Is web3 decentralized?

In all current scenarios web3 still requires central parties for its technical operation and simply involves recentralization of services that already exist. To the extent web3 is centralized, it has neither the censorship resistance properties or decentralization its marketing claims.

See our summary of Angela Walch's ‘Deconstructing ‘Decentralization’: Exploring the Core Claim of Crypto Systems’.

References

  1. Walch, Angela. 2019. ‘Deconstructing ‘Decentralization’: Exploring the Core Claim of Crypto Systems’. C. Brummer (Ed.), Crypto Assets: Legal and Monetary Perspectives, 1–36. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3326244.
  2. Allen, Hilary J. 2022. ‘DeFi: Shadow Banking 2.0?’ William & Mary Law Review, Forthcoming.
  3. Soatok. 2021. ‘Against Web3 and Faux-Decentralization’. Dhole Moments. 19 October 2021. https://soatok.blog/2021/10/19/against-web3-and-faux-decentralization/.
  4. Marx, Paris. n.d. ‘Why Web3, the Blockchain and Crypto Internet, Is Doomed to Fail’. Accessed 29 March 2022. https://www.businessinsider.com/web3-blockchain-crypto-internet-doomed-fail-doesnt-live-up-hype-2022-3?r=US&IR=T.
  5. Zhang, Zhexi. 2019. ‘The Aesthetics of Decentralization’. PhD Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/123614.
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  7. Weaver, Nicholas. 2021. ‘The Web3 Fraud’. USENIX. 16 December 2021. https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/web3-fraud.
  8. Marlinspike, Moxie. 2022. ‘My First Impressions of Web3’. Moxie Marlinspike. 7 January 2022. https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html.
  9. Diehl, Stephen. 2021. ‘Web3 Is Bullshit’. 4 December 2021. https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/web3-bullshit.html.
  10. Levine, Matt. 2022. ‘Web3 Takes Trust Too’. 10 January 2022. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-01-10/web3-takes-trust-too.
  11. Aramonte, Sirio, Wenqian Huang, and Andreas Schrimpf. 2021. ‘DeFi Risks and the Decentralisation Illusion’, 16.
  12. Arnosti, Nick, and S Matthew Weinberg. 2022. ‘Bitcoin: A Natural Oligopoly’. Management Science.
  13. Azouvi, Sarah. 2021. ‘Levels of Decentralization and Trust in Cryptocurrencies: Consensus, Governance and Applications’. PhD Thesis, University College London. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10139069/.
  14. Babu, Asvatha. 2020. ‘Behind the Veil of Decentralization: Analyzing Blockchain Frames and Sponsors in US News’. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3749482.
  15. Becker, Moritz. 2019. ‘Blockchain and the Promise (s) of Decentralisation : A Sociological Investigation of the Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Blockchain’. In Proceedings of the STS Conference Graz 2019, 6–30. https://doi.org/10.3217/978-3-85125-668-0-02.
  16. Bodó, Balázs, Jaya Klara Brekke, and Jaap Henk Hoepman. 2021. ‘Decentralisation: A Multidisciplinary Perspective’. Internet Policy Review 10 (2): 0–21. https://doi.org/10.14763/2021.2.1563.
  17. Garrod, J. Z. 2016. ‘The Real World of the Decentralized Autonomous Society’. TripleC 14 (1): 62–77. https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v14i1.692.
  18. Halpin, Harry. 2020. ‘Deconstructing the Decentralization Trilemma’. ICETE 2020 - Proceedings of the 17th International Joint Conference on e-Business and Telecommunications 3: 505–12. https://doi.org/10.5220/0009892405050512.
  19. Humayun, Syeda Mariam. 2019. ‘Creation and Resilience of Decentralized Brands: Bitcoin & the Blockchain’. PhD Thesis. http://hdl.handle.net/10315/37662.
  20. Mannan, M. & Schneider, N. 2020. ‘Exit to Community: Strategies for Multi-Stakeholder Ownership in the Platform Economy’. Georgetown Law Technology Review 4 (1): 2017–19. https://georgetownlawtechreview.org/exit-to-community-strategies-for-multi-stakeholder-ownership-in-the-platform-economy/GLTR-05-2021/.
  21. Manski, Sarah, and Michel Bauwens. 2020. ‘Reimagining New Socio-Technical Economics Through the Application of Distributed Ledger Technologies’. Frontiers in Blockchain 2 (January): 1–17. https://doi.org/10.3389/fbloc.2019.00029.
  22. Rocas-Royo, Marc. 2021. ‘The Blockchain That Was Not: The Case of Four Cooperative Agroecological Supermarkets’. Frontiers in Blockchain 4 (April): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fbloc.2021.624810.
  23. Sai, Ashish Rajendra. 2021. ‘Towards a Holistic Assessment of Centralization in Distributed Ledgers’. https://ulir.ul.ie/handle/10344/10766.
  24. Sai, Ashish Rajendra, Jim Buckley, Brian Fitzgerald, and Andrew Le Gear. 2021. ‘Taxonomy of Centralization in Public Blockchain Systems: A Systematic Literature Review’. Information Processing and Management 58 (4): 102584. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2021.102584.
  25. Schneider, Nathan. 2019. ‘Decentralization: An Incomplete Ambition’. Journal of Cultural Economy. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2019.1589553.
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