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.
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... See more
If you’re a programmer, you might think that the fiddliness of programming is a special feature of programming, but really it’s that everything is fiddly, but you only notice the fiddliness when you’re new, and in programming you do new things more often.
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
Consider building some basement stairs for a moment. Stairs seem pretty simple at first, and at a high level they are simple, just two long, wide parallel boards (2” x 12” x 16’), some boards for the stairs and an angle bracket on each side to hold up each stair. But as you actually start building you’ll find there’s a surprising amount of nuance.