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Ask HN: Is web3.0 or Blockchain tech likely to disrupt centralized marketplaces?

by beerglass on 10/8/21, 11:23 AM with 8 comments

• by yulaow on 10/8/21, 1:12 PM

  I am currently working as researcher and software dev exactly in this field, this is my personal opinion:

  Nope. At least not at the current market conditions.

  Almost ALL the clients and institutions with which I have collaborated like lot of things about web3 and blockchains, but in the process of finalizing the requirements they end up disliking a lot more of them.

  Like almost everyone wants a way to revert transactions easily and very fast by a "controller" entity managed by themselves. They want advanced fraud prevention. They want a way to recover private keys (wallets) for their clients or to manage those directly themselves. They want a way to manage whatever there is in those wallet for various security purposes. They often want to collect a lot of personal information which require a strong synchronization between what there is in the bc and a very large db. They want transaction costs to be almost nil with nonsensical transaction volumes. Etc etc

  All these things are hard to do using blockchains, but possible in some way or another. The problem is that the result is often a bastardization of what a blockchain is, with lot of extra slow, sync and cost factors. So you end up with just another centralized and very inefficient solution that most of the time would be far better just removing the whole blockchain concept from the project.

  In the last three years probably I can count just ONE project which was truly a good match for a bc solution (and was not strangely requested by a local association of no-profits for a local-economy solution), another dozen which were hard bastardization, and a lot of others which we just refused to implement because they were absurd proposals, even if the clients put a lot of money on the table.

  My contacts in the same field feel all the same.

• by jstx1 on 10/8/21, 11:49 AM

  No. Most people want good services and products, they don't care about decentralization.

• by jyu on 10/10/21, 2:17 AM

  Everyone in this thread so far says no. Existing marketplaces and companies have solutions to their problems. You need to look at important problems that can not be solved with standard tech and are trivially solved with web3 or blockchain. There are many examples if you look hard enough.

• by Raed667 on 10/9/21, 10:42 AM

  I worked for a marketplace and had a day per week to work on whatever shenanigans I wanted.

  So I built an equivalent marketplace based on an etherium smart-contract, web3 and all the decentralized stack. It was just a tech project but got some interest internally to see if there is any future in it.

  TL;DR: No.

  No one wants to make a marketplace even more expensive by paying for gas when you buy or place a bid.

  Prices, speed, customer support and trust (in the brand name) are what drive people to use a platform or another. Blockchain tech doesn't add anything to that space.

• by speedgoose on 10/8/21, 3:47 PM

  No, I don't think the database technology is what matters in marketplaces.

• by metaph6 on 10/8/21, 11:52 AM

  Capitalism never lets such thing happen without making it something that it profits itself first. I think the issue is not trust but exploitation, and such future without a central authority of eco, edu, tech and etc. can be attained ONLY via revolution not innovation