[iskander]

I think what Stephen misses in his campaign against crypto is that the old ideals have already been coopted and smothered with the corporatization of the web and splintering of what was a decentralized ecosystem into a megacorp walled gardens. I know there's a tiny community of non-crypto decentralized web advocates and I hope they win. But, the main force for a return to decentralization is in crypto and the only realistic alternative to a web3 future is one where everything is a property of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, &c

[PragmaticPulp]

> But, the main force for a return to decentralization is in crypto

The more I watch this space, the more I realize that many of these projects are just an excuse to flip novel tokens for a quick profit.

We reached the point where there are enough blockchains and crypto tokens for almost every conceivable purpose. At this point, many of the new entrants feel like they’re just arbitrarily bolting new coins and new tokens on to ideas that could have been executed on top of many existing chains or coins. Or even executed entirely without a blockchain at all. The reason, of course, is that it’s far easier to get rich quickly by minting new arbitrary coins and tokens than it is to build on top of someone else’s coins.

> But, the main force for a return to decentralization is in crypto and the only realistic alternative to a web3 future is one where everything is a property of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, &c

What’s stopping any of these companies from simply buying 51% of the tokens to a decentralized DAO, for example? There’s nothing magical about crypto that makes platforms immune to big company involvement. If anything, many of them make it easier to execute and harder to detect.

There’s nothing stopping anyone from launching a project that isn’t owned by these companies but also doesn’t involve blockchain. In fact, it’s never been easier to get something off the ground and going.

This argument always feels like an appeal to binary thinking: We’re supposed to imagine that there are only two possibilities (web3 or big tech) with the implicit assumption that big tech is the “bad” one and therefore web3 is the obvious choice. Yet there’s a huge middle ground between the two that is more accessible than ever before.

[015a]

> What’s stopping any of these companies from simply buying 51% of the tokens to a decentralized DAO, for example?

Smaller coins, sure. Its a legitimate concern.

But it becomes far harder as coins get bigger. Up to a local maxima of general global use and investment. Even harder as companies compete against one-another to do the same thing. What's stopping Chase Bank from buying up tons of coins and mining power to control Bitcoin? Well, every other human who owns Bitcoin, not to mention Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

Company interest in doing this will naturally correlate with usage. Which means, companies & governments simply wont do it until its too late and they can't. And if they did; if they jumped the shark; the coin's value would drop as users recognize this, and their investment would be ruined. Suicide-bombing is not in the self-interest of most corporations. The GDP of the US, the single richest cohesive entity on the planet, is still only ~25% the GDP of Planet Earth.

This sort of co-option of a currency won't happen, because a currency would either be so big that no entity could afford to do it, or a currency is so small that taking control would destroy its market and their investment.

[burnished]

Whats the distribution of mining power in the bitcoin network right now? Like, what % of the total are the top ten groups?

[015a]

The top singular contributors to mining power are, for most coins, mining pools comprised of thousands of individuals and corporations. So, its very difficult the say; we can point to pools, but that's where the investigation stops.

The pools themselves are collectives, and as such really don't hold much logical power in swaying the network. If one pool goes rogue, miners are generally pretty savvy, and would react (this has happened in the past).

[burnished]

Ok. With what little I understand about the way wealth pools and congregates, and the inability to peer behind the curtain in this situation, I don't see any reason to believe that the majority of power has not centralized into a small group of people.

[iskander]

I think you have to participate a bit in the non-speculative side to get a feel for the culture and social movement that's brewing there. New entrants aren't the ones to watch since they're probably jumping in to make money, look to the increasing interest in DAOs as social coordination mechanisms, they will keep evolving to empower groups of individuals to have outsized impacts.

[s5300]

> feel for the culture and social movement that's brewing there.

It might be slightly cool if they weren’t 99% either grifters or people who can’t actually do anything. Like, even basic programming that would actually make something real.

The current “culture” is literally just saying a lot of words and making absolutely zero point.

Sort of like Kanye said

“No one knows what it means, but it's provocative

Gets the people going”

[_nhynes]

> “No one knows what it means, but it's provocative. Gets the people going”

This is actually a high quality quote from Blades of Glory, a high quality film. Apt reference either way, though.

https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Blades_of_Glory_(film)

[neilk]

What are some non-speculative places where one can get into this?

[iskander]

It depends on your interests, I just joined a decentralized biotech discord where people are exploring alternative funding mechanisms for both non-profit science and biotech startups. There are quite a few art discords/communities that are focused on the actual art (and not on resale prices).

[lowbloodsugar]

Any of them could easily deploy enough compute to own any blockchain.

[phillipcarter]

> But, the main force for a return to decentralization is in crypto and the only realistic alternative to a web3 future is one where everything is a property of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, &c

It'd be awfully nice if said decentralization was offering more valuable things than just naked ponzi schemes.

