So I wanna talk about decentralization. This is a phenomenon of which I am massively in favor, but the current approach is absolutely barmy. The idea that every decentralized interaction requires some "zero-trust" calculation-based interaction on a growing network is a bad idea.

OpenSea, on which I ill-advisedly opened an account some months ago, bases its transaction on the Ethereum network, which uses "gas fees" to cover the immense computational complexity of exchange. Over the course of three hours, they just spent $598,850.92 to simply verify work.

I can get 4,000+ months of bare metal compute time on Vultr for that. "But Sarah", you might say, "once you've verified yourself on OpenSea you can do many things without gas prices." You know why? Because you operate within OpenSea. With trust. Which obviates the whole thing.

So you log on to this monster garbage site, pay $70 to get your ticket to enter, all so you can... trust it? To sell you the right links to pictures of apes looking stoned? For what? What is the value? Someone else can trivially mint an NFT that links to the same damn resource.

It becomes, at that point, indistinguishable from the original. The same thing is "owned". At the end of the day, you're idling a car that solves sudoku puzzles to prove that you performed a transaction on a site you already have a trust relationship with. Which is silly.

That exact same interaction can take place with a single database call, and in that database you can actually enforce that the resource linked is unique. You have MORE stability and verifiability by limiting your trust in the same scope but just skipping the blockchain.

Someone can still right click your inebriated primate wearing a silly hat, and they can still copy, but at least a trusted party can vouch for your exchange properly without a "decentralized" (rogue) party doing a carpet pull. With the extra money saved, they can just host it.

The only thing democratized by the blockchain right now for anything larger than a text string that fits in the receipt is the ability to perform fraud. Now, rather than one draconian organization fucking you, it's that organization as well as anyone that feels like it.

I have yet to see anyone present something that requires "proof" of an interaction that isn't less secure than having an escrow organization vouch for the same thing. The only thing you've proven is that you're a gullible stooge and you've advertised that you're scammable.

I know loads of people have said this already, but the more the merrier. There are many purposes for similar methods, but cryptography is cheap now and Diffie-Hellman can do everything you've used blockchain for without the fuss. You'd see it if you weren't blinded by novelty.

I know this is an unpopular perspective in the techbreh community, but here goes. The path to success and joy in tech isn't gambling. Learn algorithms and coding, work hard, and make something that genuinely improves lives. Actually fucking do something. There is no substitute.