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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Agreed it’s great to be able to choose. But there’s also a practicality of what is required *architecturally* to support that choice. And if at the end of all that work, will there really be fewer centralized services if they remain 10X easier for consumers (see: Coinbase).
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I agree that it's an empirical question. In practice there are many choices.
Uniswap & decentralized exchanges are giving centralized exchanges a run for their money. And there are many centralized exchanges globally too. See defipulse.com & coinmarketcap.com.
Totally. For trading of digital assets I buy we will get this choice. My issue is the extension of crypto to use-cases where the architecture is ill-suited because at some point you have to trust a centralized provider for off-chain data or logic.
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Yes, but that trust is not unconditional.
You have many checks on the uploader. For example, you have all past digital signatures by the uploader, so you can do a Pagerank-style eigentrust or web of trust. And use oracle networks, like Chainlink v2. research.chain.link/whitepaper-v2.
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