The point is that you now have a choice of who to trust.
You can trust a centralized service, like Google.
You can trust a partially centralized service, like a crypto exchange, that lets you withdraw your assets when you want.
Or you can trust yourself with full root control. twitter.com/zachweinberg/s
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This is too long a topic for a tweet, but we’re just moving trust from entities that have business risk to anonymous users that don’t. Trust is still there: NFTs collections can get diluted, tokens rug pulled, DAOs given up, “partially centralized” services can lose data, etc.
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I understand where you and Zach are coming from. And like I mentioned in a thread with , many security issues are also real.
However, simply the fact that we can *choose* who to trust is a huge step forward in an increasingly low trust society.
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I think there is a big corollary here with email. For many people, a hosted email provider is just fine and works. And there is a decent oligopoly that serve most ppl but no one entity controls email. Anyone can join from their own server and participate equally in the system.
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OK, but this is now an argument against individual initiative.
I agree that for many tasks you want to outsource it. And many startups fail.
But some succeed. Without the ability for people to self-host you'd cut off many new startups, and products like thehelm.com.
Agreed that for most people - a system with an on ramp is going to be better and easier than self hosting. What I find most interesting is that the protocol forces at least an oligopoly instead of a monopoly. And that is a good thing.
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