[JamilD]

> And while it can still be accessed over HTTP, the bottlenecks become the same companies that might comply with censorship requests.

This is something that bothers me about the state of dapps right now. The way many of them connect to the blockchain is via Infura (a centralized service); even Metamask uses Infura to connect to the blockchain. There’s this abstraction that you trust, that you’re working with something totally decentralized, but right now the technical constraints necessitate single points of failure or censorship.

Of course, the data is still there in the blockchain, decentralized over many nodes, but the way we access that information seems very, very brittle.

[noman-land]

This is very true. Like I said in another comment, the HTTP gateways are bridges, not destinations. It'll only take one or two bridge collapses before people wise up and move to sturdier ground.

[mattdesl]

This is true; but there are multiple entry points to that data (The Graph, Infura, etherscan, etc) and just because one fails does not mean the entire ecosystem will collapse (ie: you can easily create a new indexer and switch HTTP provider from Infura to NewInfuraReplacement), or even run your own node for your company.