[rajeck]

I'm always happy to be convinced that someone has seen something I've missed in all of this hype about crypto, but when you say things like...

'imagine if you could fork Amazon and launch a direct competitor'

..you've lost me. Amazon is not a code base. It has over 500,000 employees who work hard to serve its customers. How do you fork that?

I would offer another, better example but I can't think of one. Web 2.0 companies are so far ahead that web 3.0 is going to have to come up with something completely different to be commercially interesting.

[roymurdock]

The author is arguing that decentralizing the control of compute power and compute-as-a-service is valuable and should be invested in.

It is valuable if we ever reach a point where say, AWS has a monopoly on all compute power, and starts making bad/unfair/predatory decisions that hurt customers.

Otherwise running decentralized payment networks to exchange compute power is much less efficient and much more costly than relying on purchasing services directly from a few competing (read: non-colluding) service providers using USD, GBP, EUR, credit cards, etc.

There's really no need to decentralize compute-as-a-service. This person is getting paid to talk their book because their employer has placed a lot of bets in the cryptocurrency/blockchain world and is trying to brainstorm ways to turn them into actual viable products and exit these investments.

Blockchains / decentralized ledgers are almost always solutions looking for a problem. They solve the very niche issue of exchange between untrusted parties, with caveats, and with extra performance/cost added to a centralized solution.

There's currently no reason to implement a decentralized ledger solution for exchanging compute-as-a-service.

[tlrobinson]

And you don't even mention the biggest issue: why would I ever trust my data to some random compute provider in a "decentralized compute-as-a-service" system.

At least with applications like storage you can encrypt your data. AFAIK homomorphic encryption isn't general or efficient enough to be very useful yet.

[dsr_]

"It is valuable if we ever reach a point where say, AWS has a monopoly on all compute power, and starts making bad/unfair/predatory decisions that hurt customers."

Or... we could use intermediate libraries that translated our desires into whatever backends were currently cheap or fashionable, thus making it relatively easy to deploy across multiple infrastructure companies and just possibly preventing this monopoly from happening in the first place.

I encourage my competitors to code directly for Amazon APIs, though. I'm sure it gives them a performance advantage.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Web 2.0 companies are so far ahead that web 3.0 is going to have to come up with something completely different to be commercially interesting

Web 1.0 (e.g. e-mail, http, et cetera) was more de-centralised than any token-based company I see today.

[jsutton]

It started out decentralized but quickly consolidated. Cryptocurrencies in theory should enable a sustainable decentralized network.

[urda]

Yeah but in practice today they are far from sustainable, and have done significant environmental damage due to their ridiculous energy consumption.

[ghthor]

This argument is absurb. The damage done by crypto mining is nothing compared to the environmental damage that government(aka weapons) backed fiat currencies have brought upon the world.

[urda]

One of those provide value, protection, and an exportable / importable product. This actually progresses nations and communities, which is not a waste of energy at all.

The other is crypto mining and crypto currency.

> This argument is absurb [sic].

Your entire argument here is indeed absurd, as demonstrated in this thread.

[berberous]

Amazon is too big of an example. But look at Filecoin. They are trying to create a competitor to S3 -- a decentralized file storage service. Today, that is much more expensive and slower than Amazon's offering. But with all of the scaling solutions in the pipeline (sharding, alternative consensus algorithms like dPOS, sidechains, etc.), perhaps that will change. And I don't see why that couldn't be forked, in the same way that BCH forked from BTC.

Here's another example. Peepeth.com is creating a decentralized twitter, with IPFS for storage and indexing on the Ethereum blockchain. Since all that storage is open and public, the creater of peepeth.com is trying to build a business based on his front-end. People can freely create alternate front-ends or apps, and leverage the existing open database of tweets without being limited by Twitter's policy whims regarding its API.

[simias]

>with all of the scaling solutions in the pipeline

That's a big problem for me, many cryptocurrency/blockchain projects (IOTA, filecoin, the lightning network, basically every ICO ever) are basically saying "sure, this is barely usable as it is, but in the future YOU'LL SEE!"

Given the ridiculous amount of investment in the blockchain/cryptocurrency space these past years how long do we have to wait until we see the actual results? I remember when I first used Google Search all those years ago my first reaction was "uh, that's a weird name", my 2nd reaction was "damn, that's so much better than the search engines I've used so far". How long until we reach this stage with blockchain apps? How many years, how many billions of dollars? I'm not asking for a polished product, just something that makes me think "that's actually better than what I've used before".

