Web3 is just expensive P2P | Poal: Say what you want.

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So, essentially, the P2P community established something like a tiny, lightweight communist bubble, to the benefits of everyone. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked, if someone could install the software and keep it running.

The Web3 community approaches this from the opposite side: Instead of a lightweight communistic take, they follow a heavyweight libertarian path: Everything should be monetized.

This is an oversimplification and he's basing much of his opinion on the error of that oversimplification. The hobbyists running their own P2P nodes could manage the operational costs themselves because they were small and it was part of the hobby. Those services are not as highly available as Web3 precisely because they the incentive to keep them up is tied to the incentive to continue the hobby. Web3 fills in this gap by providing the very incentive needed take P2P to a serious level: People can run a Web3 node because it's a hobby, or because it pays, or both.

On the consumer side, that glowy whine "heavyweight libertarian path" borders on being ignorant. Someone has to pay the operational costs of keeping the service up, whether it be centralized, federated, or decentralized. Advertising or direct pay, consumers pay for it somehow. The fact that older P2P hobbyists paid for it on our behalf doesn't belittle Web3's chance of survival.

What the author is really complaining about is the shock that most people face when entering the decentralized world: With the freedom comes responsibility, even if you're just a consumer. As this landscape is carved out more every day, Web3 is really more like a spectrum of centralized and decentralized services. Hardcore Web3 advocates are willing to accept the responsibility of running their own node, securing their own wallet, writing their own contracts and reviewing others. Newbies are willing to trust a centralized gateway to do all of that for them so they don't have to, and we're all free to choose where we want to be on spectrum, between those two extremes (or not get involved at all).

> So, essentially, the P2P community established something like a tiny, lightweight communist bubble, to the benefits of everyone. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked, if someone could install the software and keep it running. > >The Web3 community approaches this from the opposite side: Instead of a lightweight communistic take, they follow a heavyweight libertarian path: Everything should be monetized. This is an oversimplification and he's basing much of his opinion on the error of that oversimplification. The hobbyists running their own P2P nodes could manage the operational costs themselves because they were small and it was part of the hobby. Those services are not as highly available as Web3 precisely because they the incentive to keep them up is tied to the incentive to continue the hobby. Web3 fills in this gap by providing the very incentive needed take P2P to a serious level: People can run a Web3 node because it's a hobby, or because it pays, or both. On the consumer side, that glowy whine "heavyweight libertarian path" borders on being ignorant. Someone has to pay the operational costs of keeping the service up, whether it be centralized, federated, or decentralized. Advertising or direct pay, consumers pay for it somehow. The fact that older P2P hobbyists paid for it on our behalf doesn't belittle Web3's chance of survival. What the author is really complaining about is the shock that most people face when entering the decentralized world: With the freedom comes responsibility, even if you're just a consumer. As this landscape is carved out more every day, Web3 is really more like a spectrum of centralized and decentralized services. Hardcore Web3 advocates are willing to accept the responsibility of running their own node, securing their own wallet, writing their own contracts and reviewing others. Newbies are willing to trust a centralized gateway to do all of that for them so they don't have to, and we're all free to choose where we want to be on spectrum, between those two extremes (or not get involved at all).

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