I'm talking about crypto as in Ethereum, which are designed to resist centralization. HN wrongly thinks of crypto as a financial system (which it can do, for good and bad reasons thanks to its permissionlessness), instead of a family of methods for making composable, decentralized protocols with built-in economics (blockchains).
Compare this to something like torrenting - people give, people take. Sure, indexing is centralized, but once you have the index, it's all p2p. That's the direction decentralization should be taking, instead of the next generation of microtransactions where they're required for operation.
Also, there is a misconception that the cryptocurrency based web is like dial up. It isn't. What it is is: 1. a way to decouple the ownership of the digital goods from the service that gave them to you 2. a way to actually do privacy preserving computing 3. an open layer to build added value things that can interact with assets and services others have created (think web2.0 in the bookmarklets era but your bookmarklets can talk with any site)
1. There's no question that ownership is going to be a hot-button issue going forward, but I don't see how decentralization solves that problem (i.e NFTs being on ten different chains).
2. How does it preserve privacy? If I share data with a third party, what's to stop them from copying it over and ignoring my request to cut it off?
3. What is that added value? If you're talking about data portability that's certainly an argument in favor of decentralization, but that has a mess of competing & conflicting standards to wade through (see #1)
The reality is that in current networks, which are totally financial but only implicitly and in a way that is opaque to most users, computation and data costs are still subsidized. Crypto networks open a huge design space that simply makes the economic flows explicit — and not necessarily borne by users.
[1]: https://www.varunsrinivasan.com/2022/01/11/sufficient-decent...
[2]: https://medium.com/coinmonks/ethereum-meta-transactions-101-...
I believe, in this time of humanity where economy matters, that Blockchains have built-in economics for two reasons:
1. They all started copying Bitcoin, which by nature is an economic system (this is the goal of the Bitcoin's paper). 2. Reward by money is a common way to attract a sustainable amount of active users that keep the network alive without evil intention appart from making "quick bucks". In contract to volunteer networks such as Tor, where a lot (even a majority) of nodes are run by gov. agencies with the goal of identifying users, popular blockchains are still run properly since users are focusing on money and not destroying the network.
You don't need the mainstream, you just need the cool kids. The mainstream will follow---or not.
As for why anyone would want this, there is a very compelling reason---no ads.
https://cryptoslate.com/research-ethereum-is-neither-decentr...
> permissionlessness
The existing internet is sufficiently permissionless for the vast majority of potential activities. Where it isn't, you start to reach into the boundaries past which there are often reasons for permissions to exist.
> HN wrongly thinks of crypto as a financial system... instead of a family of methods for making composable, decentralized protocols with built-in economics
A system with "built-in economics" is a financial system.
That's how it's implemented in real life, so that's what people's takeaway is going to be. What was the last dApp anybody used that wasn't a pay-to-play game, or crypto marketplace?
You may as well say communism is theoretically sound, but people will continue to get hung up on the fact that's it's real-world implementations have always led to despotic leadership.
