Yeahhhhhhh personally I wouldn’t want to invest or put money in a technology where a single developer could fork the network and instantly reduce the value of my tokens to zero.

Damn, this just does not happen in centralized currencies.

This will happen with Ethereum, where proof-of-stake will drastically reduce the profitability of miners.

Wow, this seems incredibly volatile and inefficient.

You can change existing transactions by removing an old transaction and adding the altered old one.

This is probably because Bitcoin has yet to be adopted for anything useful other than wild speculation by investors. If companies’ business interests were tied up in Bitcoin, it’s highly likely that they would want to gain control of the network. If you can define what ‘reality’ is, that’s a huge amount of power, which is highly attractive to corporations (look at any monopoly in the US today).

And it’s killing the planet. Yay!

This is a huge assertion that needs evidence to support it. Hardly anyone under capitalism is ‘rational’.

This causes the value of Bitcoin to spike, which decreases its usability as a currency. Bitcoin is incredibly volatile because of its highly limited supply and the sharp increase in demand, which decreases its usability as any sort of a currency.

So it’s incredibly environmentally efficient and objectively worse than all existing centralized systems. Cool.

No. Proof of work rewards miners for being the first to mine a block correctly, not that it’s correct.

It decreases the likelihood of this happening, but it can’t guarantee it.

No. Benefits are subjective and not objective. It made the economic cost of attacking the network higher than it used to be.

Again, no.

This is false and easily Google-able.

No. Anyone who doesn’t have the storage space or network capacity to download the blockchain doesn’t have access to the data. The blockchain only becomes larger, which makes it increasingly likely that average users won’t have access to the data directly. They have to trust third-party institutions to provide the compute needed to explore the data on their own.

???????????????

No they don’t??????????? The internet is not controlled by any centralized party (outside of maybe ICANN for domain names). It’s not possible for it to have any sort of a governance layer.

Only the person with the private key.

This is not prohibitively expensive for large companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. who already have large amounts of compute and who have billions of dollars they could throw at this.

Difficult, but not impossible. This again just increases the likelihood that this won’t happen.

To increase the likelihood. This is not possible to ensure.

This is very much not how more centralized currencies work…

That the majority of nodes agree on.

Again, tokens are not a thing here. Correct wording of this would be ‘this increases the likelihood that the same transaction would go through twice’.

This is something that could happen before Bitcoin (example: Usenet). The only thing BTC did is increase the likelihood of that database’s integrity.

This is not what a distributed database is. A distributed database is just a database that’s spread across multiple computers. Nothing about the definition says anything about organizational control.

Decentralized databases are a subset of distributed databases. So a blockchain is an example of a kind of distributed database because it’s not geographically stored in one place.

This is… incredibly misleading wording. Tokens aren’t stored anywhere in BTC because they’re derived values. If I have 0.5BTC in an account, there’s not ‘half a Bitcoin’ in my account. Instead, the transactions that add and subtract from my accounts’ value are summed up, which produces the derived value that’s my current balance. Bitcoin wallet balances are derived values, not a set of tokens that are added and subtracted from.

Misleading. Correct wording here is “that it’s unlikely that no single user can control”.

This is only true for old values and not for pending values. Pending values can be altered if significant power by one actor is acquired.

No. Bitcoin made it expensive to change its ledger of what happened and its representation of who has how much money. It made it expensive to trick the network and the network’s view of reality, not for it to be hard to ‘copy digital values’. This is misleading.

This has nothing to do with the internet and applications that are on the internet.

No. TCP / IP / HTTP have no concept of what a ‘value’ is, they’re just ways to communicate / send information. ‘Value’ is an application logic concept, not something the Internet handles. The double-spending problem is something application developers have to solve in their own web apps, and it’s not a problem in all web apps. This point is incredibly misleading and false.

And this is the key point. The issue is that users don't distrust centralized systems, and centralized systems are highly incentivized to keep things that way. When there are broad misuses of user data, users leave that platform or those platforms are regulated. Furthermore, platforms are able to use their massive profits to publish PR that significantly changes public opinion on these things. Look at Uber / Lyft and Prop 22 in California for an example of this happening.

This is again misleading. There's lots of additional overhead here because the client has to wait for the network to reach consensus. It doesn't perform the 'server' functionalities, it performs part of the server functionalities.

This is because downloading lots of small files from IPFS or any decentralized network is really, really slow. Google 'IPFS is slow' sometime or just try using it for anything.

HTTP and client-server interactions are the most efficient solution to this problem. Developers have no reason to switch frontends to decentralized alternatives other than for vague 'decentralization' handwaving.

No, it communicates with individual computers on the blockchain network.

The graphic above is again incredibly misleading. Again, the current internet is not 'centralized', and you still have to communicate with individual servers in a decentralized cloud. You have to talk with individual computers at some point, you just have to talk with more of them. Maintaining connections to more computers is more inefficient than maintaining a single connection to a server.

