Nobody Cares About Decentralization - They Just Want To Get Rich
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In Clotaire Rapaille’s The Culture Code, he states that the American mindset is one that looks for something that “just works.” They are less concerned with perfection (figuratively or literally) than they are that the thing does what you want it to. They want a website to load on an app that works on a computer that turns on and loads and runs apps. To be clear, a lack of perfection doesn’t mean the thing is
Worth noting: a lot of bitcoiners dive into these discussions claiming that BITCOIN is really truly decentralised - but that hasn't either, since mining hit 51% on one pool in 2014, and five guys controlling 80% of mining stood on a stage together in 2015. Bitcoin is just as full of centralisation.
"Decentralisation" is a legal term meaning "can't sue me bro" - not in any way an operational reality. They're wasting a country's worth of CO2 for absolutely no effect.
Well, the only people who really care about decentralization are the people who are on the outside of centralization. Basically the people without power, money, or influence.
Decentralization is only a value of the people too poor, late, or unfortunate to not be part of the centralized group.
If we have to pretend it’s not primarily a Ponzi scheme - if you insist we try to evaluate it on its own terms…
then why do they all have Discords instead of some web3 version where they can own their identities across crypto networks. I am sure they have an excuse, and I don’t care.
The bitcoin and its friends are just based on the same Blockchain technology as web3/dApps and are not to be confused as identical. The point of web3/dApps is *privacy* i.e. how and where your data is stored compared to centralised ones. The data is chunked, encrypted, signed and distributed across many private Blockchain entities thus safe from tampering or exploiting in the way Google and Facebook do for example. In other words no-one has the power to manipulate with your personal info any way they like it, including possible blocking access to your own data or distribute it to third parties (including governments) because they (legally) must or just feel so for their own profit. It is up to people to decide how much they value their privacy and if worth the clunkiness you mention.
> In Clotaire Rapaille’s The Culture Code, he states that the American mindset is one that looks for something that “just works.”
This is why we're stuck with crap like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter because nobody wants to think through the implications of how they post their "I'm horny" pics.
You make a lot of good points about cryptocurrencies and their particular form of blockchain use. But it does frustrate me that when people talk about "blockchain" they completely ignore other, more successful uses of it. The largest blockchain-based application in the world has been running since 2005 and has tens of millions of users who each, every day, add multiple blocks to various blockchains within this application. I wonder if anybody here, especially those who currently use it, can even identify it?
"who cares about decentralization? What does decentralization do for the average person? What benefits does it give the user over another system? And, most importantly, does it work?"
It's the same old media phenomenon: when one industry starts getting disproportionate coverage, then the jargon of that industry enters common parlance. The same thing happened with "Black Friday" (a marketing / retail term that's now associated with sales) or referring to viewers of a story as "eyeballs".
"Decentralization" only matters to engineers, and then only to a subset of them. But because crypto platforms are getting flooded with private equity, and because business news is treated like home team sports coverage, the word "decentralization" gets repeated as if we're supposed to care about it.
Web2 disrupted newspapers and broadcast tv and took all the revenue from them - government was not ready to regulate it, large news rooms and networks flailed to play catch up; Web3 is just the same game plan against banks investment firms...in both cases VC's are going to be the winners.
Worth noting: a lot of bitcoiners dive into these discussions claiming that BITCOIN is really truly decentralised - but that hasn't either, since mining hit 51% on one pool in 2014, and five guys controlling 80% of mining stood on a stage together in 2015. Bitcoin is just as full of centralisation.
"Decentralisation" is a legal term meaning "can't sue me bro" - not in any way an operational reality. They're wasting a country's worth of CO2 for absolutely no effect.
Well, the only people who really care about decentralization are the people who are on the outside of centralization. Basically the people without power, money, or influence.
Decentralization is only a value of the people too poor, late, or unfortunate to not be part of the centralized group.
If we have to pretend it’s not primarily a Ponzi scheme - if you insist we try to evaluate it on its own terms…
then why do they all have Discords instead of some web3 version where they can own their identities across crypto networks. I am sure they have an excuse, and I don’t care.
The bitcoin and its friends are just based on the same Blockchain technology as web3/dApps and are not to be confused as identical. The point of web3/dApps is *privacy* i.e. how and where your data is stored compared to centralised ones. The data is chunked, encrypted, signed and distributed across many private Blockchain entities thus safe from tampering or exploiting in the way Google and Facebook do for example. In other words no-one has the power to manipulate with your personal info any way they like it, including possible blocking access to your own data or distribute it to third parties (including governments) because they (legally) must or just feel so for their own profit. It is up to people to decide how much they value their privacy and if worth the clunkiness you mention.
> In Clotaire Rapaille’s The Culture Code, he states that the American mindset is one that looks for something that “just works.”
This is why we're stuck with crap like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter because nobody wants to think through the implications of how they post their "I'm horny" pics.
The article is correct in broad terms, but there's two points I disagree on
- It is possible to access at least some blockchains in a decentralized way - Bitcoin with Electrum, for example
- Reading data from the blockchain rarely requires you to make a transaction, only writing.
You make a lot of good points about cryptocurrencies and their particular form of blockchain use. But it does frustrate me that when people talk about "blockchain" they completely ignore other, more successful uses of it. The largest blockchain-based application in the world has been running since 2005 and has tens of millions of users who each, every day, add multiple blocks to various blockchains within this application. I wonder if anybody here, especially those who currently use it, can even identify it?
"who cares about decentralization? What does decentralization do for the average person? What benefits does it give the user over another system? And, most importantly, does it work?"
It's the same old media phenomenon: when one industry starts getting disproportionate coverage, then the jargon of that industry enters common parlance. The same thing happened with "Black Friday" (a marketing / retail term that's now associated with sales) or referring to viewers of a story as "eyeballs".
"Decentralization" only matters to engineers, and then only to a subset of them. But because crypto platforms are getting flooded with private equity, and because business news is treated like home team sports coverage, the word "decentralization" gets repeated as if we're supposed to care about it.
Web2 disrupted newspapers and broadcast tv and took all the revenue from them - government was not ready to regulate it, large news rooms and networks flailed to play catch up; Web3 is just the same game plan against banks investment firms...in both cases VC's are going to be the winners.