something needs payment, it probably shouldn't be a core layer of the whole system. The first priority should be make things too cheap to meter where you can, and then figure out how to decentralize the remaining stuff, assuming there is demand.
Blockchain inherently can't do offline first LAN apps properly, you can't have consensus without communication. If I can't talk to someone on a mesh network without internet, a large amount of the advantage of P2P is gone.
I agree that not everything requires payment, but the things that do cannot truly be p2p without p2p payments.
Let me pose the question in a different way: why do you see p2p filesharing, hosting, communication etc as valuable but p2p payments as non-valuable?
Uncensorable payments are important for some and detrimental for others, since the majority of people have no need or desire to do anything that would get them shut down by a bank, and in fact actively benefit from the ability to "censor" fraud.
Putting something like that in the core of a protocol as a mandatory element doesn't make a lot of sense. There's an incredible amount of overhead involved, and it means the protocol is no longer general purpose, it's optimized for doing stuff payment processors don't want you to do, at the expense of the other use cases.
Which would be fine, if it weren't for the fact that almost all p2p projects have become money-centric, and payment free P2P has almost totally stalled.
For most use cases, payments aren't really a weak link. Their tech is highly reliable. If I were to host something with 3 different cheap seedboxes, I'd expect very good reliability, because mastercard probably won't have a long enough outage to make an invoice overdue.
P2P payments are definitely valuable, just a bit more niche.
What incentive? Users forced to mine to view content? Or just as a paywall? Because the former isn't an incentive (it's just ads taken to an even more extreme level), and the latter is already doable on 'web2' and vastly cheaper at that.
> Blockchain provides incentives
No, it absolutely does not. Blockchain is just a public ledger. It doesn't provide incentives of any kind, just an append-only list. Proof of Work provides "incentives" to burn power pointlessly, which is a pretty awful incentive. Proof of Stake provides incentives to hoard "money", which is... well actually a pretty big regression from the current state of the world, even. And that's about it.
And in both of those cases the money (and thus "incentives") still have to come from somewhere. Blockchain technology itself isn't generating any value, nor do things like IPFS. They need externalized funding to function. Filecoin then tries to make IPFS make sense for people to participate in, but that's then just a mediocre twist on AWS S3 or Backblaze or any other cloud storage provider. "Mediocre" because it completely lacks things like customer support & uptime guarantees. Kinda important things if you're trying to build a business on top of it.
Decentralized insurance seems like a horrible idea. Who makes the decisions? And who do you sue if they turn out to be a scam? How can you sue anyone without a centralized legal system?
At best, DeFi seems like a last resort, being marketed as a replacement for the whole bank system, while still not providing core services the current system does, and calling the lack of those services a feature rather than a bug.
It may have uses to certain niche groups, but the name web3 implies it's some kind of revolution on the scale of web2.
But most people have exactly no use for cryptocurrency. I don't want my money outside the traditional reversible financial system.
DeFi loans seem to mostly be based on large amounts of collateral. Greatly defeating the purpose of taking out a loan, which, unless you are rich and doing wierd finance stuff, is because you need money that you don't have.
I know very few people with any reason to touch Web3, unless it provides something of interest for anyone but rich people with a grudge against the government.
It would be fine as a niche thing, but unfortunately it has completely taken over the tech scene to an insane degree.
Open source software already is literally free. Almost all the good stuff is developed by corporations at a pretty high price, but it's still not much considering billions of users.
Hosting apparently costs so little to provide that just a few ad clicks and some data collection, or a donation model like Wikipedia, can be way more than enough.
Some of it appears to even be given away just as a promotion.
It's not literally free, but it's getting close to irrelevant costs per megabyte of data.
What exactly, do you think web3 is?
I think that the lack of a consistent definition and understanding of what web3 is supposed to solve is why every thread about it turns into a bit of a mess.
e.g IPFS is generally considered part of web3, and is not about money at all.
As far as I know it also still spews your entire wantlist to all peers, which could be hundreds, in hopes that maybe one of them happens to have a popular block you want.
It's also immutable first. So you can't change anything without changing the parent, and so on all the way up the tree, which is fine for some kinds of content but not others.