The author has presented no evidence that users will ever want to mass-adopt decentralized apps.

There is no evidence to suggest that this problem will be resolved anytime soon. Our current internet infrastructure was not designed to support single computers maintaining large amounts of connections to tons of different peers. Try using IPFS sometime: it's a bad experience because talking with lots of different peers and traversing over the DHT is slow and inefficient compared to asking a single endpoint for a value. There is no evidence to suggest that the speed offered by client-server interactions will ever be beaten by decentralized networks.

IPFS is implemented and can be used today.

Reward tokens don't ensure attack resistance, they reduce the likelihood of it happening.

The author has presented absolutely zero evidence that there will ever be such a transition, or that users would want such a transition.

Most all of these are incredibly slow, and the protocols / networks that do have speed have a larger amount of centralization.

Couldn't comment on it, but the graphic above is incredibly misleading. The current internet doesn't have a single point of failure, it's not a 'single server' that has control over data (again, see federated networks), and P2P networks do not provide no unique point of failure. That's not something they can guarantee. They reduce the likelihood of that happening. Those are two very, very different things.

Again, not what a blockchain network is. Blockchains do not give you arbitrary computation power.

This is not what a blockchain network is. A blockchain network manages a blockchain, which is an immutable, decentralized data structure. Certain types of decentralized networks build arbitrary data processing on top of this (like Ethereum), but that's not a 'blockchain'.

Yes, this is the case. 'Web3' folks have to throw out a large amount of the decades of research and engineering that have gone into the current internet. They do this for incredibly arbitrary reasons that no average user wants or is asking for.

If I asked my grandma if she wanted to use a Facebook alternative that was slower, less efficient, and cost money, she would look at me like I'm crazy. The average user likes the current internet, and there's no reason to suggest that they'd want to move over to a 'Web3' based internet. If users cared about their data, we'd see significantly more data privacy legislation than we see now, or large amounts of users leaving platforms in droves. We see none of that.

The author fails to note that this is orders of magnitude slower and less efficient than any sort of centralized protocol or application (like a database) that we have today. Even in networks where majority consensus is not needed, the amount of network latency, compute power, and storage needed to record a single transaction is indescribably high compared to the amount needed to do that in a comparable centralized system.

Again, blockchains do not ensure unique state, that it's collectively maintained, or that that state is completely free from modification.

No. Bitcoin mining is done by larger groups and / or organizations. It's maintained by multiple organizations, yes, but this statement is misleading. It's not controlled by everyday average Joes, but by larger companies with profit incentives and who, if they grew to a large enough size, could control everything on the network.

Yes, this is now what we observe. Finally something true in this paragraph.

I have zero clue what the author thinks 'state' is, but holy fuck please stop using buzzwords you don't understand.

What followed was first untargeted advertising, then better untargeted advertising, then targeted advertising. Again, it's more profitable to do targeted advertising.

This is a false depiction of what happened. Advertising won out over all other forms of monetization because it's what users preferred. Companies didn't choose it because they wanted to create a specific kind of internet, they chose it because it was more profitable because people liked it more.

Consumers don't like paying for information or online content just like they don't like paying for healthcare or taxes. People don't like paying for stuff because it makes them poorer.

This is false. The internet was created to solve a communication problem, not an access problem.

Relevant quote from Robert Taylor:

For each of these three terminals, I had three different sets of user commands. So if I was talking online with someone at S.D.C. and I wanted to talk to someone I knew at Berkeley or M.I.T. about this, I had to get up from the S.D.C. terminal, go over and log into the other terminal and get in touch with them.... I said, oh man, it's obvious what to do: If you have these three terminals, there ought to be one terminal that goes anywhere you want to go where you have interactive computing. That idea is the ARPAnet.

Web2 platforms, not web2 protocols. The protocols had absolutely nothing to do with this. IP, TCP, and HTTP do not care about power or control, that is a social construct.

This is how unregulated markets work. Wealth accumulates in the hands of a few, and the rest are left with scraps. We've seen this in nearly every unregulated market we've ever observed. There's no reason to suggest that decentralized alternatives wouldn't do the same.

........this is how applications work. This is how any application has to work.

You still have to do this with session cookies, this is just a more efficient way of doing this. Session cookies are shorthand for the data that needs to be sent every time.

This is ridiculously false.

The main reasons are convenience and cost. Centralization is faster, easier, and cheaper for users. Decentralization is not.

And this is where the logical fallacy is. Nothing about the web's current protocols dictate that data must be stored centrally. Look at Mastodon or any other federated platform that doesn't store data centrally. It is false to say that the current internet is centralized: it's not, there's nothing in the protocols to make it that way. The reason why several large corporations have gained more control over it is because that's how capitalism works.

This is very misleading wording. The issue is not manipulation of data, it is access to the data. Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. do not make money off of you by manipulating your data. They don't make money by changing your browser history or your search preferences or what you've viewed. That would remove their profitabilty.

