Item — HN Reader

> can not guarantee it will be make available always

True! However I trust the wikimedia foundation, and the fact that because it is a valuable dataset there are many copies of it. If they really did restrict access, anyone could spin up their mirror.

Most of the decentralisation arguments seem to rely on some fetishistically absolute version of the world where you cannot trust any single person or entity, and crypto/web3 is the only reasonable solution if that is true. I, however, have more faith in other people, and am fine placing trust—to varying degrees—in others.

4 comments

> some fetishistically absolute version of the world where you cannot trust any single person or entity

And even then, there’s still trust necessary to the extent that web3 things interact with the real world. You can have provable on-chain voting in a DAO, but if the DAO owns any non-crypto assets, you’re trusting a human to execute the consensus decision.

...and society to run the internet you depend on

> I, however, have more faith in other people, and am fine placing trust—to varying degrees—in others.

That's one perspective, another is: privilege.

That's a great example of decentralization, but expecting anything which gains value from being decentralized ala Wikipedia to be handled solely or even marginally by volunteers is unrealistic.

> I trust the wikimedia foundation

The board members change so it can go wrong.

> ..where you cannot trust any single person..

You are missing the point. Obviously society runs based on mutual trust. One can not ignore the fact that a few people or group in power can create great damage. Crypto makes it possible to create "trust by design" systems so that a small group can not do great damage or censor things that undermine their power.

No it doesn't. It just creates the illusion of this and allows you to build systems with different tradeoffs.