NFT.storage is well, to put it nicely, a scam platform to drive traffic to Filecoin.
tell that to the russians right now, or to all the other 3. world countrys whose only hope for usable currency is bitcoin
1. Russia's problem is that other countries are choosing not to do business with them. The mechanism doesn't change that (China and India will do business, at a hefty discount, but that's true for gold, too) and Bitcoin adds some risks because the blockchain model is perfect for enabling censorship because it not only allows people to avoid transactions with sanctioned entities up front but adds retroactive risk: if you accept Bitcoin from someone on that list your transactions and everyone downstream can also be blocked, driving down the value of those coins and reducing your potential buyers.
2. If your concern is censorship by the government where you live, think very carefully about whether you'd want to be someone in Russia using an application which requires a great deal of very easily detected network activity and maintains a full public transaction history for the convenience of the cops who just illegally searched your phone. Each time someone you've interacted with is compromised, they now have a hard record to go after everyone else in their history so you're not just at risk at the time of the transaction (as with cash) but for years afterwards, hoping that nobody you know has been compromised and wondering whether the police are monitoring you to see whether you lead them to anyone more interesting.
It's great if Facebook is censoring you, but it doesn't seem strong enough to protect you all that strongly against someone bigger who can just shut down a platform if they don't like the content it allows.
Bitcoin does have a use in some places with no other alternatives, but I'm sure glad I'm not forced into that position with their unpredictable fees that often go way above credit card fees.
Sure its a little different than most payment providers where the person initiating the payment pays the fees, but the fees are well under credit card rates.
Credit cards are 2 to 4 percent.
Most people pay their only large payments(Rent and bills) with cheaper direct transfer schemes from zero to a few USD.
For a 16 dollar fee to be better than 3%, you would have to spend 480USD in one transaction, on the kind of thing that you'd normally have a fee at all for. Something I have only done an extremely small handful of times in my entire life.
A few of my more well off friends might have computer parts or jewelry worth that much. My laptop is the only single thing I own close to that price, and even then, it's not much over it.
For a trip to the grocery store for a single person, bitcoin would probably be a 8% to 20% fee.
Flat fees are a regressive sales tax.
In the middle you have the space where you can do BTC to BTC transactions with somewhat smaller fees, sure.
As an example, Coinbase charges reasonable withdrawal fees that correspond to the actual TX fee, around $0.05 when I last used it a few weeks ago. Others charge absurdly high fees, biggest examples of that being Binance and Bitstamp that charged ~$20 for a Bitcoin withdrawal around the same time Coinbase was charging $0.05.
Point being, different exchanges charge different fees, and LocalBitcoins is always an option if you want to avoid exchanges altogether.
To me the best part of decentralized systems is that they allow for centralized sub-systems to emerge organically, instead of being decided top-down.
For instance, I don't think that when launching the first internet nodes we would have anticipated that certs should have centralized entities, it happened that it made more sense that way once we saw the issues emerging from actual use.
The early net code assumed trust. Email, DNS, FTP, etc. You were trusted or authorized to use particular computers. Getting on those meant talking to someone with a bit of sense not to let spammers/trolls onto their networks. Then if they did get someone like that they walked over to their terminal and just locked them out of their account. It was also why they heavily stayed away form corp interests for so long. As many times a small cohort of people will ignore doing the right thing if it gets them some sort of power/wealth. So we end up with central authorities who can either limit or kick off those who do trolly things.
It is not going back to that. It cant. But the trick is can we get those distributed properties back? Yet still keep the spammers at bay?
Most people who use these systems could not care one whit if it is centralized or not. They just want to send some cat pics and watch a video of someone doing something silly and give a thumbs up to that.
Git's selling point is that it's decentralized and distributed... but just look at the shitshow that happens whenever GitHub goes down. Git may allow for developers to all pull from each other, but in practice your employer will always have a canonical repo that's blessed as the official source, and if that one becomes unavailable for any reason work grinds to a halt. And that goes double if your company's deployment process is tied to GHA.
You’ve got workflows bolted on top that block forward progress when it goes down. Hooks for when push requests happen, when commits happen, etc. You’ve got code reviews in your workflow that cannot happen when the service is down.
Basically there is much more to a service like GitHub / gitlab than just “write code, commit”. These services enable powerful workflows. When those go down all you can do is write code locally. The rest of the pipeline is dead in the water, which in many cases makes your overall ability to work virtually impossible.
All the interesting stuff for normal people is built on top.
