> Your in-game purchases are yours and you can carry them from one game to another.
this is close to what web3 is trying to achieve but with all digital assets like domain names as well.
not familiar with roblox but it sounds close to this, except built on a private centralized ledger instead of public and decentralized. so the assets are attached to roblox as a company.
but it is still locked into the walled garden. if 5% of Twitter users want to escape the platform when a billionaire buys it and reinstates Trump, their only option is to use an entirely new protocol (Mastodon).
if 5% of OpenSea users want to escape the platform, they can and already are doing so because OpenSea never owned the tokens and media on its platform to begin with. see: LooksRare, Zora, Rarible.
it would be worth taking a sample of higher value tokens that are not minted by OpenSea. probably the vast majority of those tokens are spam or bots trying to capitalize on existing web content like DeviantArt database.
better platforms like Manifold, Foundation and Zora are already using IPFS or Arweave
centralization is not a bad thing - a lot of NFT websites exist that are centralized and curate and moderate the data on the public ledger to give a better UX for users. there can be multiple of these websites that co-exist - like how you can visit different book shops that sell the same product.
the core issue of web2 is that users are locking value into walled gardens run by singular corporations. if the corporation changes like Elon buying Twitter, the users have no power to escape. the same is not true in a web3 app where users can (and probably already are) operate on the shared data across a variety of platforms.
agree that media storage is not going to be easily decentralized, and most web3 products will depend on big cloud tech companies for storage and services.
almost all NFT platforms will extract some % commission from trades as a form of monetization. they could take 0% but then will have to cover their costs some other way; maybe monthly subscription or regular advertising.
but in the end it doesn't matter how the platform decides to offset its costs, if the data and assets are removed from centralized control. good example of this is NFT art marketplaces - one can go offline, and users can just move to another, or build a new one on the public data (blockchain tokens + IPFS media).
you can run an Ethereum node without running a full node. agree IPFS client is pretty janky but the idea of content addressable p2p hosting is not a bad thing.
the goal of these base systems is not to be faster or easier to use than a centralized Amazon server. the goal is resistance to centralized control.
mod note: my other account “web4” is rate limited after a couple comments?
this is close to what web3 is trying to achieve but with all digital assets like domain names as well.
not familiar with roblox but it sounds close to this, except built on a private centralized ledger instead of public and decentralized. so the assets are attached to roblox as a company.