<story><title>Web3 is centralized</title><url>https://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/web3-centralized</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>r_hoods_ghost</author><text>The main issue with &amp;quot;Web3&amp;quot; is that it moves records of transactions from many private places to one public place. Sure this one place may not be controlled by a single entity, but it facilitates tracking at an unprecedented level.&lt;p&gt;Cryptocurrencies are the ultimate example of this and are an absolute boon to tax collectors, forensic accountants and fraudsters. In our current economy financial transactions are recorded in millions of individual ledgers that are kept private, or in the case of cash transactions are often not recorded at all, or are not linked to an individual. There is no central ledger.&lt;p&gt;With crypto currencies however you can not only see all transactions but also trace them back to individual users as long as you can link a wallet to a person. This is a massive increase in centralisation yet discussion of whether this is a good idea seems to be entirely missing. The notion that centralising transactions in one place is somehow an example of decentralisation just seems mad.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lwansbrough</author><text>Web3 is more of a problem soup, I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s accurate to say there&amp;#x27;s any one specific &amp;quot;main&amp;quot; problematic aspect of it. The whole ecosystem is one terrible idea built on another in the name of achieving a worse version of what we already have.</text></comment>
<story><title>Web3 is centralized</title><url>https://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/web3-centralized</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>r_hoods_ghost</author><text>The main issue with &amp;quot;Web3&amp;quot; is that it moves records of transactions from many private places to one public place. Sure this one place may not be controlled by a single entity, but it facilitates tracking at an unprecedented level.&lt;p&gt;Cryptocurrencies are the ultimate example of this and are an absolute boon to tax collectors, forensic accountants and fraudsters. In our current economy financial transactions are recorded in millions of individual ledgers that are kept private, or in the case of cash transactions are often not recorded at all, or are not linked to an individual. There is no central ledger.&lt;p&gt;With crypto currencies however you can not only see all transactions but also trace them back to individual users as long as you can link a wallet to a person. This is a massive increase in centralisation yet discussion of whether this is a good idea seems to be entirely missing. The notion that centralising transactions in one place is somehow an example of decentralisation just seems mad.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chrisco255</author><text>&amp;gt; are an absolute boon to tax collectors, forensic accountants and fraudsters&lt;p&gt;Weird that it would be a boon for both forensic accountants and fraudsters. How do you reconcile that sentence?&lt;p&gt;The fact that something is done in public does not mean that it is centralized. There is public and decentralized, public and centralized, private and centralized, and private and decentralized.&lt;p&gt;Decentralization itself, is a spectrum and not a binary quality. Just as, I assume, public &amp;#x2F; private also falls on some sort of spectrum spanning from everyone in the world being able to see to VISA&amp;#x2F;Mastercard corporate privacy policy to national intelligence agencies to group or individual privacy.&lt;p&gt;It is completely possible to conduct transactions privately on blockchains. Monero and z-cash (using zero knowledge proofs) are the best examples of this.&lt;p&gt;The biggest blockchains choose not to either due to legacy design choices (zero knowledge systems are a recent innovation) or the benefits of openness. For example, public transaction history allows for development of an on-chain reputation for a pseudo-anonymous account. It&amp;#x27;s also quite useful for managing decentralized organizations, as the treasury and spending records is meant to be public to keep the DAO accountable to its members and prospective members.&lt;p&gt;With the recent introduction of zk rollups on Ethereum, it&amp;#x27;s now possible to have the best of both worlds, in my opinion (see &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;aztec.network&amp;#x2F;index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;aztec.network&amp;#x2F;index.html&lt;/a&gt;). Transactions that need to be private will be conducted on zero-knowledge rollups built for privacy. Mastercard is working on this with Consensys for Ethereum (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.coindesk.com&amp;#x2F;business&amp;#x2F;2021&amp;#x2F;12&amp;#x2F;16&amp;#x2F;consensys-collaborates-with-mastercard-on-new-ethereum-scaling-solution&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.coindesk.com&amp;#x2F;business&amp;#x2F;2021&amp;#x2F;12&amp;#x2F;16&amp;#x2F;consensys-colla...&lt;/a&gt;).</text></comment>