rel:: [[2022-01-07]] [[Moxie Marlinspike]] [[Cryptocurrency]] [source1](x-devonthink-item://5D4E031B-EEA1-4780-913A-83BA918CF0F2) [source2](https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html) # My first impressions of web3 ## Key Ideas - web3 claims to be decentralized but isn't - protocols change slowly - investment in web3 dictates rapid iteration - scale issues and client usability issues and a need to iterate quickly are forcing a centralized reconciliation layer on a distributed, inefficient foundation - web3 claims to promote privacy, but doesn't - most block chains are completely public - web3 is complex ## Highlights > If something is truly decentralized, it becomes very difficult to change, and often remains stuck in time. > Personally, I think enough money has been made at this point that there are enough faucets to keep [crypto markets] going, and this won’t just be a blip. If that’s the case, it seems worth thinking about how to avoid web3 being web2x2 (web2 but with even less privacy) with some urgency. > 1. **We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure.** This means architecture that anticipates and accepts the inevitable outcome of relatively centralized client/server relationships, but uses cryptography (rather than infrastructure) to distribute trust. One of the surprising things to me about web3, despite being built on “crypto,” is how little cryptography seems to be involved! > 1. **We should try to reduce the burden of building software.** At this point, software projects require an enormous amount of human effort. Even relatively simple apps require a group of people to sit in front of a computer for eight hours a day, every day, forever. This wasn’t always the case, and there was a time when 50 people working on a software project wasn’t considered a “small team.” As long as software requires such concerted energy and so much highly specialized human focus, I think it will have the tendency to serve the interests of the people sitting in that room every day rather than what we may consider our broader goals. I think changing our relationship to technology will probably require making software easier to create, but in my lifetime I’ve seen the opposite come to pass. Unfortunately, I think distributed systems have a tendency to exacerbate this trend by making things more complicated and more difficult, not less complicated and less difficult.