Blockchain-based systems are not what they say they are

Instead of being at the mercy of the “big tech” companies like Amazon and Google that monopolize the traditional way of doing things on the web, you are now at the mercy of a few other tech companies that are rapidly monopolizing the blockchain way of doing things.

But they grossly overstate the amount of decentralization in web3. The data itself is quite decentralized, at least on the popular blockchains, but that’s about where the decentralization ends. If someone wants to build a dApp on a given blockchain, they usually use one of a handful of APIs built by companies like Alchemy to read and write to their... See more

Blockchain technologies have somehow managed to land in the worst of both worlds—decentralized but not really, immutable but not really.If someone steals your ape JPEG, if you’re lucky, OpenSea might delist it and make it much harder for them to turn a profit on it. But you still won’t get your JPEG back, or have the opportunity to cash out on it y... See more

For users, there are a few dominant, centralized products. If they want to exchange currencies, they probably use Binance or Coinbase. If they want to buy or sell NFTs, they probably use OpenSea, which as of late 2021 captured more than 95% of the NFT market share.3 If they want to join a DAO? Well, they’ll probably need to abandon the blockchain e... See more

The immutability of this new world means that if you send someone your tokens, no centralized authority can come in and decide the transaction was invalid and wipe it from the ledger (unless, of course, there is a hard fork). But it also means that there’s no way to undo fraudulent transactions and return funds to their rightful owners. It means th... See more