If it was a pure central authority + protocol you would be doomed to live and die with them. Imagine if instead of git + github you had some source code protocol that only allowed you to checkout the latest commit of some branch. All code history needed to be viewed by connecting to the central servers. Why not make it even worse, you could only view+edit a specific file of the latest commit on your machine. All other files must live on the central server, you are not allowed to build/compile code locally either... Centralization is the process of you giving up control to a "trusted" entity. If they fail you lose everything
Of course, if your build process is tied into github actions or something, that will still be broken. But that problem also exists for any other 3rd party build/deploy service you might use, independent of git-the-VCS-tool.
Yes, that's my point. It doesn't matter if your protocol is decentralized as long as your business processes rely on having a blessed authoritative repo, which most do. Yes, you can point your remotes somewhere else, but in practice nobody bothers.
I have worked on both sides of that.
Even banks are moving to SaaS first for their core applications.
Regarding decentralized email: there are technical solutions to spam like Hashcash [0]. It has drawbacks, like a bit of energy consumption. On the other side it keeps big corps reasonable (or gives them an upper limit to how bad they can behave), as if they start to behave too bad, such solutions would likely see increasing adoption.
Isn't this just a design problem, as opposed to an intrinsic problem with decentralization?
I believe that we can design convenient decentralized systems. We definitely have not done this yet, but that does not mean this is an unachievable goal.
There are also human factors which currently are a problem too. The massive increase in people using internet technology (via smartphones obv.) Was not accompanied by massive increase in technology education/expertise.
The early users of the internet were extremely technically capable in comparison, raised on microcomputers. Getting online was a hassle, but presented a fun challenge to these people.
Not only are today's platforms essentially closed, the average user has a lot of difficulty understanding all the layers required to do something like say, set up an email server. This is a major drain of effort and it's just one piece of the networked tech people take for granted.
However if there were simple alternatives which could be setup and used "effortlessly" people would use them.
Web3 is an unfulfilled promise, so far, and is in a phase where scams and bullshit are rife.
It's unlikely that people will perpetually be satisfied with the centralized services, especially as they continue to degrade in service and ethical quality. A process which may be part of the equation which leads to better decentralized systems which are also secure and simple to deploy & use.
I think the interest is there, the technology isn't yet of course.
Humans are lazy. They'll go with the #1 option, even if it means building a centralized monopoly.
I should've made this point clearer.
Note: I am the article's author.
You have to look at the individual decisions that people make, and actually make it worth someone's time to do something themselves. For some people, they care a lot about decentralization, are anti-corporate, etc., but most people don't care. They see that they could either spend money on a cheap PC and 10 hours learning about, setting up, and troubleshooting their own mail server; or they can get a gmail account in 2 minutes and get the exact same practical result. The same will apply to web3 systems. It's not laziness, it's people making rational decisions.
This. It's not up to techies to decide what people value. The philosophical problem with web3/blockchain/whatever is that it assumes "decentralization" is a valuable thing in and of itself, without really tying it into what people actually value.
Am I lazy because I don't forge spare parts for my car and install them myself? No. I leave this to the huge, rich, established company that manufactured my car, and their contractors. Why? Because the only times I ever repaired anything in a car, was in videogames. And I want to be sure that the thing that I entrust my safety to while traveling, is in excellent working order.
For the same reason, most people don't setup their own mail servers, don't setup their own racks to run webapps, invent their own currencies, grow their own food, produce their own electricity, or dig wells.
Our society runs on a huge variety of systems, most of which are too complex individually for any single human to fully understand/make/maintain on his own. Centralization is not a bad thing to be avoided, it's an inevitable consequence of technological development.
Do I make my own bread? Sure, sometimes I do. Baking bread isn't that hard. But do I do it every day? No. Why? Because it takes time to do, my kitchen counter is usually a mess afterwards, and the result usually doesn't taste anywhere near as good as the 20+ bread varieties I can buy at the corner store. I sometimes do it for fun, but I wouldn't do it every day.
Let's go to macro scale: What's the better solution: 1000000 people each baking their own bread (1 loaf a day), or a giant company baking all the bread? A million stoves are most certainly less energy efficient than the professional industrial ones at the company. Having to divide the resources into many small packages and distributing them to each individual households is less efficient. The quality of the bread will vary widely. And lets say baking takes 0.5 hours, that's 57 person years wasted per day to do something the bread factory can probably do with a few dozen employees.
The same argument advocates monopoly or central planning by government?
