Do you actually think blockchain tech is remotely competitive with the big platforms? Blockchain payment systems have had more than a decade to become popular and still are not even remotely competitive with the big payment processors. Most of the world will only read about "Web3" on some news site or blog, then ignore it because it does not even come close to meeting their needs.
Consider how many people post something on Facebook in a single day, and now consider what it would take if each post had to be replicated across tens of thousands of independently operated systems. Big tech companies scale in large part because of their centralization, which allows them to coordinate large numbers of physical machines to efficiently provide service to their users. You may not like the ads-centric business model but on a purely technical level it is pretty clear that the big tech companies have a big advantage in terms of operating their infrastructure, and overcoming that advantage is not going to be easy for any distributed system.
I personally prefer to focus on mitigating/preventing abuses by a central authority/component of a system, which almost always results in a far more efficient and reliable solution that trying to eliminating all centralization.
> Do you actually think blockchain tech is remotely competitive with the big platforms?
Right now? Absolutely not, web3 is pure jank right now. I’m just trying to see where the puck is headed.
> I personally prefer to focus on mitigating/preventing abuses by a central authority/component of a system, which almost always results in a far more efficient and reliable solution that trying to eliminating all centralization.
How do you do this? How do you take Facebook to task? The only entity that comes anywhere close is France maybe and those fines are just a slap on the wrist.
I was referring to technical solutions, not fines or regulatory measures. For example, before Bitcoin cryptographers published a mountain of research on designing secure and anonymous electronic payments, but relied on a central bank that issued and redeemed the money. The bank was constrained mathematically so that it could not link user transactions, unless some subset of users had cheated in some way (double spending). So there was a central party but certain forms of abuse were impossible, and those systems were overwhelmingly more efficient than Bitcoin or even a proof-of-stake approach ever could be (this is because transactions are "truly" peer-to-peer, meaning that only two parties do any work at all when a payment is made or when money is withdrawn from or deposited with the bank; moreover the work required to perform transactions amounts to verifying a few signatures/NIZKs). Another example is the use of oblivious RAM for secure cloud storage, which both protects user data and ensures that "most" of the access pattern (everything but the number blocks of data a user has accessed) remains private. There are also many examples of real-world deployments of secure multiparty computation that limit abuse by large/centralized parties in various ways while still allowing those parties to operate and even expand their business (without having to collect more user data than they already collect).
Consider how many people post something on Facebook in a single day, and now consider what it would take if each post had to be replicated across tens of thousands of independently operated systems. Big tech companies scale in large part because of their centralization, which allows them to coordinate large numbers of physical machines to efficiently provide service to their users. You may not like the ads-centric business model but on a purely technical level it is pretty clear that the big tech companies have a big advantage in terms of operating their infrastructure, and overcoming that advantage is not going to be easy for any distributed system.
I personally prefer to focus on mitigating/preventing abuses by a central authority/component of a system, which almost always results in a far more efficient and reliable solution that trying to eliminating all centralization.