[Cryptography] Interesting discussion of Web 3.0 ...

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

On Wed, Jan 19, 2022 at 4:07 PM Wendy M. Grossman <wendyg at cix.co.uk> wrote:

> On 1/15/22 1:16 AM, Brad Klee wrote:
> > Self deprecation is self ad hominem? The purpose of my previous
> > posts was just to say there are at least two sides to the debate,
> > and technological innovation doesn't have to favor centralization
> > or loss of know how in user communities (even if institutions
> > and finance want to go on a fox hunt, so to speak).
>
> I don't think the claim is that technological innovation favors
> centralization but that *users* do. You run your own SMTP server and so
> do I (though it's held together with string and paperclips), but the
> vast, vast majority of the *techies* I know gave that up years ago when
> Gmail's spam filtering got good and they show no interest in returning.
>
> All this stuff is insanely complex and getting more so, and every bit of
> added complexity means more people will want someone to do the hard
> stuff for them. And that, inevitably, brings centralization.
>

In general, there are two ways to deal with complexity. You can deal with
it or you can declare all the difficult parts non-problems.

The Ponzi-currency folk passing themselves off as 'decentralized Web' do
the second. They don't actually solve anything in the real world. They just
declare all the hard parts of the problem to be 'details' beneath their
contempt.

When people claim that their brave new financial world is built on a
solution to a problem believed to be impossible to solve, that is a pretty
good tell that they haven't really solved it. Proof of Work only 'solves'
the distributed consensus problem by smuggling in an inconsistency, just
like you can prove anything in math if you divide by zero. Proof of Work
only 'works' because it is asserted that the good guys with a mining rig
will be an infallible and incorruptible arbitrator.

You can make any trust system work with an infallible and incorruptible
arbitrator, it is dividing by zero.


Even if we were to accept the consensus system as distributed, it doesn't
scale and it cannot recurse either, there can only ever be one PoW system
in the world for if there are two, one is subject to a 51% attack by the
other.

So all the scaling schemes in use in the real world for criminal currencies
all depend on unaccountable, trusted third parties.


See, that is the cost of lying about the centralization. That doesn't
remove the need for intermediaries, it just means there is no
accountability of them.

NFTs were a pretty clear sign we were reaching peak Ponzi. The Dune DAO
might just be the turning point.
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