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by Strom 1636 days ago
I think there are two fundamental issues that need some addressing:

1) Either the decentralized software system can't easily be updated without true consensus - which will make it slow and cumbersome (like bitcoin) or there will be a central authority that can just change the rules at any point - which will make it centralized (like Ethereum Classic vs Ethereum fork). Every web 3.0 related tech that I've peeked at looks to be like the latter - it claims to be decentralized, but is actually controlled by some central authority that is authoring the whole thing.

2) Governments aren't going to stop enforcing laws just because the activity moves onto a blockchain. Governments will most likely be slow to react, sure - but ultimately all these decentralized encrypted bits flow through a cable that the government can just cut. Wireless signals aren't an answer either, because the signal can be located and the antenna owner introduced to a wrench. A lot of web 3.0 promises that I've seen seem to either implicitly or even explicitly promise freedom from government policy, which I think is naive at best.

2 comments

I think 1) will probably never get "solved," but that's ok. I don't think the vision of DAOs replacing traditional companies will ever materialize, for example. It's just too inefficient.

What I see blockchains enabling (to what degree, tbd) is ownership of digital assets without a central party. Take concert tickets, for example. Imagine a world where transaction fees are nominal and blockchains are scalable. An artist/venue can mint tickets and have people buy them directly from them, no TicketMaster with 20% "convenience" fees needed. Now, of course, there will exist a product (probably a winner takes-all, as usual), that will serve as the UI to mint the tickets. But a significant value add of such products, the validation of tickets via the authority of their name, will be replaced by the blockchain. I don't know exactly what that'll look like, but I don't think that's insignificant.

> Every web 3.0 related tech… claims to be decentralized, but is actually controlled by some central authority that is authoring the whole thing.

Can you elaborate a bit? Are you saying that ultimately things start looking like competing groups or that they start looking like a single group?

Things look like competing groups, just as they do now with corporate control over web 2 infrastructure