Rather, they make money by reading your data and transforming it into something more useful. Like an oil refinery, they take something in a raw form (data) and extract something useful out of it (your likes and dislikes, preferences, triggers, etc.). They then use this derived data to try to sell you things.

Data in decentralized protocols is completely public. Anyone has access to the entire history of the blockchain, that's how it has to work. The data you send, therefore, has to be encrypted. The same is not true of the current internet: nobody has access to your Google search history except for you and Google, and it's very likely encrypted.

The analogy here would be "Trying to access data on a server resembles trying to steal someone's bank account number by breaking into their house through a complex security system, finding the number, and de-scrambling it. Trying to access data in Web3 is similar to the criminal having to do almost none of that, because your bank account number would be publicly accessible, but in a scrambled form. They would just have to un-scramble it."

This is exactly the same sort of thing people said about private companies using our data to manipulate us, or third-parties using advertising platforms to manipulate elections. 'Prohibitively expensive' does not matter when large corporations have a huge incentive to access and manipulate your data.

This is false: these protocols just make it harder to spot the intermediaries. Every cryptocurrency currently must have its value transferred back to a currency with actual value (eg. the dollar). This process must take place through a centralized institution (or intermediary), the currency exchange. Cryptocurrencies are an intermediary currency because their uses as a currency currently (hah) are very limited. Because of this, these centralized currency exchanges are effectively intermediaries for otherwise decentralized transactions.

This is false: decentralized protocols don't provide a unique state layer. There are infinitely many state layers that can exist. Anyone, at any time, can fork any particular blockchain and create a new state layer. There are multiple competing state layers currently.

Even inside those state layers, uniqueness is not guaranteed either, because there are infinitely many different representations / protocols for state management.

Blockchains guarantee immutability and certain kinds of uniqueness within the blockchain itself. They can't, and will never be able to, guarantee that other blockchains will exist, and most can't guarantee that other arbitrary representations of 'ownership' won't exist inside the system itself.

Yes, this is how capitalism works. Larger private corporations remove the power of individual consumers. This is not new.

Not correct. It's built on the idea of connecting to a single access point, which is very different from 'a stand-alone computer'. Tech companies distribute data across lots of computers and lots of zones, but you still have to access your data through them. You connect to different computers / servers each time you interact with a web app, but those are always managed by the same institution.

Decentralized protocols can never guarantee that corruption won't exist, just that the likelihood of it happening will decrease. No protocol or network or algorithm can get rid of corruption.

Decentralized protocols will always be less efficient than any sort of centralized protocols that exist. Even on smaller, 'greener' networks, there are still more efficient centralized protocols that can undercut them in terms of efficiency. The problem of trust introduces overhead that no centralized protocol has to deal with.

Yes, this is how any protocol has to work. No protocol can ensure that nobody else has access to your data except you. The only way you can ensure that you have sole control over a given series of bits and bytes is by never exposing it to the public internet. As soon as you send those bits and bytes to someone else in any sort of readable form, encrypted or otherwise, they can do with that whatever they want.

No decentralized protocol can solve this problem. Even if you do encrypt, at some point you have to hand that series of bits and bytes off to some other computer that is beyond your control. Decentralized protocols can incentivize those other computers to act in a privacy-respecting way, but they have no way of guaranteeing that.

I would not view this as a 'problem' of the existing web. Never have I wanted a 'native value settlement' layer to exist in a protocol. The thing everybody likes about the web is that it is free to access, and adding a value settlement layer removes that.

This is wrong. We have control over the creation of our data and who we give it to. If you don't like that Facebook uses your data to show you stuff that makes you angry, you can stop using Facebook (ie. not giving them more data). If you don't like that Google tracks you on the web, you can delete your Google account and install a browser extension that removes ads and stops tracking. You have the power to, at any time, stop tech companies from accessing new data and / or using your data to profit off of you.

What we do have an issue with is control of how our data is used. We have no say in the terms and conditions or privacy policies of tech companies. As an individual, you have no bargaining power in the transaction between larger tech companies.

However, we can change policies through collective action. If we boycott companies, companies change their policies. The issue is that most people simply don't have an issue with how tech companies use their data, even after being informed of the facts. So that doesn't happen.

Colonialism is a product of the bourgeoisie expanding to maintain their power!

Marx's view here seems to be that capitalism is in a lot of ways a lot worse than feudalism. Feudalism at least had subtlety: people under it at least had worth, some sort of decent level of understanding that they were human. Under capitalism, however, people are only valued at their market value. People are no more than products under capitalism: they are not valued for who they are, their humanity, or anything other than the amount of capital they can bring a business.

Feudalism still had tons of exploitation and was still terrible, and Marx doesn't try to distance himself from that fact. While he does say that capitalism is worse in that its exploitation is "naked, shameless, direct, brutal", it's still just that: exploitation. Both of these systems are unjust and exploitative, they just differ in levels of how exploitative they are and on what they base the value of the people living and working within those systems.