>Peepeth.com is creating a decentralized twitter, with IPFS for storage and indexing on the Ethereum blockchain.

Remember Usenet? Remember email? Remember IRC? I think there's a false dichotomy in the mind of many nowadays, mainly that the internet is either centralized or "blockchain based", whatever that means. It's a lie. The internet is fundamentally decentralized, the centralization is a relatively new phenomenon that started in the early '00s.

You want to "fix" the internet? Get people to use IPv6, not the Blockchain.

[berberous]

>> "Given the ridiculous amount of investment in the blockchain/cryptocurrency space these past years how long do we have to wait until we see the actual results?"

This kind of thing is obviously extremely hard to say without any sort of accuracy, but my best guess, within a year or two. Specifically, you will start to see scaling solutions finally launch (lightning network, the numerous ETH initiatives, etc.), and you will start to see some dapps gain actual usage or traction (DEXs, collectibles, etc.).

>> "It's a lie. The internet is fundamentally decentralized, the centralization is a relatively new phenomenon that started in the early '00s."

Yes, obviously there is nothing _technically_ stopping the Internet from being decentralized. But I think what you are missing is the incentive structures and the realities. Here is an interesting post from Chris Dixon arguing that what's unique about cryptocurrencies is that they provide an alternative structure that will encourage decentralized protocols to flourish: https://medium.com/@cdixon/why-decentralization-matters-5e3f.... It's not that Twitter can't be coded to be more decentralized without blockchains. It's that in reality, the economic reality is that such a service eventually closes off its API, bait-and-switching users into their walled garden. Like open source software, cryptocurrencies may be a means of aligning people to work towards a different paradigm.

[simias]

>I think what you are missing is the incentive structures and the realities

Oh I assure you that I'm not. The incentive structure is exactly why we ended up with a centralized web. But as with everything else the blockchain has a lot to say on the matter but not much to show for it.

Currently working in blockchain "stuff" is extremely rewarding because of the massive speculation and deflation surrounding it. You can write a relatively mundane 50 pages "whitepaper" and get millions for it. There's no shortage of "free money". But surely that won't last forever, things are bound to stabilize eventually, one way or an other.

So then what do we have? Those "dapps" are open source, the devs don't control the code, they don't control the storage, they don't control the blockchain. They control nothing. Anybody can come and undercut them with zero effort. That's a feature. Google and Facebook control everything, they control the interface, they control the storage, they control the data, they control how you access all of that. Thanks to this they "offer" you the service "for free" (i.e., for your data). How can blockchain devs ever hope to compete with that? By convincing the general population that they should pay for decentralized services instead of using centralized services "for free"? The very thing they've refused to do time and again for the past 15 years at least?

I'm very much unconvinced that the Blockchain has found a solution to this very complicated problem. It's just wishful thinking IMO.

[ghthor]

Cebtralization as I see it has been mostly pushed by spam and abuse. Email became centralized due to the difficulty in combating spam at scale. The large positive I see with crypto networks is the cost of being a bad actor is magnitudes higher, and now you don't have to be the machine intelligence wizards to fight spam, you can combat it fairly straightforwardly with simple economic hindrances for being a bad actor.

[cocktailpeanuts]

> I remember when I first used Google Search all those years ago my first reaction was "uh, that's a weird name", my 2nd reaction was "damn, that's so much better than the search engines I've used so far".

That's because most "blockchain" apps are no Google. Going with your dotcom analogy, I'm sure most of these are equivalent to pets.com, Yahoo, AOL, etc. which means they will either crash hard or stick around while being marginalized to oblivion by newcomers that have learned from the mistakes and started from scratch (or Bitcoin itself).

And continuing on with Google analogy, this meteoric rise of the hypothetical "Google for blockchain" will happen AFTER the crash of rest of these trash blockchains.

[ericb]

From 1993-1997 the internet had similar potential to what we use it for today, but the websites were roughly the equivalent of business cards. Nothing was real time. You couldn't get theater tickets, or shop, or do much of anything.

[xkarga00]

> Remember Usenet? Remember email? Remember IRC? I think there's a false dichotomy in the mind of many nowadays, mainly that the internet is either centralized or "blockchain based", whatever that means. It's a lie. The internet is fundamentally decentralized, the centralization is a relatively new phenomenon that started in the early '00s.

