Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

The narrative of ownership is integral to decentralized financial technology. Traditional online bank accounts represent balances as numbers stored in a centralized database, which can notionally be withdrawn or exchanged for goods and services at any point. As the story goes, this requires placing trust in a banking institution. Blockchain protoco... 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

Indeed, taken to the limit, in Web3, users sometimes have no need to trust the company (or people) behind a project; rather, they just have to trust the code itself.

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