If not, you have to jistify where is centralised enough. Now, if we have a 20,000 different bakeries, is that actually centralised?
Decentralisation of plumbers doesnt mean everyone does his own plumbing, it means anyone willing to learn can become a plumber and there is no plumbing monopoly.
Also we should debate the actual subject, not debate it indirectly throufh analogie, it just introduces an extra step of inaccuracy and cultural baggage.
But it is more about the problems than the methodology. Centralized/Cooperative methods are more appropriate to solving a complex problem for which you know the solution (building a house, mass transit, maintaining highways). Distributed/Competitive methodology is better for exploring a problem space (determining the most energy efficient house design, innovative bus or train engines, cost effective highway surfaces). If you use cooperative when you should be using competition, you get a cartel. If you use competition when you should be cooperating, you get extreme inefficiency and long delays (I don't think we have a word for when we force groups who should be cooperating to compete with each other for resources).
I agree in terms of forcing, but we have plenty of ways to describe the general idea of choosing this direction, typically in exchange for a (real or perceived) benefit, but almost always with the inefficiency/delay you mentioned:
homegrown
homemade
handmade
handcrafted
artisan
DIY
roll your own
My argument isn't "centralization is good no matter what".
My argument is "centralization is not inherently a bad thing that is to be overcome. Done correctly, as demonstrated by many existing systems in our society, it is a great way to make things our society needs work at scale in an efficient manner."
Decentralization like democracy introduces inefficiencies but at the same time provides safeguards against these conditions. The goal is to provide the minimum amount of inefficiencies while providing the maximum amount of safeguards.
Most democracies are not purely decentralized systems, however. There is still a central government, the difference is how it obtains its ruling power.
Even the elections themselves are not de-centralized, as in "everyone run his own DIY election system and we'll see what sticks". There are central authorities for tallying votes, providing election sites, safeguarding and vetting the process, declaring rules, etc.
Which is a perfect example for how cenralized systems can be both efficient and safeguarded.
Do you wear sweaters?
The sweaters you have -- did you knit them?
Do you wear shirts?
Did you sew them yourself?
If not, why are you so lazy?
It's true that centralization & decentralization tend to operate like a pendulum over time. Having a blockchain that provides historic cryptographic evidence of provenance with a modicum of worldwide trust seems like a generally valuable capability to combat all forms of digital newspeak.
So long as you keep monopolies and abuse of power in check, in the past 30 years we have gone from a dozen conpetitors to like 2 or 3 player cartel in many industries
Without the centralized regulation of decentralized system, they seem to consistently centralize around a few key players to the detriment of the system.
The fallacy here is most centralized services are implemented on top of the biggest, most successful decentralized system: the web.
> And it's because people don't want to spend time setting up their own shit, they are very happy to pay in either money or data to have someone else do it for them.
I'm not so sure. For really important tasks, I'm routinely amazed by what people cobble together to solve the problem, especially when they can't build software. Perhaps there are just a lot of things that if made easy, provide enough value they are worth buying, but aren't important enough to people to invest a year or two building a product for. Regardless, most modern centralized systems are simply nodes on a decentralized system.
Every decentralized system that works was created with a goal other than directly profiting from it to start with, and succeeded because someone found a way to profit from some part of it. Eventually though, in most cases, the companies and people that run the system coalesce until its effectively centralized, with a few single entities running the points of failure. See electricity generation, car manufacturing, news media, game publishing, book publishing, glasses manufacturing, etc for examples. The Internet is still in the "companies coalesce" stage which is why it still looks decentralized, but those companies merge or vanish quite regularly, with fewer and fewer getting more and more control.
Sorry, it just bugs me when people talk like this. Politics, too. People want us to do things "in the middle". What does that mean? Like a single payer system that pays for half of everything? What people actually mean is, they want a better solution that works for everyone. It's not a split the difference situation.
basically what happens here everytime youtube has some sort of drama and users recommend all these alternatives "that put the power back to you".
the vast majority of users (I even argue 99+% when you exclude the technical crowd) don't want the "power". They want to host their content, not deal with random It related issues, and maybe even make a small bit of monetization. not having videos taken down for mysterious (or not so mysterious, but asinine) reasons would have them jump ship to ANOTHER solution that offers the above factors, but they won't jump to open source like a developer may.