The internet started in the early 90s so you are talking approximately about two thirds of its lifespan hence "new" doesn't really apply.

[kgwgk]

That may be true for some values of “started”, but symbolics.com was registered as early as 1985. Or maybe you meant early 80s?

[marcus_holmes]

OK, I don't understand this.

Forking BTC was one thing, because speculators and miners and all. There was bound to be some interest in a second version of BTC because everyone got free money, right?

But forking filecoin? I don't understand how this works. Please explain. Who would be into this, why would they mine a second filecoin? How does the community survive half a dozen forks (and having to specify which fork your precious.jpg is on?)

[berberous]

I think it's analogous to open source forks. A fork should have a good reason to fork, otherwise, indeed, why would anyone switch? So, why would someone fork? One or more of the following comes to mind:

1. Deep philosophical differences (e.g. Bitcoin Cash) or incompatible technical changes.

2. Removing rent-seeking (e.g., if a network/token is successful, but has some sort of greedy/rent-seeking aspect to it, I expect the community will just fork it away to remove that aspect).

3. Governance issues (e.g. if a token is setup such that its run by folks who have either actual or perceived control and those folks start failing to make good technical or other decisions, a competing faction might decide it's easier to fork than to wage war for either actual control or perceived control).

4. Greed (e.g. Bitcoin Platinum; these will generally fail in my view)

>> How does the community survive half a dozen forks (and having to specify which fork your precious.jpg is on?)

How does Linux survive its numerous forks? As to specifying which fork your file is on, why can't there be middleware that makes it easy to support multiple storage networks, just like today?

[marcus_holmes]

Why one middleware? Let's make ten different middlewares, each with their own technical differences and benefits in particular niche scenarios, right?

Let's have some intense ranty debates about which middleware is better for which scenario, and a couple of religious wars about which fork coupled with which middleware is "best".

Meanwhile, S3 just does the thing. It gets called "$3" by intense people who understand exactly why it sucks so bad. But for anyone who needs to store documents on a thing, and have someone to blame if the documents stop being on the thing, it works fine and it's much less fiddly to set up.

Yeah, I get the Linux analogy all too well...

[icebraining]

Forking BTC didn't give anyone "free money" - all the money came from buyers.

Filecoin could be forked to improve it, much like BCH has differences in relation to BTC (e.g. maximum block size).

[marcus_holmes]

I had 1 BTC. Then it forked and I had 1 BTC and 1 BCH, together worth more than the 1 BTC I started with. I did nothing to get this. Free money.

[IncRnd]

There may be more of these unrealized potential presentations about cryptonetworks then there are companies which accept cryptocoins.

[snissn]

AFAIK the author means imagine "Amazon" as a concept around a popular marketplace for books, food and computers. Not imagine that tomorrow amazon is supplanted. Amazon is not built as a blockchain competitor. If you imagine that it is, then imagine forking it...

[simias]

As for most things the blockchain solves .1% of the problems Amazon solves. Dealing with delivery issues alone is something the blockchain cannot solve on its own. Dealing with warehouses, making deals with shipping companies, managing stock, providing results tailored to the user etc... The Blockchain isn't magic, it can't deal with that. You might be able to build a complex system of oracles and smart contracts to reimplement all that functionality but I posit that it won't be more effective or cheaper than a centralized system.

Think about the price you're paying for your Amazon prime subscription or your Visa card. Now think about the amount of complexity these companies have to deal with, handling thousands of third parties that are willing to take advantage of the system if given the chance. Dealing with human error. Dealing with scammers. Think how well it works on average. Now you want to undercut that using slow, inefficient and redundant distributed trustless technology? Good luck.

I could be wrong, but the burden of proof is on the cryptocurrency enthusiasts' shoulders because Amazon and Visa work today while Openbazaar and the Lightning network are still highly experimental.

>If you imagine that it is, then imagine forking it...

Can you imagine if we had 100THz computers? How cool would that be.

[snissn]

it feels like we're speaking two separate languages, I don't know how to tell you what you want to hear

> the burden of proof is on the cryptocurrency enthusiasts' shoulders

It feels very unfair to walk into a conversation with an internet stranger who believes that. If you feel so strongly, who am I to try to change your mind?

[simias]

I don't think it's unfair to say that the proponents of a technology that does not yet exist have the burden to prove that it's superior to the technology that does exist and work today. "Imagine if you could fork Amazon" is not a reasonable premise.