I'm on team "we're in an ad bubble and it's disgusting that these major companies created a surveillance state" but the alternative presented is an extremely toxic culture of money-obsessed scammers who burn energy with reckless abandon.

I'd advise that proponents of cryptocurrency-based systems like "web3" clean their houses out a bit.

[iskander]

I think it's easy to miss the content at the core of the movement given how thoroughly it's wrapped in gold rush and scamming. But the more time I spend around the space the more it seems that there is a legitimately transformative force which attracts the gold rush in the first place. And the ethos of people working on e.g. research DAOs, decentralized publishing, crypto art, &c feels right compared to the web2 world.

[nefitty]

It's the classic MBA meets genius nerd situation.

"Hey everyone, look at this weird tech thing my brother has been obsessively building for the past year! You can have one for $5!"

[easrng]

> But the more time I spend around the space ...

The more you get sucked in to the reality distortion field. I've been there, get out.

[iskander]

Nah, I kinda like it. It's a very idealistic and optimistic space with a vision for creating a commons that's not owned by any one commercial entity. The scams will drop away when the current bubble bursts but the web3 culture + tech are probably here to stay.

[NoGravitas]

> the only realistic alternative to a web3 future is one where everything is a property of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, &c

Take heart! Living in a mud hut and drying jellyfish on racks over a tire fire is also a realistic alternative to a "web3" future, and a more likely one for most of us!

[iskander]

Maybe the most likely future of all...

[paulgb]

I'm also bummed by the centralization and corporatization of the web. What web3 projects should I be looking at? What stands out as promising?

Because when I look, I just see things that look like grifts, platforms that eschew centralized moderation and become spammy cesspools, or projects that actually aren't decentralized but co-opt the web3 name. But I'm open-minded, if there are things I'm missing.

[iskander]

It's legit very hard to sift through the scamminess of the space, I've been thinking of it as the cost of revolutionary potential: exponentially more people rush in to profit off "being early".

I would say start with web3 science folks like https://twitter.com/joshuaforman and https://twitter.com/eperlste who have a vision for the utility of DAOs for positive social impact that's unlinked from personal profit.

[stanleydrew]

If I read something from the folks with vision for the utility of DAOs, will they explain why a DAO is meaningfully different from a traditional corporation for whatever purpose they are imagining?

[iskander]

To really act meaningfully in the world outside crypto, DAOs needed to be wedded to LLCs so they can participate in the legal system.

But...the DAO governance structure allows very low friction, high transparency coordination between pseudononymous strangers on the internet.

The DAO is the "real" manifestation of the collective will of a bunch of people, the corporate shell is just going to perform whatever actions the DAO votes on.

[streamofdigits]

forget web3. basically we are in a situation where lots of people, smart, tech savvy people, stupid band wagon people, well meaning people, me-too people, go-with-the-next-big-thing people, all made a wrong bet that the particular set of algorithmic technologies and protocols that bitcoin spawned are a generic blueprint for a new decentralized digital infrastructure.

it aint.

the choice is not between web3 and meta-dystopia. The choice is between people owning and running their own hardware and software versus being granted that "privilege" by some digital overlords.

[notpachet]

As one of those non-crypto decentralized advocates, I am not super optimistic. I think the best case would be that we manage to build a bunch of generic decentralized infrastructure while all the easy money is being thrown around at the bottom of the Ponzi pyramid, and then that infrastructure manages to survive and continue to provide value even after the cryptocurrency house of cards collapses.

[iskander]

> then that infrastructure manages to survive and continue to provide value even after the cryptocurrency house of cards collapses.

That's my optimistic forecast for what happens after the current speculative bubble pops. We'll be left with e.g. universal sign-on via crypto wallet that's not owned by any corporation and can be used for cryptographic signature / voting / &c. We'll also have increasingly robust decentralized infrastructure like zero-knowledge rollup L2s on top of Ethereum to make increasing complex decentralized applications. The money making stuff is about as vacuous as everyone seems to think but the substance it's attached to is a movement away from walled gardens and towards increasingly empowered individuals.

[AlexandrB]

> That's my optimistic forecast for what happens after the current speculative bubble pops. We'll be left with e.g. universal sign-on via crypto wallet that's not owned by any corporation and can be used for cryptographic signature / voting / &c.

This seems entirely self-contradictory. How do you certify that a nominally anonymous cryptographic ID represents a particular individual for the purposes of signature/voting without some real-world (likely centralized!) entity establishing a connection between the two?

This seems like fundamentally the same problem that SSL certificates are trying to solve for website identity and I don't see how blockchain removes the need for a central authority somewhere if you want guarantees like "one person, one vote".

[iskander]

Why assume you need a pseudonymous persona to map onto a real world ID? Check out how DAO proposals work at e.g. https://gitcoin.co/grants/

[dbmikus]

There's a bunch of cool stuff if you Google "proof of {humanity,personhood}". Here's the wiki page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_personhood

It's all pretty new and not proven long term, but it is an area of active research.