Business companies all strive to get monopolies, hence they build things to capture consumers. Same companies are more attractive than open standard because making things not interoperable is more agile/faster as you can break things whenever you want. Thus companies build more attractive things to the users and users get captured in those shiny gold plated cells.
The spam problem is also simply the decentralized system not working; it has no protections against unwanted incoming messages.
Buying my food from a market instead of foraging for it is a cost cutting measure.
In theory yes. In practice, nobody has made this supposedely good for the hacker / engineer system. Otherwise I'd be using it. Since your post is just parrotting the usual anti-decentralized stuff with extremely strange motives, and ignoring obvious facts such as that bittorrent works perfectly even with the legal threat to using it, lets move onto a new topic: What such a system would look like.
I don't want 2FA, phone auth, certs. I want to connect to a service providing my own public key as auth and authenticating it against a known public key which is saved on my computer. I can secure my computer however I want. I also don't want to use a badly designed roundabout way to do this like X.509 with cert pinning. I can just have a <1000LOC lib written from the ground up to do all cryptographic tasks.
I don't want my software to have """human readable""" names that are stored in a centralized directory where they conflict with others with character sets (and restrictions on them) that change every month. Instead, I want content-addressable code (functions, types, etc) which I have a dedicated editor for that allows me to write code against them.
I don't want a weird character set full of unknown functionality like ASCII. I don't want to have untyped data where I or my code is forced to make insecure ad-hoc decisions on how to interpret it (is this ASCII, CP*? UTF?). I don't want a crappy ad-hoc fly by night serialization system (each with its own gimmick such as "speed", "readability") like protobuf, yaml, yet another yaml, toml, yet another toml that doesn't solve any semantic problems associated with serialization. I don't want that protobuf lib where there is no documentation on how it maps types to protobufs and in some cases it leaves pointers initialized to null and in some cases it initializes them to point to an empty struct, based on some stupid intuition I was supposed to pick up if I become a fanboy of this particular serialization lib over the 10,000 others.
Instead, I want to use the same editor mentioned before to view data, which is just data of the ONE programming language on this computer. Algebraic data types serve this purpose almost perfectly. This problem was solved in 1970. I want one serialization format which is just a set of steps on how convert data of one type to bits. Then when I receive this data, I will view it in this editor. The point being that we don't care how the data looks on wire, because it's universally decodeable with the most common tool of the OS.
I don't want multiple programming languages that are each overly designed around strawmen like "the user" and "speed" and "C-like", with tons of edge cases such that even if I learned one well enough to be able to write sound code (you can't: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16159203/why-does-this-j...), it wouldn't matter because your program relies on components written in 15 other such languages.
I want the only language to also be at the very least, such that I can understand what it does on a syntactic level. Again, you can't:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8115522/a-unicode-newlin... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17707290/set-a-variable-... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17662815/how-does-java-d...
I don't want to have to check what ports my program uses and check if the web browser (of course, I don't want a web browser at all) on a malicious page can send a request to those ports that will be processed as some administrative function; I want things not to pointlessly listen for no reason by default in a non-composable way. Instead, I want a program to have a list of channels that only I as the computer owner can choose to link up with other programs I choose to have it communicate with (this is known as the capability security model).
I don't want to host data, I want to refer to them by links in a self organizing anonymous content addressable storage like Freenet. I want to use the same system to distribute code.
I don't want my programming console (essentially what *sh is, just an extremely poor version of it) to be implemented on top of some obsolete tech called a terminal, that you couldn't even explain to the typical software engineer 20 years ago, that goes bezerk when certain characters hit it and has ui interaction quality comparable to a 5 year old's javascript program.
The biggest example is the internet itself - the internet is a completely decentralized network until it wasn't, with website certs becoming required. People use popular web hosting because it's easier and just better than what they could do. Email is completely decentralized, and it's very easy to set up your own web server - as long as you want every single spam system to immediately block all of your messages.
"Decentralized" systems will all go the exact same way. And it's because people don't want to spend time setting up their own shit, they are very happy to pay in either money or data to have someone else do it for them. Yeah, it's very easy to say "well just set up your own thing" but once you get to a critical mass of everyone using Gmail instead of their own server then the system becomes unusable without centralization.
Decentralization is a fantastic idea, and it works great in theory, but it fails to actually consider any of the practical problems that come with decentralization and doesn't consider what people who aren't programmers actually want to do with their time and money.